Deep Cover

Excerpt of the week.

Here is the new Ordo Lupus and the Temple Gate cover – designed and completed by Omri Koresh.

I hope you like it! Omri and I have worked together over the last few weeks to produce a cover which expresses the soul of the book as well as illustrating one of the scenes in the book. Those of you who have read it will recognise the Cover Girl. The cover will appear on the Kindle in the next 48 hours and on the paperback in the next two months.

I am also repositioning this book as an Occult Thriller. I have always had problems fitting this book into any genre: mystery/detective, historical fiction and fantasy/historical or fantasy/myths and legends don’t seem quite right so let’s see how the new genre works.Amazon applies categories very loosely to the books anyway so it might not make much difference.

Free Books!

Unknown Place, Unknown Universe is free now until 3 July!

Vampire: Beneficence: (Short Stories III) will be free from 2-6 July!

Get your free copies while you can.

Results of Free Promotion of Too Bright the Sun

The Free Promotion of Too Bright the Sun has ended. I am pleased with the results. I have been using Hootsuite to schedule tweets and posts to Facebook. This helped a lot: perhaps too much! I had all links to Too Bright the Sun declared spam by Facebook so I have submitted a request to them to reverse this decision otherwise sales of this book will be hindered for a very long time. I am surprised by their sensitivity because I was following the advice of other successful authors and I achieved a tweet/post volume far shot of what they were recommending.

I had 200+ downloads of Too Bright the Sun.

This included 24 in Germany, 2 in India and 4 in Canada. I was suprised by the German downloads: I had been tweeting in German as well as Korean, Urdu, French, Spanish, Vietnamese, Japanese and Chinese but I don’t know why the German ones were so successful. It might be because of the mention of the Iron Cross in Too Bright the Sun but I am skeptical since sales of any books about the Wehrmacht are poor in Germany. I did have to struggle to get the messages down to 140 characters so maybe this was why. The Indian ones were also a pleasant surprise.

The highest sales rank achieved was 38 in Amazon US Science Fiction/General and 2500 in Amazon US Free Kindles.

On Amazon UK it was 17 in Science Fiction/Genera and 834 in Free Kindles.

This was all achieved without a paid advert on Facebook. I didn’t feel it was worth paying for this after Facebook declared the link to the book spam. I am however paying $10/day for the first two days of the Free promotion for Unknown Place, Unknown Universe so I will let you know if this works. So far I have had12 clicks from a audience reached of 37000. the potential reach is 5 million but I would think I would run out of budget before I reach that many. I have chosen two sectors of ebook readers and science fiction readers.

Caption Competition for Too Bright the Sun’s Laser Weapons

I decided to do a caption competition half way through Too Bright the Sun‘s promotion and had some great suggesions. My current favourite for the Alien Laser Rifle is Organic Plasma Rifle by Dominic Kay @DBCK83. My favourite for the Laser Pistol is Laser Carbine LC5150 and I quite like the ‘Bullpup’ too from @david_bayne. One of the unexpected benefits from this campaign has been meeting new people and possibly new collaborations. I will announce the final results on next week’s blog. The names will be included in Iron III: Worlds Like Dust.

Blog moved!

Yes, I moved the blog. I was unhappy with Blogger. Hopefully you can all see this now.

Other News

Good Luck to Valentino Rossi and Marc Marquez and Lorenzo (if he can ride) in today’s MotoGP. I was also sad to hear of the imminent retirement of Mark Webber. I haven’t read his reasons yet.