Active again.

I decided to write my blog a little earlier today
because I find myself making excuses for not getting the entry out on a Monday.
Last week has seen more activity in the promotion and marketing effort I’m
putting to my books. One major achievement for me was the production of one
thousand bookmarkers. I designed them myself, although I listened to
constructive criticism from family and friends, and had them printed at a small
printers in Bognor. I picked them up last night and am delighted with the
result. Why a thousand? I want to distribute them in places where people will
pick them up and maybe look at my website, find out who I am and perhaps buy a
book. I plan to use my family in this (they already know), and expect the
distribution to cover about six areas in UK, couple of places in Sydney and
one, at least in America. This isn’t about distributing leaflets and flyers,
and sticking them under car windscreen wipers: it’s more of a kind of
subliminal advertising. It isn’t something that has been suggested to me; quite
the opposite: I dreamed this one up on my own. Bookmarker advertising isn’t
new, I know, but with luck I can get a kind of placement advertising simply because
my bookmarkers will be found in unexpected places. I hope so, anyway.

I have also cranked up my promotion for The Eagle’s
Covenant. I have had four, five star reviews posted on Amazon, but there has
been no quantifiable result in the numbers I’ve sold, so just how effective
those reviews will be I’ve no idea, but I’ve decided to concentrate on pushing
the title until well into the New Year.

Another step in getting myself known among the community
is to go to a meeting of the Chindi Authors Group. This is a group of Chichester
Indie authors who meet once a month in Chichester. Their aim is to help each
other with promotion and to generally encourage each other. I will be there on
Monday evening and I hope I can learn something from them and perhaps help
anyone there to learn from my experience as a long time writer. I’ve looked at
their website and seen the good reviews their books have attracted on Amazon.
Earlier this month they had a seminar in the Chichester library where about
seven of the group were doing a Q & A session. There were quite a few
people there in the audience. It’s this kind of event that can only help
writers like myself to become established in the local, book loving community,
and I hope we can all profit from this.

I began tentative steps with my dusty, old manuscript
yesterday. Having now purchased the Scrivener programme, I began using it
yesterday. I will be compiling my research material into separate sections
first. Then I will begin reading through my manuscript to bring my mind back to
the place I need to be with regard to the story line and character profiles. I
expect to be entrenched again by January and push on from there: hopefully
completing the novel by the summer. Wish me luck!

Slowing down towards the end of 2014

Once again another gap between blogs. No excuse, but
then I don’t have a great deal to say at the moment. I have been brushing up on
my Scrivener project. This is a writer’s work tool to help in the building of a
manuscript. It’s extremely useful and popular with a lot of writers. I’ve just
about worked my way through the course, but have promised myself to go through
it again. It’s not a long course, and the project is loaned on trial for thirty
days. That’s thirty days that are not necessarily consecutive. Theoretically
you could download one page a year for thirty years; not that it would be much
help. I will purchase it once I have grasped its finer detail and got used to
the way it which it functions. It isn’t expensive either. I plan to read
through my manuscript from the beginning and use that to get my thought process
back on track with the story line, and to build it with Scrivener. I can see
Christmas interfering with my plan, but I do intend to try.

Next week, December 1^st. I plan to visit the
Chindi writers group. This is a group of local authors who meet in Chichester
once a month. Their aim is to help fellow writers in the group in any way they
can with promotion and marketing ideas, and generally to encourage each other
in their work. I’ve looked at the group’s writers on the web links and can see
that they are all similar to me in that they are ‘indie’ authors and all have respectable
reviews. I’m looking forward to it

I have received a couple of five star reviews for The
Eagle’s Covenant, which
I hope will give it a kick start. When I removed it from Acclaimed Books and
published it myself on Amazon, I lost all the reviews. It has been a pain
trying to build it up again, so hopefully the five star reviews will be a great
help.

Coming towards the end of 2014 will see me (and Pat) regarding
the year as one of the most traumatic in our lives. I battled chemotherapy and
the subsequent problems associated with that. We sold our house and moved into
rented accommodation in Spain, and then moved to England where we are happily
settling into life here and enjoying every minute of it. I will be having my
next session of treatment, my first in UK, at the local hospital in Chichester
tomorrow, and this will continue for another eighteen months. I’m looking
forward to 2015 and the hope that my progress, both in my health and my writing
will be upward, fruitful and positive. I have a marketing idea for my books which
I hope to have ready before Christmas, and will explain more once I have it up
and running.  I have my December 8^th
promotion coming up and the hope that this will boost my rankings. Let’s hope
so. Wish me luck!

As You Were: back to basics.

So where was I? I missed
last week’s blog post, but have no real excuse. Maybe it’s just a case of
getting back into the swing of things. I’m slowly getting my writer’s head
back, and have started promoting again. Over the last month or so, my rankings
on Amazon have dropped away steadily, and I can only put that down to the fact
that I have been pretty lax in that department. Mind you, my rankings picked up
a couple of days ago. I think that was because a small promotion I had planned
kicked in on November 1^st. I’ve submitted another for December 8^th.
with BookSends. I’m also in the process of working on a project that might help
to increase my sales, but more about that in future blogs.

Because we have moved
into a new address, there has been a lot to do, not the least getting the spare
room ready for me to use as a study. Last week I bought a work desk at IKEA,
the flat pack people. It meant redesigning the spare room, but now I have my
desk (work station) set up and I can knuckle down to some serious writing (if
time allows!). Although I haven’t been putting pen to paper for quite a while,
my manuscript has never been far from my thoughts, and I keep making changes:
none of which have been written down. I sometimes see things on TV, or in the
paper and think of how I could use the idea in my story. Then I bin that because
it would detract from the way in which I write and create my characters. I keep
promising myself that I will rationalise that way in which I work, and try to
set goals throughout the week, but one of the penalties of writing for a hobby
and trying to live a normal life, is that no two days are the same. Plus there
are demands made on me that have to be attended to. So that’s my excuse.

It’s getting close to
Christmas which means a lot to most of us. It means we’ll get busier because of
the way in which we view the festive season. But one thing on the horizon for
me is that my next book, Past Imperfect,
should be on its way to me from my publisher. Publishing date is January, and I
usually receive my advance copies ahead of the date. Although I read the book
last month (the galley proofs), I will read the hardback with a great deal of
enthusiasm and sheer joy, like a kid with a new toy, because that’s how I am
with my books. I think is must mean I still have a measure of disbelief that I
actually made it as a published writer — a traditionally published writer at
that — and to hold the finished article in my hands fills me with a sense of
achievement.

However, after all that,
I think I have made a decision (my wife says not) to finish writing and
concentrate of promotion and marketing the seven titles I have on Amazon. I
will have two others of course: The Boy from
Berlin, and Past Imperfect, but
the rights of those two belong to my publisher. If I complete my current work,
I will offer it to my publisher. If she turns it down I will publish it myself.
This would mean I would have ten titles in print. Not bad for a boy who never
knew he would one day become a fully-fledged author. Wish me luck!