Question Time at the Rox Music Festival

July 31st. 2016 Yesterday, five members of our CHINDI group and myself set up a bookstall at the Rox Music festival in Bognor Regis. It might sound odd, being as it was a music festival, but it worked. The six of us were there all day, and met some interesting people who stopped by the stall to chat. And we sold some books! It’s amazing what kind of questions we are asked. “Are you all authors?” was a common one. One visitor wanted to play a kind of one upmanship. “So where’s so and so then?” We’d never heard of him. Seemed he’s a local author but not a member of the CHINDI group. When we pointed out that our banner describes us a ‘CHINDI’, he got the message. And there are those who have written a book, but seem embarrassed to admit it. One woman told me she had 5000 books at home, and had no intention of adding more to the pile, so wasn’t buying. Oh, unless the price was £0.99 a book. Another lady got all excited because we were authors, as though we are hidden away, out of sight and only appear publicly on the odd occasion. I liked her because she bought one of my books. One chap listened to me for a while as I explained my novel, Past Imperfect, then decided to buy it (what a salesman!). When I told him the price, he said, “That’s cheap.” And so the day rolled on. It began with rain, fine drizzle for an hour or so, and then the sun came out and lifted out spirits. More people turned up at the festival and we got busier answering questions, handing out brochures, collecting sign-ups for our quarterly newsletter. From the profit and loss point of view, it wasn’t worth the effort, but from the point of view of making contact, it was extremely successful. And I think we all enjoyed ourselves, and I suspect we’ll seriously consider doing it again next year. On the domestic front, I haven’t written anything because I have been one degree under. It’s some kind of viral infection that doesn’t want to go away. I am improving slowly, day by day, but on the few occasions I have attempted to write, it’s been a non-starter; the brain won’t function. My Facebook advertising is progressing and picking up ten subscribers a day. Few more days to go before I finish the campaign, then it’s on to another FB advert. This time I think I will use my 1000 plus subscribers to get FB to select a ‘lookalike’ audience. FB recommends having at least 1000 subs to make the advert work effectively. Today, Pat and I went to a Golden Wedding celebration. It was over at a posh looking golf club near Chandlers Ford, just outside Southampton. The happy couple immediately introduced me as the ‘celebrated author’. Nice friends, eh? Perhaps next time I should take an armful of books with me. No more news now. Hopefully I’ll be able to add more words to my manuscript tomorrow and then be able to look ahead to seeing that light at the end of the tunnel. Wish me luck!

Upsides and downsides

July 23rd. 2016 The sun is shining here in Bognor and I have a lousy viral infection. Can’t write, don’t want to write, and know that as an author I should ignore the pain and get on with it. But it shouldn’t be too long before I’m back in the game once the antibiotics kick in. You get days like that, don’t you? But what has been happening on the upside is that I have passed the 1000 subscribers mark! Time for a celebration. The next target must be 2000, but that’s a long way off. It’s a bit scary, you know, having 1000 people out there. I feel that they are my responsibility, although I know they are not. But what is the point of trying to get a burgeoning list if there’s nothing there for them? I know of some writers who have thousands of subscribers, and it makes me wonder how they keep them faithful. I also wonder if the top writers have subscriber lists. I can’t imagine they do; their name is a big enough draw anyway. I said last week that I was thinking of tweaking my Facebook advert. I tried and failed miserably. No doubt I’ll have to wait until my brain is functioning properly and try again. Nest week, July 30th, six of us in our CHINDI group will be putting up a bookstall at the Rox Music Festival in Bognor. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it, having a bookstall while all that rock music is going on? But it’s all about being in the public eye and reminding people who you are and what you do. I would like to say that I expect to sell loads of books, but my experience tells me I will be lucky to sell a couple. But we try. Today, the Daily Mail published the result of its First Novel competition. A young woman won the prize with her first book. She beat the other five short list candidates. All of them were women! I started watching the American TV series, ‘Breaking Bad’ on Netflix this week. My eldest son has just finished the box set, said it was brilliant. I often find myself envying the writers of scripts like that (The Sopranos of course), and wonder what kind of thriller writers they are, if indeed they are writers. To produce something as clever as that, you need a good team around you. It puts our singular efforts into perspective, and I suppose most of us would like to see a film made of at least one of our books. I did manage to get my title, The Eagle’s Covenant into the hands of Judy Coppage some years ago. She was responsible for bringing Die Hard to the screen. She liked the book but thought the location would not be attractive to American audiences. The book is set in Germany and uses German police procedures throughout. I did live in hopes. And so we press on. Maybe one day I’ll hit the big time and see my work up there on the silver screen. Wish me luck!

Making eyes at the bigger prize.

July 16th. 2016 It has been a quiet week for me, with nothing to show in my diary except for one event that had nothing to do with writing. On Monday, my wife received a phone call at two o’clock from the local hospital in Chichester. Would she be available for her cataract operation that afternoon? Yes, I says (demonstrative!). So we’re there at three o’clock and home by six — cataract done. No time to worry, no long wait for the op. Now she can see through that eye almost perfectly and is looking forward to getting the other eye done. Marvellous. Back to the writing and promoting. My WIP progresses and I have reached 35,000 words. I’m making bullet points as I go along because there are key elements in the story that may not be too obvious to the reader, and I will need to remember where they are so I can pull them all in together at the end. I have twenty nine so far after sixty pages, which may seem a lot, but in some cases they are reminders about an incident that I will need to revisit. Naturally some of these will be dealt with before the denouement; they’ll have to otherwise I’ll end up with a kind of table of events and their results. But the plot thickens and there will be more bodies, of that I have no doubt. I mentioned my Facebook campaign in my previous post. So far it has been fairly successful with regard to sign-ups. My subscriber list now sits at a shade below 1000. When my campaign began eleven days ago, I had about 550 subscribers. That was an organic growth of about one a day from the beginning in March, last year. Now, after an initial surge, I am adding on average about 15 per day. I get no financial return on this because the subscribers are downloading The Devil’s Trinity for free, but I hope that in time they will begin buying some of my other titles and also letting their reader friends know what a spiffing writer I am! I haven’t looked in on Mark Dawson’s Facebook course for a few days, but will need to get back to it to see how much longer I should hold this campaign. I am tempted to start a new one with a couple of ads aimed at America and UK separately. Not sure yet. My low price promotion for Hell’s Gate yielded one sale last week. This is the problem with scattergun marketing; not aiming at the right targets or using the wrong weapon (promoter) to fire the shots. One of my titles sold forty six copies in four weeks, that’s without any promotion. So the poor attempt last week was down to — who or what, me or the choice of promoter? But the reality must be my standing as an author. If I’m good, more people will want to read my stuff. If I’m bad, they won’t. I believe my reviews stand up against the kind of reviews I’ve seen for other authors, so I must hope my lengthening subscribers list will eventually lead to a boost in sales. It’s simply a case of getting it right. Wish me luck!

The Word game and getting it out there.

July 10th. 2016. Marketing, promoting, meeting and lecturing: something of a book week really. I didn’t do any lecturing, except to our puppy. Monday was our CHINDI meeting. There’s always a lot said and done at these meetings, but last Monday was entertaining, watching two of our group trying to “live video chat” between their laptops. It worked after a fashion, but their skills, and ours, need polishing. It’s all to do with live chats with readers on our website and seeing how efficient we can become — make us look more professional. If we can crack this, it will be beneficial in the future. Four new members were introduced, some surprisingly successful in their writing careers. It was good to hear what they’ve done and know that it brings so much more to the group. Because they all had to introduce themselves, it was decided that the members there would do the same. I think it worked well. CHINDI were at it again on Wednesday at Chichester Library, giving a seminar on book indie publishing as part of the Chichester Literary Festival. There was a good turnout where four of our members gave a PowerPoint presentation on how to get your book published and the pitfalls to avoid. All this information is contained in the group’s excellent book: “Before You Press Publish”. The book is available on the website www.chindi-authors.co.uk I began a Facebook ad aimed at building my subscriber list. I’ve gone from a fairly slow, organic growth of about one or two a day to about twenty a day. I don’t know how long I’ll run the campaign for, but I have a budget limit and may leave it to run its course. From time to time I’ll tweak the audience, make a couple of changes and see if the result bombs or takes off. It can be an exciting, frustrating and head scratching experience. I also paid for a low key promotion and the results are — “low key”. Serves me right. I’m making slow progress with my novel. I have passed the 30,000 word mark, so that’s something to be pleased about. I sketched out a kind of ‘data flow’ diagram, putting in names, places and links, but it’s beginning to look more like an “Activity on the Node” rather than a clear picture of what I’m up to. And if that expression is not clear to you, don’t worry; it’s got nothing to do with writing. So what lies ahead? More writing for me of course and more training for Tuppence (our puppy). If I could get half of my writing discipline into the dog, I would be doing well. And today I must put the price of Hell’s Gate back to its pre-promotion price; I might sell a few. Oh, and I am reading through one of our group’s latest novel: The Front of the Wilderness Generation by Jeremy Good. Why not have a look on our CHINDI website and see what it’s about? So that’s it for another week. I wonder how many more words I will have added to my book, or how many more sign-ups? Watch this space and wish me luck.

Living in the world of make believe

July 2nd. 2016 Halfway through the year already and I’m only a third of the way through my latest novel. I had great plans, probably like many writers, and when I see Facebook posts from other writers who are churning out three or four books a year, I wonder where they get the time or stamina from. I am just nudging 30,000 words, which makes the ending seem an awful long way off. I’ve found my story splitting into two parts, but not part one followed by part two. Both halves could warrant a novel on their own, but I feel I would lose something of my uniqueness if I allowed that to happen. Am I unique? We all are one way or another. As a standalone writer, I believe I bring something to my readers that support my belief — an eclectic mix of genre, time, place and readability. I’ve just got to figure out how to sell them this idea of mine. My sales are still buoyant, but slipping away. I expect to be launching a Facebook ad later this month to boost my numbers. I can’t make up my mind whether to promote a box set, which seems to be all the rage at the moment, or continue advertising my website and the free book offer. At the moment I don’t know how to make a box set, but it won’t take long to find out. I expect I’ll be using Photoshop to do that. If I do go for the box set, I can still promote the fact that there is a free book available on the site. I did make a small change to my website yesterday. It was an update of the image I have there of my hardback books. I had to do that because the first image was of a pile of books, all mine, but two or more the same. Now they are a pile of nine different titles. Oh, and a mug with pens sticking out: gives it a kind of cheeky charm. This coming week I will be at our monthly, Chindi meeting. There’s always a lot to talk about. I could be asked about an item that appeared in the local magazine, Sussex Views. It was a promotional bit about me and the CHINDI group. I was trying to encourage wannabe writers to come out of their shell and join a local group; get their books published. On Thursday I’ll be at Chichester Library with the group where four of our writers will be giving a talk about writing and publishing. I’m not taking part in the lecture, but as a member of the group I can offer my books for sale at the end. And looking ahead to the end of July, I have just paid for a stall at the Rox Music Festival in Bognor. Six of us will be selling our books on that day. Should be fun. Hopefully we’ll sell a ton of books. On the domestic front, our grand-daughter has announced she is expecting. That will make three great grandchildren for us if she is only having one. Our puppy has finished the six week basic training at puppy school, although no-one has told her she was awarded a certificate; she’s still naughty. And I’m slowly getting on top of my gardening chores. By winter it should all be done. Wish me luck!