Continuing from last month’s topic of Amazon Ads… If the business side of all of this doesn’t interest you, skip on down to the next section.

In the first week of February, in addition to the ad campaigns with Amazon’s chosen keywords, I built a second series of campaigns where I selected the keywords. These were a combination of genre and Amazon sales categories and authors who write within the genres I write in. In looking at my ad spend; I also reduced the cost I was willing to pay per click.

The number of impressions skyrocketed, as did my click-through and my KU page reads. I’ve included three graphics from Amazon’s dashboard below. The top is a bit complex, but the blue bars are the number of impressions (times my ad was displayed on a page), the gold line is the number of times someone clicked on that impression (these I paid for), the magenta line is the number of page reads from folks KU subscriptions from my ads, and the green line is the number of units sold from my ads (both ebooks and paperbacks). On the sides are the scales for each. In summary, across the top of the chart, I had 751,218 ad impressions, which generated 1,666 clicks through to the book’s product page, 19,056 pages read, and 34 orders from these ads.

The next bar chart represents the total number of KU pages read, both from my ads and otherwise. At the bottom is the breakdown by book.

The third image is the total number of units sold, both ebook and paperback, from ads and other direct sales.

Much of this goes to the mental gymnastics of running a business in this space. I hope you find this interesting. I promise not to fill every month with this kind of stuff. I find the differences between the ad-generated page reads and total page reads to be interesting, as well as the difference between ad-generated sales and total sales.

That KU (KENP) page count works out to 50-ish folks reading my two books. Coupled with the other 40 units moved and 90 folks have my books in their hands - which is kinda cool.

On to other interesting things.

A fellow writer and one of my favorite workshop facilitators, Matt Pallamary posted a call for authors to a Book Festival on Facebook.

On March 23^rd the Carpinteria Arts Center is having its Festival of Books. From noon to 4p, I’ll have a table there with paperbacks of Tunguska Deception and Genesis Renewed available for sale and signing. Below is their flyer within my announcement.

Please come on down, wander around, see what other folks are writing, and say hi to me. If you do, I’ll have a small token of thanks for coming by for ya.

If you hear of a small community book festival in SoCal, drop me a note and let me know. I enjoy getting out for a day and talking to folks about how I tell lies, kill folks, and create general mischief for your entertainment.

I finished Follett’s Armor of Light. I loved it, all the characters and their outcomes, except for Hornbeam’s resolution. I would have made him suffer more and forced him to be aware of, or witness to, the undoing of his malevolence.

In addition, I’m all caught up on Mixon’s Last Hunter Series and anxiously awaiting its next installment. In the meantime, I’m twenty-five pages into Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South – a time-travel story where Gen. Lee’s army is provided AK-47s by a time-traveling mystery man. And I’m about to start David Grann’s The Wager, a non-fiction tale of shipwreck, mutiny, and murder – according to the dust cover. Both were gifted to me by old friends. More on those later.

Oaths and Odysseys is making slow progress. I’m at twenty-five thousand words and well behind the pace I had hoped to set. Having a first draft done last month was too aggressive.

I’ve had some competing priorities with consulting gigs from my past life as a technology manager. It is the income from those that make much of what I’m doing now possible. My goal of three books this year has been pared back to two.

I want to have Oaths and Odysseys in print by the Santa Barbara Writers Conference in early June and its follow-up Genesis Alone, the story of Ben Lee, who joins the survivor’s community at the start of Oaths and Odyssey, ready for the Author Nation Conference in November.

If I get on a roll and manage a third book for the Genesis Renewed Saga in this year, then so much the better. But I want to be upfront and manage expectations for folks as best I can.

I appreciate your patience, as I’m still working out the scheduling and life of writing full-time-ish.

The hooligans have neighbors. A couple times a year, the ten-acre pasture diagonal from us on the corner has twenty-ish head of cattle. The past couple of years they have been brahmans. This is Tess's first experience with the 'big doggies' across the street, and she is not quite sure what to make of them.