Audiobooks

After dismissing Virtual Audiobooks AI from Amazon, I decided to try it on Desperate Action. I was surprised at how well the audio came out. Now, mind you, I’ve only listened to the first chapter. That’s not much of the book. I’ll listen to the rest of the book sometime this week and see if it meets my standard for an audiobook (would I listen to a book with this audio quality?). If I can get through the entire book and think it sounds good, I’ll set it up for sale. I’m still skeptical of the quality, but who knows?

Dead End

Dead End is up to 52,000 words (approximately) as of this writing. So progress is being made. I’m a little ahead of my planned rough draft, but I have a lot of details I need to fix. So far, I’ve been looping back and fixing stuff along the way, and I like the way the ending came out. Doing two books at one time is a bit crazy, and I’m not sure I’d do it this way again (though I might do all my future trilogies all at once). The proof will be later on when people post comments after reading the whole trilogy.

Escape from the Abyss

I’m still contemplating new covers. I’ll be looking for a designer to do these instead of just me. I can do some covers pretty well (see The Traveler Trilogy for an example), but some covers I really struggle with. The covers that I put together for the Abyss series are nice, but they’re a bit off for the sub-genre that they represent. I think that’s skewing the sales a bit. What’s happening is that people see the cover, click on the Ad, and then assume they are buying drama when the series is more of an action-packed thriller type of Sci-Fi. The Archons has a female astronaut who doesn’t properly represent the main protagonist. Sure, the story has multiple protagnoists, including the pilots as well as the captain of the Dark Wolf. The first book cover should probably have a space battle or an older male figure. Maybe several faces representing the core crew of the book.

The reason I think the covers are causing problems is that I get a lot of clicks, but they don’t convert into sales. I’ve tried changing the book description around to match what’s shown on Amazon’s page as well as mimic the cover design (in fact, many of my Ads use the cover design itself). There could be other reasons for the book not converting. The data I get from sales is slim, so I have to read some tea leaves to figure out what’s happening.

The Archons is still set to 99 cents. People are buying the book without any Ads running. So I’m happy about that. It’s also driving sales to books 2-4. I’ve only sold about 50 of those books, which is why they don’t have any reviews yet. Book 4 has one review but just stars. They’ll get reviews as they sell, but it’ll take time for people to get through book 1 and into the series. Also, putting on a 99-cent sale will drive purchases, but many of the readers who buy a book for 99 cents are like me. They grab the book because it’s cheap, then don’t read it for months (I have that problem because I have a large backlog of books I’m reading). Eventually, a trickle of book 2 sales show up because someone read book 1 and discovered they liked the series.

I’ve thought about other reasons like the series is unfinished, but nobody would know that from the Ad and the Amazon page. They would only find out about that if they came here and read that I have plans for more. And if you’re just coming here to find out about the Abyss series, there is a books in progress link at the top of this page if you want the latest status on what I’m working on. I know that I hate reading a bunch of text just to get to the information I’m really looking for.

Once I get Survival and Dead End completed, I’ll be doing more of a deep dive into the Abyss series to see if I can fix the covers to match the story.