Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

Front cover is finalized. Paperback and hardback covers are underway. Formatting proceeds, and once that and the print covers are complete I will have a book ready to go.

So hopefully all will be in place by the end of this month. Fingers crossed, but monkeys armed with wrenches lurk everywhere in metaphor, ready to strike with deadly imprecision and grind progress to a halt. It’s what they do.

But this week I have been learning hard lessons. The Killer and The Dead has not set the heather on fire since becoming resident on BookSirens. The data does not lie. The impressions are decent, but the click rate is not great, so a combination of the cover and the genres listed are not working. They don’t have a grimdark fantasy option it seems, which is a shame. The rate of reviews is not what I would desire at all, which means the strapline I wrote off the cuff (a minute and a half of thought, tops) when applying to the site isn’t good, and it can definitely be improved, or the blurb isn’t snagging people.

So I need to fix the strapline first, and see if that moves the needle. If it doesn’t, I need to look at the blurb. I also need to look at the genres I am offering the book under, as well as the keywords and trigger warnings. The cover I am not changing at present as it has received better stats from Amazon click-throughs in the past, (when I paid attention to such things – I really need to go back and look at those stats again) so I’m currently figuring the surrounding language is not doing the job.

This is the business of learning about the business side of writing, and how best to present your work. I could cling to the excuse that it is a 3 year old book on a site whose readers focus on new releases rather than existing novels, but that would be the easy way out. I would hope for the book to attract more attention despite that fact, and so have to work to improve its attractiveness to readers, accepting the lessons given here rather than hiding from them.

I can’t lie, it is easy to be discouraged at this. But there a couple of quick and obvious thinks to try to address, and I have a time window in which to experiment and try to find a more compelling presentation. I have procrastinated through this past weekend, using the excuse of an anniversary as a reason for inaction. (There is always at least one excuse for procrastination, and I, as a former Olympic hopeful in the discipline, don’t even need an excuse to put off to tomorrow what could easily be done today. But this weekend I decided an excuse would be handy, and that was the flavor I chose.)

I did start putting more than 90 seconds thought into a new strapline this morning, 100 characters or less, and it has been a good focus both for this strapline and for future Amazon ad copy, an area I have completely neglected to the extent that Amazon Ads sent me emails saying they missed me, hahaha! My intention was always to write a bunch of those for all three books at the time of The Gardener and The Goddess’ release, so this is getting me to start and put together a bunch for TKATD, which is useful. And as Amazon givens me 150 characters, the 100 character limit here forces me to tighter economy, which I think will pay dividends in the advertising space too.

Got to make some lemonade here!

See? Now I feel better. Writing fixes everything, my friends. I’ll try putting grimdark in the strapline, to make the book’s positioning unmistakable. I shall find my people. Hard lessons may be unpleasant, but hopefully through these challenges we get better. It is unfortunate for me that I seem to possess acres of room for improvement, but perhaps if I had not procrastinated so much earlier in life I’d have met these obstacles earlier on my Long Road. If you take nothing else from today’s column, my friends, remember this: procrastinate later, learn now!

Until next week, all the best to you in your endeavors.