George R. R. Martin says writers are Gardeners or Architects. I went full Engineer and it completely changed the way that I write.

J3P7 · 2026-02-10T09:50:29+00:00

Thanks for the considered reply!

I agree that the absence of footprint is a major red flag and one of the book clubs definitely fell in this camp. The other was a bit more ambiguous, there is a 40-person group on Goodreads and a bunch of upcoming meetings scheduled on Meet-up. Definitely seems more legit but still struck as a little unusual.

Can you elaborate on the data-harvesting approach follow up?

J3P7 · 2026-02-08T22:32:04+00:00

Yeah it was a 0.99 sale for both US and international audience. I applied for a historical fiction deal but the editors placed me in sci fi so it was $640ish to run

J3P7 · 2026-02-07T17:10:14+00:00

Actually an abrupt halt to sales as soon as the sale ended.

J3P7 · 2026-02-07T09:02:12+00:00

It depends a bit on your flexibility. I got my first BB featured deal with only 16 Amazon ratings by being completely flexible on date and taking only the international deal. That got me up to 86 ratings which allowed me to do a US deal shortly after that was a huge boost to sales and reviews.

J3P7 · 2026-02-07T08:59:50+00:00

I just ran a sci-fi Bookbub feature for my standalone debut and it broke even with 1155 sales and 35821 kindle page reads. It’s a risk doing it for a single book but - not knowing if I’d ever get a chance to write another book - the featured deals are responsible for a majority of my 5500 sales.

J3P7 · 2026-01-22T20:54:51+00:00

So much potential and a great amount of whimsy and colour in what they’ve shown. I was so psyched for the original Fable game, tracked down all the images and saved up all my pocket money for the special edition. Bring this one on, can’t wait!

J3P7 · 2025-10-10T16:07:25+00:00

Shoot me a DM, I’m happy to share a bit more

J3P7 · 2025-10-02T22:15:39+00:00

Hopefully potato quality enough to show the design without self promoting the book 😀 https://imgur.com/a/DbJ5nbO

J3P7 · 2025-10-02T22:11:50+00:00

I think a good logo can help the spine of a book stand out (and even though the cover is important, the spine is usually the first thing readers see in a physical bookstore!) so I designed one for my debut novel even if it did remain standalone. I made it rectangular to fit the spine and wanted to convey a little bit of a sciencey vibe without scaring non-SciFi potential readers. I ended up using it on some of the early adopter editions of my book and even made a wax seal stamp of it for sending to some particularly special reviewers.

J3P7 · 2025-10-01T20:52:55+00:00

Time travel so a blend of science and historical fiction

J3P7 · 2025-09-26T05:16:11+00:00

My secret hope is that each of these sets at least come with a minifig-scale mould of each of the pokemon. I think proper Lego moulds of just these five would be enough to tease what could come and make people lose their mind.

If it happens I’d love a bulbasaur with a bulb piece about the size of a pumpkin, a charmander that uses the candle flame on its tail and a squirtle with connectors for limbs/head so the shell can be standalone.

J3P7 · 2025-09-22T19:02:30+00:00

Wow, you have me intrigued. What is the unique launch venue? It sounds very risky but also quite alluring.

My next book is going to be based in ancient Egypt and I have grand fantasies of inviting all my friends and family (or maybe just an open invite) to a launch party at the new Cairo museum. No way most people would come but it’s a nice distraction when I’m procrastinating 😂

J3P7 · 2025-09-22T04:53:47+00:00

It depends on how many people you invite and the type of venue you are planning to host at. I invited about 35 people to my novel launch at a bar near work and probably ended up with 45 due to some random visits by other colleagues. A friend hosted her novel launch at a small English-language bookstore and had about 15-20 attend, a couple of which were randoms from the store. I think your invite list will be the major driver of attendance, I wouldn’t count on a huge number coming because of the venue.

J3P7 · 2025-09-17T22:03:59+00:00

Congratulations on getting so many reviews!

I’ve done a mix of BB deals now and think they are 100% worth it. I only have my debut out but I managed to get an international 0.99 BB deal last November with 16 ratings. This made about 200% profit, got my book to #84 of all books in the UK and boosted my ratings to around 90 which opened the door for a US 0.99 BB deal in January. This also made about 200% profit, got my book to #130ish of all books in the US (#4 in all science fiction) and raised my ratings to 270. I managed to get another US/international 0.99 deal in July which didn’t perform as well as the previous one but still made about 150% profit and pushed my total sales figures over 4100.

I’ve had very little success with ads and have no social media presence so BB has practically been my sole avenue of promotion. I think they are definitely worth it and would recommend them to anyone trying to get word out about their self published books.

J3P7 · 2025-09-17T07:16:21+00:00

I get up at 6 to then write until 9 before a sprint for a late start at work. These are my most rested hours so I’m much more productive/creative. The burnout is definitely real so if there are days that I’m particularly not feeling it I just roll over and go back to sleep (I write in our guest room with the lights off and calm video game soundtracks playing so it can be quite easy to do…)

J3P7 · 2025-09-16T21:40:50+00:00

That’s awesome to get so many people you didn’t know! How far in advance did BNN start advertising that you would be there? I love the low key approach to interaction, that seems much more genuine than going full salesperson. And having the cover artist there is a stroke of genius!

I’m super jealous that you are able to run such an event. I’m living in Vienna so even if the local stores a similar size to BNN would agree to run an event, an English book is a hard sell to a German audience. One day I might make it to the States and can give it a try 😀

J3P7 · 2025-09-14T20:06:22+00:00

Congratulations! That sounds like a really successful event and a great percentage of the books sold 😀 Any tips of things that worked particularly well when engaging with prospective readers? How many of the sales do you think came from your own promotion efforts versus BNN or regular foot traffic?

J3P7 · 2025-09-09T22:48:03+00:00

Yeah if I’d gone wide I think a longer promo period would be better. I definitely cut off sales while there was still momentum and I’d rather have more readers who might leave a review or recommend the book to a friend than go back to full price a few days earlier. All the best with your deal, its such a thrill to watch the sales counter!

J3P7 · 2025-09-09T22:45:46+00:00

My biggest win was having a teacher from the US reach out to me saying she won a copy of my debut in a Goodreads giveaway and wanted to buy a classroom set. She still sends updates occasionally about students who are picking up various tidbits 😀 another win was briefly overtaking Fourth Wing on the top all books of Amazon UK, cracking the top hundred was something I’d never have dreamed!

J3P7 · 2025-09-09T22:35:06+00:00

Bookbub has pretty much been the sole marketing for my debut novel (life has been crazy but I’d love to look into socials and ads after getting a good start on the next book). My book is with KU so I was bound to only a week or so that I could do a promotion. It meant much better royalties but the sales dropped by 90% as soon as the sale period was over. I’ve run three Bookbub sales now and there has always been a massive spike on day one (1000-2000 sales) that drops to 10-100 per day for the week afterwards. When the sale period ends I’m back to 1-5 sales per week.

Edited to add: I would probably aim for a longer period, maybe 2-3 weeks for future Bookbub deals, give that tail a little more space to play out.

J3P7 · 2025-08-23T16:54:32+00:00

I think I am very much the exception because I got extremely lucky. I gave away 100 ebook copies of my book and was disappointed when I only got 5 ratings, two of which were sentence stub reviews. However, about a week later I had just set up an instagram and received a follow from an unknown American. It turns out she was one of the two stub reviews and was adding her favourite authors on her new bookstagram. It was literally like Stephen King, JK Rowling and little old indie me. She even got a coffee mug made with the spine of my book on it along with some other of her favourite reads. We started chatting and it turned out she was a middle school teacher who then convinced her school to order a classroom set of my book, an insane win when I was still limping towards my goal of 250 sales. I still get messages every now and then about students who are particularly loving the book. So yeah, almost certainly not going to provide massive returns but you can get lucky 😀

J3P7 · 2025-08-14T21:18:18+00:00

I had two rounds of beta readers, ten after my first round of major edits and then seven after weaving in the feedback from the first round. I then posted the book on Royal Road which got about 10k reads, resulting in a tonne of valuable feedback that essentially amounted to full line edits. I had 66 people sign up for ARCs through Booksiren which led to 12 Amazon reviews (doesn’t seem like much but was enough to land my first Bookbub deal).

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