Portland Winter Light Festival
My wife and I hadn’t been planning on going down on the first night of the festival. But we both ended up having a bad day at work. The kind of day where you just log off early, pick up your bag, and head out the door. As such we kind of snapped a hodgepodge of photos at the waterfront before the sun set and we captured some of the festival. Had we known it would be raining the second weekend, we would have gone further and taken more pictures while the weather was so lovely.
Don Draper In The Making
This month I did an experiment, I put Vampire Detective Agency on sale for 99¢ and then ran advertisements. I put these ads up across Meta properties (Instagram & Facebook) as well as BookBubs. The results were surprising and encouraging.
First off, BookBubs did not deliver any successes. I tried half a dozen ads and none ever generated a notable number clicks. I fully recognize that this probably says more about my ad creating abilities than it does the site itself. I’m including a handful of the ads I ran here so that you may cast judgement on me.
Facebook was a different beast all together. While their Ad Manager is awful and everyone involved in its creation should be embarrassed, the actual results can’t be disparaged. Because I could target by gender, interest, and country – I got far more clicks for my money.
In fact, the cost of ads vs the money I was making everyday on sales & Kindle Unlimited page reads started to touch the spot on the graph where it goes from a money losing experiment to a way forward. Especially when taking my back catalog into account. I’m going to continue playing with ads in March, and I’ll report back if I’ve reached the point where I can pay for ads with book sales.
Bloody Fangs and Dames
A few weeks ago I shared that Vampire Detective Agency: Double Date will land in your laps on October 13th. But how is the actual work of finishing the book going? Well, the rough draft is done and I’m putting the final touches on a first revision. I’ve shared the first four chapters with a few test readers for a quick vibe/gut check and they gave me thumbs up. We’ll see what the rest of the testers think in March when they read the whole book. At this point I’m not anticipating any big issues that necessitate massive rewrites. From here until the ARC copies go out it’s all about polishing up the book.
Speak Not Thou Demons
I came across this incredible story written in English that changes style every few paragraphs to mimic how English was written at different time periods. Give it a read and see how long you can follow the tale before it becomes gibberish to you. Then scroll onward to the end to read a great summary about how English existed as a written language over the centuries: How Far Back In Time Do You Understand English
Old Lost Friends
I finished the first season of Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, and I can’t say enough good things about this anime. The way it twists D&D storytelling conventions by starting at the end of a hero’s journey, the use of the passage of time to reflect stages of grief, the richness of characters by using tropes in unexpected ways, and of course the charm of a main character who’s a bit of a mess. It’s given me a lot to think about when writing Veronica as a long lived vampire.
Once Monster, Always Monster
I’m late to the party, but I finally got around to watching Predator: Badlands. Damn. What a great movie. The way they found to make the monster of the franchise into the center of the story, without making him a hero is great. If I could complain about anything it would be the goofy Macguyver’d kit that he puts together at the end using woodland scavenging, but those ten minutes are so brief compared to the rest of what is a never ending series of badass scenes.
Notes From The Readings
I said at the outset of the year that I would make the time to read a book every month. This month I didn’t make the time to read a book… I read two books! I read both of Ali Hazelwood’s wolf-romance books, Bride & Mate. They’re wonderfully written. Of the two, Mate is perhaps the stronger book because Bride’s 3rd act drama comes across so clearly as a lie that it doesn’t feel realistic that the main character buys it. However, I should warn that Mate has multiple chapters of spice so hot it would make my vampires blush.
RossWeisfish.com 