If you read fantasy for the magic, the world-building, and the occasional moment of dark humor—I write that. One urban fantasy series, one epic fantasy series, both set in the Fractured Arcana universe, with more coming. My newsletter takes you deeper into the worlds, the characters, and what's next.
A Strange Win: FB Ads, Profit, and Progress
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Kids are back at school and I’m back at work. Had to cancel a vacation to Venezuela. Then I took that money and almost bought Greenland, but the price jumped up. Weird, right? Maybe I’ll head to Iran. Busy month. My last email was a pretty dismal writing update: FB account hacked, no story progress. This newsletter gets to smack that one around a bit. 🥊 FB Hack UpdateNo, I don’t have my Facebook account back. But I learned something genuinely valuable when my ads shut down—something I probably never would have learned if I hadn’t been hacked. I was hurting myself with Facebook ads. There was a time when FB ads clearly helped. You could see sales track with ad spend. But over time, I crossed a line without realizing it. I was losing money every month, spending more on ads than I earned back in sales. What I didn’t see was that somewhere along the way, while I was pumping a Facebook audience into Amazon, the Amazon flywheel had started spinning on its own. When my ads shut down, that flywheel kept spinning. I dumped a bunch of data into ChatGPT, and it showed me something surprising: there came a point where FB ads were likely hurting my sales. The theory is that I was sending a colder audience than Amazon would have found on its own. That audience bought less often—and in doing so, may have confused Amazon’s recommendation engine. To be clear, the correlation isn’t ironclad. But here is something I know for sure: this is the first month I’ve made a consistent profit since I started writing. That feels really good. It’s enough to pay for ongoing writing costs— overs, editors, software. It doesn’t erase the historical money pit, but it pulls me back from the edge of wondering whether I should stop entirely. That said, every marketing expert will tell you these systems are fragile. Relying on only Amazon, or only FB, or only BookBub eventually leads to trouble. So I’m rebuilding cautiously. I’ve started a fresh Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/steven.j.morris.author The old page still exists somewhere in limbo. If you’re willing to like the new one, I’d appreciate the momentum. I don’t have a grand plan for it yet—but I know I’ll need one. Shepherds of TruthHuge uplift since the last email. I’ve written several new chapters based on editorial feedback and cleaned up almost half the manuscript. The story is done now—but the work isn't finished. The biggest issue is that it’s dense with action while still being relatively short. It needs breathing room. It also needs a few more moments of levity. The plan (loosely held):
Mom always gets first dibs — and first pain. I’ve never had a formal set of beta readers. If anyone is itching to help with emotional pacing, please let me know. And anyone who has been around for a while knows that I'm terrible at book launches. If anyone wants to help organize, reach out. I reserve the right to decide I want another editorial pass, which would push out the timeline noticably. All books by Steven J. Morris Previous Newsletters
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Steven J Morris
If you read fantasy for the magic, the world-building, and the occasional moment of dark humor—I write that. One urban fantasy series, one epic fantasy series, both set in the Fractured Arcana universe, with more coming. My newsletter takes you deeper into the worlds, the characters, and what's next.
Hey Reader, Quick fun bit before today's update: the polls from my last email are in. I'd asked how many of you had actually read the three portal fantasy books that made me want to write the genre: Mordant's Need: 14.3% have read it The Darwath Trilogy: 0% have read it War of the Flowers: 14.3% have read it Almost nobody has read them, which tracks. They're buried treasure. If any of them ended up on your list because of that email, I'd love to hear how it goes. Okay, the actual update. I...
Hey Reader, I was ~sixteen when I first read Mordant's Need by Stephen R. Donaldson. A woman gets pulled through a magic mirror into a medieval kingdom that desperately needs a hero—except she isn't one. No power, no destiny, no idea what she's walked into. What Donaldson does with her arc stuck with me, particularly the moment she finally understands the game being played around her, finds her place on the board, and chooses to step into it. I try to replicate that in my storytelling. That...
Well... this isn't the newsletter I expected to be writing. A couple of weeks ago I accidentally wandered into a blockchain hackathon. As one does. The timing was terrible. I was busy, traveling, and already had more on my plate than I should have. Naturally, I signed up anyway. And I created a... something. It's called Eigenthrope. It's an interactive mystery where the community votes and influences what happens next. Every week the story branches based on those votes. It runs on the XRP...