News Progress Post

Progress Report 2022 Week 18

Did I implement a new landing page? If so, how did it perform? Did I finish the second draft of Evolution’s Hand Book 2: Dying Breath? Or did Real Life Family Events and Real Life Work Events obliterate my time? I’ll answer all these questions and more after we talk about the week’s numbers!

Progress Report 2022 Week 18 By the Numbers

The last point kind of spoils the surprise!

The numbers show that I wrote zero words in Evolutions Hand Book 3: Primary Target. That’s okay, because that’s how many words I planned to write! It also shows that I wrote 1,715 words as I finished the second draft of Dying Breath. That’s good, right? Doesn’t that mean the second draft is done?

Well, not quite. I’ll talk about that next. But overall, I had a productive week.

Dying Breath’s Second Draft

I finished the second draft of all 68 chapters in Dying Breath. Then I wrote two new chapters supporting the arc that ties the first three books together. Instead of celebrating, I contemplated the shiny new ProWritingAid icon my MacOS Monterey dock. I thought I had caught almost everything in the second draft. I thought it might be ready for beta readers.

Then I remembered watching a Chris Fox video called The Value of Extra Editing. It’s a topic that’s gnawed at the edges of my mind for months now. How much editing is enough? How will I know when the manuscript is ready? In short, how do I maximize the chances I’ll delight my readers?

So I fired up ProWritingAid, which now supports Scrivener. I test edited the first five chapters. On average, I found that I accepted about 50% of ProWritingAid’s suggestions, which was about twice as many as I expected. What’s more, it found things I should have found, but didn’t. It found enough to convince me I need to apply it to the whole manuscript. Right now, I’m about half way through.

Editing is taking longer than I expected, especially since I’m now considering running Evolution’s Hand Book 1: Executive Action through it. More on that when I talk about my goals for next week.

Facebook Ad Take III

I ran a new Facebook ad, and I thought I only changed the landing page. The goal was to isolate the weak link in my advertising chain. I used the same image and ad text, which looked like this:

I didn’t think this looked too bad. But I’m not sure the sure yet how to interpret the click-through rate.

I even used the same audience. However, I did try to increase the budget to $50.00, so I expected more impressions and therefore more clicks. Here’s how the raw numbers stacked up against the previous two ads:

AdReachImpressionsClicksCost
First Ad9,70621,235116$32.70
Second Ad86,976236,912655$32.46
Third Ad (the new one)24,37647,917218$13.93

I don’t understand why Facebook didn’t use the full $50.00. That seems strange. The click rate compared to impressions was .2% for the second and .4% for the third, so the third ad performed a little better than the second ad. However, my social media expert suggested that a 2% click-through is expected, so there’s something wrong with the ad or with the audience I selected. I’m going to think about this for a bit.

The First Newsletter Went Out!

I send my first biweekly newsletter to my new e-mail list! I didn’t get any feedback, but that’s okay at this point. The goal was to keep my promise to send it out. I want to build a good relationship with potential readers, and I think that honoring my commitments is a good way to start.

Also, I hoped they enjoyed the actual text! At least no one unsubscribed as a result of the newsletter! That’s a positive!

Goals for the Week in Progress Report 2022 Week 18

  1. Revise the E-Mail Campaign’s Audience: Since my third ad didn’t get the traction of even the first, I want to change the ad’s audience and try again. I need to understand if my changes I made to the landing page were helpful, and I can’t tell that with such a small number of clicks the third ad produced.
  2. Complete the Dying Breath ProWritingAid pass.
  3. Make a ProWritingAid decision for Executive Action: I need to decide if a ProWritingAid pass is worth the time. I’ll likely run the first four chapters through it to see. That’s going to be interesting, because Executive Action has already benefited from two professional proof readers.

What Do You Think?

Have you ever tried to select an audience in Facebook? Any pointers on what worked for you? I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments!

One thought on “Progress Report 2022 Week 18

Comments are closed.