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Independent publishing has a way of keeping your ego under control.

I recently checked the numbers again, and Sovereign Knight appears to be up to about 17 books sold between Amazon and Barnes & Noble. That includes a couple of new Amazon sales in September, which was a very nice discovery.

Then I looked at my mailing list.

One subscriber.

My wife.

So, technically, I have a 100 percent family participation rate.

I am choosing to focus on the positive.

When I started all of this, I knew writing...

For the last couple of weeks, I have been experimenting with advertising for Sovereign Knight, and most of those experiments have been exercises in patience. Amazon gave me impressions without clicks. Earlier BookBub campaigns struggled to deliver at all. At times, it felt as though I was paying for the privilege of learning exactly what did not work.

Today, though, I finally have something that looks like a real pattern instead of noise.

My newest BookBub advertisement has now been shown 392...

There is something slightly strange about watching an advertisement for your book get a better response in another country than it does at home.

That is where I am right now with Sovereign Knight.

My recent BookBub advertising has been performing best in Canada. The newest campaign has produced a few clicks there, while the United Kingdom has been quieter. Earlier advertising in the United States produced plenty of impressions but very little response.

I will admit that bothers me more than I...

A few days ago, I was staring at an Amazon advertising campaign that had managed to collect more than 1,200 impressions without producing a single click. That campaign is gone. I rebuilt the advertising from scratch, changed the message, changed the targeting, and decided to stop paying attention to what Amazon thought I should bid unless the numbers actually made sense.

Now I’m starting to see what the new approach does, and for once, the news is not terrible.

My new BookBub advertisement has...

I got a nice surprise today.

Barnes & Noble sold three copies of Sovereign Knight.

If I have my numbers right, that brings me to 14 books sold so far.

Fourteen is not exactly a number that is going to frighten Stephen King.

But I’ll take it.

What makes these three sales especially interesting to me is that they came from somewhere other than Amazon.

Most of my attention lately has been focused on Amazon and BookBub advertising. I have been testing campaigns, changing targeting, adjusting bids,...

One of the ideas at the center of Sovereign Knight is something I learned long before I ever started writing science fiction:

Good people can serve bad systems.

That does not automatically make them bad people.

It also does not excuse what the system does.

I spent thirty years in the Army, and one thing military service teaches you very quickly is that organizations are made up of individuals.

Some are exceptional.

Some are mediocre.

Some are ambitious.

Some are cautious.

Some will challenge a bad...

For the last couple of weeks, I have been learning something every independent author eventually learns.

You can become emotionally attached to a terrible advertisement.

Not because the advertisement is particularly good.

Because you built it.

You spent time choosing the audience. You picked the words. You adjusted the bids. You watched the numbers. Then you told yourself that maybe it just needed another day.

Then another.

Then maybe another five cents on the bid.

Eventually the numbers stop being...

At the beginning of Sovereign Knight, humanity has a history everyone accepts.

Twelve great Houses dominate human civilization.

They control territory, fleets, trade, politics, and generations of inherited power. Their rivalries can threaten entire regions, but they are also the political structure that has held civilization together for centuries.

Everyone knows the Twelve Houses.

The problem is that human history is missing something.

There was a First House.

And it vanished.

That idea became one...

There are days when publishing feels pretty good.

Today is not one of those days.

I’ve been experimenting with advertising for Sovereign Knight on both Amazon and BookBub. I knew going into this that advertising a first novel from an unknown author would involve some trial and error.

I may have underestimated the “error” part.

My latest Amazon campaign has now been shown more than 1,200 times.

Clicks?

Zero.

Not one.

The good news is that Amazon charges me when someone clicks, so all those impressions...

I spent 30 years in the Army.

When I started writing Sovereign Knight, I knew that experience would find its way into the story. What I didn’t want to do was take the modern U.S. military, put everyone on spaceships, and call it science fiction.

What interested me much more was something underneath all of that:

How do people actually behave inside large military organizations when the situation starts falling apart?

Real military operations are rarely as clean as they look in movies.

The commander...

Publishing a book has a funny way of making you celebrate and question everything at the same time.

As of today, Sovereign Knight has sold 11 copies.

That feels good to say.

The problem is, I have absolutely no idea who bought most of them.

They were all sold in the United States, and some are probably family and friends. Maybe all of them are. Maybe a few came from people who found the book on Amazon. I simply don’t know yet.

And that uncertainty has become one of the more frustrating parts of...

My wife’s copies of Sovereign Knight Volume 1 and Volume 2 arrived.

I put them next to each other.

And immediately saw it.

Look at the spines.

UGGGG.

Volume 1 and Volume 2 are supposed to be a matched set, but somewhere during the endless process of formatting, resizing, uploading, correcting, re-uploading, and getting two very large books into print, the spine designs ended up noticeably different.

Is it catastrophic? No.

Does the average reader care nearly as...