A Penny earned

I tweaked my Amazon advertisement settings once again and at least now I'm not paying for as many click-throughs. The last book moved around 11 1/2 copies, and the only ones that don't belong to a friend or a reviewer are that "1 - 1/2." And maybe one ebook in addition. There was a brief uptick in the other books, mostly Kindle Unlimited page reads of Book #2.

So...the theory is still untested. I think if I had a half-dozen books in the series I'd see more of this cross-support.

Thing is, I don't even know if this is what I wanted to write. I'm calling it Penny's fault. When I wrote the first book, I thought I had to make it plausible that this person could be young but know a lot of trivia about history. The needs of the story also seemed to push her to be athletic and especially to be friendly and open and be able to get people to talk to her.

So basically the standard skills of your typical RPG character. Everyone trusts Aloy with their problems and asks her to run errands for them that usually require some death-defying climbing stunts and of course a bunch of robots to fight.

It all feeds back on itself, a nice little feedback loop. For better or for worse these became stories not about the history, the archaeological mystery, or the action-movie stunts, but about Penny, her personality, her growth, her internal conflicts, etc.

And maybe that's why each book continues to be hard. They have yet to become formulae. For the Paris book I'm still asking deep questions about the purpose of the series and Penny's personal arc and all of that related stuff I thought I was done with already.

Those numbers would look better if I could throw six books up this year. The last book was uploaded in November. And as of mid-January -- I still don't have a plot.