Sunday 18 January 2015

Finding reviews, sales and publicity

January 17, 2015
I’m in the process of re-publishing seven of my titles
which up until now have been published under the name of Acclaimed Books Ltd.
The reason is simple: I want to manage my own titles now that me and my wife
have settled back in UK. One of the problems with changing the name of the
publisher — in this case from AB.c to Michael Parker — is that any reviews
accumulated can be lost unless you keep the same ISBN number and don’t change
the edition number. I learned the hard way with my first title and lost the
reviews. But another oddity has cropped up: I have a different number of
reviews for my titles depending on which Amazon site I log onto. In US for
instance, my latest upload, Roselli’s
Gold
, has thirteen reviews, with an average showing of around four stars.
But in UK there is only one review. It makes me wonder if my reviews are
determined by the website from where the titles are purchased. I’ll have to ask
Amazon. I suspect that my ‘readership’ in UK is very low, and I’m hoping that
now I am living back in England, I can build my following.
I was once advised by someone in publishing that unless
you’re on to a major thing with a publisher; the only way to build is to begin
locally. It has to be the way now for a lot of self-published writers, and to
begin my building project I am hoping that membership of the Chichester
Independent Writers group will help me do that. I’ve only attended one meeting
so far, but I am impressed with the current members who have achieved something
quite significant in the twelve months they have been in existence; so much so
that I am really looking forward to being a part of their programme for 2015.
I do feel as though I have a foot in two camps though,
because I am traditionally published as well as being an independent. My latest
novel, Past Imperfect, will be
released on January 30th. while my latest title to be uploaded as an
indie is Roselli’s Gold. Although I
have seven titles on Amazon for which I own the rights, until now all seven
have been published by Acclaimed Books Ltd. Now three of them have me as the publisher,
and within a couple of months I expect to have all seven under my name. I am
also using Smashwords because I want my titles available on as many platforms
as possible, and Smashwords are bigger than Amazon when it comes to e-books,
according to their statistics. Can you believe statistics?
I have reached something of a milestone with my current
manuscript: I have run out of ideas! I finished transferring the 50,000 words I
had completed thus far to Scrivener and now have no idea where or how to take
the story forward. My wife says that I am like this with all my books, and this
one is no different. She could be right, but I am concerned about this one
because I started it about three years ago, interrupting it to write Past Imperfect. Oh the things we writers
put ourselves through.


Looking ahead, I have to pick up on my promotion and
social media stuff. Tomorrow I am at hospital for my ongoing cancer treatment,
although this is simply medication and not chemo, thank God. And I have a
couple of thoughts running around in my head with regard to local publicity
etc. Maybe I'll contact some friendly radio stations. Must prepare a sales
pitch though and offer my book for review. Wish me luck!

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