I’m not sure what’s happening with this book, but I’m suddenly selling copies like mad on Ingram. Could it be promotional help due to an excellent interview with Deborah Ross? Possibly. I have another excellent interview with J. Scott Coatsworth that released today, so we’ll see. Now I’m just hoping I don’t get hit with massive returns!
I bit the bullet and did my writing income books for 2022 and started for 2023. My Draft2Digital income dropped significantly, but it wasn’t until I was working on getting links for an interview that I figured out why. My usual sales source, Barnes and Noble, didn’t publish The Enduring Legacy until a few months after its release. Ouch. B&N, normally my best seller, fell significantly and hasn’t recovered. Thankfully, Apple and Smashwords seem to be filling in the blanks, along with a mild assist from Kobo. But my Ingram sales started picking up. That gives me an additional incentive to make sure that all of my books are eventually available in paperback form–and I need to fix my older books that were formatted in Scrivener. While I’ve done that for the Netwalk Sequence books, I need to do that next for the Goddess’s Honor series. Which is going to be–a job, especially since those books will probably need new covers due to adjustments in pagination. We shall see. It’s a big job, and I’m not sure I’m ready to get to that yet. I learned my lesson from doing the Netwalk books last year!
However, I managed to wrap up the worldbuilding short story for the new Goddess’s Vision series in development. I’ll probably send it off to the NIWA anthology because it somewhat matches the Harbinger theme for this year’s anthology. It will end up being a reader magnet for the Goddess’s Vision series no matter what–I’m trying to get into Heinmyets’s head because he is going to be a big part of that series.
I also got another chapter written for The Cost of Power, which takes that serial up to the end of June before I have to worry about running out of material. Not that I’m too worried, because I think that book will finish long before the serialization does. It gave me a nice breathing space for Federation Cowboy, which will be next week’s focus. I’d like to get a couple of chapters in with that book. My sense is that it’s going to turn out to be about 60K words, which means I’m about a third of the way through the whole book. But it could surprise me. We shall see. I still need to introduce the Memaj issue, and get everyone to the Federation Congress, where stuff really gets exciting. Not that it hasn’t been exciting at this point….
I finished revising the print interior for the first Netwalk Sequence book, Life in the Shadows. Hopefully, I can get the cover designed and the whole thing uploaded to Ingram today. Then I started work on the interior for the print version of Beating the Apocalypse and yikes…it’s pretty telling that this was about the time that my eyes started misbehaving. I have a mess to fix.
Today also needs to be taking a deep breath and diving into creating some sort of coherent, doable, promotion plan. I’ve been blocking out pieces of it already with my new spreadsheets–well, it’s time to start integrating them into planning.
I keep thinking about direct sales, but a reminder that sales tax is an issue made me step back and reconsider. I need a venue that handles the taxes because I am just not gonna dive into that mess on my own. SIGH. That may slow things down significantly.
Overall, then…a fairly productive week, with a bunch of stuff crossed off of the weekly to-do list. Hopefully I’ll get some other pieces crossed off today.
Onward.
