October News and Updates

I've always enjoyed October. The weather is usually a little haywire (I've lived in the Philly sub-urbs my entire life so I can say that with some authority for this area) but the sun is almost always warm and inviting. This year in particular I can vouch that its still pretty powerful – Jules and I took our respective munchkins on a hayride and ended up with a very light sun-burn. We've also both been fighting a bit of hay-fever and sinus problems (is it just us, or has this year really been bad for that sort of thing?) but we're trudging through with copious amounts of coffee, sometimes tea, and taking it easy.

But that hardly means we're sitting back and letting our goals pass us by.

Right now, I can turn around and see that Jules is on chapter 30/32 (32 now with how long it's taken me to write this post) of the line edits for the print version of Eyes of the Seer that will be out by the end of the month (by early November at the latest, if the proof copy isn't to our liking – to those we owe copies, you'll be getting a PDF version in anticipation of the final product). Don't worry, we'll be updating the various Ebook versions too so that everything stays consistent, but it's the final editing sweep we'll ever need to do. Thank bloody heavens.

Some of you know this, but we've been working on Eyes of the Seer since September of 2009. A very rough [print] ARC copy was released in June of 2010, which we tore apart entirely throughout the fall into spring of 2010-2011. The E-versions were released in June, 2011, but due to it being my first attempt at formatting it took until August to finally have the book pristine enough to make it through Smashwords's evaluation process and into their premium catalog, the gateway to distribution to other sites like Apple and B&N. Eyes of the Seer was first listed on B&N on September 3 and on Apple on September 14. It's been on Amazon since August as well, seeing that was just a matter of uploading the acceptably formatted version through KDP. But in total, it's been two years since we started editing the manuscript that Jules / Peter originally penned in 2006.

And we're looking forward to moving on.

To keep ourselves busy, and our muses happy, in the meantime we've been putting out short stories once a month since June. There are currently four in our library, some listed solely on Smashwords but some on Kindle, Nook and iBookstore as well. Three are free and one is 99-cents.

In the back of the E-versions of EotS we've added a sample of the next novel of the series, Rebirth of the Seer. In between line-edits, writing short-stories, and corralling our (between the two of us) five kids (don't talk to us about coordinating doctor appointments unless you want to spend a few hours hearing about the juggling we have to do for Jules's two disabled kidlets) she's also been making headway into the initial edits and prose conversion (all five novels were originally written in the present-tense and are being changed to past-tense) of the second book of The Vampire Flynn Trilogy.

And we both plan to put a solid effort into NaNoWriMo this year. Jules, for the sixth book (the third installment of The Immortal Seer Trilogy) and me, for a [I feel like I should be whispering this] PNR story that has been sitting on a shelf for the better part of two years that I plan to completely rewrite to fit into Peter's World.

They say you can have it all, and we're big fans of reaping what you sow.

To that end, we're also bouncing around the idea of putting together a different kind of publication, of the quarterly or monthly and definitely collaborative variety, in the future (probably after the new year, though preliminary work will be done during our free time from now until then) and experimenting with how else to promote our work.

At the same time, we're both really proud of what we have to show for the last three months of work. For those curious, we don't mind sharing (and this will be updated when Smashwords finalizes it's sales reports)-

Through KDP [two months of data]-

2 copies of A Vampire's Game (99-cents)

7 copies of  Eyes of the Seer ($2.99)

(free) 2500-and-counting downloads of  To Sir, With Love

Through Smashwords [lifetime data since June]-

3 copies of A Vampire's Game (99-cents)

8 copies of Eyes of the Seer ($2.99)

(free) 803 downloads of To Sir, With Love

Through B&N (via Smashwords) [one month data]-

The report hasn't been updated yet, but as of today Smashwords seems to be showing that we've sold 22 books through B&N. We won't know until they officially release their sales reports what sold, nor how many people downloaded To Sir, With Love.

Of all that, we've also gotten 2 reviews of TSwL on Smashwords, (3) on Amazon (two of which don't really count since they were posted mostly to counteract two one-star reviews that Amazon ended up removing due to the fact that they were only criticism over the choice of title, not the story itself), and 4 reviews on Goodreads. Eyes of the Seer has received no reviews on Amazon or Smashwords, but it did get a new review on Goodreads in the last three months. We've submitted it to one review site so far, and should be seeing that review any day now.

Like I said, we're pretty proud of those numbers. We've also gotten 8 new subscribers to the blog, are up to 39 'Likes' on Facebook for CrimsonMelodies and 45 'Likes' for EyesOfTheSeer. Our twitter followers keep going up as well, and I know that 350ish of those are from June onward – that's when we began our social marketing campaign. This blog has also gone from only having spammer traffic, to having between 300-500 monthly visitors (June thus far has the highest, with 530 visitors, because that was when we were most aggressive with social marketing and link spamming on Twitter and Facebook. However, it didn't net us sales numbers, which is why we abandoned our initial approach – also because it didn't really feel like 'us'.)

Clearly we're doing something right in the exposure sense, we just need to figure out where else to reach out so our feedback continues to grow. Projects for the future.

As always, thanks for reading,

Jesi

aka Victor Mason