The Hard Yards

August 27th. 2017

The weather is warming up along with our sales on the Chindi book stall at the Arundel Festival. Each day those manning the stall manage to sell more than on the same day last year. Tomorrow, a bank holiday here in UK, is the last day, and we hope to be able to declare a real bonus for the Cancer_UK charity we are supporting with our book sales. I popped along last Thursday. Got there early and left at mid-day. Sales were so slow that we only sold one book; fortunately it was one of mine. Sales did pick up during the afternoon though. The photo on the left was taken yesterday. It shows Carol Thomas, Helen Christmas and Dan Jones, all members of Chindi, hard at work in the sunshine. You can see more of them and our work at www.chindi-authors.co.uk. I’ve also been keeping an eye on my book sales on-line, and can see the benefits of using an ongoing advertising campaign like Facebook. Although I’m not quite clearing my investment, sales have been good enough to make it worthwhile. However, I now need to reconstruct the advert and target another audience. I received an e-mail alert from Facebook during the week telling me that there had been a sudden change in the activity on my advert. Trouble was, they didn’t say if it was good or bad. I had to decipher all the metrics to make sense of it. I believe I was being told that they had more or less exhausted my chosen audience, which is why I will be changing tack. I have registered my interest (and paid) in a Literary event at Crawley Library in October. It’s about an hour away from here, but I’m quite happy to make the journey and, hopefully, find more readers. There’s also a chance I can meet my son for a late lunch if he isn’t working, but the main reason is to sell books. But it hasn’t all been about selling books. Last Friday, we went along to Petworth to meet our No.3 great grandson, Orin. He is six months old. He brought his mum, Gemma, along with him. We had a picnic in the grounds of Petworth House. It was lovely sitting under the shade of the trees and having him and Gemma to ourselves for a while. As a result of all that is going on in my busy schedule, I haven’t put pen to paper; so my latest thriller is gathering dust on the electronic bookshelf. I can’t see me making much progress in the next few weeks either, so perhaps I have resigned myself to the fact that there will not be another Michael Parker release for the foreseeable future: certainly not this year. I do run ideas over in my head, but I suspect that’s the same for all writers; how else would we fill our thinking moments? Something will turn up though, I’m sure it will. Wish me luck.