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New Short Story
I’m sticking to my goal to publish one novel and four short stories in 2015 by starting another entry on Wattpad. This short story, titled The Song Under the Mountain, will be updated weekly via Wattpad until completion, and will later be edited and polished for publication on Amazon. I had a lot of fun writing weekly installments of The Sight of Blood last spring and hope to get the same levels of motivation for this new piece!
Like The Sight of Blood, this story will also take place in the Children of Fire universe, but new readers shouldn’t have a problem following along.
Click here to read part 1 of The Song Under the Mountain.
Reading Challenges ~ Love them or Hate them?
Cate the Book Hut Nut encourages readers to branch out for 2015! Which of these would you like to give a try?
So we are at the beginning of a whole new year and, as is their usual practice, Goodreads are encouraging users to join their Reading Challenge. As much as I like reading challenges, this one is beginning to feel a little stale, so I started looking for something that would be more of a challenge while at the same time opening me up to new reading experiences. Scouring the internet I came across the challenge below that I thought I would share with you, and hopefully inspire you to open up to new reading experiences as we progress through this year. I know that reading a book from the second category on the list is really going to be a challenge for me!
Amazon Updates Dashboard for Kindle Direct Publishing
Amazon has recently updated their Reports section for those of us who publish through their KDP system. For a detailed description of what they updated, you can look here.
I’ve been wishing for more trackable data from Amazon for a while now, and this is a great first step, in my opinion. The graph on the dashboard will be a great help to indie authors who want to have more control over tracking their sales and marketing efforts. You can filter the graph by dates, title, and various international markets to target what’s selling and when.
This update will help indie authors to track their marketing efforts much more accurately. Instead of having to keep a list of numbers in mind, we’ll be able to see how many of each title we’ve sold on any given day. If you’re trying several promotions in a month, for instance, you’ll be able to check the dates for those promotions and compare the success, or lack thereof, directly.
This is something we’ve had on Smashwords for a while, so it’s nice to see Amazon catching up. Here are some more things I’d like to see on my sales dashboards in the future:
-Referral traffic data. I’d like to know how many people are coming from my website, social media, outside sources, etc. This would also benefit people running promotions, as we’d be able to determine how much traffic we get from those promo sites.
-Data on repeat customers. How many people who bought book 1 moved on to books 2 and 3?
-Page views for my Amazon pages, including books and author pages. Are my pages getting traffic? What’s the bounce rate? How often do pageviews convert into sales?
That’s my 2 cents on Amazon’s latest update for KDP users. Hopefully we’ll get more of these author-benefitting changes in the near future! What are some things you’d like to see?
Writing Effective Villains: by Mary Fonvielle
Occasionally I’ll be guest blogging over at williambryanmiller.com . Check out my first post on what I think makes a good villain:
Mary Fonvielle 