Unlucky for Some?

I didn’t realise it was Friday 13th, but here in Spain the Spanish do not consider this to be an unlucky day. I don’t know what date their unlucky day is, but I know it falls on a Tuesday. Do I believe in Friday 13th. being unlucky? Nope! But we all have good and bad days, and today I’m having a good day. Went shopping this morning and bought a new washing machine. I didn’t choose it; I just tailed along with Pat and produced my card when she had made her choice. We went to about five shops before ‘our’ mind was made up. This afternoon we will be visiting some sick friends: an elderly couple who are now in a care home. It’s a Spanish kind of care home, not like you find in UK.

I exchanged e-mails with a writer in Australia yesterday. She wondered if our publisher accepted manuscripts by e-mail or was it necessary to send the typed version still. She wasn’t keen on the idea of paying for the cost of postage to London while she considered the book business seemed to be going through a major upheaval. I suggested she sent her manuscript because of our publisher’s connection with the public libraries and the amount of business they do. If you have faithful readers borrowing your books on a regular basis, then you owe it to them (and to yourself) to keep the titles coming. My library statements for the last two years showed that there had been over 6000 loans in 2010 and the same again in 2011. While not comparable to the top novelists, it means I have a large band of followers and I want to keep my supply of titles up for their sakes as well as mine. So I urged the lady in question to bite the bullet and send the MS.

The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that I have missed a day between posts. Normally I post on a Thursday, but for some reason I forgot everything about my blog yesterday. I could make the excuse that I was working on my latest novel, which would be true. Trouble is; I didn’t get very far. I also had to make a couple of corrections to my e-book and its original Word doc. It’s all done now and hopefully I won’t be asked to re-edit again.

Next week I will be asking Acclaimed Books to put A COVERT WAR up for a free promotion on Kindle select. This will be at the end of the month followed by a two day promo for ROSELLI’S GOLD. Then NORTH SLOPE will go back