Morgan Clasper Author

After writing several fantasy books in 2020-2022, I took a few years off from writing to focus on my work, and I kind of forgot about them. While my Frostwing series continued to generate sales and page reads in the background, my newer series—with Dragon’s Mark as book 1—floundered. Sales dropped off, and it never reached the level of my debut.

I’ve since returned to writing, and one of my goals was to see if I could revive my backlist and rebuild some of that momentum.

And, since one of the things I’ve taken to doing is using my books as case studies, I’ve collected my results so that others can learn from them.

In this article, I’ll show you the 3 changes that revived my “dead” book—and generated a 987.5% increase in performance.

Most importantly, I didn’t run any ads. My philosophy has always been to direct my ad spend at my biggest series and let my other books benefit from trickle-down readers.

Change #1: Rewriting the blurb

This is a particularly interesting case, because on the face of it, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the book description. But when I looked deeper, I found a serious oversight that had a major impact on my number of readers.

First, here’s the old description:

Once Marked, forever hunted.

Rejected by the dragons and left disfigured by their magical fire, Isiah is faced with the horrifying prospect of being hunted until the day he dies.

But when he ventures into the unforgiving Badlands in the hopes of recovering a long-lost cure, he soon finds his fate tangled up with a hostile gang of Raiders and the mighty eagles they fly. The Raiders hold the key to fixing his curse—but if they find out who he is, they’ll kill him.

Fighting to keep his past a secret while navigating a deadly world of cut-throat thieves, buried ruins and vicious rivalries, Isiah must stay one step ahead of his enemies—all while figuring out who he can really trust. One wrong move and he’s as good as dead… and beneath the scorching Badlands sun, the dragons are the least of his problems.

As I mentioned, there aren’t any glaring errors. The blurb opens with a tense situation—Isiah branded and banished—and develops his desperate search for a cure and the risks he undertakes. There are deadly Raiders, hidden secrets, and the ever-present fear of being discovered.

Only, the dragons are barely mentioned.

For a dragon-rider fantasy book, the bond between human and dragon is a key selling point, and it’s typically a focal point of the blurb. The old blurb does mention dragons, but it’s quickly relegated to the sidelines. Even the cliff-hanger indicates that dragons aren’t Isiah’s main problem.

The blurb reads more like a fantasy that happens to have dragons in it, rather than the dragon rider fantasy it actually is.

Here’s the revised version:

A cursed rider.

A long-forgotten cure.

And a chained dragon that could set him free.

When Isiah attempts the dragon bonding ceremony that should make him a noble rider, he’s instead burned by dragonfire, banished from his kingdom, and marked as prey.

Desperate to escape the dragons hunting him, Isiah flees into the scorching Badlands in search of a mysterious oasis said to cure any curse.

But surviving here means joining the Raiders: cut-throat thieves who rule the desert skies on the backs of mighty eagles.

The Raiders hold the key to finding the oasis. But they’re also hiding a secret.

A chained dragon.

Caught in a deadly world of buried ruins and vicious rivalries, Isiah must decide what matters more: curing the Mark that made him prey… or bonding with the dragon that could change his fate forever.

Dive into a gripping young adult dragon rider fantasy series with redemption, found family, and an atmospheric desert backdrop. Dragon’s Mark is perfect for fans of Ava Richardson and Eileen Mueller. Start reading today…

The first thing you’ll notice is that I immediately identified the big thing readers want to see: a rider and his dragon. Dragons become a central part of the blurb: Isiah was supposed to bond with one, then he’s branded, then he’s hunted, and then he finds a chained dragon that could change everything.

Even his central conflict—that of finding the oasis and curing his curse—is framed through his relationship with the dragon.

I also added a strong selling paragraph that signals my genre, key tropes and themes, my comp authors, and includes a call to action.

Change #2: Updating my A+ Content and metadata

One of the other major changes I made was shaking up my sales page. I added:

• A 3-module spread of the book cover with the main hook/tagline
• A single “reading order” graphic listing all current books
• And a “Who will enjoy this book?” module for targeting readers

The next thing I did was revamp my keywords. I hadn’t updated them since I first published the book, and I saw some opportunities to improve them.

To go along with my book description, I targeted keywords like dragon bond, YA dragon rider, as well as tropes like found family and coming of age.

As an aside, I did submit the book to both Reader’s Favorite and eBookfairs. This resulted in two 5-star reviews, which I added to my Editorial Reviews section. I mention this in the interest of transparency, as it was something that changed, though I can’t vouch for what kind of impact it may have had.

Change #3: Improving my series readthrough

It’s good practice to link your books together. For example, you can put a “teaser” in the form of the first chapter of book 2 at the end of book 1. This makes it easy for people to keep reading, get hooked, and go on to buy the sequel.

Directly linking the next book in a series means that readers can binge-read with minimal effort, resulting in more copies sold and higher earnings.

That being said, it’s trickier to “sell” an unrelated series. Because it has a completely new world and characters, there’s no inherent reason that readers should immediately jump into this new series.

Fixing this problem was a matter of simple wording.

Instead of a “sneak preview of a brand-new series”, my series upsell looked something like:

“Ava’s adventure may have been dangerous, but what happens when bonding goes wrong? Far beyond the frozen mountains, in the scorching Badlands, a new rider is about to face a trial that will leave him banished, hunted, and marked an enemy of all dragonkind.”

This new paragraph may seem small, but it does a few important things. First, it creates a sense of continuity, as if the two series exist in a shared universe. That makes it feel like a more natural progression. Second, it highlights what makes this new series different (Isiah is marked and rejected, whereas Ava succeeded in bonding).

I then added a nice reading order graphic that showed the full series, so that readers 1. knew where to start, and 2. could see there was binge-reading potential.

I’ve since swapped out this upsell to focus on a different novel, but you’ll see the impact that this had.

The results:

In the whole year of 2025, Dragon’s Mark had a grand total of… 200 pages read and 7 eBooks sold.

After implementing these changes, that number quickly grew to over 17,000 pages read, equivalent to around 56 copies, with an additional 31 eBooks sold, resulting in a total of 87. It climbed from being my 5^th most popular book to my 2^nd.

That’s a 987.5% increase, all from making a few targeted changes. And better still, because this book is part of a series, my other books also saw an increase: an additional 27,000 pages, equivalent to 90 copies, and 42 eBook sales, meaning 132 in total.

That’s nearly 220 units sold, all from organic traffic and series readthrough.

Graph showing KU page reads for early 2026. Changes implemented in January.

Granted, advertising my main series and promoting it to my email list did help, but this experiment does show that you should never underestimate the power of a few seemingly small tweaks.

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