My family went on our first summer adventure—to Cancun! It was our first time to take our kids to Mexico. We intended a relaxing trip and we hit the mark.

That said, we have our share of sadness going on as well. I'm less inclined to share the lows, but I also don't want to give the Instagram "all is rosy" picture. There are plenty of tears around the house of late.

I jumped ahead to begin writing Book 3 while I await structural feedback on Book 2.

I also spent some time trying to understand my data over time... ratings/reviews/sales. I don't expect this to mean a whole lot, but here's what I came up with: (time to geek out with my engineer and accountant readers!)

Raw Data for Guardian of The Palace ratings/reviews/sales

I did not start collecting data until about April of 2023, so there's no data before that.

Red: Amazon Reviews
Blue: Amazing Ratings
Purple: Books sold (divided by 10 so that it fits)
Green: Goodreads Reviews
Yellow: Goodreads Ratings

So... what's going on here? First, there's a gap between Goodreads and Amazon. That's because I foolishly tried to do a Book Tour in India on my first book. It is NOT the same as doing a Book Tour from the groups you find in the USA. Most of the tours groups in India do not have amazon accounts and can only post on Goodreads (GR). I didn't do the same with any future books. It really screws up your numbers. Any new authors out there... don't do it! I also did a tour in Europe, which is more like what you would expect in the USA, and I don't regret that, but I also did not do that with future books, because I wanted to concentrate on the US market (well, USA, with some spillover in Canada and the UK).

So, why did the sales climb in August 2023? I did a deal with Atlas Elite Publishing. They work with you to organize a burst of publicity. I think that was useful--it helped me understand how spiky the data on Amazon is. By collecting a burst of sales over a few days, but really with a specific focus on a few hours, your book rockets up the ranking on Amazon. It falls just as quickly, but it does allow you to claim you were on the Bestseller list, even if it was only for a few hours. Yeah, it's gimmicky, but it is good to understand. I appreciate those folks and what I learned from them.

But also note that the sustained growth is not from that one effort. The sustained growth is from advertising on BookBub. I tried numerous things, on both Amazon and BookBub, and I found what works best for me is BookBub ads with pictures other than my cover, targeting known authors of a similar genre. It's crazy, but it's been eight months now, and I still max out clicks from those ads almost every day. One thing I take away from that is my covers are not right--I don't get clicks from using my covers. I have to use alternate images to get clicks. I think I've shown this before, but these are the ads that get me consistent clicks (and purchases):

Now, Thaumatropic Roots isn’t Urban Fantasy. I’m calling it High Fantasy, but please correct me if you think I’m wrong. I haven’t figured out who to target yet as a similar author. Help me out if you think of books that felt similar to Mother of Trees.

Finally, let me describe something I see from the data that relates to readthroughs for a series. I've done two pricing schemes. One that had books 1 AND 2 priced at $0.99, and one where only book 1 was priced at $0.99. What I can see is that the readthrough rate (someone reading all 4 books), drops when I move the price of book 2 up to $2.99. At the low price of $0.99, my readthrough rate for book 2 was 50%. At $2.99, it was 25%. Books 3 and 4 are about 75% readthrough, but the price for book 2 cuts my follow-through in half. In terms of money, the greater readthrough from the lower-priced book brings me about $9 per day. The higher priced book with lower readthrough brings me about $7.40 per day. Unfortunately, I'm spending about $10-15 per day, so I'm losing money either way. But it is interesting that I can make more money with a lower priced book. I thought that the introduction of the new series would push me to the break-even point, but it doesn't. I get almost zero folks picking up the new series after reading the last. I suspect that is due to the recent culture of wanting to see a series complete before investing in it. I'm doing experiments with independent ads for Mother of Trees (as I mentioned above), but I suspect I need to halt ads for MoT until more books are out in the series.

The lower price for book two generates more readthroughs, resulting in more revenue downstream (blue and yellow) [readthru scaled by 10 for visuals]

I made a couple of presentations for my local writing group if you’d like to read more about self-publishing:

https://sjmorriswrites.com/writers-corner

Funny story, and please forgive me if I shared it already. I’d decided to write another short story in the Guardian League world, one that would explain how Elliah got her hands on a nuclear sub. Well, thirty years ago, in high school, I had a buddy who went into the Navy and worked on a nuclear sub. So I looked him up on LinkedIn, thirty years since we’ve talked, and asked, “If you were going to steal a nuclear sub, how would you do it?”

He wrote me back in MINUTES with a list of what he would need.

I wrote back and said, “What if you had goblins and magic?”

Again, he wrote me back in minutes, “Then it would be easy. Call me and I’ll talk you through it.” And he left his number. We talked for a couple of hours, catching up on the last thirty years.

Ironically, it became too easy to steal the sub. I lost my story. I’m trying to think of how to make it less simple and more interesting.

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Conflicted: Elemental Academy - Book 1

by A.R. NITUS

Abandoned as a child. Hungry for answers. Will she find the truth in a magical academy?

Alya Reed yearns to locate her biological parents. Intolerant of bullies and good with her fists, the now eighteen-year-old escapes her foster home in the hopes of discovering their fate. But her taste of freedom goes up in smoke when a violent run-in narrows her options to jail time or enrolling in a mysterious supernatural college.

Though she quickly makes friends, the kind-hearted protector is disturbed after a trek in the nearby woods ends with a frightening encounter that no one believes. And after learning her only hope of tracking down her mom and dad lies with passing the grueling final exam, she fights to harness her elusive power…

Plagued by memory lapses and repeatedly failing to connect to an element, is Alya doomed to flunk out of her future?

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Wedding of the Torn Rose (Symphony of Crowns and Gods Book 1)

by Brian Mendonca

As torn petals of a rose fall, a hero must rise in a race against destiny.

What starts as a fairy tale rescue spirals into an intricate web of dark fantasy laced with intrigue and magic. After the downtrodden merchant Kaine saves the runaway Princess Lydia from an unexpected monster, he feels inexplicably drawn to her. Lydia’s uncanny knowledge of his deepest secrets looms over him, suggesting she knows more about him than he has revealed.

However, there is little time to investigate this mystery. The princess is betrothed to the magic wielding Throatian Kingdom, and Lydia’s father has rewarded Kaine with a job offer he cannot refuse.

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With time dwindling short, and the ceremony happening the next day, will Kaine unshackle himself from his past to embrace the guardian he is destined to become? Or will the ties binding him to Lydia be torn apart like petals in the wind?

Journey with Kaine and Lydia as they attempt to prevent a war and save a kingdom in the first volume of the Symphony of Crowns and Gods series.