I feel really blessed today. Yesterday, I was able to make a $700 donation to Wounded Warrior Project for the sales of Fallen Pride. What's more, I know my donation on 7/31 will be $800 and my donation on 8/31 will be $1000. These amounts are based on half of what my profit is on Fallen Pride. The vision of WWP is "To foster the most successful, well-adjusted generation of wounded service members in our nation's history." They make a huge difference in the lives of returning Warriors, who have been injured in battle. While I've donated in the past, it's been in the $10 to $20 range every few months. This book gives me a platform that I fan make ongoing donations from.
Sales through June were amazing. The release of Fallen Out on 5/31 was scheduled to coincide with a large promotional campaign on all my books. The result was a single day of sales totaling 1872 books on 5/31, of which 180 were Fallen Out, launching it into the top 6,000 books on Amazon and resulting in a "Hot New Releases" listing for 28 days. Fallen Out was #1 in the Sea Adventures genre for nearly all of those 28 days and is still #1, four days after falling off the list. June was the first month I completely trounced my old income as a truck driver. Previous months had pretty much replaced it, but June was more than double. Thank you to all my fans who have enjoyed my books for allowing me to follow my dream. There's not a day that goes by now, that I'm not completely humbled by the fact that you are willing to pay your hard earned money to read my sea stories.
I'm still struggling with the title of the novel I'm currently writing. The working title is Fallen Coconut, but that brings to mind Gilligan's Island. A short synopsis of the book is this. Clues to the location of buried
treasure are carved on a coconut, sealed in a chest in 1566, and placed
in the bough of a mangrove tree. As time goes by, the tree grows around the
chest on the uninhabited island. The tree is toppled by a hurricane just after the American
Revolution and an ancestor of one of Jesse's friends finds it. It's
handed down for generations, but nobody can solve the riddle. Until now.
As the treasure hunt mounts, east European gangsters get wind of it and
try to beat Jesse and the team to the treasure buried somewhere on
Elbow Cay in the Bahamas.
I like the name Fallen Mangrove, but is it too many trees with Fallen Palm? Or maybe start over with another tree, another constellation (Did you know Fallen Hunter is named for Orion?), and another emotion? Palm, Hunter, and Pride, followed by Mangrove, Scorpion, and Honor? Hey, I'm open to suggestions. Email me any time.
Current word count is 27,000 for a planned 100,000 word novel, so I'm 27% complete. My goal is 1,000 words a day and I started it on 6/1, so I'm 4,000 words behind. I took a few days off to go down to Folly Beach, in Charleston, to put my toes in the sand. I expect to have the manuscript ready for editing by the middle of September, with a release by early October.
I'll be announcing some special deals, via email, as the release date gets closer, including the first printed copy, signed personally to one of my email subscribers. To get my weekly (okay, maybe every two or three weeks) email, go to my website and sign up.
Right now I'm reading a really great book, actually two books in one, by my friend Michael Reisig. It's called "Brothers of the Sword/Children of Time". The first half is a swashbuckling tale straight out of the pirate days of the 1700's in the Caribbean, while the last half is a more modern tale of pirate days in the Caribbean. The two stories are interwoven by characters from the first, who find one another again in a later life. Michael is a real master story teller. If you've finished my books, take a look at his. Here's a link to the one I'm reading on Amazon. Brothers Of The Sword/Children Of Time.
Semper Fi,
Wayne
