Is Author Platform Rocket (APR) Worth It?

Strap in for another episode of Chris Reviews a Service. A fellow author who was asking questions in my writing group is who turned me on to Author Platform Rocket/APR. At first, it sounded like something I was very interested in. I think that a perfect service would be something that manages your ad accounts and takes a healthy commission off of the sales for their hard work. You would pay for the ads and they would build/manage them so that the writer can do what they excel at: writing. This sounded like that sort of service! (That led me to the million dollar question… what does that cost?)

Advertisement

Review: Before the Fall

I got an ARC of Leah Downing’s Before the Fall to review for my blog, Inside the Inkwell. It is book #3 of the Shooting Star Series.

While this is not normally my type of book (it’s in a POV I normally hate and on the more romance-tilted side of my main genre,) I found myself really enjoying this book.

Author Feature: Mark J Schultis

Community leader. Particle physicist. International Assassin. Mark J Schultis is none of these. He wrote his first story in elementary school and has spent a lifetime keeping that childhood passion of storytelling alive, studying theatre and filmmaking before eventually earning his writing degree from the University of Pittsburgh. A perpetual night owl and pizza connoisseur, Mark was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where he lives with his wife and their two children. Schultis’s Dawn Cluster series is an action-packed Military SciFi.

Tell us about yourself and how you got into writing:

In my youth, science fiction and fantasy helped me make sense of the world in ways my family couldn’t. Not only was I entertained, but the moral and ethical themes great Sci-Fi contain helped me see the world for what it was and what it could be. I was inspired to contribute and have been writing since childhood.

The Power of the Amazon Author Central

One of the tools that authors easily overlook is the Amazon Author Central page. We often hear about the importance of establishing our brand, blogging, social media, and personal web presence and when we get to Author Central it’s easy to look at it and go, “meh, I’ve already got pages that do all that stuff.”

However, there are lots of critical reasons to engage with Author Central, and if you haven’t done anything at all with it, or have just used it to go through the motions (by adding your books and bio so readers can see the bare minimum about you) then you are missing out on some powerful features and leaving a lot on the table.

Review: Boxer Earns his Wings

Boxer Earns his Wings, by Douglas Van Dyke Jr. has a certain flair to it. It opens by putting you smack dab in the middle of action and Van Dyke does a great job of continuing the level of excitement throughout the book. It was an easy read and not overly long which is nice, but also promises more in another fun realm Van Dyke writes in.

State of Writing

SUCCESS. I finished my audio recordings and I also completed the next Dekker’s Dozen story, The Seed Child of Sippar Sulcus… editing has already begun. It’s similar in length to my last installment, which means there ought to be a compilation book of the Armageddon Seeds coming this spring! I’m quite pleased how the book turned out, over all, and I’ve got extensive notes for another full-length installment, Dekker’s Dozen: Austicon’s Lockbox (the title is a huge hook if you’ve read any of Seeds books other than Arbolean Moon.)

This week I’ve got lots going on, but hope to revise another draft of DD:SCSS while doing some of the background work necessary for my new ACX installment (Wolves of the Tesseract 2). If I can get audio uploaded for WotT2 this week I’ll be happy. That, plus getting some prelim copies of Dekker’s Dozen into beta hands would be great.

Author Feature: Nix Whittaker

Whittaker’s Lady Golden Hand is a steampunk/gaslamp set in the 1830’s with a lady detective who has a prosthetic mechanical hand. She is investigating a murder of a conman and the main suspect is a dragon.

Tell us about yourself and how you got into writing:

I’m Nix Whittaker and I live in the shadow of an active volcano on an island. I got into writing because I ran out of books to read. Which might seem strange to some because I’m also dyslexic. But I was lucky enough to have a lot of supportive people who taught me some tricks to reading and I got addicted. Still can’t spell very well but meh who needs to with technology in this day and age.

Mailing lists: what is this newsletter swap thing i keep seeing?

I’ve been pretty keenly interested in getting better at promotions lately. To that end, I’ve enrolled in promo author-guru Mark Dawson’s SPF course and been working on his ads for authors package, especially the Facebook side of things. I’m working though it slow, and dealing with newsletter signups, etc.

I have a mailing list and I set up my triggers to auto-send mail every so often so that my system is in place… before I start spending money on ads, though, I have begun seeing lots of authors talk about newsletter swaps and looked into it.

State of Writing

I ALMOST met my goals last week. It was a busy one to be sure, but most of them really are. I did write well past the half way point mark of my newest SF book. I’ve been promising a new installment for Dekker’s Dozen for a while and said that I would have a new print book in 2019 for my fans to buy at conventions. My novella series (called the Armageddon Seeds) will be available this year—but I have another 10k-12k left to write in it (of a projected 80k or so total) and I hope to be done  with the last 25k novella by the end of next week.

I got about 3.5 chapters of audio recorded last week. I had some time budgeted for it, but my mic began picking up a 60cycle hum and I didn’t want to keep recording until I was able to get a clean input. I’ll try again this week. I really want to complete the audio recording of Wott2 by the end of the month as well. I’ve got lots of projects with notes pending and I’d love to jump into them, but these come first.

Also, convention plans are booked—come hang with me at comicon and lets talk fiction!

Author Feature: Thomas Webb

Thomas Webb writes Steampunk Thrillers, Alternate History, and Military Sc-Fi.

Tell us about yourself and how you got into writing:

I’m a short story author, essayist, and novelist. I’m a prior service Marine who resides in Richmond, VA, with his wife and two kids. When I’m not spending time with my family or writing, I like lifting weights, running, and choking my friends via the fine art of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I got into writing because I love a good story, and was audacious enough to think that I could tell a few myself.