Like Fusion energy, I have yet to reach break-even. I hate to put money into Amazon advertising but it clearly result in people getting the books. I've tweaked the settings as much as I can but all the sales are still from search terms like "Kindle book." No indication that any of these readers went as much as a category search, much less a proper keyword search.
That means I'm spending money on people who have no idea what they are clicking on and immediately click away. That's why the best I've been able to manage is a 10:1 ratio; ten bucks spent for every buck earned.
Well, I didn't do this for the money. If I thought more people would read the book if I threw thousands into the advertising, I'd consider it. As it is, the most copies I've moved has been by putting it on promotional giveaway. Three copies moved after dropping another seventy bucks on advertising. Twenty copies moved by making it free for three days.
(And, no, the free readers didn't seem to move on to purchase the next book in the series. But that is at least partly on me. If it was a really good book, they'd be more likely to, right?)
***
It all seems so artificial now. I am clearly still writing. I've always written, even if I gave up on publishing for far too long and am now looking at far too short of a potential writing career ahead of me. I look at all the other things I threw time and energy into and I wonder, "why?" But at the same time, a lot of what I could write seems as meaningless.
I've got a handful of sketches that aren't this particular, slow-moving, difficult-to-write series. None of them feel real enough to go forwards on. None of them feel important...whatever that means. Something about this light adventure I set out on with a fake archaeologist who knows she is a fake is touching the kinds of things I really want to talk about. About cultures and societies and the ways people interact with them. About how we as modern human beings try to understand how the world around us came to be.
My process seems to be a slow simmer one. I talk glibly in writing forums about how you can set up a conflict and build a plot but that isn't how I work. I seem to just meander, doing bits of research, playing music or playing computer games, until the people living in the back of my head begin to feel real to me.
I don't even have names for most of the cast. I don't know how many there are in the "Bohemians" that Penny hangs out with in Montmartre are and if they are all involved in the same show. Or exactly what kind of show it is. I don't know how many people "Nathan" has in his group. I'm not even sure of the nationality of "Soldier." But bit by bit, just through the process of forgetting and confabulation over the passage of time, I feel as if there actually are fleshed-out characters somewhere in some other world and all I'm doing is biography.
***
Well, I found my favorite breakfast nook from when I was there. I also found my notebook and a too-thin folder of museum pamphlets and other things I saved from Paris. Even a card from my hotel in Montmartre. Haven't picked out a cafe yet -- I really need one of those outdoor table things for a lot of the encounters I am planning.
I'm also slowly soaking in something of France, the history and politics (though not the philosophy -- that's a bit much for me.) The Napoleonic era still just confuses me. Too many players, too many shifts in alliances and so forth. It is worse than the end of the Warring States era, when Nobunaga Oda, Tokugawa Ieasu, and Hideoshi...something... got into a huge multi-clan wrangle that finally ended in the unification of Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate.
(And I couldn't have done that last bit if I hadn't boned up a bunch during writing of the last book).
Hey, maybe that's why it takes so long. The plot that matter to me is the underlying meaning and themes. If what mattered was "Find the Atlantean Orb before the Sacred Foot uses it to destroy the world" then I'd probably have the thing written by now.
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