Now for Consolidation

May 6th. 2017 Most authors like to be interviewed, and I’m no different. Over the years I’ve been fortunate enough to be interviewed on radio, TV, in the Press and through author websites, including YouTube. It’s difficult to quantify the effects of these interviews, and I doubt they do much for my sales figures, but at least it puts me in the public eye. My next interview will be in June on award winning author, Karen Ingalls’ website. (kareningallsbooks.com). Hopefully the interview will attract a few more fans to my books. I’ve come to the conclusion that my less than 100% commitment to promotion is one of the reasons why my rankings and sales are low, and it’s about time I consolidated the effort I’m putting into it by setting aside my writing time. No doubt some people will say that I should write more books and keep on writing because it’s the only way to increase reader awareness out there, but it’s like a chicken and egg argument to me; so unless some unshakeable idea drops into my head and won’t go away, I’m going to spend more time trying to sell my books than writing them. Trouble is, it doesn’t stop me coming up with ideas: I keep getting them buzzing around in my head. I mentioned my Romance last week: Past Imperfect. I decided to tidy it up, edit the book for some minor typos and make a small adjustment to the cover. I uploaded it to CreateSpace at the beginning of the week. Two days ago it appeared on Amazon at £2.01. I queried this to be told that this was normal practice with book-sellers, and the royalties would be paid on the full price of £8.50. I was dubious about the whole thing so I ordered a copy. It came today. It isn’t the edited version I uploaded to CreateSpace, and was printed by Lightning Source. I’ve contacted CS, but now I’ll have to remove it from LS until I’m satisfied that the old version doesn’t exist. Who’d want to be a writer anyway? Yesterday I e-mailed my subscribers with a promotion for my author friend, Helen Christmas. We are both keeping our fingers crossed that she will enjoy a bounce in her sales figures because of it. Click rates are notoriously low these days, probably because there are so many “offers” going around, and the readers are being saturated with them. But unless we keep plugging away and gently pester the lives of the reading public, we won’t get anywhere. Helen’s promotion offer is at https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B017WLXY7K. Why not click and have a look? It’s a great offer. I had a hearing test last week after seeing an advert in the Daily Mail. I’ve had so many of these over the years that I could practically draw the graph they come up with after the test, and this one was no different. Hopefully the product will be a vast improvement on my current hearing aids, which I purchased a few years ago in Spain (American company). It comes with a remote control: should be fun playing around with that. At least I get a trial period before making up my mind whether I want to shell out the money or not. Next week we are off for a family bash in Norfolk, then a trip round to an old friend in Lincolnshire, so there won’t be a blog post from me. Hopefully when I post again, I will have some good news about, well, anything really. Wish me luck!