I’ve been working recently with my cover designer, Lucie LeBlanc, and she hit on the idea of featuring one of my favorite characters on the cover. This is a small robot named Sceptre, about the size of a pocket watch who supports the king. In my head, I had always pictured him looking like one of the tiny clanks that Agatha Heterodyne created in “Girl Genius“. Lucie and I started working on an image that would fit this character, and so I tried to sketch out what I thought it would look like. This was my first attempt.

Recently, I signed up with a company called “BookBub” that is essentially a huge mailing list of books on sale. I promoted my book “The Hidden Institute” on there, dropping the price to $0.99. For sci-fi books selling for under a dollar, the cost was $120 to mail an ad to 90k subscribers who had expressed an interest in sci-fi. If I got even half of one percent of their subscribers to buy my book, the ad would pay for itself.

Goals

Before we start talking about numbers, let’s look at everything I hoped to accomplish with this ad.