Making good use of my shovel

February 2^nd 2019

I can at last say I now have my romance, Past Imperfect, published as an eBook with me credited as the publisher. It took some time to get the holder of the eBook rights to return them to me, and after three years they sold precisely none. I already had the paperback available on Amazon, and sold a few, not many though; but now I have a chance to make the eBook more noticeable with some advertising. This is something I intend doing through BookBub ads, hoping to reach readers on Kobo, Apple, B&N etc. My current ads on AMS are producing sales of Roselli’s Gold, but still with a very poor ROI. I will let them run for another week, and if I see the sales have dropped off significantly, I’ll bin them and maybe push the Romance. I have high hopes for Past Imperfect, but it will only happen if I can target the right readers. I don’t think my current fans will appreciate the change of direction though. By the way, the link is https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07N8FCYPQhttps://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07N8FCYPQ

I am almost at the end of my pulp fiction thriller. My target was 60,000 words, but it looks like I’ll have reached about 52,000 by the end, probably tomorrow. Once I’ve gone through it, I expect to push that up to my target. Next step will be to send it off to Mark Dawson. I don’t expect he’ll want to use it because I’ve drifted away from the plot lines he requires. However, there’s a piece of me that will be happy when/if he says no; after all, it’s a lot of work to simply hand it over (well, sell it), when I could add it to my growing list of titles. Some of you might wonder why I will still be offering it to him. Well, it was an agreement that we did it this way, and I intend honouring that.

There was a discussion on Mark Dawson’s group about one of his admin team leaving and starting her own FB ads. course. The questions raised were about who’s course is better, and what can one offer opposed to the other. This applies to all the numerous ‘courses’ out there. Mark said that the only people making money during a gold rush are those people selling the shovels. And he’s right of course; the on-line courses offering to turn us all into best-sellers are the one growth industry making money in today’s current publishing world. I see myself as a prospector having bought my shovel off Mark Dawson.

Looking ahead to the direction I’m going once I have finished the pulp fiction thriller, I expect, in a way, to return to my WIP, but I have to be prepared to set that aside as me and Pat get closer to when her treatment starts. She had a bone marrow biopsy last Monday, and the results are not expected for up to a fortnight. Hopefully they’ll be available next week and a decision can be made about her treatment. Having been through chemo myself, I know my free time could be seriously curtailed, and the thought of writing will not be the closest thing on my mind.

Next book event on the agenda for me is a talk at a local ‘Friendship Club’ in March. It’s all women. I have bought myself a personal microphone with a clip-on amplifier, just to make sure I’m heard. I might make their hearing aids screech, but hopefully they’ll just love my smooth talking and buy all my books. Wish me luck!