The Next James Bond

 

Image Credit: IMDb

After waiting years to hear what’s next for the James Bond franchise after the end of Daniel Craig’s run as our favorite British spy in 2021’s No Time To Die, the news today is that Amazon has taken control of the franchise rights from longtime owners Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson for the cool figure of $8.5 billion. If you’ve read many of my posts over the years, you know I’m just a bit of a James Bond fan. I’ve ranked the films. I’ve ranked the theme songs. I’ve even suggested artists for the next theme song. Now I’m going to weigh in on who I think should be cast as the next James Bond. I don’t hold out much hope Mr. Bezos and his Amazon minions will heed this advice, after all this is the same corporation that delivered the tepid spy thriller All the Old Knives (2022) but cancelled The Peripheral (2022) after just one season, but a fanboy can dream, can’t he? Note, James Bond is typically cast in his mid to late 30s in order to give him both the proper amount of veteran presence while also enough time to do three to five films before he ages out of the role. This almost assuredly rules out favorites like Tom Hardy (48), Michael Fassbender (48), and Idris Elba (53). So, who’s left? Here are five top candidates:

Image Credit: Longines

Henry Cavill

Cavill is now 41 so the James Bond opportunity may have passed him by, but he’s definitely got tall, dark, handsome and British down pat. He’s also played Superman, the Witcher, Sherlock Holmes, and a host of other major roles. My guess is that he’s too obvious of a pick, but might he play England’s greatest spy next?

Image Credit: Shayan Asgharnia/For The Times

Theo James

At 40, James might also be a few years too old to get the nod, but if you’ve watched Guy Ritchie’s spinoff Netflix series The Gentlemen (2024), you probably know he can pull off the suave, dangerous Brit-type. He’s got plenty of experience, but he’s still enough of an unknown, he could be a good pick to follow in Craig’s footsteps.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Nicholas Hoult

Hoult is 35, English, and he’s been starring in films since he was a kid including About a Boy alongside Hugh Grant in 2002. More recently he’s starred in Nosferatu (2024), Renfield (2023), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and several of the X-Men movies. He’s got the talent and the action chops to play the part, but he still strikes me as more of sidekick than a leading man.

Image Credit: Pascal Le Segretain for Getty Images

Jack Lowden

Lowden stars as River Cartwright in the excellent Apple TV+ series Slow Horses. The 34-year-old Scotsman has proven he can play a convincing (though much less intimidating) British spy in that series, but his resume might be a bit light for the part. Would Lowden put enough butts in seats to satisfy what will surely be a massive budget for the next film? I’m not convinced. 

Image Credit: Jon Kopaloff/FilmMagic

Aaron Taylor-Johnson

A year ago, I thought 34-year-old Taylor-Johnson was as close a thing to a shoe-in to be the next James Bond as we’re likely to find. Then he starred in Kraven the Hunter (2024), an absolute stinker of a comic book movie. Will that dud keep him from landing the part? We should find out soon. Based on his work in films like Bullet Train (2022) and Savages (2012) I still think he’s the top contender. 

Does Amazon Book Advertising Work?

Image Credit: Amazon

Warning: This post is geared toward my fellow writers. For anyone that isn’t interested in the nuts and bolts of selling books, you might want to pass on this one. That said, let us continue!

If you spend any time at all browsing books on Amazon, you’ve noticed the Sponsored Products advertisements toward the bottom of every page. Being the eternal optimist that I am (Hey, no laughing) I decided to give this advertising method a try. Sure, my novel Storm Orphans has been out for years, but let’s be honest, almost no one has heard of it. Perhaps Sponsored Ads would be a way to get the word out there and find some new readers.

Setting up an ad through KDP is actually kind of fun. From your author page, click Promote and Advertise from the "..." button associated with your book then click the Create an ad campaign button. From there, choose the Sponsored Products campaign type. Then you choose the date range for your ad, the maximum amount you’re willing to spend each day on the ad, your maximum bid per click, and finally the keywords that should trigger your ad.

The cool thing about Sponsored Product ads is that you can try different campaigns while risking very little money. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad and once you meet the maximum amount you’re willing to spend that day, the ad won’t appear again until the next day, preventing the possibility of you spending more than you wanted to.

I followed some advice I found online and stuck to the default bid per click of $0.25. That means I’m bidding against other authors for ad space. I’m bidding up to a quarter per spot. If someone bids more, their ad gets shown instead of mine. Again, I don’t have to pay that quarter unless someone actually clicks on my ad, but I’m willing to pay up to $0.25 every time they do until I hit my daily maximum spend.

Being a newbie to this advertising platform and not wanting to spend a ton of money on something that might not earn me any sales, I started cheap. I set my daily max at $5 for my first campaign. As you can see in the graphic below, I needn’t have worried. Despite using keywords based on similar authors and books, I only managed 400 impressions in a week and from those impressions, I only received 4 clicks for an average of $0.17 each. None of the four people purchased my book so I earned nothing, but only spent $0.66 for a week of chances.

Image Credit: Matt Handle

Undeterred, I tried again the following week with a slightly different book description in my ad and a revamped list of keywords. I kept the handful of keywords that seemed to provoke a bit of interest in my first ad, but then added two dozen new keywords to replace those that didn’t perform the first time around.

As you can see in the next graphic, my second ad received way more impressions. This time around, 1831 people saw my ad in a week, but my click percentage was much worse than my first attempt. I only received 5 clicks and again, generated zero sales. A full 2/3 of my impressions were generated on the keyword “Frank Tayell”, the indie author of a popular post-apocalypse series titled Surviving the Evacuation. I mistakenly thought his readers might find my book interesting since they’re based on a similar theme, but all I can surmise is that few other authors used his name as a keyword since I wound up winning that space so often. Only one of the 1225 impressions from his page actually clicked on my ad.

Image Credit: Matt Handle

You’ll also notice I didn’t have any impressions on well known, traditionally published author pages such as Max Brooks. Tons of people are interested in his World War Z and Zombie Survival Guide books so I can only assume my $0.25 wasn’t a high enough bid to win any of those spots. This is kind of a bummer, but in the end I only spent $0.75 on the week-long campaign so I can hardly complain.

So what did I learn from my little experiment with Amazon advertising? It’s something of a fun game trying to figure out which keywords will generate interest while minimizing non-sales-generating clicks, but at least for me, Amazon advertising failed to do what it’s supposed to do. It didn’t help me sell any books.

The Self-Publishing Blues

Image Credit: schuldnerhilfe/Pixabay

Several readers have asked me lately why I haven’t published a second novel yet. It’s been four years since I self-published my debut novel Storm Orphans so that’s a fair question. The answer is until I find an agent and a publishing deal, I won’t. I learned my lesson. I can’t speak for other authors, but for me, writing a 60-100K word story is hard. Really hard. I went into self-publishing wide-eyed and enthusiastic. Here I was putting a zombie apocalypse novel out in the world at the height of The Walking Dead’s popularity. I figured there must be a decent-sized audience for a fast-paced, well-written tale of a ragtag band of good-guys trying to survive in a country overrun by the undead. The Walking Dead was pulling in 17 million viewers per episode at the time. My goal was a modest 10K digital sales. Surely a small portion of those millions of people would try a book with a similar theme and location, especially one they could download for a measly four bucks on the world’s largest eCommerce site. Well, I sold less than 300 copies. And don’t call my Shirley.

For anyone unfamiliar with Amazon author revenues, that means I made a bit over $400 for my efforts. There are certainly self-published authors who have been wildly successful. Hugh Howey (Wool), E.L. James (Fifty Shades of Grey), and Andy Weir (The Martian) are three of the best known. I became one of the bazillion others. Yes, I managed to find a potential couple thousand more readers via free giveaways, but paying customers? Darn few.

Was it a lack of good promotional skills? Was it a poor choice of subject matter? Was the book simply not good enough? With four years of road behind me, I’m willing to admit it might be a combination of all three. What I’m not willing to do is the same thing hoping for a different result. We all know how that old chestnut ends.

I actually did write a second novel. It’s a MG sci-fi story. For those of you not hip to publishing lingo, that’s science fiction for middle-graders aged 8 to 12. I wrote it for my kids and ideally, yours. My query letter was rejected or ignored by 45 agents that specialize in that genre between March of 2016 and February of 2017.

So I shelved it. As much as I’d love for kids to read it, I’d rather it sit lonely on my external hard-drive than lost in the shuffle of Amazon’s million books published each year. Unlike Howey, James, and Weir, I obviously need the boost an agent and traditional Big 5 publisher offer.

So what does this mean for my small, but loyal band of readers? It means I’ll continue to publish short stories when I find magazines willing to buy them. I’ll post more flash fiction on this blog from time to time too. However if you’re going to read another novel by yours truly someday, it’ll have a publisher’s logo on the spine.

If a Tree Falls

Image Credit: artellliii72/ Pixabay

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the world’s largest book seller is named after the world’s largest tropical rainforest. I’ll bet most readers are familiar with the philosophical thought experiment of “if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around, does it make a sound?” Sadly, many self-published authors can ask a similar question about their work. If your audience is small, does your work matter?

As I continue to hunt for an agent to represent my middle grade sci-fi/fantasy manuscript, I sometimes find myself fighting against this same self-doubt. Yes, I’ve sold a couple of short stories recently. Yes, my 2014 self-pubbed debut novel Storm Orphans still sells a few copies a month, but finding readers in the vast forest of more than 12 million books on Amazon is a daunting task. Doing it without an agent or a publishing company promoting you is even tougher. It’s easy to imagine your words lying forgotten and rotten in that forest, no one noticing their passing.

For any of my unrepresented writing peers facing the same uncertainty, I offer you this: Keep writing for you. Write because it feels good to put words on the page. Write because those stories and voices in your head aren’t likely to leave you alone until you set them free. Write because if even one person values your work, you have an audience and something to grow on. Fallen trees, even silent ones, leave roots and seeds behind. You never know when something new and beautiful will blossom.

The Importance of Amazon Reviews

Image Credit: Amazon

Being an indie author isn’t exactly glamorous. No one is toasting you in New York. Your books aren’t gracing the front window display at B&N. They’re not written about in USA Today or the Times either. You’re not getting a whole lot of invitations to conferences or book signings. And interviews on TV or radio? Forget it. Those communication vehicles are reserved for authors signed by the big publishing companies. No, as an indie author, you’re probably toiling in obscurity just hoping that one day your big audience will find you.

But how do they do that? Spamming your Twitter followers certainly isn’t a viable solution (no matter how dedicated some indie authors seem to be to this method.) Facebook ads and webpage banners don’t seem to be the magic ingredient. Paid book reviews might work, but you’re either paying a fortune to a company like Kirkus or you’re cheating and facing a potential ban from the very sites you need to be listed on.

No, the only way to establish a robust audience as an indie author seems to be through the natural growth and buzz that legitimate book reviews on Amazon generate. The more people that post something positive about your work on that site, the more other people notice and decide to buy it for themselves. A reader browses through books in a particular genre. A couple of book covers, titles, or blurbs catch their eye. Which one are they more likely to purchase, the one with a handful of reviews or the one that 100+ people publicly recommend?

You know the answer to that one and so do I. That’s why I bit the bullet and gave away the ebook version of my post-apocalyptic novel Storm Orphans last weekend. Almost 1000 people downloaded it over the course of those three days. It had eight reviews at the time the promotion began. Yes, they’re very positive reviews, but just eight of them after two years on the market. In the three days since, a ninth review has been added to the list. Bless that ninth person! “bsslady_j” you rock! Now I sit and wait to see how many more of those 1000 people read, enjoy, and post something about my zombie-slaying crew on Amazon. The more that do, the more likely others will take their lead and decide to click that “Buy now” button.

Giving away the result of a year of work wasn’t an easy decision, but it is a strategy. Now we’ll see if it pays off.