Forging ahead, come rain, come shine

September 2nd. 2017

As we roll on towards autumn, I look back over last week and see the highlight was the amount of money Chindi authors raised for Cancer_UK: a magnificent £482 ($624). The Arundel Festival certainly proved a winner for us because we managed to beat last year’s target of daily sales and the money raised for the Cancer charity. A lot of credit has to go to Carol Thomas who worked jolly hard, supported by her husband, Mason, to bring this to fruition. Carol is a self-published author who writes clever stories. You can see a short trailer of one of Carol’s books, Crazy Over You here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfA-RjTDI94. A number of us took a turn on the stall, which meant we all endured the heat (and the rain), and managed to sell some books. The next big event for us, unless we squeeze one in before Christmas, will be the UK Southern Book show at Worthing on the South Coast. This will be in March, so more of that next year. I have posted two Facebook adverts for my thriller, A Dangerous Game. I put the promotion price back up to £2.99, and targeted audiences in North America for one ad, and UK for the other. I’m switching the ads off and on according to the time of day, hopefully trying to avoid nights when most of my targets will be sleeping. So far I have just managed to sell enough books each day to cover the daily cost of the campaign. I know I will have to keep an eye on the ROI, but equally important at the moment is learning how to “tweak” my adverts for maximum benefit. I have also teamed up with four other authors to promote a box set of cross-genre novels. It’s a bold attempt at drilling into the hard earth and uncovering readers who prefer to read across the different genres. It’s risky, because not everyone wants to buy a set of books that probably contain three of which they would never read. Contracts have been signed, and brain-storming has begun on the how, why and what of the campaign. Launch date is probably going to be around the end of October. Price will be at something like £0.99 for a short period, and then will go up to around £3.99. One of the things we’ve been asked to do is get ARC readers for the box set, and pick up some reviews. So if any of you who are reading this blog would like to have a stab at being one of the ARC readers, contact me at www.michaelparkerbooks.com/. I had another go at my current WIP. I keep getting pulled away, sometimes because I find other jobs to do, but more so by the absence of any real plot structure. I could fill it with a load of nonsense and call it a thriller, but I wouldn’t be true to myself if I gave in to that little demon. I was tempted to kill one of my characters off, simply because the way in which I had composed the paragraph demanded that it ended dramatically, and this person’s death was the only way. The trouble with that, and it would have been fairly dramatic, is that I need this character later in the story. Our Chindi group have an on-line meeting on Monday evening. I hope it doesn’t take too long; England are playing Slovakia, and it’s on TV. Hope I don’t miss it (the game, I mean) Wish me luck!