Prayers do work!

Yeah, that should be a no-brainer, but it’s still thrilling to have them answered. My problem? The noise of advertisements to authors about marketing, public relations, social media, author brand, etc. There are so many people out there hawking their theories about all these different aspects of writing, it’s hard to tell which to work with. So, prayer. God, give me the wisdom to understand just who to listen to.

The answer came when I watched a podcast by Thomas Umstattd Jr of Author Media and his guest Dave Chesson of Kindlepreneur. I’ve been a subscriber to Umstattd’s Patreon since last August and I’ve watched his podcasts before, but this one talked about the metadata Amazon uses in their algorithms. It was packed with so much information, I realized I had two voices in the business which cut through all the noise out there.

The tool sets these two gentlemen created are amazing and I wish I had taken advantage of them before I published The Accident. I did so many things wrong. The cover is wrong. Umstattd has a tool to review a book cover and tell you what genre the images conjure up in readers. My cover for The Accident? Mystery-thriller. Far from my Christian supernatural science fiction. So, back to the drawing board for a cover.

My subtitle: An Eric D’Tra’val Story has no meaning to any reader. Eric is not a household name (yet), so nobody will have any clue what the story is about. I need to come up with new subtitles. Currently, I’m thinking A Story of Faith, Psionics and Spiritual Warfare. Spell it right out. If Eric becomes a household name, then I’ll change it back.

There are more tools Umstattd and Chesson have to help with marketing, ads, and PR, I could have saved the money I spent on them. Oh well. Learn and grow!

What else is going on?

I’m cutting back on some of the socials and website work to focus on finishing up the rough draft of Canthany Genesis. I have some automated posts on social media still running, but I need to develop a campaign of sorts and rebrand myself. I haven’t focused on what readers can expect from my stories. That will change.

Writing Progress Report

Canthany: Genesis is coming along nicely. I’m up to chapter four with my critique partners and working on chapter five. It does look like seven will be the magic number for chapters. I’m pushing this a bit because I want to have it ready for the Realm Makers conference in late June. In order for that to happen, I need the final version ready by May 1^st to have enough time for Amazon to print the copies I need for the conference bookstore. So, I need my polished draft ready for my editor by April 1^st. Which means my rough draft has to be ready by about March 22^nd to have time for my critique partners to read over it. Yep, three weeks to get the last three chapters written.

God Bless you all!