Round Up!

May 29^th. 2015

In the last two weeks
I’ve seen much of the countryside, blocked motorways, new family members and a
small rise in my book sales. We travelled up to Norfolk to meet up with our two
great-grandchildren, Harrison and Archer. Archer was born in February but we
hadn’t been able to see him because he lives in Cyprus. Harrison celebrated his
third birthday while we were in Norfolk, but we lived in Spain when he was
born, so this was a first time for the two little ones and me and Pat. It was a
great weekend which also included our eldest son, Vincent’s retirement from the
RAF. After the long weekend we travelled up to Ruskington in Lincoln to spend a
bit of time with our two friends Brian and Pauline. Oh, and the dog, Daisy,
their new Chihuahua. We brought them down here for a week and then drove back
home with them. On the way back the following day we crawled round the M25.
During the week we went to Arundel where some tosser clouted my car in the car
park. No telephone number left for me, just the prospect of a bill to get my
car repaired. Why are people like that?

I’ve kept a sneaky
eye on my book sales while we’ve been away and am pleased to see my average
just going over one a day. No big deal you might think, but a sale is a sale.
My subscriber list has grown steadily and at the time of writing has reached
145. I will begin promoting again, but first things first; I need to get on
with uploading a book jacket for Ingram Spark: they rejected the one I thought
would be fine. My ability with PhotoShop is limited, so that means a teeth
gnashing time trying to adjust the size of the jacket spine lettering to fit
the template.

I have been getting
on with some side issues with the author group, Chindi (Chichester Authors). I
picked up a display rack from a firm way out in the Hampshire countryside when
we were travelling back from Lincolnshire. The sign on the roadside said “Wriggley
Tin”. No, that wasn’t the name of the company, but it was the right farm track
we needed.

I’ve been giving a
great deal of thought about my writing process and the direction I’m going. My
instincts tell me to keep going; keep plugging away. But as time goes by I seem
to be losing the will to follow those instincts. A couple of weeks ago I spent
a bit of time with a bookshop owner in Petersfield. He used to work in
publishing and advised me not to drop my publisher in favour of self-publishing.
He said I was fortunate to have a publisher. And considering the time, effort
and cost of producing a paperback, I do wonder if it’s worth the effort. I can
produce an eBook no trouble at all, and it costs very little: beans in fact. If
I stay with my publisher, and providing she likes my next offering, she will
produce an eBook anyway. I can concentrate on my own paperbacks and hopefully
rely on sales of my traditionally published work on Amazon.

Looking ahead (but
not too far), we are off on our cruise round Alaska in three weeks’ time, then
a wedding in Norfolk early July. I should have a clear run until our visit to
Spain in October, so perhaps I will have something to offer my publisher. We’ll
see. Wish me luck!

There's got to be a book in there somewhere.

May 10^th. 2015

I’m still on that learning curve, but slowing down a
little. I know I will not make my own, self-imposed deadline of June to finish
my WIP, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles. I have so much to do alongside
the creative process, and not just promotion etc., but also work around the
house; trips out, essential business. All part of life’s rich pattern really.
Well, my life.

I’ve scheduled a book promotion for Monday 11^th.
This is for A
Covert War, which is picking up some good reviews
incidentally. It’s always a chore trying to choose a title to promote because I
feel they should all be promoted. I have tried to set myself a monthly budget
for advertising, but sometimes the price is too high. I have studied Facebook
advertising, and intend to use that sometime. The results can be good with FB,
but I need to make sure I know what I’m doing. I did think about advertising my
latest book, Past
Imperfect, but the price on eBooksToday was a
little high. The point about this book and promotion is that my publisher has
the rights still. If I promote, I’m not treading on anyone’s toes, but there’s
always the chance that my publisher is planning something. No, I don’t think
so, but you never know.

With my other hat on, I am putting something together for
the author group, CHINDI. This is to do with getting our books into a bookshop
during the Chichester Arts Festival in June. I have secured one shop, but
getting into others is like looking for hen’s teeth. I contacted four shops.
Two have failed to reply. One replied and said that self-published authors don’t
sell unless they have a promotion to back them up. One shop replied and showed
some interest. I will be calling in on the owner next week.

I did make a little progress with my WIP, but not a lot. I
had a problem with Scrivener that left me dangling a bit, but a word with their
support team and I received a reply from the designer himself. It’s more or
less sorted now, but these delays can be very frustrating, particularly when
you’ve found a window of time in which you can sit down and write.

On the family side, we spent a day with our second son, Terry.
He and his wife are buying a new-build up at Horsham; close to Gatwick airport
where he works (he’s a commercial airline pilot). Horsham is a lovely old town,
and it was nice to wander around with Terry and have lunch with him.

The following day, yesterday, we were over at our third son’s
place to celebrate his wife’s birthday. Me and John played snooker. Pat and
Bryony shopped. We arrived home in time to watch the VE celebrations on TV.
Great day all round.

This morning we chatted with son number four (Stephen) in
Australia. Skype is a wonderful thing for families who are separated by
thousands of miles. Oh, and Pat spoke to our eldest boy, Vincent on the phone
too. So there you have it: all the boys in less than seventy two hours.

I don’t expect to be writing up a blog for a couple of
weeks now because of family commitments that will take us away for a couple of weeks.
Hopefully when I return and put pen to paper, I will have more to say about how
successful I have been with my promotion. Wish me luck!

Technical and all that

What's PDF/X-1a:2001 got to do with it? Read on.

May 2^nd. 2015

When it comes to a learning curve, most of us have to
struggle. But when the advice comes in unrecognisable instructions, the
struggle takes on an unseemly desperation to make an advance up the learning
curve, knowing you’re not going to make it. And so it was when I tried to
upload a book jacket to Ingram Spark. It was rejected because of colour issues
along with the need to select something like CYMX and ensure the image
resolution was 300 ppi etc. etc. But! All this could be resolved simply by
saving as a default setting of PDF/X-1a:2001. And that, as they say, was where
it all began. Sounds like the opening line of a mystery, doesn’t it?

So what did I do? I did what anyone in desperate need of
help: I Googled PDF/X-1a:2001. And there it was: an explanation as clear as
mud. Several in fact. So I floundered and tried other ways around my problem,
but to no avail. Then, quite without warming, and not in the mood to do battle,
I chanced upon something in Photoshop called Adobe Presets. What was this, I
wondered? Could it be? You bet it could. There, nestling in this drop down
window was the PDF/X-1a:2001 in the smallest of fonts as though it was afraid
to show itself. I did a quick scramble, whistled up my book jacket, saved it
with the default setting and successfully uploaded it to Ingram Spark. So why
didn’t they suggest that in the first place? Probably because we are all
expected to be computer savvy. Fat chance! But its another piece of the jigsaw
in place and another hurdle I should be able to get over without a second
thought. Fingers crossed.

I’ve had a busy week with a mixture of gardening,
publishing but no writing. Try as I might, I am still finding it increasingly
difficult to make any headway with my current novel. I have prepared North Slope and Shadow
of the Wolf for publication on Amazon. At the moment
both titles are available on Amazon, but under the publisher name of Acclaimed
Books (AB.c). I have asked Peter Lihou, the CEO at AB.c, to de-list those two,
which means I will then be free to publish them with me as publisher. This
brings all my seven titles under my account with Amazon. Now I can begin to
handle the books, change the pricing, promote etc., without having to ask Pete
to do this for me. This was a long standing arrangement: something I intended
to do once we had moved back to UK from Spain.

My e-mail subscription list is growing, and hopefully this
will help propel me to bigger and better things in the book world. For anyone
reading this blog who might want to download a free copy of The Devil’s
Trinity and join my subscription list, the link
to obtain your free copy is http://eepurl.com/bgYKMj

Apart from the literary world, I have dug up a quantity of
soil in our garden to remove the weeds so we can lay turf down. I purchased
this today, and also laid in some lawn edging to tidy up the lawn edges. I also
bought a patio set. I changed some light fittings for Pat and put up a couple
of hanging baskets. The garden will look great come the summer but I doubt
if  I’ll have my book finished by then.
Let’s hope so. Wish me luck!