Supporting Cancer research and KIA car sales

August 27th 2016 I had an interesting week, what with a trip to the dentist to begin with and finishing by ordering a new car. In between I was at Arundel in West Sussex doing my shift on the CHINDI book stall supporting Cancer research in the UK as part of the Arundel festival. I also managed to publish my three book box set on Amazon, but have so far failed to get it right for Draft2Digital, but more of that later. Oh, and I did manage to write a bit. For the benefit of Carol, who I know reads this blog, I added another 500 words yesterday, just to make sure I’m ahead of you! I was able to resolve the formatting problem I had with the middle novel of my three book box set. To do that, I had to save the Word doc. in html as a web filtered document. This took me back to the early days of Kindle when it was necessary to go that route before converting to Kindle. Even then you had more work to do to get it right. Now, thankfully, Amazon convert the document automatically (unless you have an ancient document that their conversion software doesn’t like). With D2D it’s a whole new ball game. I already have my titles with them and have had no conversion problems that I know of, but for some reason the box set came out all wrong. I have been in touch with D2D who have pointed me in the right direction. Hopefully I’ll have it right within a couple of days. The book stall at Arundel has proved eventful and reasonably successful for the CHINDI group. We are raising money in support of Cancer Research UK and attracting some rewarding interest. About four of our authors are doing well. I have sold two paperbacks to date (three days to go), but I don’t look at it as a competition between us, simply a joint effort to promote our group and raise money for charity. The weather has been good; too hot much of the time for the poor book sellers, but it does lift your spirits. My spirits were lifted by a small result after e-mailing my subscribers with the news of my box set. I sold eleven that day (Kindle). That may not sound like a lot, but the three books are my lowest sellers, and I’m trying to persuade people that my stand alone, cross genre novels are really worth reading, hence the reason I lumped them together and launched them at a rock bottom price. I’ll be spending some money next month on a Facebook advert, and hopefully visitors to my website will be intrigued and persuaded by the offer. The car? Well, I had to finally admit to myself that my KIA Sportage was really too big for me and Pat, and it’s a devil of a car to park straight! My boy racer days are over and I have to be sensible, so we went to KIA this morning and ordered a sensible, Kia Venga automatic. Had a test drive and liked it immensely. Pat can actually see out of the front windscreen without having to stretch her neck, and the seat height for the two of us is just about right. We have to wait a while though because there are no Infra Red Venga automatics available, so it’s likely to be November before it turns up. Must look after my Sportage now until the deal is done. Wish me luck!

Boxing Clever? Maybe not.

August 20th. 2016 No, Tuppence didn’t win best puppy, but it didn’t appear to bother her. Why can’t people be more like dogs? While I was struggling through my manuscript, I thought it might be a good idea to put it on hold and knock out a box set for three of my least performing novels. After all, it would only take an afternoon to set the thing up and get it on KDP, so I thought. For a box set of books, they need to be one document, each book following on from the other. So I began to process of creating a file and loaded the first book in. It needed a little attention, but I made good progress and then loaded in my second book. Then the problem of inserting a “Table of Contents” reared its ugly head. Each time I searched for Chapter One, say, I ended up at the beginning of the document: right chapter, wrong book. Undaunted I loaded in the third story and, after a few adjustments, realised that one of them had the wrong indents. It would have been a bit time consuming to work through each page, so I binned it all and started again. So the next day I was at it again until I had it all working perfectly. Then came making up a box set image in PhotoShop. I can make a 3D image of a book, no problem, but to make a 3D box set image gets a little tricky. Sure, you can Google it, but there is always a problem, usually one of not being able to understand the wiz kid who is explaining how to do it at ninety miles an hour and using a programme that doesn’t quite match up to the latest version of PhotoShop. I gave up in the end, having decided to make an image of three books, all in 3D but stacked as though they were part of a box set. Three days later and it’s still a plan. I will get there eventually. I had coffee during the week with a fellow author, Rick Haynes. I’ve only known Rick briefly, but we have a lot in common, not the least that we come from the same area in London and went to the same speedway stadium in Somerton road, home of the Wimbledon Dons (defunct now). Same Pie & Mash shop? Yes, still there I hope, although it may be a kebab outlet or a halal butchers. Whatever it is, it won’t be serving bagels. It’s nice to spend some time reminiscing and talking about common ground. We chatted about books and writing of course, and Rick is well on his way to producing his second, full length fantasy novel to go with his short stories and “Drabbles” (no, I haven’t either!). I said earlier that I was struggling with my WIP. What author doesn’t? I have made it past the halfway mark and have a clearer idea of where I’m going with it. I just need to up my discipline levels and knuckle down. Next week I will be at the Arundel Festival for a couple of stints on our CHINDI book stall. We are donating a sum to charity as part of the fee, and giving something like a 20% cut of our sales to the cancer charity. At the moment it’s raining, there is a very strong wind blowing and the forecast doesn’t look too promising for now. The festival began today and will run for a week. At the time of writing, one of our authors has sold seven books (Dan Jones). Dan usually does sell well because his books are self-help based on his twenty years of working with children who have problems like Asperger’s Syndrome and Autism. He has released a particularly helpful book of bedtime stories for youngsters, which is receiving good reviews on Amazon (ASIN: B015HVQZV4). You can find out more about Dan and other members of the CHINDI group, plus buy their books at www.chindi-authors.co.uk. So for me next week it’s a trip to the dentist, two stints at Arundel, a family meet at Petworth (lovely place) and more work on my novel and the box set. Wish me luck!

Friends, fiction and puppy dogs

August 13th. 2016 I didn’t write last week’s blog because we had company over the weekend. Two friends of ours from Spain are on an extended holiday in UK and spent four days with us. Sometimes it’s right to stand back from your routines and see life from a different angle, and the four days with our friends was like a mini break for us. On the other hand, I didn’t get any writing done and missed writing this blog. Looking back over the past fortnight, I can say my Facebook advert has proved relatively successful, bringing me an extra 450 subscribers to my e-mail list. I now have over 1200 subscribers, which gives me an opportunity to develop something from that relationship. But where do I begin? I expect to be framing another FB advert later this month using ‘Lookalike’ audiences. Facebook consider a minimum of 1000 subscribers is necessary to make this kind of campaign work, so it will pay me to go down that route and see what transpires. My writing has picked up again and I have now passed the 40,000 word mark, which I consider to be over halfway. I’m way behind my schedule, which should have seen me finishing the first draft last month. I usually take a year to complete a book, and I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll have this one finished before 2017 arrives. I am at a kind of crossroads now, because I have to begin picking up the elements of the story and gathering in the sub-plots to bring it to a final and dramatic conclusion. I have compiled a list of bullet points as a kind of aide memoire so that I don’t leave out any pieces of the jigsaw. Although I write with MS Word, I copy everything into Scrivener, which I find extremely useful. It gives me the ability to search through my manuscript at a glance using the corkboard facility and the fact that every scene is recorded separately. I keep the bullet points in Scrivener so that I can refer to them from time to time. One danger of writing sub-plots into a story is that you can see how some of them would make a story on their own. I’m having that problem with Vereen, my main female character in the book. She is a single mother, on benefits, mixed race and likes marijuana. She buys her smokes (spliffs, zoots) on the estate where she lives. Her supplier gets murdered, which means her source has dried up. I can see how this could develop into a story on its own, but she is connected to the main male character, Marcus Blake, a private investigator who is trying to uncover the truth behind a cabinet minister’s apparent suicide. There is no direct link between Vereen and the cabinet minister except the country of their birth in the West Indies, but there is an element, a tenuous link at the moment, that draws the two of them to the arch criminal behind Vereen’s situation and that of the minister’s suicide. That’s why I need my bullet points: to keep track of all the little clues I keep putting in. What else is in the pipeline? A book stall at the Arundel Festival this month and a chance to sell a couple of paperbacks. The CHINDI group (www.chindi-authors.co.uk) have something planned for September and November, and ideas keep tumbling out at our regular monthly meetings. Tomorrow is the local dog show. We will be entering our puppy, Tuppence, into the “Best Puppy” class. We expect to win of course like all puppy owners do. But will Tuppence behave or make her mum look a fool as she tries to walk her round the show ring? Who knows, but it’s all in fun and in aid of cancer research — something close to my heart. Wish me luck!