From the Writer's Desk

in ,

Hi there, not much happening in Writer's land. I had to travel a lot all over the place for my company, which took me away from my Mac and my iPad for the last three weeks. Every night a new hotel room, a new conference center, and new faces. Kind of social overload for an introvert like me. But it all went well and actually was a lot of fun. This is how Bruce Springsteen or the Rolling Stones must feel when they are doing one show a day for months and months. And we remember Mick Jagger's advice to us road warriors:

What else is new? Kindle Scout for "Troubleseeker" did not pan out, unfortunately. Even though it got almost the same exposure as "Five for Forever", they decided not to take it into their portfolio. Which means that I'll need to do the final edit and publishing one of these days. Big question is whether I'll make it an Amazon exclusive and put it into KDP Select, or do a broader release. Decisions, decisions. The Troubleshooter series so far hadn't created much buzz in the past, so I'd like to try something new this time. Most likely I'll publish it broadly and run a campaign via Wattpad. Put up the first "Troubleshooter" novel up to Wattpad, and advertise books two  and three ("Troublemaker", "Troubleseeker", and 2.5 "Pieces of Trouble") heavily. Maybe that works better. The Calendar Moonstone story gave a lot of attention.

Which brings me to the planning for the next novel. My latest work in progress "Matchbreaker" is about in the middle. Many core pieces are in place, although I am not so happy about style yet. It is supposed to be a romantic comedy, but I tend to linger too much on the backdrop (Start-up scene New York) instead of the hilarious comedic and romantic situations of my three main characters. After that it will likely be either the next Calendar Moonstone Brilliant novel (working title: Brilliant Heist)  or a high speed ultra-violent thriller with the working title "Rattlesnakes". I might throw a coin...

 

Five for forever — my ride from obscurity to superstardom and back

in

Amazon has this concept of author rank. According to Amazon definition it summarizes all your cross book sales and pitches you against the rest of the world. With Kindle Press-driven promotion for "Five", I had for the first time taken a systematic regular look at my own rank. Talking about modest, have a look at my ranking from the last half year. It reflects nicely my activities around the two books I published this year "Five for forever" and "Pieces of Trouble".

What do we see? February and March spikes are easy to explain. I had bought some gift copies   (10 each)of my books via Createspace, that probably was the large May peak that brought me into the 100.000 for the frist time. The other earlier peaks were the typical 1-2 copies per month per book. There appears to be an interesting calculation method in place that catapults you up at a purchase but then uses some moving average to the end, which explains the right-heaviness of the distribution of each peak. 

Then mid-June things became serious with Five for forever on Kindle Press and the parallel promotion on Amazon. Basically what they did is that they added my book to the various recommendation results that you typically see.

The peak was July 5th, seems there were a lot of bored people in the US Independence Day, and bought something good to read. I made it up to Author rank 27.503. This probably does not yet bring me up to ranks with Stephen King or Frederick Forsyth. But next book, next goal! Crack the four figures.

PS: Just a plug for Wattpad's "A Brilliant Plan" - the next chapters are online.