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Sons of Thunder

An innocent young man is accidentally caught up in a convenience store robbery. He’s shot three times in the torso and once in the head.

He walks away without a scratch on him.

A young woman is locked in a government cell with no windows, one locked door, and zero way out.

The next morning she’s gone without a trace.

Together, the two of them will learn that God is doing something new in our time. A new age of miraculous gifts is breaking out in the world. Now a team of young Christians will have to learn how to use their Gifts for the good of all, while an evil counterfeit arises to oppose them. In a classic battle of good against evil, a new kind of hero will rise to take up a mantle and a name that dates back to the time of Jesus.

The Sons of Thunder.

This is my next novel. It’ll be published before November! (I hope)

Sign up for my e-mail list to get notified the moment it’s out.

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My next novel…

For me, with every novel, there’s a point of no return.

Up through about 10-ish thousand words, it’s entirely possible that I scrap the whole thing and start over. My hard drive is littered with novel-starts of 5-10,000 words that I set aside because they weren’t working how I expected. But there comes a point at which the novel is going to happen. I’ve written enough to love it enough to need to finish.

Sometime in the last couple days, I passed that point with my next novel. I’m super excited about it.

I am shooting for a late-September launch date. I’m planning some slightly different marketing strategies. I’m visualizing the cover.

What’s more, I have a big announcement about it coming next week. I can’t wait to tell you!

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Life of Secrets: Proofs Are In!

2014-06-10 21.57.54The physical proofs of Life of Secrets are in! This is such an exciting time for me. I remember when I held the first real, physical copy of my first book — now it’s here all over again.

The launch is on schedule for June 23. If my work schedule ever lets up a tiny little bit, I’ll be trying to set up some advance ordering options before then. But one way or another, this book is going out. Thank you God for the wonderful experience of publishing books.

 

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Life of Secrets: Ambassadors Wanted

I’d like to recruit some Ambassadors to help spread the word about life of Secrets when it launches. As an independently published author, there’s no publishing house marketing budget behind my books. I manage all the promotions myself. And word of mouth is a crucial part of that marketing. Ambassadors will have specific things they can help with. Read on!

Who should be an Ambassador?

Did you read Death of Secrets? Did you like it? Have you been looking forward to Life of Secrets? Are you comfortable telling other people that, including strangers and friends? If so, you’re the perfect candidate.

What do Ambassadors get?

You will get a FREE e-book version of Life of Secrets, and you’ll get it weeks before anyone else. (So, one more qualification for Ambassadors: you should enjoy reading electronically, whether on a Kindle, iPad, tablet, nook, your laptop, or whatever.)

Sounds great! What do I have to do?

Ambassadors commit to three things:

  1. Posting an honest review of the book on Amazon.com within 24 hours after the official launch date. This is the biggest, most important duty of an Ambassador. The most successful e-book marketing tools are all based on the number and average star rating of your reviews. It takes at least 4 to get listed in some places, and as many as 20 in others. I need reviews, and I need them quickly, in order to get started on the advertising campaign to sell the book. Remember: honest reviews. Ambassadors are not obligated to write a good review, or give it five stars, or anything like that. They only commit to posting a review that tells how they really felt about the book. The official launch date is likely to be the last week of June, so you’ll have  quite some time to read the book and craft your review to get it ready to post on Amazon.
  2. Sharing Life of Secrets posts on Facebook. This really helps increase the awareness of the book.
  3. E-mailing me any typos or edits you might find. The great beauty of electronic publishing is that mistakes can be corrected at any time, even after the book is published. Life of Secrets has already been worked on by very skilled editors, but the lesson I learned from Death of Secrets is that typos still crop up no matter how many times you think you’ve polished it.

Ambassadors are a fundamental part of my marketing strategy. I want to be clear about this: I am asking for your help. If you’re willing, and the above description sounds good to you, then fill out the form below and I’ll get you started!

UPDATE: Life of Secrets is published, so the Ambassador program is over now. Grab your copy on Amazon!

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BookBub lives up to the hype

For Indie authors trying to promote their books, the name BookBub looms very large. Once I finished blindly flailing about, I discovered that BookBub is the leading name in promotion of e-books by e-mail. I also learned that they’re hard to get in with. But eventually, they accepted Death of Secrets.

Bookbub has certain requirements: The price you give them has to be the lowest for which the book has been advertised anywhere else. It has to be a limited time special. Unfortunately, I had put Death of Secrets at $0.99 as a regular price starting in March, which made it hard to get listed in bookbub for that price.

I put the novel on free promotion, and paid BookBub $220 to list it. I also sent the free promotion to a few smaller e-mail lists that promote free e-books. As usual, I scheduled like a bazillion tweets over the course of the free promotion.

What happened?

Over the course of the free promotion (April 29-30) the book was downloaded 40,000 times. Let me repeat that: Forty Thousand. My previous free promotion had 5,700 downloads. So yeah, BookBub can move e-books.

But of course, those are all free. Your humble narrator makes zero. Obviously, it’s a great audience builder for the sequel, which is the main point at this stage of my writing “career.” But still, one yearns for entrepreneurial success as well.

Good news!

Amazon. of course, lists books based on their sales. So by spiking the downloads so hard, Death of Secrets was all of a sudden much more visible on Amazon to people who are looking for thrillers. What that means is, after a free promotion, there’s always a spike in paid sales. In this case, that spike was pretty impressive.

I set the price back to $2.99 after the free promo, rather than $0.99. (more on the pluses and minuses of the two price points in a later post). And at that price, the day after the huge free promo, 220 people bought Death of Secrets. In the intervening days, the number has grown to 320.

Since $2.99 qualifies for the 70% royalty rate on Amazon, I get roughly $2.05 per sale. That means, of course, that I’ve made $656 in royalties so far in May. Given that the BookBub promo cost $220, that qualifies as a smashing success!

Now, the trick is to keep the success going. I have a couple other promotions scheduled today and later this month. I’ll post again about how things develop.

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Death of Secrets – Amazon Bestseller!

Screenshot 2014-05-03 at 9.33.15 AMDeath of Secrets hit number one in Amazon’s list of political suspense thrillers!

The book was on free promotion through 11:59pm Wednesday night. Thanks to a listing in Bookbub.com’s daily e-mail, the free promotion was wildly successful, with almost 40,000 downloads over the course of two days. The residual sales after the free promo ended much more than covered the cost of the bookbub promotion — indeed they’re still going on.

Those same residual sales were strong enough to boost it to the top of its category for a while this week. It’s still in the top ten as I write.

For a person strongly influenced by Tom Clancy in my youth, it’s pretty amazing to see my own work ranked above his.

I plan to fully analyze the cost/benefit of my investment in bookbub soon. I think it’ll be info that other indie authors want to know.

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Death of Secrets now includes a sample from Life of Secrets

The e-book version of Death of Secrets has been updated with a sample chapter from the forthcoming sequel, Life of Secrets. To celebrate, it’s free for download today.

Life of Secrets is a thriller about a professional thief framed for an assassination. It’s also a character driven novel exploring why a person comes to do bad things. Most important of all, it’s a story of redemption.

Return to the world of Mike Vincent, Kathy Kelver, and D. W. Tilman. Meet Alyssa Chambers. Go deeper into a political world where secrets and betrayal can be the difference between life and death.

You can start reading early by downloading the Kindle version of Death of Secrets today!

 

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Death of Secrets hits BookBub

As I’ve learned the art of marketing an indie novel, I’ve been trying to inform readers about what works and what doesn’t. But in all those posts, there has been one name that loomed over everything I wrote about analyzing sales. As I wrote “E-Reader News Today is good” or “Facebook advertising stinks,” there was always a caveat. The huge, most effective marketing channel that everyone talks about is BookBub.com. And I couldn’t report on it because they would not accept Death of Secrets for promotion.

Until now!

Yes, DoS finally qualified for the (reputedly) most effective marketing channel out there for e-books. So after April 29th and 30th, I hope to be able to report on just how well BookBub works.

So I want to say a thank you to everyone who responded when I asked for reviews. Your actions directly helped make this happen. More and more five star reviews make it possible for an e-book to qualify for some marketing channels. Thanks to you, I guess I finally made it over BookBub’s threshold.

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Free promotion – results

Holding a free promotion for an e-book on Amazon definitely does increase paid sales after the free promotion ends. So far, the increase is not as large as the increase from paid forms of promotion like e-mail lists, but it is definitely there.

On a normal day with no promotions going on and none recently concluded, Death of Secrets sells at most 1-2 e-books a day. It may sell zero, on depressing days.

From 12:01 am Sunday, when the promotion was over, through now, about 30 paid downloads have happened. So the rate is way higher than zero promotion. To compare, however, being listed in E-Reader News Today generated about 150 paid downloads in a day. And being Thriller of the Week on Kindle Nation Daily generated about 100.

To make the free promotion work, I submitted the fact that Death of Secrets was free for a limited time to about ten different e-mail lists that notify readers of free books. I also scheduled about a dozen tweets on @bowengreenwood and @deathofsecrets over the course of the two days, plus relatively fewer but still  a noticeable number of Facebook posts, Linked In, Google+, this blog, etc.

I also had a $75 Facebook ad credit, so I threw that into the mix as well, running $70 worth of Facebook ads to indicate that the book was free.

Over the course of the free promotion, the book was downloaded 5789 times. Facebook tells me that the ads generated 480 clickthroughs to the Amazon sales page. 480 is not immaterial, so I have found a way that Facebook can contribute to e-book marketing. However, considering that if I hadn’t had the $75 credit Facebook would have been the only advertising I did that cost money, its utility is really not on par with the free e-book lists.

In July, which I hope will be the second month of sales of Life of Secrets, I hope to repeat some of these studies with a book priced slightly higher. Death of Secrets is at $0.99 for its regular price as an e-book, which I used after reading a lot of discussion among indie authors that “$0.99 is the new free” and that readers were really sucking up books at that price. At this stage of the writing business, I am committed to long-term audience development, rather than huge immediate profits, so I didn’t mind pricing it low.

However, I have no experiential data of my own to indicate how the $0.99 price will work in terms of Sales numbers compared to a $2.99 price tag. I hope to see how the sequel fares if I keep it at $2.99 for longer.

Learning about e-book marketing has been super rewarding. I’ve enjoyed sharing the information as I get it.

Coming up next, a look at where Life of Secrets is in the writing process.