This was a better week on the word count for the novella, over 10k. I'm almost to the ending and should have the rough draft finished before the end of next week. That's in line with my estimate from last month. Once it's completed, the plan is to read through it and make sure it works and no glaring errors or inconsistencies crept in along the way. After that I'll start going through it polishing the prose and dialogue and characterization and all that. I'm not sure how long it will take, but it's a novella not a novel. The page count should be around 150 or so. If there are no major problems or unexpected life events, I'm guessing it'll be out in April.
Getting AoE on Barnes and Noble has become a higher priority. I put working on the novella above that, which may be a mistake. No matter how many downloads I've had, when I look at the AoE page, it's not showing the "people who read this book also read" these books section. Instead, I'm seeing 67 pages of "Sponsored products related to this item." Two sections of it. That makes AoE very hard to find without paying Amazon a sponsorship fee. My plan has been to have a small marketing budget, but Amazon charges a lot per click. If I remember correctly, the minimum is 68 cents per click. The royalty per e-book is currently $2.73. So, every four clicks without a purchase means I would have to sell one book just to break even. Also, with 67 pages of sponsored books, how will people find mine? I've got to figure something out, probably using the marketing budget somewhere besides Amazon. Nevertheless, I do plan to try sponsorship at Amazon and see if it does anything at all.
My next experiment is to get AoE on Barnes and Noble to see whether Amazon considers that to be competition and loosens up. And on Kobo and maybe on Apple. If I gained traction on another site, would Amazon increase my sales ranking, trying to get a slice of the pie? They shouldn't, but who knows.
Have a great weekend.
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