Sean Stone's Blog

  ​With the final draft of Cursed done and dusted (you can read a sample of it here), I’ve been concentrating on the business side of things this week. I enrolled on Mark Dawson’s, Facebook Ads for Authors course (selfpublishingformula.com) which teachers all the techniques Mark used to turn his writing into a full time career – and get rather rich in the process. I don’t need to get rich; I’ll settle for earning enough to quit my day job. The course is pricey but if I can utilise the

  ​Cursed is finished. Completely done. Final draft is typed, formatted and ready for release. Of course, I’ll never feel like it’s finished to perfection. Even as I was typing those final edits from the final proof, I was seeing things that I wanted to change. Things that just weren’t perfect. That is the curse (excuse the pun) of all writers; never being fully satisfied with their work. But there has to come a time when a writer says “no more editing” and submits what they’ve got. It’s not[image error]

  This week I finally finished the final proof read of Cursed. It was painful and let me explain why. Imagine spending several months reading the same book again and again and again. For some people that’s not such a bad thing, but for me it’s a nightmare. I’m not the sort of person that can read the same thing more than twice – not in that short a time period anyway. So, imagine that you’ve had to read the same story several times over the course of a few months. You know when you start the[image error]

  I’ve been going over my marketing plan this week getting ready for the release of Cursed in November. The biggest problem I’ve come across so far is defining my target audience. I’m not sure what my target audience is. I spent time doing marketing experiments with Horrors from Cedarstone and managed to learn who my audience for those books is but the Cedarstone novels aren’t of the same genre. The short stories were all horror whereas the novels are contemporary fantasy. Therefore, the

  I ran an advertising experiment earlier this month. Using techniques learned from fellow author and Facebook advertising mastermind Mark Dawson (look him up it’s worth it) I created an advert for Horrors from Cedarstone to see if I could drive sales. That way if it was a success then I could use the same technique when I release Cursed. It was a success in terms of advertising, but it was a failure in terms of profit. Let me explain. Over the short time that I ran the ad a total of 6 people

      When I named Cursed I wasn’t as selective as I should have been with choosing the title. From a creative perspective the title is perfect. It fits the story and sets the right tone for the book. From a business perspective it sucks. From a business point of view I want my book to be as easy to find as possible. I want people to stumble on it when they’re searching Amazon for something to read. One way to make it easy to find is to choose a title which won’t return too many hits in the

I’ve run several experiments on advertising my short story collections now and I’ve come to the conclusion that short stories are difficult to sell if you are not a known author. For that reason, I’m cutting my budget for advertising and putting everything into Cursed. I want Cursed and the Cedarstone series to be a success so I need to commit to it fully. For those of you who have read the short stories and enjoyed them (according to my figures 404 copies have been bought/downloaded since the

I’ve been thinking about whether to leave KDP Select. Select is a scheme with Kindle Direct Publishing which lets people borrow your books and then you get paid royalties depending on how many pages they read. I’ve been signed up to Select since I started publishing with KDP last November and until recently I hadn’t really thought much about it. I’ve been listening to podcasts and reading things about other writers and quite often the question of KDP Select, in or out pops up and the results

The mailing list has taken a bit of a hit this week. I’ve been running adverts offering a free e-book to anyone who subscribes but so far they’re just not biting. I had really good success the first few adverts I ran but now things have taken a bit of a turn with only 11 subscribers so far for the month, my target for August is 50. The first thing I’ll look at is my target audiences for the ads. I’ll see if I can narrow them and try to focus the ads towards the right people. If that doesn’t work

I had a cover designed for Cursed over the last week and I am chuffed with how it came out. For my short story collections I didn’t buy a cover I just used the stock images and created my own. For my novel I wanted it to be as good as it could be which meant investing a bit more in it. Looking back I wish that I’d got covers designed for the Horrors of Cedarstone collections. The main reason I didn’t get a cover designed was because of the cost. When I first starting looking all of the quotes I[image error]