Runic Vengeance Update

Book 3 in the Runic Series, Runic Vengeance, is closer to completion!

I've finished the final draft and am making final edits now. The book will be complete this month, and after I publish it, I'll be working on book four - already 20% written - and book one of a new series.

I promised myself to write unique book series for each of my children, and seeing as how I recently had another son, I have a promise to keep! I'm very excited about the new series, and can't wait to get started.

To keep track of my progress on Runic Vengeance, check out the bar graphs on my home page. I update it on a semi-daily basis.

Narrator found!

I found a narrator for the Runic Series audiobooks. His name is Nick Cracknell, and he did a superb audition. He's a former Shakespearean actor and has done work in ads and film, as well as audiobook narration.

I'm guessing Runic Awakening will be done by end of March or early April. Runic Revelation and Runic Vengeance will follow!

The Runic Series Audiobooks

I've decided to publish audiobooks through Amazon's ACX site. ACX offers authors the ability to submit the books so that voice actors can read a sample of the text to audition for the role of narrator.

After you choose a narrator, you submit an offer to them. There are two basic options: offer 50% of your royalties to the narrator, or pay an amount per finished hour of work and keep your share of the royalties. I chose the second option. You can also choose whether or not to give ACX exclusive rights to your audiobook, in return for a greater percentage of the royalty. If you give ACX exclusive rights, it publishes to Amazon, Audible, iTunes, and wherever else it wants.

I found ACX easy to use, and got a little over 60 auditions in a matter of a week. I think I've found my narrator, and am excited to start development on the audiobook for Runic Awakening! I'll be using the same narrator for the second and third books as well. I suspect that the audiobook for the first book will be available by April of 2017, but I'll keep you updated!

Google Adwords Update

I stopped the Google Adwords Express campaign a month ago, and found no drop in sales. When I tried restarting the campaign, it was far more expensive. Whereas before the cost-per-click was around 20-30 cents, now it is over $1 per click for the same ad. In addition, I found minimal change in sales. I believe that the ads helped to develop initial organic growth, and now they are too expensive to continue using.

As a result, I'm running campaigns on various book promotion websites. I plan on doing these promotions in a "throw a bunch of noodles on the wall and see what sticks" approach. I'll keep you posted on the results!

Runic Awakening on Sale!

The Runic Awakening ebook is on sale on Amazon.com for $0.99 for a limited time only! The sale will run from January 9th to the 15th.

I've also run a promotion on BookBongo.com, and I'm looking to run more promotions on sites like Indie Author News. I'm interested in how effective these kinds of sites are; I'll let you know how it works out, as usual!

Call to Action!

I've been having issues with in-text images on Amazon KDP for Runic Revelation. I have four jpg's in the middle of the book. They showed up on the KDP previewer and in the HTML and MOBI files I tested. So naturally I published the book. Imagine my surprise when I tested the book on my Samsung Galaxy 6 Kindle app, and found that the images didn't show up!

After a bit of research, I realized that I must not have inserted the images into my docx document...I had copy-pasted them. So I inserted them and tried again...with some success. This time, the images showed up on my Kindle reader, but not on my Samsung Kindle app. I've tried just about everything, but they still don't show up. Quite frustrating!

At this point, I put a link to an email address on my Amazon description page for the book in a call to action for my readers to let me know if they're having issues with images not showing up. If I can't fix this in a reasonable time-frame, I may have to remove the images altogether. They're not essential to the book, but I do use images quite a bit in the third book, so it would be advantageous for me to find a solution.

If anyone has an issue with the images in Book 2, please email me at author@runicseries.com.

Bookdaily Promotion

As I mentioned in the last blog post, I tried Bookdaily.com to help promote Runic Awakening. BookDaily has a website where they feature your book for free, allowing people to read a sample of it and purchase it by clicking a link to Amazon or other online book stores. They also have a paid promotion for about $50 per month, where they email an excerpt of your book to their readership. They offer statistics on the promotion; the details of my promotion for November were:

  • 46,698 emails sent to their readers promoting my book. 
  • Of those, 1,305 emails were opened by their readers. 
  • Also, 103 readers read my excerpt on the BookDaily site (part of free promotion). 

That means about 2.8% of BookDaily's readership actually opened the excerpt email. This seems like an awfully low percentage. But what about sales, you ask?

Well, looking back at Amazon's sales dashboard, the days where the BookDaily email excerpts were read - all 1,305 of them - showed lower than normal sales. Meaning the promotion had no appreciable effect on sales.

I've since cancelled any further promotion with BookDaily. While I can't say how effective the site is for other authors, it definitely was not effective for me.

A Few Updates...

I'm nearly finished with book 2 in the series, Runic Revelation! It's been quite a productive few weeks, despite the upcoming holiday. The final editing process is 80% complete, and the next step will be formatting the book for ebook and paperback.

The third book in the series, Runic Vengeance, has a nearly-complete book cover. I'll post the cover soon, and once book 2 is done, I'll be working hard to get book 3 out by February of 2017.

I've also added Runic Awakening to Librarything.com and Bookdaily.com.

Runic Revelation Update - and Runic Vengeance!

Book 2 in the Runic Series, Runic Revelation, is nearly complete! One more read-through with a few touch-ups and it will be ready for formatting and submission to Amazon KDP. As with Runic Awakening, it will be available in paperback and ebook formats, and will be available free through Kindle Unlimited.

The cover for Runic Vengeance, the third book in the series, is nearly finished. As it is a bit longer than the other two books, I suspect it will take a few months to be ready for prime-time. I'll post updates as I go, and update the bar graphs on the home page showing my progress!