Progress Report 2025 Week 52

The month-long Real Life Family Event (RLFE) continued unabated, and that had a huge impact on my writing time this week. Compounding that is that I’m going to physical therapy for something I did to my hip. That’s not so much a time issue (the visits are around four hours a week) as an energy issue. I had forgotten how much energy it takes to deal with physical pain. Not only that, but I gained a new appreciation of Draft2Digital based on something I tried to do this week — and can’t finish until next week. And that’s if it all goes well. Before we get into any of that, let’s look at the key performance indicators.

Last Week’s Progress By the Numbers

Achieved less than 10,000 words, but it was a really challenging week.

I had to devote a lot of time to the RLFE this week. On top of that, physical therapy demands more energy than I anticipated. I guess the bright side is that it’s my hip, and I don’t type with my hip. But it’s still distracting. That’s a problem, because I need focus for the level of detail I’m trying to develop in Wayland’s Hammer Book 3: Lines of Operation.

Still, I made progress, and I’m still having a lot of fun writing these chapters. My favorites deal with Owen Payne and Amaterasu. They stepped up this week and seized the initiative, which is a good sign. It means I’ve internalized the characters and plot, and they’re just doing their thing.

The RLFE should wrap up my mid January, if all goes well (guess I’m ever the optimist!). My physical therapy will likely last at least until March. I’ll say this: I took my good health for granted. I didn’t exercise enough, and I’m paying for it now. Well, the physical therapist is optimistic, so I will be, too. And I’ll practice writing in discomfort.

Who knows? Maybe it’ll he me write certain scenes!

Draft2Digital and The Sword of Sirius’s New Ad Campaign

A few weeks ago, I unenrolled The Sword of Sirius from Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited. Once you enroll, you’re in for a rolling ninety days. That period ran out on December 18th, and Amazon did their part by no longer offering The Sword of Sirius to Kindle Unlimited.

Why unenroll? Because the audiobook for The Sword of Sirius Book 1: Red Flag Warning is available wide. Now, I can take the ebooks wide. I logged into Draft2Digital, where I already list Evolution’s Hand. Of course, my goal is to sell more ebooks. But more than that, I saw the ebooks being wide as a prerequisite to starting an ad campaign to generate sales of the audiobook, which Summer Foovay narrated. I want to see if the audiobook will sell, and if it does, what kind of reviews it generates.

If the sales are strong, I’ll consider moving forward with audiobooks for The Sword of Sirius Book 2: Collapse Zone and The Sword of Sirius Book 3: Firebreak. Now everything’s in place, so I’ll probably kick off the ad campaign in January.

Why am I singing Draft2Digital’s praises? Because Draft2Digital doesn’t publish to the Google Play store. That’s counter intuitive, so please let me explain. I tried to set up my account at Google, upload the ebook, and define the series (The Sword of Sirius). I did all that. But Google has several steps my account needs to go through before it’ll make the books available. As of writing this, I’m on the third day of waiting for an approval. Part of it is a random, small amount of cash deposited into the account I designated. I have to confirm it before I can publish.

It’s probably my fault for starting this near a weekend!

Here’s how Draft2Digital helps. It distributes to a dozen or two ebook retailers. I don’t have to work through the particulars of two dozen retailers — and the Google example reminded me of that. That could work out to be hours of administrative time. Draft2Digital takes about 10% for their troubles, and I’ll tell you what. That’s fair! Now I can use that time to keep writing or editing.

Progress Against Last Week’s Goals

Here’s how I did when measured against last week’s goals:

1. Write Owen Payne’s pinch 1: Half done! Turns out this will need a second chapter to develop some of of the ideas Payne and Amaterasu came up with.
2. Write a helper plot chapter from Jackson Scott’s perspective: Not started!
3. Monitor availability of URLs in Author’s Republic: Ongoing! I have 2 URLs now, despite many retailers offering the audiobook for sale.
4. Continue working on the Sirius colonial guide: Ongoing! I have the graphics for the major colonies drafted. Now I have to do the colonial candidates.

Goals for the Week in Progress Report 2025 Week 51

Here’s what I hope to accomplish this week:

1. Finish Owen Payne’s pinch 1
2. Write a helper plot chapter from Jackson Scott’s perspective
3. Writer Gerhard Wimmer’s midpoint
4. Monitor availability of URLs in Author’s Republic
5. Continue working on the Sirius colonial guide
6. Finish publishing The Sword of Sirius to Google Play

What Do You Think?

Do you publish your ebooks across multiple retailers? If so, do you leverage an aggregator like Draft2Digital? Do you think it’s worth the cut they take? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!