Newsletter – May 2026
Facebook ad hell & another half a book written.Shameless plug: The Paschal Moon is out, you can buy it HERE.
Facebook Ads
Now that I’ve climbed the enormous learning mountain how to write a book, it’s rather depressing to face another one; how to promote it. These days, organic reach from posting lots and getting lucky and going viral aren’t really a thing. You pay to play now, and if you dont, no one sees anything.
Facebook is the #1 platform for ROI on book sales (in this genre anyway), and along with paid Amazon promotion, they’re the two things to use. So I’ve been tinkering with different ideas, listening to podcasts, and scrolling through how other authors do it. I had the pleasure of dicovering the “billionaire mafia don” genre. Its a real thing, go look, the ads are all moody-but-misunderstood men in suits who insist on having their shirts undone, showing AI-distorted six packs.
Its a complicated world, ads, billionaire mafia dons aside, and I admit its a struggle to take it all in. But I’m doing what the advice says, chucking loads of stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks, and then taking the stuff that sticks and doing variations of that, and then chucking that at the wall. And so on… bleh. I prefer writing.
Innismor – Slaine reborn… kind of
Which segways nicely to my other thing… It’s been a pretty steady word count on my new book, and this week I passed 50,000 words, which is halfway. Woop!
When I was a teenager, I loved the comic 2000AD, probably more than life itself. I still have some Judge Dredd graphic novels on my shelf to this day. One of the more lesser known characters from the comic was Slaine (IYKYK), a axe-weilding nutcase loosely based on the mythical Cú Chulainn, the hero of the pre-christian Ireland sagas called the Ulster Cycle.
I’ve always enjoyed Celtic stories, symbols, stone circles, megaliths, all of it. There’s an ancient mysteriousness to it that draws me in, and its myths and religions are more grounded to the earth and sky, the natural world, as opposed to messiahs and original sin.
The new series is set in an alternate past, where the Celts discover and settle in Iceland, rather than the Vikings. They call it Innismor, and live there for many centuries undisturbed and isolated from the Old World. They have a close connection to and method of harnessing the energy of the earth, something Iceland is famous for today. Its a medeval fantasy with a lot of violence and politics and jostling and feuding, set in a stable-but-fractured society thats watched over by a brooding, repressive religion. Awesome.
I’m aiming for something that appeals to lovers of the SFF genre, but with as much character driven humanity than maybe some fantasy books. I’ve read the genre since I was a child, and there are some brilliant, brilliant examples, but I do find a lot of it is more about the complexity of wizard names and the shininess of swords than the story itself. I’ve had several people say to me that they liked the Cambria Trilogy “even though they don’t normally do science fiction”, and I think that’s ultimately down to the characters, so I’m aiming for that.
Thanks for reading 🙂
Daniel