Wipeout

April 7^th. 2018

This week has been the kind I need to forget and move on. Last week I went down with a bug that more or less wiped me out on Monday and Tuesday. Struggled to the doc on Wednesday and now, Saturday, I am only just about getting close to normal. It was also the week I started with Amazon ads. I stopped my BB ads for this reason, but had great expectations with AMS. Nothing has happened! I have totalled just over 500 impressions, one click and no sales. I’m trialling two ads: one on sponsored keywords, the other on sponsored product. Fortunately I’ve only spent sixteen cents! Obviously there’s something radically wrong with my creative marketing process. And my D2D sales have slumped to one.

I watched an interesting SPF podcast yesterday. It was David Stansbie of The Creative Corporation talking about web design. His impressive list of clients include Katie Perry, Pink Floyd and J.K.Rowling’s alter ego Robert Galbraith. Oh, and Mark Dawson of course, which was why David was featured on the podcast. I’m in no position to call Mr. Stansbie up and ask him to redesign my site (and goodness knows it’s needed), but he spoke a lot of sense when highlighting the errors some designers and their clients make when choosing how to present their site. It struck a chord with me because of my CV as a stand-alone author not having a clue how to encourage potential readers to get the best out of my site by pointing them towards the books of mine they might like. Do I go with my Thrillers? My Historical novel? My Romance? The irony of this, for me anyway, is that David Stansbie started life as a graphic designer long before Web design became a major player. Years ago, when I was in the RAF, I was often asked to design posters for events, all of which would be hand drawn and coloured. No, I wasn’t a graphic designer, but how I wish I could bring something of my earlier skills to modern web design. Well, mine anyway.

My WIP has taken a battering, and is now in the ‘screwed up paper on the floor stage’. There’s plenty of it, too! It looks like it will be a major re-write with a lot of culling going into it. Perhaps I should look at the Dragon software again. Nick Stephenson has included a blog about this very item to his weekly newsletter. It makes interesting reading, but it won’t complete my book, nor give me inspiration; only I can do that.

I think I lost control of my Smartphone during the week; perhaps it was something I said. But I am beginning to fear for the sanity of our future generation. So many aspects of our lives are now being controlled by technology in such a way that I can only see technology developing itself at the speed it believes is essential for progress. Advances in mobile phone technology, medical science, robotics and drones will force us all to do the will of the corporation that holds the power in its hands. Facebook and Google have already shown a lead in this, and I believe that one day all our books will be written by robots: authors will become dinosaurs — antediluvian creatures that had a mind of their own but were wiped out by modern science. Perhaps my Smart phone has already done that to me, and I don’t even know. I must try and write! Wish me luck!