I have some results from my sales of the new Novis Terminal. It’s the most popular book in my catalog so far. It’s more popular than RUSTY’s Memories, but that could be because it’s the first of the series. When I advertised RUSTY’s Memories (at publish time), a large quantity of readers saw the Ad, went to the series, and picked up the first book. That was the first edition of Novis Terminal, and the readers DNF’d it. Understandable. The quality of the first edition was nowhere near that of the second edition or RUSTY’s Memories. But it did throw the sales stats for RUSTY’s Memories.

I made an error in not re-reading Novis Terminal one last time. I had a gut feeling I should have held off publishing the second edition of Novis Terminal and gone through it one last time, but vacation was closing in and I knew I wouldn’t be able to get it out there until this week. But many weathered the storm of grammatical errors and stupid stuff. Thanks for putting up with that (If you’re one of the readers who put up with the crazy version). I managed to get through it and published the final corrected version on Thursday, May 29th. Those who are reading the book are probably scratching their head about my comments. Or, maybe they stumbled onto more grammatical issues. If something blows you out of the story, you can post a comment on this blog, or the Facebook page (this gets posted at both places), or email me at frank@galacticcorebooks.com.

The read-through rate from Novis Terminal to Dangerous Cargo is 24% (for KU page reads). That tells me that people are dropping off in the middle or even the beginning of Dangerous Cargo. Also understandable, since Dangerous Cargo is not up to par with the new Novis Terminal. Once people get through Dangerous Cargo, 74% go on to read The Nav Computer. Then 86% go on to Stolen Property. After that, 61% read Supercomputer. I suspect people don’t really like Stolen Property as much. The read-through from Supercomputer to RUSTY’s Memories is 130%. Which tells me there are some that read the previews on Amazon and skip over to the book that looks the best. They might even be aware of the publication date and skip the older ones—all very good reasons.

What to do about this?

I have options here. First, I will be finishing Shadows in the Bloodline before making a final decision on what to write next. The Q-Mystery books that I wrote under a pen name (Elliot Droit) are not selling yet. I’m still analyzing the results on that one. And since I don’t have a lot of data to work with, I have to keep my Ads running to see if that series will catch on. If it continues to lag, I’ll let the Cozy Mysteries go for now and focus solely on Sci-Fi.

One option is to rewrite the older Daphne books. And that I’ll probably do, even if I make other decisions. But, I might start a new series and publish the first book, then come back and rewrite Dangerous Cargo. Then alternate. Or, I might plow all of my time into the Daphne series and get the older ones up to standard to match the new Novis Terminal.

That’s not to say that I have another series in mind. I’d have to noodle on a story I’d want to use. I’ll probably do that, anyway.

Daphne’s Future

After I’ve fixed the series and smoothed out the bumps, I can add books to it. After Shadows, there will be seven books. I have 10 more book ideas for the Daphne Blazefire series. I don’t think I’ve even begun to tap into my well of ideas for that series. I’ll cut off the current series at 10 books, then start a second series so people can get a breather.

Well, back to the rough draft of Shadows.