Getting over life's little problems

28th October 2017 Well. I got my PC back from the shop, but had to phone them because it still didn’t connect to the Wi-Fi. Fortunately it was cleared up by the technician over the phone after having to take it back for another session with the techie guys. I was almost back in business, but had to get on with the cross promotion I had agreed to do. Although I thought I had reduced my book for the promotion, it turns out I hadn’t; but I didn’t find out about that until the author’s promoters contacted me. Embarrassing? Yes. But all is well now and the cross promo is running. I’ve only sold one book though so far, so it can’t be making much of an impact out there, can it? For those of you who may want to see which author I am promoting, click the link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075R35B5J/ I got back to my WIP and am feeling a little more confident about where I’m going with it. Yesterday I typed about 1000 words, which is a lot for me because I often stop to research something that needs clarifying. But at least I’m making some kind of progress. Another kind of research I was engaged in was preparing my sermon for this Sunday evening at my church. Yes, we have to do research for that as well. I will put a link in my next blog should any of you out there wish to hear what I have to say. Yesterday I watched a video on Mark Dawson’s SPF group. It was a forty minute interview with Adam Croft; another student of Marks, who has sold over a million books on-line. He spoke about the poor sales of his stand-alone novels, and mentioned that the valued opinions out there believe you have to produce a ‘series’ of titles if you are to make a success of self-publishing. Well, he blew that theory out of the water by using BookBub advertising to advertise his ‘eighth’ book. As a result of that, his other books are selling: something they failed to do previously in any great number. I said last week that I would be looking at Amazon ads (AMS), but now I will give BB a go. I’m a member already, so I don’t have to apply to go on BB’s waiting list. This is not a “Featured Deal”, but is similar to FB ads and AMS. It’s worth looking into — for me anyway. Next month, our book group, Chindi, will be advertising great deals for their books coming up to Christmas. Have a look at https://www.facebook.com/chindiauthors. There are some great books there with generous discounts and genres to suit everyone in the family. Looking back over my week, health has figured largely in our lives. Fortunately for me and Pat, nothing too serious. Mind you, having injections in the eye, which my Pat is having, probably is serious. I had a couple of hospital visits: different hospitals, nothing to worry about either. And a friend of ours passed away over the weekend. Losing a loved one is sad news for anyone, but on Tuesday we held our church house group here, and the theme was: Celebrating Janet’s life. We had a lot of laughs and spent a couple of hours in tears of mirth instead of tears of sadness. Oh, and one of my fish died. That was sad. So, next week I begin with preaching at my local church, looking ahead to Christmas (shopping!), getting more pages added on to my WIP and maybe, just maybe, getting to grips with BookBub advertising. Wish me luck!

When Gremlins attack

October 21st. 2017 Just when you think things are running smoothly, a gremlin hops into your daily routine. My PC went belly-up on Tuesday: it wouldn’t boot up. Took it into the shop, got it back on Friday and now I can’t access the internet. I’ll be going back to the shop on Monday to have a “talk” with them. Obviously I’m not without a PC or the internet, but I have to use my laptop, which is not geared up like my main PC. These problems, when they come, always seem to pick the most inopportune moment. I am supposed to be preparing a Newsletter promotion for a fellow author. In return he will be posting about my book, A Dangerous Game. It means seven days of tweets, FB and social media, and now I have to come up with something satisfactory so I don’t fall short of the agreement I made. Another hurdle I have to cross is that my church has asked me to preach on Sunday week (October 29th). No big deal really, but the access I have on line to research the stuff I need is already part of my ‘Favourites’ on the main PC. So now I’ll have to go hunting via my laptop. On top of that, a very close friend of ours has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. I had to give up two mornings this week to ferry a very distraught husband in to the hospital. Plus I was asked to sit in with him when the doctor delivered the sad news. His grief, and my friend’s condition, make my problems pall into insignificance. Naturally I have made no progress with my WIP, but it has never been too far from my mind. My foray into Facebook advertising was pretty disappointing too, but I’ll survive the trauma of handing Jeff Bezos (FB founder) my money for so little in return. I will do nothing now until next month because I reached my self-imposed budget limit. I’m thinking of having a look at Amazon ads. According to Mark Dawson, a prolific user of FB and Amazon, they offer a more direct way of directing your potential readers straight on to your Amazon product page. It makes sense: an FB ad asks someone to click a link to an Amazon product, whereas with Amazon Ads, the product appears and the click takes the reader to the place where they can purchase the book. Plus the fact that the product page contains so much more information about the author, the book, the also-boughts, the reviews, and a host of other stuff, which would cost a fortune to place on an FB ad. We took our dog down to the beach for her routine walk this afternoon, but had to turn back because the beach has been battered by the strong winds brought on by “Storm Brian”. I despair of the naming culture for hurricanes and storms etc. The name ‘Brian’ suggests a gentle nature. I have a couple of friends with that name, and neither of them is violent. Why don’t they pick names with connotations of strength and danger? Attila, Ghengis Khan, Napoleon, Brian? Spare me, please. So what happens next week? I might have a serviceable PC, and I might even have got back to my WIP, but whatever happens, as always: wish me luck!

Mystery upon mystery

15th. October 2017 We all like a mystery, right? Well, I was walking along the beach with my dog, Tuppence, the tide was out and just a couple of dog walkers around. I trod on what I thought was a plastic bottle, but when I looked again, it was more like a gun than a discarded piece of plastic. I picked it up. It was quite heavy. There were a couple of dials on it, and also some switches. Plus, a port that looked the same as the one on my phone. It was definitely something electronic. I wondered if it was some kind of signalling device; you know, a short wave transmitter. Perhaps there had been some illegal activity on the beach. Smugglers? I pulled out one of Tuppence’s poo bags and put the device inside, and looked forward to discovering what this mysterious object was. When I got home, I showed it to my wife, but she couldn’t help me out there. So, using my research skills, I went on to Google and began dialling in some of the letters and numbers that were barely discernible on the side of the object. And as I got closer to the truth, I began to wonder what planet I lived on. Am I so far out of it now that I couldn’t recognise an electronic cigarette? A vapour thingy? Ah! Then I thought about how life changes, pulling the rug from under your feet. The world and his dog would have known what it was. But I likened the reality to my Granny and her hearing trumpet. What would she have made of my modern hearing aids? When I smoked years ago it was a packet of cigarettes with twenty fags inside. I’ll just have to keep taking the tablets. Oh, and the vapour thingy has gone into the bin.

Yesterday I went along to Crawley library for their ‘Book Fest’. It was a first for the library, and they made a good show of it too. It was limited to twenty authors (all pre-booked). We had our own allotted space with a small, printed poster attached to the front of the table. I only sold one book: one of my religious books. It was only £1, which is practically the same as giving them away. My son and grandson came along for an hour. They live close by, so that was a bit of a bonus. It was good to meet other writers, many of whom only had one or two books to show. I think I made a mistake by taking too many book along, but it’s all part of the learning curve. I’ll have to remember that “Less is more” in future. I left two of my hardback titles behind for the library. They accept donated books. I don’t know what Facebook are up to, but they suddenly ‘disapproved’ one of my ads for “profanity”. The ad in question was one I ran through September and had been inactive for two weeks, and contained no profanities at all. I let them know in their ‘appeal’ box that they had made a mistake. So why is it that big companies can’t apologise? They sent me a response to say that my ad had been approved and I could view it etc., etc. The ad wasn’t even running! I’m still failing miserably with this advertising game, but I will persevere. Yesterday I had an ‘uptick’ (I like that word) in my sales, so perhaps I’m doing something right. My WIP moved on a notch, and I have managed to get to the fifth character that needs introducing. It’s still early days and I’ve only written about 4000 words. Just 76000 to go and at least eight or nine months maybe. We’ll see. Wish me luck!

Disingenuous freeloaders

October 7th. 2017 I have to start this week’s blog with a little rant against the freebie again. I mentioned two readers last week who had won a copy of my ebook, The Eagle’s Covenant. A day or so after writing that piece, one of the ebooks was downloaded from Instafreebie. Three days ago a second was downloaded. This told me that the winners had picked up their prize. I didn’t end the giveaway there and then, knowing I had only given the free link to two people. Yesterday I discovered that the book had been downloaded four times. I ended the giveaway straight away. It suggests to me that one of those winners passed on the link to others, which is against the spirit of the free book idea; the link was not theirs to give away. So be it, but I will keep a closer eye on this practice in future. I made some small inroad into my current WIP. I said in my last post that figuring out a back story was almost like writing a novel, but I bit the bullet and persevered. I was amused by a post I read today on an author forum where a question was posed on what is making us happy today. One writer was excited because she had book 4 being published, book 5 with her content editor, book 6 with another professional and book 4 (yes) being prepped for something else. I got exhausted just reading that. Where do these people get their ideas and stamina from? Must be my age because I can never see a novel taking less than a year to write. I was once told by my London publisher that there are only about nine stories you can write, but many, many ways of telling them. My current effort is about a girl going missing. No, it isn’t Gone Girl, but simply another slant on a missing person. She is sixteen years old and the daughter of a notorious London crime boss. Sounds exciting? No, not yet, but it’s my job to make it so. How do I do that? If there’s a recipe book out there about writing the perfect plot, let me know please. Meanwhile I’ll struggle to come up with something to stretch between the beginning and the end. My venture into Facebook advertising doesn’t look too promising at the moment. One of my ads achieved an audience relevance of eight, which is good, and the other ad was wilting fast. I tried a tweak and immediately lost the plot. So much for carefully following the good advice I found in Michael Cooper’s book. I will persevere and make every effort not to give Facebook too much of my money. This time next week I will have spent four hours at the Crawley Library book fest trying to persuade people to by my paperback books and maybe even venture into my electronic pile and download some ebooks. But at least I will be meeting people who are there because they are book readers, and are interested in talking to some real live authors. After that I will be meeting my son for a spot of lunch, and that’s a bonus. Hopefully I’ll be able to brag about how many books I sold. Wish me luck!

Writing in a straitjacket

30th.September 2017 I finished setting up my Facebook advert using Michael Cooper’s advice. Some of you may wonder why I haven’t stuck with Mark Dawson. I wonder that myself sometimes, because so many authors on his forum seem to do so well with his course. I did double my subscribers list last year using Mark’s instructions, so, yes, it works.

However, with Michael Cooper’s approach, it opens up FB advertising in a different and unexpected way. For example, he insists you must never, never use your book jacket to advertise the book. I squirmed over this but he was insistent. And you can’t really argue with a guy who sells thousands of books a week and does this by some pretty forensic work on his adverts. To give you an idea of what I mean, you can see from the image what my ad will look like. Doesn’t make sense, right? But I have to go along with it for a while. If you can’t see the image, click this link: bit.ly/2yzwyqa. I have created two adverts: one for women over 35 in UK, and one for men. I’ll run both adverts for about three days and keep an eye on the metrics. If it fails, I’ll switch to USA, but I won’t hang on too long for results. I began work on a new, Marcus Blake thriller during the week. I spent some time fleshing out a back story which will be revealed piece by piece as the plot develops. One of the problems I found was that by sketching out a short synopsis of characters, events and reasons why, I found I was literally developing a story on its own. I did think for a moment that I ought to go down that route, but then I remembered that this is supposed to be a Marcus Blake thriller, and that’s what sells — one character in a series of books. So I’ll stick to this literary straightjacket I’m in and hope for the best. I’m still a million miles away from coming up with a plot that’s convincing and “different”. Oh, and this is supposed to be a psychological thriller: something new for me. My book sales have just about flat-lined, but once I begin the Facebook project, I’m hoping to see a definite change. I’ve hooked up with another author for a promotion, but these generally produce very little. It’s simply a case of trying and hoping. I received an e-mail from an author who ran a competition which included two ebooks from me. I was given the email addresses of the two ‘lucky’ winners, and duly sent them the link for their prize. Two days later and nothing has been downloaded from Instafreebie, and I have had no acknowledgement from them either. I’m loathe to give away books now. Over the years I have given away about 50,000 books, which may have improved my readership, but it’s something you can’t quantify. I’m fast coming to the conclusion that it’s a waste of time and leads to very little in the way of author/reader connection. So, no more freebies unless I’m persuaded that something might come of it. Am I living in hopes? Maybe, but whatever I do, wish me luck!

Three in a bed

22nd. September 2017 I should write comedy novels. All you have to do is hire a motorhome, take yourself, the wife and the dog away with you and let the research take care of itself. One thing we didn’t have in our possession was years of camping experience. Looking at the other happy campers we came across, I decided that their stoicism is what we need when it comes to defending the rights and principles of our glorious nation (Brexit!). They all smiled! I think they must have all been treated to a facelift at some time to make sure the smile remains fixed despite the weather and the conditions. And they all gave me the impression that they wouldn’t be beaten, whatever they came up against. The dog didn’t complain too much. She wasn’t too sure, and just to be on the safe side she decided our bed was much better than hers. So we ended up as three in the bed, cold, sleepless and wondering how, if ever, it could improve. We did manage though, and made the best of a “challenging” job. The end result was that we cut our holiday short by a day and got back to enjoy our comfortable bed, decent shower, cooked grub. Churchill once said, “Never give up”. I say, “Never again”. Although I wasn’t able to devote my time to writing, I did manage to read a novel by Claire Francis (Dark Devotion). She made a name for herself by sailing round the world single handed. When she wrote her first thriller (Night Sky, I think), I read it and was surprised at how good she was. If there are any budding writers out there wanting to know how to craft a novel, they could learn a great deal from a master at work by reading one of her novels. I thought about my WIP while I was away, and have reluctantly come to the conclusion that I will not finish the book. For that reason I have set it aside and will think of something else to occupy my mind on the literary front. I will continue to promote and advertise, but with a measure of control that has been a little lacking recently. I intend using Facebook again, but not until I have finished Michael Cooper’s book on the subject. I’ll probably have to read it twice, because I need to ensure I come close to the advice he is giving out. I kept my eye on my book sales too. I sold none over a period of five days, probably because the FB ads had finished. But yesterday I sold six. It’s amazing how such a small number can get you excited. I don’t expect too much now, until I start advertising again. I need to wait until next month because of my self-imposed budget limit. If I exceed that, I’ll be pouring good money down the drain. And my wife will divorce me. Probably keep the dog though. Those of you who have read my bio on my author’s page will know I published a religious book based on my conversion to Christianity. I preached at different fellowships when we lived in Spain: something I never believed I would be capable of. Once we returned to England, I assumed my preaching would come to an end. But God moves in mysterious ways (so they say), and I have been asked to join the preaching team at my local church. We’ve been attending for about two years now, so it’s probably about enough time for people to get to know us. Some people might wonder how I can justify my position as a preacher and a thriller writer at the same time, but I feel no conflict. If you’re curious about my “other side”, why not have a look at my book, A Word in Your Ear (How God changed my retirement plans). https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01EA6LWUQ. So what next? A small promotion for Hell’s Gate today — price reduction to £0.99. A cross promotion coming up during October, but before that, more reading on Facebook advertising. Let’s hope I get to grips with it. Wish me luck!

Struggling and budding writers

16th. Sept. 2017 No progress on the literary front for me this week, simply because I’m being persuaded that my current WIP is not a good idea. I have seen figures (statistics) that support the premise that ‘series’ novels outsell ‘cross-genre’ novels by something like 80% to 20%. Having now published two thrillers with Marcus Blake as the main character, it makes sense for me to go for a third book with Marcus leading the way. But this puts me into the literary straight-jacket I’ve mentioned before, knowing I have to follow that line to improve my potential readership. I need a good plot for Marcus, and at the moment I’m more likely to win the lottery than I am to find a good plot. I’ll just keep my fingers crossed that something turns up. We were at a family wedding last night. My niece, Sarah, was marrying her partner, Simon who she has lived with for about ten years. They have a daughter called Jasmine and a son, Hugh. Jasmine was very keen to meet me because she was amazed to discover some time ago that there was an author in the family. And not just that, but her Uncle Matthew had been mentioned in the credits to one of the books. She even took the book into school for a “Show and Tell”. Jasmine has already written a story: a five page story. She also played the Wedding March on the keyboard for her mum and dad as they walked up the aisle. Certainly a very talented little girl. We had to meet. Jasmine told me she would like to write another story, so I asked her to come up with a 20 page book this time, and I will see if I can get it published for her. I would use CreateSpace if it’s possible, or maybe Lulu, but I would love to able to do this for her. I’ve no idea if I can produce a book that small, or even if CS will accept my account with Jasmine as the author. Time will tell though. It was lovely talking to Jasmine: she seemed so shy, and perhaps a little intimidated by my ‘reputation’. On the subject of being the author for a title: I had to persuade CS that my re-sized paperback, Roselli’s Gold, was really my book. I sent the required proof to them and have since received the new book. Right size too. Tomorrow we are off on a five day break. I’ve hired a motor-home and we’ll drive to Dorset and Devon. It’s a ‘try-out’ for us. I’ve never driven a motor-home before, so it looks like it could be fun. We’re not hiring a Winnebago, just a 2 berth Chausson. We’re taking the dog with us. I have downloaded a book on Facebook advertising after seeking advice on one of the forums I use. In response to the question about audience relevance, I was told that anything below 9 is a waste of time. The book I downloaded is called ‘HELP, my Facebook ads suck!’ by Michael Cooper. At a cost of under £4, it isn’t money wasted. And when you consider my relevance on UK is 4, and on USA it’s 7, then I need help. The author of the book has an impressive CV, and the author who suggested the book has never dropped below a relevance of 9 since he bought the book. So here goes, maybe I’ll crack this FB advertising lark and see some improvement in my ROI. And maybe I’ll unearth a decent plot for Marcus Blake. Wish me luck.