Looking Ahead

As the old year succumbs to Father Time, so we all look
forward to what the following year might hold for us all. I’m no different and
tend to feel a sense of optimism as the New Year approaches. This time last
year I was in the middle of chemo therapy, living in Spain and wondering what
the future held for me. Now we are living in England and I have no worries
about my condition. We are settled into our new life and I have great hopes for
my continuing progress in the book world. I have a 30 day promotion with IBD
(Independent Book Authors) for my title, The Eagle’s Covenant, beginning on
January 3^rd. This is a low key, low budget promotion, but it’s a
promotion at least. Second week in January I will be meeting up with the Chindi
Authors (www.chindi-authors.co.uk) who I hope will teach me a lot about
promoting and marketing my books. I also have plans to continue publishing my
titles on Amazon under my name as publisher. At the moment they are published
by www.acclaimedbooks.com.
This is a ‘collective’: a small group of writers from all over the world
publishing under one heading. We are all “directors” of this group but in
reality the bulk of the work is done by Peter Lihou, the CEO of the outfit. (He
pays our royalties!). Although I will be removing my books from Acclaimed Books,
I will still remain a member of the group. But although I will be fully
independent, I still have a publisher at www.halebooks.com (Robert Hale Ltd) and
Harlequin Books in Canada www.harlequin.com. So I have a lot going
for me and titles out there over which I have no control.

My current work in progress (WIP) is back on the shelf
again, but simply because of the Christmas period and all that it entails. I
have been learning Scrivener and have been putting my WIP there. I’m a long way
from being competent at it, but once I get back into some sort of groove in the
New Year, I’m sure things will take off. I am also learning Photoshop with a
view to buying the software. This is something I need to do if I am to
republish my own titles as an Indie on Amazon. It’s more for CreateSpace than
the e-books. I’m using the 30 day trial at the moment. I also want to trim my
social networking and rationalise it somewhat. By that I mean the use of
Twitter, Goodreads and other associated network forums and sites. It can be complicated,
time consuming and pointless sometimes, but I do need to understand the why and
wherefore of web marketing etc. Pinterest is another which I am told is the
No.1 site for promotion (Free). If I could afford it, I would use BookBub: it
does what it says on the tin and is a great source for writers.

Well, I knew what I was doing this time last year and I
wonder what I’ll be doing this time next year. With luck I will have established
myself as a favourite among readers of my genre,
and have a better grasp of how to manage myself. But we are all in God’s hands
and only He knows what’s in store for us. I do hope that all the readers of my
blog, and my books, whatever your beliefs, have a wonderful, happy 2015. See
you all next year!

The waiting game

No internet today because
we are waiting for a carpet fitter. This meant emptying the lounge and dining
room, hence no router plugged in. It’s amazing how, in today’s world, being
without Wi-Fi tends to render one helpless for a while. So, waiting for the
carpet fitter to arrive meant I could finish my current reading: Lamentations
by C.J.Sansom. This is an historical novel, a best seller, but one that a
Goodreads search could not find. I tried twice because I wanted to leave a
review for a quite outstanding novel. Perhaps Goodreads were ‘wireless’ too!

I’ve begun distributing
my bookmarkers to the family who all seem quite happy to pass them around their
social circles and leave them in bars and restaurants. I’ve distributed a few,
but not as many as I would want. I think it’s because it isn’t something I am
used to doing, or maybe I don’t get out much! 
But I’ll persevere.

And on the subject of
perseverance: I am still struggling to get my book jacket uploaded to
CreateSpace. Not being a dab hand at this kind of thing, I have to use the
subjective approach. I’m getting closer and hoped to have had it uploaded today
if it wasn’t for the carpet fitter. Maybe this evening. Needless to say I did
not work on my current novel last week. I do have excuses, mainly down to
other, unavoidable commitments. I suspect it will be after Christmas before I
can crack on with it.

I had a nice surprise
last week: my title, The Devil’s Trinity,
shot up the rankings after a small promotion. It reached 469 in the thriller
category and managed to sell about 40 copies in one day. For me that is a major
step up, particularly as it was wallowing at the bottom of the swamp. The sales
have tailed off now, but the promotion with Choosy Books cost me $9.99 was a
worthwhile investment. It was a one-off deal the company offered. I’ll go with
them again. Lot cheaper than BookBub, but not with the same results.

I read last week that
Amazon are now third in the top 100 book sellers. Smashwords are second. I
forget who came top though. I also read of the problem Amazon’s new Kindle
scheme is creating for the top writers. If I lend a book from Amazon’s library,
the writer gets a set royalty, and it is the same value for an unknown writer.
Whereas a purchased copy of the top writer’s novel would yield a higher royalty
compared to the cheaper, unknown writer. It doesn’t affect me because none of
my titles are in the Amazon library programme. Not that it made any difference
to me when my books were enrolled: I never made more than a couple of dollars
in a year anyway.

So I press on and look
forward to calmer times when I can get down to serious writing and promotion.
The carpet fitter is due in a hour, and the store just phoned to say that the
furniture will be delivered on Saturday. We’ll have a totally new front room
and dining area then.

Once again, wishing all
my readers a merry Christmas and a Happy New year. See you all in 2015.

Making progress and meeting other authors.

I made some progress last
week with my manuscript, but it was more of a reviewing of my work and learning
to put it on Scrivener at the same time. It will take a while yet,
notwithstanding the fact that Christmas will get in the way. I’ve no trouble with
that. After all; Christmas is to be enjoyed and used as a time to forget the
pressures, whether self-imposed or not, that we all have to endure throughout
the year. I also resurrected my attempts to get an acceptable, book jacket
uploaded to CreateSpace for the paperback version of The Eagle’s Covenant. I’m still struggling with that, but I will
persevere.

Last Friday I met a local
author, Christopher Joyce, in Chichester. Christopher is a founder member of
the Chindi Writers group, www.chindi-authors.co.uk. This is the group of
self-published writers I mentioned in my blog last week. I missed them last
Monday, so caught up with Chris at Carluccio’s in town. I was encouraged by
what he had to tell me, particularly in the way the group promote themselves
publicly. They are not a collection of writers who meet to praise each other’s
work, but use their collective skills to bring their books and their group to
the public. This week they have a stall open in Chichester promoting their
books and providing help, advice and encouragement to whoever wants it.

I’ve noticed a movement
in my book sales on Amazon over the last couple of weeks. Nothing dramatic but
certainly an improvement on November. There won’t be much more now until I
begin pushing the boat out in the New Year. Hopefully my efforts will yield
some positive results. Maybe my bookmarkers will help too. I sent 100 out to
our youngest son in Australia. Some of those will go to America and hopefully
nudge people over there into looking at my website and checking out my titles.
My eldest son, whose job takes him all over the country has promised to put
some about. He’ll be receiving his quota shortly. One of our grandsons works in
Scotland, running his own business, www.brokenblonde.com and often meets up with
people who might be interested, so he has agreed to help. And so it goes on.
Whether it will make much difference remains to be seen, but I live in I hopes.

This week will be a
mixture of visiting family, shopping, decorations (putting up) and all the
usual things that we fit into the build-up to Christmas. Then it gets manic.
Lovely! If I don’t get round to publishing my blog next week, although I will
try, I want to wish you all a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Active again.

I decided to write my blog a little earlier today
because I find myself making excuses for not getting the entry out on a Monday.
Last week has seen more activity in the promotion and marketing effort I’m
putting to my books. One major achievement for me was the production of one
thousand bookmarkers. I designed them myself, although I listened to
constructive criticism from family and friends, and had them printed at a small
printers in Bognor. I picked them up last night and am delighted with the
result. Why a thousand? I want to distribute them in places where people will
pick them up and maybe look at my website, find out who I am and perhaps buy a
book. I plan to use my family in this (they already know), and expect the
distribution to cover about six areas in UK, couple of places in Sydney and
one, at least in America. This isn’t about distributing leaflets and flyers,
and sticking them under car windscreen wipers: it’s more of a kind of
subliminal advertising. It isn’t something that has been suggested to me; quite
the opposite: I dreamed this one up on my own. Bookmarker advertising isn’t
new, I know, but with luck I can get a kind of placement advertising simply because
my bookmarkers will be found in unexpected places. I hope so, anyway.

I have also cranked up my promotion for The Eagle’s
Covenant. I have had four, five star reviews posted on Amazon, but there has
been no quantifiable result in the numbers I’ve sold, so just how effective
those reviews will be I’ve no idea, but I’ve decided to concentrate on pushing
the title until well into the New Year.

Another step in getting myself known among the community
is to go to a meeting of the Chindi Authors Group. This is a group of Chichester
Indie authors who meet once a month in Chichester. Their aim is to help each
other with promotion and to generally encourage each other. I will be there on
Monday evening and I hope I can learn something from them and perhaps help
anyone there to learn from my experience as a long time writer. I’ve looked at
their website and seen the good reviews their books have attracted on Amazon.
Earlier this month they had a seminar in the Chichester library where about
seven of the group were doing a Q & A session. There were quite a few
people there in the audience. It’s this kind of event that can only help
writers like myself to become established in the local, book loving community,
and I hope we can all profit from this.

I began tentative steps with my dusty, old manuscript
yesterday. Having now purchased the Scrivener programme, I began using it
yesterday. I will be compiling my research material into separate sections
first. Then I will begin reading through my manuscript to bring my mind back to
the place I need to be with regard to the story line and character profiles. I
expect to be entrenched again by January and push on from there: hopefully
completing the novel by the summer. Wish me luck!

Slowing down towards the end of 2014

Once again another gap between blogs. No excuse, but
then I don’t have a great deal to say at the moment. I have been brushing up on
my Scrivener project. This is a writer’s work tool to help in the building of a
manuscript. It’s extremely useful and popular with a lot of writers. I’ve just
about worked my way through the course, but have promised myself to go through
it again. It’s not a long course, and the project is loaned on trial for thirty
days. That’s thirty days that are not necessarily consecutive. Theoretically
you could download one page a year for thirty years; not that it would be much
help. I will purchase it once I have grasped its finer detail and got used to
the way it which it functions. It isn’t expensive either. I plan to read
through my manuscript from the beginning and use that to get my thought process
back on track with the story line, and to build it with Scrivener. I can see
Christmas interfering with my plan, but I do intend to try.

Next week, December 1^st. I plan to visit the
Chindi writers group. This is a group of local authors who meet in Chichester
once a month. Their aim is to help fellow writers in the group in any way they
can with promotion and marketing ideas, and generally to encourage each other
in their work. I’ve looked at the group’s writers on the web links and can see
that they are all similar to me in that they are ‘indie’ authors and all have respectable
reviews. I’m looking forward to it

I have received a couple of five star reviews for The
Eagle’s Covenant, which
I hope will give it a kick start. When I removed it from Acclaimed Books and
published it myself on Amazon, I lost all the reviews. It has been a pain
trying to build it up again, so hopefully the five star reviews will be a great
help.

Coming towards the end of 2014 will see me (and Pat) regarding
the year as one of the most traumatic in our lives. I battled chemotherapy and
the subsequent problems associated with that. We sold our house and moved into
rented accommodation in Spain, and then moved to England where we are happily
settling into life here and enjoying every minute of it. I will be having my
next session of treatment, my first in UK, at the local hospital in Chichester
tomorrow, and this will continue for another eighteen months. I’m looking
forward to 2015 and the hope that my progress, both in my health and my writing
will be upward, fruitful and positive. I have a marketing idea for my books which
I hope to have ready before Christmas, and will explain more once I have it up
and running.  I have my December 8^th
promotion coming up and the hope that this will boost my rankings. Let’s hope
so. Wish me luck!

As You Were: back to basics.

So where was I? I missed
last week’s blog post, but have no real excuse. Maybe it’s just a case of
getting back into the swing of things. I’m slowly getting my writer’s head
back, and have started promoting again. Over the last month or so, my rankings
on Amazon have dropped away steadily, and I can only put that down to the fact
that I have been pretty lax in that department. Mind you, my rankings picked up
a couple of days ago. I think that was because a small promotion I had planned
kicked in on November 1^st. I’ve submitted another for December 8^th.
with BookSends. I’m also in the process of working on a project that might help
to increase my sales, but more about that in future blogs.

Because we have moved
into a new address, there has been a lot to do, not the least getting the spare
room ready for me to use as a study. Last week I bought a work desk at IKEA,
the flat pack people. It meant redesigning the spare room, but now I have my
desk (work station) set up and I can knuckle down to some serious writing (if
time allows!). Although I haven’t been putting pen to paper for quite a while,
my manuscript has never been far from my thoughts, and I keep making changes:
none of which have been written down. I sometimes see things on TV, or in the
paper and think of how I could use the idea in my story. Then I bin that because
it would detract from the way in which I write and create my characters. I keep
promising myself that I will rationalise that way in which I work, and try to
set goals throughout the week, but one of the penalties of writing for a hobby
and trying to live a normal life, is that no two days are the same. Plus there
are demands made on me that have to be attended to. So that’s my excuse.

It’s getting close to
Christmas which means a lot to most of us. It means we’ll get busier because of
the way in which we view the festive season. But one thing on the horizon for
me is that my next book, Past Imperfect,
should be on its way to me from my publisher. Publishing date is January, and I
usually receive my advance copies ahead of the date. Although I read the book
last month (the galley proofs), I will read the hardback with a great deal of
enthusiasm and sheer joy, like a kid with a new toy, because that’s how I am
with my books. I think is must mean I still have a measure of disbelief that I
actually made it as a published writer — a traditionally published writer at
that — and to hold the finished article in my hands fills me with a sense of
achievement.

However, after all that,
I think I have made a decision (my wife says not) to finish writing and
concentrate of promotion and marketing the seven titles I have on Amazon. I
will have two others of course: The Boy from
Berlin, and Past Imperfect, but
the rights of those two belong to my publisher. If I complete my current work,
I will offer it to my publisher. If she turns it down I will publish it myself.
This would mean I would have ten titles in print. Not bad for a boy who never
knew he would one day become a fully-fledged author. Wish me luck!

A&E and brain dead decisions

Bit of an eye-opener today at St. Richards Hospital in
Chichester. I had to pop in to A & E in the hope that they could ‘flush’
the catheter in my chest, which has to be cleaned out every four weeks. I was
also waiting to hear from my doctor about an appointment with the hematologist
to continue with my cancer medication (not chemo). Within five minutes of
walking into A & E I was being seen by a nurse. She contacted the cancer
ward and I was passed on to a hematology specialist nurse. Lots of questions of
course, but amazingly she told me her department had just received my documents
(I had passed them on to my doctor about a week ago), and her boss had asked to
see if she could locate this ‘Michael Parker’ who needed attention for the
catheter and further medication. And there I was walking into A & E. I was
examined by a doctor, weighed, blood pressure taken and had my catheter flushed
out. Oh, and they gave me a cup of tea (and Pat). Within two hours of walking
into the hospital we were walking out again. Job done. One hour after arriving
home I received a phone call with my appointment for my next medication in
November. I couldn't fault the treatment, response and professionalism of the
nursing staff, and the cleanliness of the clinic where I was treated. But here’s
the rub: the politicians; the men in suits who know what’s best for us, want to
close the unit to save money. The nearest unit then is about twenty miles away.
In the other direction it’s the same. So there would be a forty mile separation
between units. And all this on a major trunk road that is choc-a-bloc with
traffic during rush hour and holidays.

Changing the subject, I’m still a long way from
knuckling down with my writing. There’s no real excuse, but moving house and
settling in, redecorating, furnishing, sorting out all the minor details etc.,
does cut into the free time. And when I do find myself sitting in the chair
watching TV, it’s too late to think about creativity. Maybe next week, I keep
telling myself. Maybe. I must do better. Wish me luck!