Writing can be a lonely, soul-destroying business, or it can be fun and uplifting, depending on what kind of writer you are. I know of some writers (not personally) who can knock out a prodigious number of books in a month, and I suspect they are always in a good place, overwhelmed with ideas and probably writing the next book in their heads as they write down the words of their current project. I am like the tortoise in the fable, except I always cross the finish line, but a proverbial country mile behind the hare. But that’s my lot; I am antediluvian, old school, and it usually takes me about a year to complete a book.

 

For my current project, I am over halfway down the road, about 60.000 words into the third book of the Shadow Over Paris series. There’s an old saying, Irish I think, that says “May the road rise up to meet you”. I love that, and I see it in the way I have struggled to come up with a plausible tale for the third book. I reached, not just a roadblock, but a proverbial mountain as I struggled to find a way to interlock all the pieces of the jigsaw I’d scattered along the way and wasn’t sure I would get to bring them altogether to complete the picture. Well, I think I’m on the other side of the roadblock, and I can see daylight.

 

At my current rate of progress, I expect to have the first draft complete, but unedited, by the end of this month (June). But there’s a ‘but’. Isn’t there always? I’ve had two medical appointments for two different things in the last seven days, and each of those means a referral. Just when the sun is beginning to shine, the clouds come over to darken the day. I will still be writing, but I’m not in control now; that will be in the hands of others. However, I still expect to publish the book, hopefully, in November. I’ve chosen that particular month because Shadow Over Paris and the sequel were both published in November (2024 and 2025). It does kind of round it off nicely, and perfect for the build-up to Christmas.

 

I have entered the first book into a Goodreads Giveaway. These are supposed to be an excellent way of attracting readers, and there is a prolific amount on Goodreads. The current giveaway begins today (June 1^st) and runs for 14 days. I will be giving away 20 copies. This may not seem a lot, but I am going on the advice of a professional book publicist. If the giveaway is successful, I could do another, but it costs money. Doesn’t everything? That’s the rub; there’s no such thing as a free lunch, so they say. If you want to try your luck, go on to my website, facing page, and you will see the ‘Widget’ that will take you there.

 

I’m currently running a campaign on Amazon for the book, but I’ve never had any success running campaigns on Amazon. I suck at it, to be honest, but so do a great deal of authors. We can write books, but we cannot as hell, advertise. To do that successfully, you need the help of a professional with the usual costs. But Amazon promoted my book in April (for nothing), and I enjoyed healthy sales during that month. And the upshot is, readers are beginning to buy the sequel. It has actually sold more than the first book this month, because readers want to read it (natch). That’s another good reason for me to get the third book of the trilogy out by the end of the year.

 

On the domestic front, sadly, I had to have my lovely cockapoo, Tuppence, put to sleep. She was terminally ill and had been under treatment for several weeks. It was so sad. Tuppence was the centre of my universe. Now she’s gone and my house is empty. Sometimes my soul feels like that because I no longer have the two girls of my life: my lovely Pat and my lovely Tuppence.

 

But life goes on. I’m having a stall at a car boot sale here on our site this coming Saturday. I’ll have some of my books plus a lot of stuff that I’ve had in my Room 101, wondering what I’m going to do with it all. About ten days after that, I’ll be travelling up to Norfolk for a weekend with our eldest boy, Vincent and his wife, Jackie. Our No.3 son, John, will be there for a day. Then it’s off to Lincolnshire to spend a couple of nights with my long-standing friend, Pauline. While I’m there, I plan to call on my granddaughter, Sarah and her family at RAF Cranwell. Oh, and on my way to Lincolnshire, I will be popping in to see my big brother, Jim, who, unfortunately, cannot do much, so it will be nice to have a chat with him and put the world to rights.

 

So you see, there’s life in the old dog yet, and all the time I’m healthy and fit enough, I will try to maintain that journey as the road comes up to meet me. Wish me luck!

 

                                                                                                       Michael Parker

 May 2026 blog post.

 

Looking back and looking ahead. 

My last blog post was in February, and reading through it, I seem to be quite enthusiastic about my progress in the Indie world of books. But the reality, unfortunately, has been a little different. Although my book, Shadow Over Paris, was doing well, followed by the sequel, I started losing inspiration. And then Amazon sent me an email asking if I would like them to promote my book, free of charge, for the month of April. They’d done this for me in December, same book too, so I wondered what is was about my book that ‘clicked’ with Amazon.

 I used AI to ask what Amazon’s algorithms look for when selecting a book to promote. It came back with eight different reasons, and my book ticked every one of those boxes. During the promotion, I watched the book climb to No 7 in the Historical French fiction category, it nudged itself into the top 20 Historical fiction and came a respectable 70^th or so in Historical literature. It also peaked at 4120 in Amazon’s overall list of titles. This meant I needed to find a way of keeping the balls in the air once the promotion had finished.

And there’s the rub; I was cleverly scammed last year, which left me feeling violated and, let’s be honest, quite stupid to fall for the trickster. This meant that I could no longer trust anyone who contacted me by email, promising to elevate me and my work to a higher place. The majority of them never addressed me by name, it was always ‘Hi author’, ‘Hello’, ‘I read your work (which work?)’, and so on and so forth. I decided it was down to me to run another campaign on Facebook, which was responsible for acquiring over one million page reads for the book in six months. I tried Amazon ads, but I suck at them and achieved nothing. So, where to go from here? 

Quite by chance, I received an email addressed to me but wanting to discuss my book and maybe do some publicity stuff. I returned the email with the words: ‘Not my book’. But the woman wrote back, and from there we exchanged about twenty emails, and in that time, I used AI to check up on the authenticity of this person because I was convinced it was a scam. I looked at other sources as well and now find myself enjoying a small uptick in my sales. She opened my eyes to the mechanics of using the correct keywords etc, changed my blurb, told me to use a recent photo, and then we dived into the dreaded world of Goodreads. Wow, that took some doing, but we finally managed it, and now we will be looking at a Goodreads giveaway, followed by (maybe) a 30-minute Zoom call to see where we go from there. Am I excited? No, not yet, but it’s time for me to up my game and see just how I can reach higher and enjoy some real validation in the world of Indie books.

On a sad note, I had to say goodbye to my ten-year-old Cockapoo, Tuppence. She developed a terminal illness that couldn’t be controlled despite the medication and change of diet. She has been my constant companion since I lost my lovely Pat over five years ago; she has been the centre of my universe, and the reason I couldn’t make any decisions without considering her welfare first. Now she’s gone, and I find myself living in an empty house. I’m going to put a little memorial to her in a pot beneath the bird feeder. That was her favourite place in the garden, and I would often see her sitting there, wagging her tail, waiting for the birds to drop something.

 So, from here? I’m working on the trilogy (slowly) and planning a trip to Norfolk to see my eldest boy and his wife, then my elder brother Jim, followed by a quick trip into Lincolnshire to visit my friend, Pauline. And while I’m in Lincolnshire, I hope to catch up with my granddaughter, Sarah, and her family. So, things are looking up, but I still have mountains to climb.

 Wish me luck!                                                                                Michael Parker

 

 January 2026 Blog post

 Looking up and wondering if...

The beginning of 2026 was the point where I could relax and forget about all the jottings on the calendar for December and the build-up to Christmas, but life gets in the way, and it’s kind of a situation normal again. I often tell people that if you want to put a smile on God’s face, just tell Him what your plans are.

I was looking forward to going to Atlanta again for our great-grandson, Elliott’s 2^nd birthday, and to see the new addition to his family, who is due in April. Boy or girl? We won’t know until April. But I’ve cancelled the trip because they will all be here four weeks later and, yes, they will be coming to Pagham to see me, so I decided to save myself a few thousand quid and cancelled the trip. They will be here for our Grandson, Adam’s, wedding to his fiancée, Agata, in August. 

After a relatively minor op last November, I now find myself having to visit the nurse twice a week to have the dressing changed on my leg. It’s just a giant sticking plaster, but it means marking it up on the calendar. Oh, and the Gardner is here every Thursday for an hour if it isn’t raining. My church House Group started up again, which meant more additions to the calendar. There’s always a book club meeting at Littlehampton once a month. Church itself, etc. So, with God smiling, I’m busy filling up the days. Oh, and I’m planning a trip up to Norfolk in April, then round to my friend, Pauline, in Lincolnshire for a short stay. And in between all that, I’m trying to write a third book in my WW2 series. 

Those of you who read my last monthly blog post will know that I decided to give up writing, having published the sequel to Shadow Over Paris. I just didn’t want to write books anymore. But after a couple of weeks sitting on my bum with nothing to do other than watch TV  (Netflix and football), I knew I had to do something. So, I picked up my virtual pen and began putting together something for a third book. — a Trilogy. 

But there was another reason too. The first of the two books had done very well in the last few months of 2025, bringing in high sales and page reads. I published the sequel in November, and that started selling, slowly at first, but it was beginning to chase after its big brother. And I wasn’t even promoting them. It was obvious what I had to do, so I began a Facebook campaign in the USA and the UK this year. The pick-up was slow at first, but now they are gaining momentum and hitting figures that are putting a big smile on my face. The trick now is to keep those balls in the air and see how far I can push those numbers, although it will mean spending more money on Promotion and Advertising. 

There is also another reason why I knew I needed to write the third book, and that was the unusual interest I was getting from unexpected sources. I get several emails a day promising me they can advance my book, but they are usually web crawlers and robots out for my money. The difference now is that I’ve been approached by a book club called ‘The Paris Story Book Club’, and another club called ‘The Lisbon Raft Book Club’. I was dubious about them both, but no money is involved (yet!); they simply want permission to feature Shadow Over Paris. They both have different ways of doing this, which is too involved to explain here, but it’s another outlet for me to explore and, hopefully, extend my reach into the world of books. 

After writing that piece, I received an email from the Raft Book Club offering to make a video trailer for me at a cost of $100. See what I mean? It often ends in a ‘rider’ to the ‘free’ promotion they are offering. 

For anyone reading this who has no idea of what kind of level I’m at in this game, I can promise you I am still what I call a ‘Bottom Feeder’. I’ve seen sales figures from other authors like me that would make the fictional Gecko of Wall Street weep with envy, and to reach those heights at my current rate of progress would take me years. But I can dream, can’t I? 

It’s late evening on January 31^st as I’m writing this. I’ve just watched an episode of The Lincoln Lawyer on Netflix. I watched the series last year, all 30 episodes. When I think of the screenwriters who knock out script after script, week in, week out, I can only marvel at the way they can produce story lines that help keep Series like that at the top. I suppose it has to be said of the Soaps as well, but I do despair at the dross some TV Dramas peddle out at times. But then, I’m not a screenwriter; I would probably find it hard, particularly as it takes me a year to write a book. On the other hand, maybe… 

Anyway, back to earth. I’ve just ordered a non-fiction paperback about the French Resistance during WW2, so it looks as though this could give me something gritty and near the knuckle to include in the third book — as if transporting and murdering Jews wasn’t enough! We’ll see.

 

Wish me luck!