C.J. LaPolla, Author of the Isiir Chronicles

It has been a long road to get here.  2016 decided that it would be a good idea to make every inch of progress feel like a struggle.  The year consisted of the death of an elderly family member, my sister having a pre-mature baby (she’s fine now), Rascal (our dog) having to be put down, my mother-in-law passing, two bouts of month long pneumonia and I’m pretty sure a bunch else I’m missing.  I still managed to write and edit Eryn’s Tale.  I may never find the success I hope for in this endeavor.  But I will move through life knowing I’ve done my best to get there.

Persistence is key in all things.  For all those down and out about their lives, be sure to keep pushing forward towards your dreams.

Enough sappiness.  Eryn’s Tale launches tomorrow and I couldn’t be happier!  I have had my first delving into marketing through Facebook and Amazon.  I’ve already made mistakes but managed to turn them around to my benefit.

Book Marketing Lessons Learned:
1. Don’t use Facebook to push people to your sales page.  It’ll cost you more money then you will earn.
2. DO give away a free item in exchange for email addresses using Facebook ads to make valuable associations to people that may turn into fans.  (hope so anyway!)
3. Amazon ads aren’t valuable until you have a few reviews under your belt but are much cheaper then Facebook.  Over 30,000 ad shows, 0 sales.  Not a good use of the money.
4. Until you can reconcile spending the money on a service to do it for you taking names from ads and into your mailing list in a manual process.  No one tells you this.  But accept it that grooming your mailing list (something you hear a lot) is taking names from one place and importing them into another.  In doing this I have grown my mailing list from 4 (2 of which were me) to over 100.  Not impressive yet, but a start is better than gridlock.

It has been an awesome journey and I feel as if I have passed one of the many hurdles I will have to jump in order to make a career of this thing.  If anyone is interested in Eryn’s Tale, you can find it here:

or for UK

-c

Nothing is better than finishing anything.  And at long last I have finally finished Eryn’s Tale Episode 1.  This will be the first part of a three part novella.  Writing, Editing, more editing, MORE editing, and then polishing is all done.  I had an amazing book cover designed by Dragan Paunovic and now I’m just waiting for May 12th.

I will be taking the week of launch off for some R&R and then back to the grind editing Battle Engines.

That is what my next two months of writing looks like.  I’ll log in how my progress is going as I move along.  Today I start my first marketing campaigns as well and I will post up about how those are progressing.  Starting my first marketing campaigns is intimidating as hell, but with some help of the internet egg heads I’m hoping to not mess it up.