Dogged Tales and Doggy Tales

I’ve spent a little more time this past week thinking about writing and promotion, more of the former than the latter though. I pressed on with my Conor Lenihan revival story and reached a point where I managed to come up with three complications in Joanna’s life. I got Conor into her room once she was in bed asleep. Joanna was terrified at first but soon relaxed when she realised Conor was not going to hurt her. Having come up with these three complications, I have given myself something of a conundrum: which way do I go? Should be fun. I’ll let you know if I do go along with this. The promotion puzzle is a little different because it brings up the old nutmeg about giving books away. The early promotion this month that I mentioned in last week’s blog, resulted in 67 subscribers among 551 downloads. It makes me realise that us indie authors are just like the local libraries: we let people read our books for nothing. If I thought the people who downloaded my book were likely to buy my other titles, I would be happy; but there’s no guarantee, so I have to go along with it, which is why I have been thinking about the best way to go for promotion. I’m still waiting for a reply from BookBub, and there has been no word from Andrea Lundgren about reviewing Hell’s Gate. But I did cast some doubt on that last week. I read Joanna Penn’s excellent ebook on marketing. Naturally I have done it all, but nowhere near as successfully as Joanna. And I watched a webinar featuring Bryan Cohen talking about improving your Amazon sales page. I checked one of my sales pages: it looked fine to me, but from Mr. Cohen’s perspective, I guess he would say “it sucks!”. I’ve heard nothing from Mark Stop about the box set submission, although I guess it’s a little early for a reply because he has to read the book before he makes a decision. Oh, I am reading something: This Present Darkness by Frank Peretti. It’s about the end times based on the Book of Revelations. Scary stuff, and well written. It’s a big book — No.1 in the series, so may take me some time to wade through it. Know what it’s like to be a proud parent? Well, in this case, a proud dog owner. We took our Cockapoo, Tuppence, along to the local fund raising event for the Parish Church. They had a dog show, which they do every year. Our Tuppence came second in the adult dog category. We were as pleased as Punch. Only second though? No matter; we didn’t expect to win anything. Mind you, I don’t know what I’m going to do with the prizes we won, give them to the dog I suppose. No-one ever remembers who came second, but I would love to be second in the Amazon best sellers list. One day maybe. Wish me luck.