It’s been a while since I blogged about what I’m doing. In spite of the relative blog silence, I’ve actually been up to quite a lot behind the scenes here.
My career has had a lot of ups and downs lately, so for the past month or so I’ve been working to retool some things and reinvent some others. I’m experimenting a bit with different prices, especially for the Star Wanderers series, and trying to find more effective ways to market my books.
Now that I’ve set up my blog with a My Books page and individual pages for each of my books, complete with purchase links, book description, linked Goodreads reviews and everything, I’m in a good position to do some things that I couldn’t before. The most significant thing is that I can now put links to my books in the backs of other books. Without a dedicated page on my blog for each book, I couldn’t really do that, since Apple will take down your ebook if it has a link to Amazon, as well as Kobo, and Kobo probably will too… etc etc.
Point is, now I can put links to my books in the back-matter of each book, instead of just a teaser. So I’ve been going through and reformatting for that, which honestly isn’t too difficult, but it can be a little tedious. While I was at it, I made a dedicated page for my email list sign-up form, and put front-matter links in all my books for that.
After that’s finished, the plan is to release a second edition of Science Fiction from A to Z, this time with inline text links to the book pages for all of my books. Many of the chapters finish by saying “this is how I played with this trope in this book,” so adding the links should be a fairly organic and non-obtrusive way to do some marketing. And when the new version is out, I plan to give it away as an incentive to join my email list.
So that’s what I’ve been up to on the publishing end. On the writing end, I’m taking a bit of a break to work out some projects in my head before I put them down on paper. I want to shift away from science fiction for a while and work on some fantasy, starting some new series and building new universes. More on that in later posts.
Friends in Command (Sons of the Starfarers: Book IV) is set to release on July 1st, so in the lead-up to that, I’ll post a few excerpts. And I have some more ideas for the Self-Sufficient Writer series—just putting together some pictures for that. But for now, I need to get back to writing.
