The Final Match
I’m still over 8,000 words ahead of schedule on this book. The story has some sticky points coming up that I’ve been noodling on for a few days. The rough draft is rapidly approaching Act III, and I’ve been focused on the point where Act II ends, and everything is falling apart (that’s normal for almost any story). My angst is about the way Act III will come together for the final scene. The scene that has to end in a bang. I know what I want, but I need to make sure everything lines up for the major gut punch. I often get my thinking cap going when I’m not writing and try to think of ideas that are outside the box. If I run out of scenes to write, I’ll have to stop and throw ideas against the wall until I stumble upon something that I like. I’ve done that with many books, which usually slows down my production. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it doesn’t happen for this book. It’s the final book, and I don’t want it to be the only book in the series to be delayed. With that said, I will delay the publication date if I’m not happy with the story. In the past, I’ve gone as far as throwing away the last third of a book (that was the most extreme example) and rewriting it to satisfy a better ending. I’ll post any changes like that here so everyone knows what to expect.
Other Books…
This is just a rambling topic of interest. I often check the stats of my books to see what people like or don’t like. I’m not talking about the star ratings on Amazon, but other clues, like the ranking inside of specific sub-genres. I have a few books that are getting KU reads even though I don’t have any Ads running. In fact, interest in these books picked up long after I had shut off my last campaign, and it was a bit baffling to me as to how people discovered those books (because I haven’t advertised anything from the Daphne series in a long time). The two books that get a lot of reads are Dangerous Cargo and The Nav Computer. Because those books showed up in KU reads for some time, I ran a promo to boost them some more. The promo was a 5-day free Kindle promotion on the entire Daphne series. So, it’s understandable that the Daphne books got attention then and afterward (probably word of mouth prompted someone else to get the KU version). What’s baffling is the fact that Stolen Property and Supercomputer are completely ignored. These were written later than the two books that get more attention, so the writing is more refined. My wife thinks that Supercomputer is the best of the series. My only thought is that either A. the blub is not interesting enough for someone to pick it up or B. The book preview isn’t interesting enough.
Amazon keywords can make a difference. However, it seems to affect the ranking most of all. I did some research on the keywords for the Daphne books and saw that a lot of people who bought the books were searching for humorous sci-fi. So, I added those keywords to the books, and their rankings improved. Dangerous Cargo almost made it into the top 100 books under Humorous Science Fiction (Kindle Store). I also tweaked the keywords for the Abyss series. The books were being featured next to alien sub-genre books that were not even similar to the story that my series tells. Now, The Archons is at #403 in Space Fleet Science Fiction. That is the correct category for that story.
Everything is in KU right now, so take advantage of it if you have a Kindle Unlimited account. For me, there just aren’t enough hours in the day for KU. I read as much as I can, but I have a backlog of books that I have marked in my book wish list on Amazon that I’ll never get to. I also have at least six books in progress. It’s a bad habit… I usually get back to the books I’m partway through, but I’m like a dog that sees a squirrel. Something comes across my desk, and I just know I have to read it for research purposes.
Well, back to work for me…