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!

Question Time at the Rox Music Festival

July 31st. 2016 Yesterday, five members of our CHINDI group and myself set up a bookstall at the Rox Music festival in Bognor Regis. It might sound odd, being as it was a music festival, but it worked. The six of us were there all day, and met some interesting people who stopped by the stall to chat. And we sold some books! It’s amazing what kind of questions we are asked. “Are you all authors?” was a common one. One visitor wanted to play a kind of one upmanship. “So where’s so and so then?” We’d never heard of him. Seemed he’s a local author but not a member of the CHINDI group. When we pointed out that our banner describes us a ‘CHINDI’, he got the message. And there are those who have written a book, but seem embarrassed to admit it. One woman told me she had 5000 books at home, and had no intention of adding more to the pile, so wasn’t buying. Oh, unless the price was £0.99 a book. Another lady got all excited because we were authors, as though we are hidden away, out of sight and only appear publicly on the odd occasion. I liked her because she bought one of my books. One chap listened to me for a while as I explained my novel, Past Imperfect, then decided to buy it (what a salesman!). When I told him the price, he said, “That’s cheap.” And so the day rolled on. It began with rain, fine drizzle for an hour or so, and then the sun came out and lifted out spirits. More people turned up at the festival and we got busier answering questions, handing out brochures, collecting sign-ups for our quarterly newsletter. From the profit and loss point of view, it wasn’t worth the effort, but from the point of view of making contact, it was extremely successful. And I think we all enjoyed ourselves, and I suspect we’ll seriously consider doing it again next year. On the domestic front, I haven’t written anything because I have been one degree under. It’s some kind of viral infection that doesn’t want to go away. I am improving slowly, day by day, but on the few occasions I have attempted to write, it’s been a non-starter; the brain won’t function. My Facebook advertising is progressing and picking up ten subscribers a day. Few more days to go before I finish the campaign, then it’s on to another FB advert. This time I think I will use my 1000 plus subscribers to get FB to select a ‘lookalike’ audience. FB recommends having at least 1000 subs to make the advert work effectively. Today, Pat and I went to a Golden Wedding celebration. It was over at a posh looking golf club near Chandlers Ford, just outside Southampton. The happy couple immediately introduced me as the ‘celebrated author’. Nice friends, eh? Perhaps next time I should take an armful of books with me. No more news now. Hopefully I’ll be able to add more words to my manuscript tomorrow and then be able to look ahead to seeing that light at the end of the tunnel. Wish me luck!

Upsides and downsides

July 23rd. 2016 The sun is shining here in Bognor and I have a lousy viral infection. Can’t write, don’t want to write, and know that as an author I should ignore the pain and get on with it. But it shouldn’t be too long before I’m back in the game once the antibiotics kick in. You get days like that, don’t you? But what has been happening on the upside is that I have passed the 1000 subscribers mark! Time for a celebration. The next target must be 2000, but that’s a long way off. It’s a bit scary, you know, having 1000 people out there. I feel that they are my responsibility, although I know they are not. But what is the point of trying to get a burgeoning list if there’s nothing there for them? I know of some writers who have thousands of subscribers, and it makes me wonder how they keep them faithful. I also wonder if the top writers have subscriber lists. I can’t imagine they do; their name is a big enough draw anyway. I said last week that I was thinking of tweaking my Facebook advert. I tried and failed miserably. No doubt I’ll have to wait until my brain is functioning properly and try again. Nest week, July 30th, six of us in our CHINDI group will be putting up a bookstall at the Rox Music Festival in Bognor. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it, having a bookstall while all that rock music is going on? But it’s all about being in the public eye and reminding people who you are and what you do. I would like to say that I expect to sell loads of books, but my experience tells me I will be lucky to sell a couple. But we try. Today, the Daily Mail published the result of its First Novel competition. A young woman won the prize with her first book. She beat the other five short list candidates. All of them were women! I started watching the American TV series, ‘Breaking Bad’ on Netflix this week. My eldest son has just finished the box set, said it was brilliant. I often find myself envying the writers of scripts like that (The Sopranos of course), and wonder what kind of thriller writers they are, if indeed they are writers. To produce something as clever as that, you need a good team around you. It puts our singular efforts into perspective, and I suppose most of us would like to see a film made of at least one of our books. I did manage to get my title, The Eagle’s Covenant into the hands of Judy Coppage some years ago. She was responsible for bringing Die Hard to the screen. She liked the book but thought the location would not be attractive to American audiences. The book is set in Germany and uses German police procedures throughout. I did live in hopes. And so we press on. Maybe one day I’ll hit the big time and see my work up there on the silver screen. Wish me luck!

Making eyes at the bigger prize.

July 16th. 2016 It has been a quiet week for me, with nothing to show in my diary except for one event that had nothing to do with writing. On Monday, my wife received a phone call at two o’clock from the local hospital in Chichester. Would she be available for her cataract operation that afternoon? Yes, I says (demonstrative!). So we’re there at three o’clock and home by six — cataract done. No time to worry, no long wait for the op. Now she can see through that eye almost perfectly and is looking forward to getting the other eye done. Marvellous. Back to the writing and promoting. My WIP progresses and I have reached 35,000 words. I’m making bullet points as I go along because there are key elements in the story that may not be too obvious to the reader, and I will need to remember where they are so I can pull them all in together at the end. I have twenty nine so far after sixty pages, which may seem a lot, but in some cases they are reminders about an incident that I will need to revisit. Naturally some of these will be dealt with before the denouement; they’ll have to otherwise I’ll end up with a kind of table of events and their results. But the plot thickens and there will be more bodies, of that I have no doubt. I mentioned my Facebook campaign in my previous post. So far it has been fairly successful with regard to sign-ups. My subscriber list now sits at a shade below 1000. When my campaign began eleven days ago, I had about 550 subscribers. That was an organic growth of about one a day from the beginning in March, last year. Now, after an initial surge, I am adding on average about 15 per day. I get no financial return on this because the subscribers are downloading The Devil’s Trinity for free, but I hope that in time they will begin buying some of my other titles and also letting their reader friends know what a spiffing writer I am! I haven’t looked in on Mark Dawson’s Facebook course for a few days, but will need to get back to it to see how much longer I should hold this campaign. I am tempted to start a new one with a couple of ads aimed at America and UK separately. Not sure yet. My low price promotion for Hell’s Gate yielded one sale last week. This is the problem with scattergun marketing; not aiming at the right targets or using the wrong weapon (promoter) to fire the shots. One of my titles sold forty six copies in four weeks, that’s without any promotion. So the poor attempt last week was down to — who or what, me or the choice of promoter? But the reality must be my standing as an author. If I’m good, more people will want to read my stuff. If I’m bad, they won’t. I believe my reviews stand up against the kind of reviews I’ve seen for other authors, so I must hope my lengthening subscribers list will eventually lead to a boost in sales. It’s simply a case of getting it right. Wish me luck!

The Word game and getting it out there.

July 10th. 2016. Marketing, promoting, meeting and lecturing: something of a book week really. I didn’t do any lecturing, except to our puppy. Monday was our CHINDI meeting. There’s always a lot said and done at these meetings, but last Monday was entertaining, watching two of our group trying to “live video chat” between their laptops. It worked after a fashion, but their skills, and ours, need polishing. It’s all to do with live chats with readers on our website and seeing how efficient we can become — make us look more professional. If we can crack this, it will be beneficial in the future. Four new members were introduced, some surprisingly successful in their writing careers. It was good to hear what they’ve done and know that it brings so much more to the group. Because they all had to introduce themselves, it was decided that the members there would do the same. I think it worked well. CHINDI were at it again on Wednesday at Chichester Library, giving a seminar on book indie publishing as part of the Chichester Literary Festival. There was a good turnout where four of our members gave a PowerPoint presentation on how to get your book published and the pitfalls to avoid. All this information is contained in the group’s excellent book: “Before You Press Publish”. The book is available on the website www.chindi-authors.co.uk I began a Facebook ad aimed at building my subscriber list. I’ve gone from a fairly slow, organic growth of about one or two a day to about twenty a day. I don’t know how long I’ll run the campaign for, but I have a budget limit and may leave it to run its course. From time to time I’ll tweak the audience, make a couple of changes and see if the result bombs or takes off. It can be an exciting, frustrating and head scratching experience. I also paid for a low key promotion and the results are — “low key”. Serves me right. I’m making slow progress with my novel. I have passed the 30,000 word mark, so that’s something to be pleased about. I sketched out a kind of ‘data flow’ diagram, putting in names, places and links, but it’s beginning to look more like an “Activity on the Node” rather than a clear picture of what I’m up to. And if that expression is not clear to you, don’t worry; it’s got nothing to do with writing. So what lies ahead? More writing for me of course and more training for Tuppence (our puppy). If I could get half of my writing discipline into the dog, I would be doing well. And today I must put the price of Hell’s Gate back to its pre-promotion price; I might sell a few. Oh, and I am reading through one of our group’s latest novel: The Front of the Wilderness Generation by Jeremy Good. Why not have a look on our CHINDI website and see what it’s about? So that’s it for another week. I wonder how many more words I will have added to my book, or how many more sign-ups? Watch this space and wish me luck.

Living in the world of make believe

July 2nd. 2016 Halfway through the year already and I’m only a third of the way through my latest novel. I had great plans, probably like many writers, and when I see Facebook posts from other writers who are churning out three or four books a year, I wonder where they get the time or stamina from. I am just nudging 30,000 words, which makes the ending seem an awful long way off. I’ve found my story splitting into two parts, but not part one followed by part two. Both halves could warrant a novel on their own, but I feel I would lose something of my uniqueness if I allowed that to happen. Am I unique? We all are one way or another. As a standalone writer, I believe I bring something to my readers that support my belief — an eclectic mix of genre, time, place and readability. I’ve just got to figure out how to sell them this idea of mine. My sales are still buoyant, but slipping away. I expect to be launching a Facebook ad later this month to boost my numbers. I can’t make up my mind whether to promote a box set, which seems to be all the rage at the moment, or continue advertising my website and the free book offer. At the moment I don’t know how to make a box set, but it won’t take long to find out. I expect I’ll be using Photoshop to do that. If I do go for the box set, I can still promote the fact that there is a free book available on the site. I did make a small change to my website yesterday. It was an update of the image I have there of my hardback books. I had to do that because the first image was of a pile of books, all mine, but two or more the same. Now they are a pile of nine different titles. Oh, and a mug with pens sticking out: gives it a kind of cheeky charm. This coming week I will be at our monthly, Chindi meeting. There’s always a lot to talk about. I could be asked about an item that appeared in the local magazine, Sussex Views. It was a promotional bit about me and the CHINDI group. I was trying to encourage wannabe writers to come out of their shell and join a local group; get their books published. On Thursday I’ll be at Chichester Library with the group where four of our writers will be giving a talk about writing and publishing. I’m not taking part in the lecture, but as a member of the group I can offer my books for sale at the end. And looking ahead to the end of July, I have just paid for a stall at the Rox Music Festival in Bognor. Six of us will be selling our books on that day. Should be fun. Hopefully we’ll sell a ton of books. On the domestic front, our grand-daughter has announced she is expecting. That will make three great grandchildren for us if she is only having one. Our puppy has finished the six week basic training at puppy school, although no-one has told her she was awarded a certificate; she’s still naughty. And I’m slowly getting on top of my gardening chores. By winter it should all be done. Wish me luck!