Update: Everything is Moving Along
Truly, it is! I’m now going to confidently put Silver Circle #3 up for preorder, with the date as Dec 31, although actually I think that’s generous. I’m guessing — strong guess — that I’ll be dropping it at Patreon two weeks before that, though in a pinch, it might be up to a week later. Or it could be earlier! Honestly, it’s in fine shape!
What I’m still doing:
a) Integrating the last sets of comments from early readers. I’m so tempted to take off the day tomorrow and get through it, boom! But probably I wouldn’t quite get through everything in one evening plus one day, and anyway, I see I do have a few students on my schedule for tomorrow, so no. However, if I don’t get SC #3 out to final proofreaders by Wednesday — which is my mom’s birthday, by the way; she’ll be 89 — anyway, I expect to send this to final proofreaders on Friday or Saturday. I’d be surprised if I can’t manage that.
b) I think I’d better snip off the epilogue and send just that to every early reader who hasn’t seen it. It’s about 70 pages at this point, and though I don’t think I missed anything that needs to be tied off, I’d like to make sure no one else sees a dangling thread.
c) As soon as I send it off, I’ll be reading it from the top myself one more time, trying to tighten it up JUST A HAIR. I cut 9000 words earlier, but added 1100 words, and now it’s standing at 180,800 words. I would like to get it under 180,000. HOWEVER, I’m not going to obsess about that.
d) I’ll make the paper edition this weekend and get a proofing copy for my mother to read. My guess, and hope, is that correcting the remaining typos in two files won’t be too insanely tedious. My best guess, based on SC #2, is that the final proofreaders will catch, collectively, about 60 typos. This may seem like a lot — it seems like a lot to me — but that is what I expect. My hope is that this time, readers who grab it on Patreon and read that version will catch no more than half a dozen, collectively. PREFERABLY NONE. But that may be unrealistic.
Meanwhile!
My somewhat spontaneous Thanksgiving Weekend Sale — WHICH IS STILL GOING THROUGH TODAY, by the way — has resulted, so far, in 7400 copies of books downloaded or sold. I haven’t looked that carefully at everything, but Black Dog was downloaded the most, by a lot, which is certainly the first time it has ever outperformed Tuyo. I think this resulted from three major and one minor factors. The first is that I haven’t run a free book promo for Black Dog for about year. The second is that Black Dog was mentioned in the Tuyo promo. The third is that I was running a five-day promo for Black Dog; an intensive but one-day promotion for Tuyo. The third is the new cover, which probably made a pretty big difference. I mean, no way to tell, but that’s what I’m guessing.
The free book that was downloaded least was The Year’s Midnight, and I think there were three reasons for that; again, one major and two minor. The first — it took me a while to remember this — this book was not specifically mentioned in the promotion for Tuyo, while Black Dog and The Lord of the Changing Winds both were. The second is that it looks almost Contemporary. The third is that Amazon seems to have dropped it into a Horror category, which is really not appropriate. They do sometimes change a book’s categories, they don’t tell you when they do it, and though their algorithms are pretty good, I don’t think this was helpful in this case. I’ll ask them to change the category back to whatever I chose later, after the sale is over.
My feeling, without looking, is that probably the overall promotion has not quite broken even yet, but that it will probably do so today or tomorrow and then will pay off in better sales (minor) and significantly higher pages read (major) for the next couple of months. We’ll see!
I hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving (or weekend). Welcome to December! I’ll leave you with this morning’s spaniel cuteness:
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