Useful lessons

July 24th. 2017 The week began with a buzz around the Chindi group (www.chindi-authors.co.uk) because of the Chichester Arts Festival, Our first event was a ‘Crime panel seminar’ in which Christine Hammacott and Helen Christmas joined yours truly for an hour or so talking about the ins and outs of putting together a crime novel. It was a question and answer session, with invited questions from the audience. It went well and we even managed to sell a few books. The following evening, Chindi put on a ghost tour around Chichester, masterfully organised by Julia Macfarlane of the Bognor Writers Group. Julia is also one of our members. There was a lot of good feedback from that and, mercifully, the weather was warm enough to make it a pleasant evening. On Thursday we had a “Self-publishing made easy” class. Almost like an oxymoron that; self-publishing can be hard, but at least there was some excellent advice for those who turned out for the event. Today we have been holding a Creative Writing Workshop, and this evening we are rounding our week off with a quiz: a good way to round off a fairly successful week. At the beginning of the week I was featured on Karen Ingalls website as a guest blogger. You can read the article at www.kareningalls.blogspot.com. I talk about my latest book, Where the Wicked Dwell, and a little of myself. I have also been featured on Malcolm Richards’ website being asked ten questions. You can see that at https://www.malcolmrichardsauthor.com/blog/2017/6/21/ten-questions-with-michael-parker. I have also been busy redesigning a book jacket for Past Imperfect. I want to make it look more like a romance rather than a kind of dark thriller. My PhotoShop skills are limited, but I’m having great fun learning and making mistakes. I have already changed the jacket on A Covert War, once again using my PS skills. No doubt there will always be room for improvement, but I’ll still hold on to the truism that it’s the interior of the book that’s important. This week my wife and I have been taking advantage of the good weather like so many of us. Gardening has figured prominently in that as well as walking the dog along Pagham beach, but yesterday we had lunch with my wife’s brother and his wife at a pub called The Fox Goes Free. Unusual name for a pub, but the meal was good, as was the weather. It’s situated about ten miles from us in the countryside just north of Goodwood. I’m also looking ahead to some promotion. I have signed up for a one month promotion with the Kindle Book Review, and also something at the end of this month with Choosy Bookworm. A little different from BookBub I must admit, but I can’t always fork out substantial sums of money for one day promos. Time will tell whether my low-priced options are beneficial. I have noticed a lot of promotion sites are slapping big discounts on their product. It must mean that business is tough, and indie authors are getting a little sparing about where they spend their money. But I’m not concerned about other authors; it’s the readers I want to engage with. Hopefully I’ll get there in time. Wish me luck!

Virtually Public

June 19th. 2017 This week I am a guest on the Karen Ingall’s website, blogging about my latest book Where the Wicked Dwell. I will be sending a free link for the book to anyone who leaves a comment after my article. You can see it here: http://www.kareningalls.blogspot.com. It’s a big week here in Chichester as the Arts & Literary festival begins. Our writers group, Chindi, will be doing their bit, beginning with a Crime panel seminar tomorrow evening where I, along with Helen Christmas and Christine Hammacott, will be doing a talk on writing crime novels. We are all pleased for Helen because her London gangland thriller, Beginnings, has climbed into the top ten (paid) rankings on Amazon. (ASIN: B0078L8858). It’s always good to see a fellow indie author make a success of their work — makes you a little envious too, particularly when your own books are struggling. Later this week I will be guesting for Malcolm Richard on his blog, so what with virtual and actual appearances in public, I might find my book sales rising a little. I’ve been busy revising some of my book jackets. Well, having a look at them and seeing how and if I can improve them. I enjoy doing it, even though my artistic skills are not at the level of professional designers. I have looked through the Amazon best sellers for inspiration, but quite frankly, I just don’t seem to find it there. Have they all been professionally designed I wonder? I am also tackling the knotty problem of margins. There are recommendations on line, but there’s nothing like holding the book in your hand and seeing how close, or not, you are to getting it right. My plan to write a fast paced thriller by the end of this summer has been put on hold. Prevarication is the reason why: the bane of most writers I believe. I keep promising myself I will do it, but other things get in the way. I can’t blame anyone. I could try blaming the dog, or my wife. Or maybe the hot weather even? No, I thought not. I can’t let this week’s blog go by without mentioning the Tower Block fire in London. Towering Inferno is the only way to describe it. I can only imagine the horror that the victims went through before the flames engulfed them. But now we are about to be engulfed by the extreme left wing activists who are calling for “action” against the Tory government, and are planning to take to the streets. No doubt they will be smashing property, looting shops and setting places on fire without seeing the irony in their actions. At church yesterday, we prayed for the families of those who died and also prayed that those who govern us will come up with the right decisions. No doubt those activists would mock us for not taking decisive action. Sad people indeed. On a brighter note; one of my favourite sports is on TV tonight: Speedway. It’s the British Final, contested by twenty brave men (boys really) who do what a lot of us older ones would love to do, but probably never had the time not the courage to race around a small track at sixty miles an hour on bikes with no gears and no brakes. But back to the gentler art of writing. Fingers crossed I will see more book sales this week. Wish me luck!

Out and about

June 11th. 2017. We’re in a pickle now here in UK. Teresa May’s spectacular failure would make a good novel. House of Cards anyone? Can’t see it having any impact on my book sales though, no matter whether we have a left or right wing government, and whether the Brexit negotiations go well, people will still want to read (and eat!). Looking ahead to exciting times. A strange thing happened last week. I received an e-mail from a potential subscriber to say she couldn’t download the free copy of The Devil’s Trinity. It was something to do with the link I use to AMS. So I put the book free on Instafreebie and gave her the link. Within a couple of days four copies had been downloaded. I cancelled the giveaway. Bearing in mind this subscriber was the ONLY person who was given the link, I have to assume it was passed on, or Instafreebie have a leaky website. I’m still busy going through my titles and trying to rationalise it all. It’s only recently that I have come to the conclusion my paperbacks should all be the same size, so to that end I am republishing them, one at a time, at a common size. I am also just about getting the uploads right with Amazon. I have one more title on its way, but from the “Look Inside” feature, the replacement file hasn’t been used. At least I can send it back. I sent an e-mail out to my subscribers last week extolling the virtues of North Slope. I told them a little story about the good news I received from my agent all those years ago and also told them I had dropped the price to £0.99. Within a day I sold nine copies. Not many you might say, but my averages bump along the graph at about 1.5 books a day. So a jump to nine copies really put a smile on my face. I’ve finished working my way through the old manuscript my sister passed on to me. I wouldn’t publish it as it is; far too weak. But I’m thinking of re-writing it as a standard, all action thriller: a kind of novella maybe, and written in the style of an Andy MacNab book. Not that I could emulate the master of that genre, but I could give it a good try. Might sell a few if I get it right. There’s nothing on the calendar for next week, so I’ll wing it for a while and perhaps make a start on it. I have sent an email off to Harlequin Books in Canada about the two novels they published for me five years ago. The lease on them has expired, so now I need confirmation so I can publish the paperbacks for sale in North America. I still don’t have the eBook rights to one of them, which is a pity. I’m looking forward to next week when my book group, CHINDI (www.chindi-authors.co.uk) will be taking part in the Chichester Festival. My contribution will be a Crime seminar. There will be three of us (Christine Hammacot and Helen Christmas) giving the low-down on writing a crime novel. We have five events lined up for the week including a ghost tour, a quiz evening, a workshop on publishing and a talk by one of our successful writers, Jane Cable. I have a couple of promotions this week. Not the selling books type of promotion. I’ll be featured on Karen Ingall’s website (http://www.kareningallsbooks.com), and will also be the subject of an interview (June 22nd) on Malcolm Richard’s blog (http://www.malcolmrichardsauthor.com). Hope to sell more books and attract more fans. Wish me luck!

Reviewing the Situation

June 3rd. 2017 I opened up last week’s blog with a lament about the terrorist attack in Manchester. Now I find myself thinking again of another attack: this time it was in London last night. So far seven people killed. I don’t know if that includes the three terrorists who were shot by the police. Once upon a time you would be hard pressed to find an armed policeman in London, or anywhere in UK for that matter. Now you can expect a bunch of them to turn up within minutes of an alarm going off. A friend of mine believes that young people today are immune to the realities of murder and carrying weapons because of the impact that violent computer games have on them. Is that true? Who knows, but like I said last week: as a thriller writer, this is the kind of stuff that I use in my books: not necessarily killing innocent people, but certainly killing without much thought. I have been battling with CreateSpace and Amazon over the last couple of weeks about the wrong edition of my titles being published. I think I have it sorted now, thank goodness, but I still haven’t finished the complete review of my books. So far I have revised three, not including the jackets, which I may attempt later. And while I was in a brain fog miles away, I began to think of another book. It was one I wrote about fifty years ago. It never got published because it was rubbish, basically. My sister found the copy a few months ago after having a clear out at home. She typed the whole thing for me, which is why she still had it with her. I dug it out this afternoon. I may try the opening sequence out on my subscribers; see what they think. I actually feel quite energised about this. I just hope I can make something of it and come up with another thriller within the next twelve months. I’m still holding back on promotion. I can’t help but feel I need to hang on until I’m confident on doing the right thing and spending my money in the right place. This month I will be featured on Karen Ingall’s website, which I hope will bring me some sales and subscribers. I will also be interviewed on Malcolm Richard’s website blog. So a couple of promotions without having to pay out. Looking ahead, I have signed up to take part in the UK Southcoast book show at Worthing in either September or March. My author group, CHINDI, will be taking part as well, so it isn’t just a single event for me, but for our group. Because it’s a dedicated book show, I would expect the right kind of punters to turn up. Hopefully we’ll do well and attract a few more fans. The woman I mentioned last week who asked if I would review her book hasn’t got back to me yet. Perhaps I put her off. Too unkind maybe? But if I responded to all requests to review books, I wouldn’t get any work done. I didn’t refuse outright, but probably said enough to make her change her mind. I finally paid for my hearing aids; must say it a vast improvement. I even have a remote control, with them. I was playing around with it yesterday. We were at a church family weekend do. It meant a lot of singing and rousing keyboard playing: all in a hall that had been built like an echo chamber. Fortunately I was able to control the sensitivity of the hearing aids to make life a little more comfortable for myself. Now if I could only find a way to control the thought processes of book readers and get them to read my books. Wish me luck!

Losing the Plot

May 27th. 2017 At the moment I’m distilling my thoughts here, wondering what to write. This week has been traumatic for so many people because of the Manchester bombing atrocity. No-one knows, or can explain, what drives these fanatics who kill in the name of some diabolical belief. It has been going on for centuries and is unlikely ever to change. I am old enough to have survived the war in London, knew about the Korean War although as a child I didn’t understand why it was happening. The IRA campaign. Looked on from afar at the conflict in Vietnam. The Falklands War. The so-called “Arab Spring” in which the West became involved and unwittingly unleashed Islamic terror on the world. I have read and studied the Bible a few times, and can see that it all happened thousands of years ago. And so it goes on. As a writer, I can see a lot of mileage in stories that involve pain, heartache, murder, kidnap and bombings, and have used the essence of these in my books. But in those stories I had control over what happened, and could resolve it all happily. Now I find myself looking on desperately sad over what has happened and wishing there was some way I could “resolve” it so that it never happened again. But I can’t; all I can do is pray it is finished — no more, never again. During the week I had a hearing appointment for my new hearing aids, attended a church house group, went on a coach trip to Eastbourne and continued editing one of my books. So I have had an aural, spiritual, joyful and literary experience throughout the week. And I received an e-mail via my website from a new subscriber. Very nice too. Oh, and another e-mail from one of my subscribers asking if I will review her book. I don’t really have the time to wade through a novel that I wouldn’t normally pick up and read. And I did warn the writer that I don’t usually do this. I also said I was a very harsh critic (that’s why I’m editing my books again!), so not to expect a five star review. And I’m slow. So many negatives, eh? I haven’t had a reply yet. I’ll let you know what happens. I hope to start a campaign next month to sell more books. But how do I find the right source of readers to aim at? There is so much information and advice out there, that it should be easy. But of course they all claim the same thing: to get you in front of their thousands of subscribers and keep you on their twitter feed for several days. It’s a big business and makes money for those people involved; probably more than they get from writing books. Oh yes, they are usually authors themselves. There are successful ones of course: Nick Stephenson, Mark Dawson and Joanna Penn to name a few, and I know from experience that following their advice means involvement and effort, but it’s needed in spades. I’ve been changing my mind about my next book. I’ve spoken about Marcus Blake as a follow up to Where the Wicked Dwell, but now I’m thinking of continuing the return of Conor Lenihan (The Eagle’s Covenant). I have some angles popping into my head: some I like, others I don’t, but until I can get my mind focussed on which plot and with whom, I will never get down to writing my next “best-seller”. Wish me luck!

Roller Coaster

May 19th. 2017 Two weeks have gone by and much has been packed into it, but not one word have I written for my next novel. I’ve been cleaning up my act a bit with regard to disconnecting from other groups, and hopefully I’ll see things a little more clearly now when it comes to knowing who I’m working with and what is expected of me. I mentioned Amazon selling my romance (Past Imperfect) at a knock down price. I realised I should buy the stock (they said there were six copies) and throw them in the bin. That way I would get the full royalties on the official retail price, and the sales would go towards pushing up my rankings. Good plan? Nope! I went on-line and learned I could only order three copies. I did this, went back an hour later to order the remaining three to discover that my latest version was up for £7.50. I ordered it, but it turned out to be one of the remaining stock, published by Lightning Source, not the new version published by CreateSpace. The single copy arrived before the other three; all has been published by LS. I complained to CreateSpace and returned the book to Amazon. End of story? Nope! I edited A Dangerous Game, waited until the new version was available and ordered the new copy. The old one turned up. I checked the “Look Inside” feature to see that it was my new version there, which meant that CS and/or Amazon have messed it up. I complained to CS and returned the book to Amazon today. I suppose when you consider that CS and Amazon are handling an enormous amount of book traffic, mistakes are going to be made, but lightning shouldn’t strike twice in the same place as it has with my book orders. One small success was registered with the promotion I ran for my author friend, Helen Christmas. She sold several copies of her box set which delighted her. She said it probably wouldn’t have happened without my input. I was really pleased for her. Her latest book in the series, Retribution, is now available on Amazon. It’s £3.50 to buy (Kindle), and free if you’re a member of Kindle Unlimited. http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B06ZYF7TYP. My wife and I travelled up to Norfolk last week for a family ‘bash’: a joint birthday party for our great grandson, Harrison and his dad, Leon. Had a good weekend catching up. Then we travelled up to Lincoln to visit an old friend of ours whose husband is confined permanently with Alzheimer’s disease. It’s so sad watching a man who had been your friend for twenty years fading like that. At least we were able to give our friend, Pauline, a lift in her spirit while we were there. Managed a trip out to Skegness where I left a copy of my book, Hell’s Gate in a shelter on the promenade. It had a Chindi label on it asking whoever picked it up to read it and leave it somewhere else. This is something our Chindi group have been doing as a precursor to the Chichester Arts Festival and the launch of our new website, due to happen about now. www.chindi-authors.co.uk. Despite my determination not to write for a while, I found myself mulling over different ideas for plots and writing them in my head. The curse of the author: not being able to give up for a while. I’m getting used to my new hearing aids and expect to be forking out the money for them, but not for a week or so. Need to sell more books to pay for them. While I was away, my Amazon rankings rocketed a couple of times. They are back in the doldrums now, but it puts a smile on my face to see that steep incline on the graph. I just have to learn how to keep those ‘balls’ in the air. Wish me luck!

Now for Consolidation

May 6th. 2017 Most authors like to be interviewed, and I’m no different. Over the years I’ve been fortunate enough to be interviewed on radio, TV, in the Press and through author websites, including YouTube. It’s difficult to quantify the effects of these interviews, and I doubt they do much for my sales figures, but at least it puts me in the public eye. My next interview will be in June on award winning author, Karen Ingalls’ website. (kareningallsbooks.com). Hopefully the interview will attract a few more fans to my books. I’ve come to the conclusion that my less than 100% commitment to promotion is one of the reasons why my rankings and sales are low, and it’s about time I consolidated the effort I’m putting into it by setting aside my writing time. No doubt some people will say that I should write more books and keep on writing because it’s the only way to increase reader awareness out there, but it’s like a chicken and egg argument to me; so unless some unshakeable idea drops into my head and won’t go away, I’m going to spend more time trying to sell my books than writing them. Trouble is, it doesn’t stop me coming up with ideas: I keep getting them buzzing around in my head. I mentioned my Romance last week: Past Imperfect. I decided to tidy it up, edit the book for some minor typos and make a small adjustment to the cover. I uploaded it to CreateSpace at the beginning of the week. Two days ago it appeared on Amazon at £2.01. I queried this to be told that this was normal practice with book-sellers, and the royalties would be paid on the full price of £8.50. I was dubious about the whole thing so I ordered a copy. It came today. It isn’t the edited version I uploaded to CreateSpace, and was printed by Lightning Source. I’ve contacted CS, but now I’ll have to remove it from LS until I’m satisfied that the old version doesn’t exist. Who’d want to be a writer anyway? Yesterday I e-mailed my subscribers with a promotion for my author friend, Helen Christmas. We are both keeping our fingers crossed that she will enjoy a bounce in her sales figures because of it. Click rates are notoriously low these days, probably because there are so many “offers” going around, and the readers are being saturated with them. But unless we keep plugging away and gently pester the lives of the reading public, we won’t get anywhere. Helen’s promotion offer is at https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B017WLXY7K. Why not click and have a look? It’s a great offer. I had a hearing test last week after seeing an advert in the Daily Mail. I’ve had so many of these over the years that I could practically draw the graph they come up with after the test, and this one was no different. Hopefully the product will be a vast improvement on my current hearing aids, which I purchased a few years ago in Spain (American company). It comes with a remote control: should be fun playing around with that. At least I get a trial period before making up my mind whether I want to shell out the money or not. Next week we are off for a family bash in Norfolk, then a trip round to an old friend in Lincolnshire, so there won’t be a blog post from me. Hopefully when I post again, I will have some good news about, well, anything really. Wish me luck!