I’ve been running Amazon Ads for “The Case of the Missing Station Crew” for some time now and the numbers are in. or, rather, the numbers are not in. The book gets impressions, but virtually no clicks. In the author-business that usually translates into an issue with the cover or the title. I’ve analyzed the book title to death and I had a gut feeling from the get-go that the title wasn’t right. It sounded a lot like a detective story. “The Case of…” just screams detective. I suspect that potential customers that are shopping for a sci-fi book see the title and assume it’s misclassified as if Amazon stuck it in the wrong genre.
The new title will be “Novis Terminal.” It sounds like a sci-fi book and it doesn’t give away the plot. If you’ve read the book already, you can ignore the change in the title. The Kindle reader will download the updated cover and title change. This means, that you can ignore it and move on to the next book. If you bought the paperback (like I did) you now own a rare copy of the originally titled book. Maybe it’ll become a rare collectible edition.
My cover editor is going to change the cover title for me. Once that is done, I’ll have to go through the Amazon site and upload the next text for both the KU and paperback as well as change the title text for the book. Then I have to go through this site and change the cover on the “books” page. I’ll have to examine my Ad to see if there’s something in there that needs to be updated. Ah, good times. I’ll be chasing links and titles around the Internet for the next ten years.
Progress…
I might as well give an update while I’m here. I managed to put in a 10k word day last Monday, which is a bank holiday. I did one-hour sprints where I wrote approximately 1,000 words in about 45 to 50 minutes. Then I took a break and came back and did another sprint. By the end of the day, I managed to complete 9,000 words. Seeing that number, I put in another hour and rounded it up to 10k. That’s my new record (my previous record was 8k). Those words went into “Escape from the Abyss.” I want to try and get a rough draft together on that book while I wait for review notes to come back for my Daphne books. I’m currently writing a discovery version of the first Abyss book. When I get it down, I’ll go back and focus on each scene to see how I can amplify the drama. So far, it’s pretty good. Today, which is a Sunday, I put down another 5k words for that book.
On the Daphne side of books, I managed to eek out 9k words last Saturday and Sunday for Stolen Property. Then I wrote another 3,400 words yesterday to bring it to 40k. There are still 11 scenes that have not been written. That’s more than 10k words, so this book could go longer than the rest. Dangerous Cargo is the longest, sitting at 55k words.
The Nav Computer is the next book to be released. It’s in review right now and I’m doing some edits as the notes come in. That book is currently at 52k words in length and I don’t anticipate it will grow from there.
I hope the title change for the first book makes a difference. Otherwise, I’ll finish the last book (Supercomputer) and end the series there. That would be a shame too since I have a lot of material I built up from characters that appear in the first two books. Not to mention some back story for Daphne that I wanted to build some stories around. I don’t want to give any spoilers away, but I can say that I have some premises and notes for books that would involve Daphne discovering that her past is not as she was told. I’ll just leave that out there to cause agony for any readers of the series. If I bring the series to an end, I’ll post my notes or wrap anything extra in a free book.
Other projects
As I mentioned above, I’m writing the discovery/rough draft of Escape from the Abyss, book 1. I’ll need to get a cover designed for this book and series within the next month or two (maybe August). This series is going to be gritty. I’m shooting for the first book to be more than 100k in length. If I can get it up to 120k or more, I’ll be happy. The story has a lot of characters with a lot of issues. They are intricately intertwined with each other with opposing goals. I’m focused on characters that will draw out the reader’s emotions.
For this series, I have about 20 books mapped out. They are no more than a collection of notes for each story. This means the series could potentially go longer than 20 books. I will attempt to keep the word count the same per book starting with the first one. So, If the first book ends up being 140k words, then they’ll all be that length. To kick it off, I’ll publish the first book and see how it goes. If it generates a lot of interest (whether it’s profitable or not), then I’ll plow all of my writing time into the second book. Repeat for each.
Writing books that large has advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is that KU has a higher page read count, meaning the royalty payments are higher per book. A disadvantage is that it takes at least twice as long to produce a 100k book as it does a 50k book. Publishing will slow as I spend more time putting together the next book in the series. For the Daphne series, it takes me approximately two months to produce a book. Producing 140k books will come down to about two books per year.
What would happen if the first book was a bust? Ah, that’s the ugly question. I’ll be left with two choices: Pull it off the market and move on or write a closing book. If I do a closing book, I could shorten the series down to a 140k book that closes all of the loose ends. Which one I choose depends on how bad the first book is. If only a handful of books sell with heavy advertising, then I’ll just cut my losses and think up a new series. However, I’m more of an optimist and I firmly believe that if I put in the time and effort, the first book is going to get snatched up quickly. Then It’ll be a mad dash to produce the second book, and the third… etc.