Respectfully submitted

by

Mellow, seasoned, mature? Rules to include in your life

There’s an email going round which is so appropriate for us mature* types that I’m repeating some of the key sentiments below. Even if you saw it, they are worth the reminder.

*I’m still struggling to find a definition for us, the baby boomers, the golden agers, the ones who have been young for a very long time: no longer young, not yet old . . . I still can’t pin the perfect word down. However I looked up mature in my thesaurus. Check these definitions out:

Fully developed powers of mind and body

Complete in natural development

Ripe

Perfect (as in a plan maturing)

Become due for payment

Older than most (as in mature student)

Grown up

Fully fledged, developed, experienced, knowledgeable, sophisticated. (Don’t know about you, but I like that one)

Mellow, age, season, ripen, bring to maturity

Ripeness, readiness, fullness.

So I guess mature is the word, wide-ranging though it might be. I’m rather taken with mellow, mind. And seasoned.

Anyway, here are the sentiments on that email. Take notes, this is important stuff.

DO NOT FEAR. Fear is so desperately crippling, and the media of the world seem determined to whip us into a permanent state of it. Much of what you fear will never happen, not to you personally. Most of the stuff that does happen is unexpected anyway. When and if it does, deal with it. Fear offers us nothing.

DO NOT REGRET. The past is unchanging. Nothing you can do can change what happened. Take the lesson from it, yes: those who ignore history are fated to repeat it. But do not regret.  Nothing that happened to you, if you survived it, can break you, unless you let it.

VISIT PLACES YOU WANT TO VISIT.  What’s holding you back? Time? Money? Fear? If you really, really want to visit a place, carpe diem, seize the day. Visit it.

EAT WHAT YOU WANT. You may need to eat it in smaller quantities, sure. But life is short. You don’t really want to cram your face with garbage, that’s not what this message is about. It is about treating yourself. I adore cheese, but my favourite cheese, now that I am mature, triggers mood-swings during the day and nightmares if I eat it at night.  I gave it up.  Then I started again – smaller quantities. Because I am experienced, knowledgeable, seasoned and I want to . . .

SEIZE EVERY CHANCE TO SEE YOUR FRIENDS. No-brainer. We seasoned mature mellow people can let life distract us, put things off to tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. If the chance comes up to see a favourite person, no, it is not too far. It is not too much trouble. The chance may not come up tomorrow. Do it.

SMILE AND LAUGH. Have you smiled today? Laughed? Or are you reading this and that’s all well and good but life isn’t always funny.  No, it isn’t. But a genuine laugh is like a shot of vitamins, the effect is extraordinary. Smile, now, at the screen. Smile at people. I have before now gone hunting through youtube clips to banish the blues. Ellen DeGeneres is usually good, especially some of her stand-up routines. Find someone who cheers you up, and get back into the habit of smiling. The laughter will follow. It feels wonderful.

LIFE ENDS WHEN YOU STOP DREAMING

HOPE ENDS WHEN YOU STOP BELIEVING

LOVE ENDS WHEN YOU STOP CARING

FRIENDSHIP ENDS WHEN YOU STOP SHARING

by

#clickbaitbooks – say what?

Clickbait? Clickbait? It seems to be the latest buzzword on Twitter (although I am probably, as usual, behind the trend) – anyway, I’ve caught up now. And laughed out loud at a website offering clickbait alternative titles for popular books. Got it. Like newspapers screaming shock headings which have not a huge amount to do with the articles.

Clickbait titles for my books, hmm. Whodunits aren’t really that dramatic, apart of course from murders and stuff. Still, I do love a challenge.

Murdered! And No-one Cared!  (That’s One Two) (Aw. True.)

Dog Bites Death! (Three Four) ( I LIKE this one. The dog did, too.)

Dying To Meet Mr Right! (Five Six) (actually, I used this. So I was a little ahead of the curve after all)

Dumped In A Pit Full Of Bodies! (Seven Eight)  (Fiona really was)

Chained And Loving It! (Nine Ten)  (not, I hasten to add, one of my guys. But yup, one character was a little weird. More than a little.)

Plunged Into A Coven! (Eleven Twelve). (Pretty much what one disgruntled reviewer—who did not read the blurb first—said)

Drugs And Death In Tenerife! (Thirteen Fourteen) This may need work. Segway Horror!  My Wife Must Die! Nah. Not getting the essence here yet. Read it and tell me your suggestion.

You can still get 13 14 on promo price, by the way, last few hours.  Click on the title in the margin and you will be Whisked To Your Local Amazon!

(If you read this straight away, while I am still loading 13 14 in the margin because I am not very organized, the link is in the previous blog as well.)

by

I Do Not Want Your New Free Book

Yes indeed

jilljmarsh's avatarjjmarsh

Herewith the oft-quoted and possibly apocryphal Picasso anecdote:

Picasso is sketching at a park. A woman walks by, recognizes him, and begs for her portrait. A few minutes later, he hands her the sketch. She is elated, excited about how wonderfully it captures the very essence of her character, what beautiful work it is, and asks how much she owes him. “5000 francs, madam,” says Picasso. The woman is outraged as it only took him five minutes. Picasso says: “No, madam, it took me my whole life.”

As an author, I’m anti-frees. I spent years honing each of my books, not to mention the years of craft and education it took me to get to publication stage. You want all that – gratis?

booksnake Book Snake by Alan Levine (Creative Commons)

Before I even pressed the publish button, I promised my novels two things: Never free, never exclusive. If I don’t…

View original post 396 more words

by

Securing your personal media – seriously?

That’s a genuine question. Security drives me nuts sometimes. I have a little address book filled with all my accounts and passwords and frankly, if that gets lost, I’m in trouble. I won’t even be able to ask my zillions of accounts to send password reminders to my email address because that password is in the little book too. And no chance of setting up a new email address and asking all my accounts to use that. Cyber hands will be flung up in horror at the very idea.

I do see the point of security, of course I do. It means that only the clever crooks can hack our accounts, not just Joe Blog. Does anyone have a blog called Joe Blog? I should go and look. No, I will go and look later.

My school reports used to say I was easily distracted. Huh. Look at the above for self discipline, Mrs English Teacher. The stories I could tell you about her – where was I?

Right. Security. I was away over Christmas and tried to log in on Christmas Eve to see if anyone had sent any emails I should be dealing with, and Yahoo said pompously that it couldn’t see its way to letting me into my account. Oh please please? Grudgingly it said well, there was one way it would consider it. All I had to do was respond to an email sent to my verification account.

Which, it turned out, was my work email account from 2 years ago.

Okay, bad housekeeping on my part that my verification account was 2 years out of date, I will put my hand up to that. But hello? even if I was still working there, how much use would it have been on Christmas Eve, at 6.30 in the evening? I begged for security questions instead. Yahoo, eyeing me askance, stood firm. I was looking dodgier by the minute. No chance.

People do go on holiday, Yahoo. Sometimes to other countries. Anyway, those friends and relatives waiting anxiously to hear from me had their Christmas quite possibly ruined.

I am now brooding about internet security. All those passwords. Forget which letters you had in capitals and boy, are you in trouble. Use the same password for everything, eek, recipe for disaster. One account hacked is every account hacked.

And don’t get me started on the spammer-proof wobbly letters. I must be part spammer because I really struggle to recreate them.

Anyway. That’s my little rant over. I now have created another account, introduced it to Yahoo, updated my verification emails on both, identified all eleven wobbly letters and numbers, apologised to those poor friends and family members for making them so anxious, and must go walk the dog. I actually came in to wish you a lovely festive season, if you like festive, or a lovely couple of wintery weeks if you don’t (or of course summery ones for the luckier half of the world) and all best for 2015 if that is what year you are about to enter.

I’m even worse at politically correct than I am at internet security but I do hope you are having a nice time whatever it is you are planning on doing just after you finish reading this.  You could walk the dog with me? Yes, icy out there, but the sky is blue, the sun is shining and I’ll be putting the kettle on the second we get back.

 

 

by

Change your name. Now.

To briefly digress, I just changed my website title from ‘Exploring the newbie writing world’ because eighteen months after publishing my first book I now finally know everything.

Ha Ha Clip Art_thumb[1]

Oh dear, as if. Ever. Now, where was I—oh yes, the new title. Well, that’s it. The new name. I say that a LOT. At this rate by the time I reach my sixties I’ll need an atlas to keep track of my monologues, Heavens knows how I will cope in conversations.

The idea is to stop ignoring the fact that time is flying by at a fairly terrifying rate of knots, and start snatching some of those flickering minutes and pinning them down here on the blog. For that matter, start putting them to work. The yesterdays were mostly fun (with bits stuffed into boxes and pushed under the bed marked DO NOT OPEN.) The tomorrows look slightly alarming and potentially challenging. Today, well, are we all making enough of today?

Changing your website name is a two second job. Ever been tempted to change your own name? I’ve always liked the name Featherstonehaugh, mainly because of the pronunciation*, although spelling it out for those not in the know must get less amusing with time. Still, if I wanted to call myself, for example, Elegsabiff Featherstonehaugh, a name with a fine ring to it which would drive bureaucrats pleasantly insane, I could do so.

Three

Two

One

Abracadabra, done, I just changed my name. Of course getting the bureaucracy in line—passport, driving licence, all the hundreds of places that would prefer me to stop rocking the boat and stick with my original name, please—would take significantly longer and cost a fair amount, fees all over the place.

For my own fun, however, I can use any name I like. Beulah, Dowager Duchess of Onderness? No worries. As long as I am not using the name for purposes of fraud, I can call myself Spot the Blue-eyed ET from Sirrius, if I want.  I need only to print my calling cards, and I’m on my way.

If the idea has caught your fancy, I found this website in my idle browsing. I have no idea if it is the best way to go as this is not a serious in-depth investigation into name changes, just a brief glance – How to change your name

So what would you call yourself?

Ever researching on your behalf

Yours, as always,

Grand High Priestess Butterfly Pearl Featherstonehaugh*

(*Fanshaw. But you knew that)

by

Non-surgical cosmetic surgery nips a bit

Every now and then I go into the kitchen, get a pack of frozen veg out the freezer, and press it to my mouth for 10 to 15 seconds. The dog is definitely puzzled.

Hands up any reader who remembers the completely agonizing shock of the first time you tried to pluck your eyebrows? (or, worse, had a ruthless friend behind the tweezers) – the frozen disbelief that one tiny hair could have been wired to the mains of your brain, and routed via your deepest pain centres? Well, I found a worse shocker today. No, seriously.

Quick background. In the last three months, I have lost two and a half stone (35 pounds or approximately 15 kgs) (work-related stress, long story) dummywhich I was pretty pleased about as there’s this little wedding event coming up which I may have mentioned, oh, only 20 or 30 times since last year. Apart from the fact that I keep having to change my mother-of-the-bride outfit, I’ve been quite chuffed about it. However, I noticed a few days ago that the new creases from my mouth to my chin make me look like a cross between Deputy Dawg and Charlie McArthy.  The pretty name given to these is Marionette creases. Aw. That’s sweet. Not. THEY HAVE TO GO.

So I went to Twitter—as one does—and shrieked for help and lovely Jacqui said just stay animated and nobody will notice (it is a twelve hour wedding. I doubt the bride will manage to stay animated for twelve hours, but her feeble old mum sure as hell won’t) and lovely Charlie suggested Juvederm. As a joke.

So, here’s what happens with dermal fillers. You register your phone number and a clinic calls you back and gives you a nice low appealing quote for which price you will be turned into Cinderella for 6 to 9 months. Then you go in and the Marchioness de Sade who is about to do the work triples that quote. You need, she says, cheek plumpers (£700) and lip filler (£180) and marionette crease fillers (£370) You haggle. You end up paying more than you wanted for an effect that will last for a shorter time – 3 to 6 months. Then the sadist giggles fiendishly and says ‘this may nip a bit.’

I’m no stoic. My shrieks and howls for mercy probably reached Australia. I still have nail-shaped crescents in the palms of my hands, three hours later.  I told her she could stop but she said I’d paid for the whole injection so I might as well have it.

No, no, let me inject the rest into you. Please.

There’s that nasty moment or two when she looks startled, gets cotton wool, puts it to your face and says ‘just press on that for a minute or two’, that was also fun.

Okay, wild exaggerations aside, it does indeed nip a bit. It nips a lot, and you don’t get used to it. Despite anaesthetic cream, and a mild anaesthetic built into the product, it stings like buggery. That dentist jag that stings for a second or two? More. For longer.

Then you get up to look at yourself in the mirror and all is instantly forgiven. The skin may be red and fetchingly dotted with the occasional spot of blood, but Deputy Dawg has been told to voetsek and Charlie McArthy is no more.

Those mild anaesthetics wear off as you drive home and right now I’m not smiling, talking or eating. No makeup allowed before tomorrow. The redness, bruising and swelling, despite all the frozen vegetable smooching, is ongoing although I sneakingly rather like the trout mouth, I think it suits me. But in a week, two at the most, I will be looking exactly the way I did before, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, just a bit more rested. And that’s fine. If I just look the way I did in the mirror straight after the procedure I’ll be ecstatic, it took 10 years off and is worth every penny. I recognized the woman in the mirror as an old friend I haven’t seen in a good while.

She said at the end that the next time we should try the £700 cheek plumpers. NEXT time? Aye, right. They could pay me £400, or £700 or up to £1000, I won’t be doing it again.

(Okay, over £1000, I’m probably listening.)

Respectfully submitted
Your guinea-pig
Elegsabiff

by

So, the trial on Scrivener, part one

So many people were recommending Scrivener that I decided to do the thirty day free trial and see how I got on. One third of the way through, and a little bit of feedback:

The theory is evocative. Scrivener will create a project file where you keep your writing, your research, your concepts, your character notes, all in one place. It creates an automatic card for the corkboard for each section you open, and you can mark the status on each section as first draft, revised, complete, etc. Do a readthrough, then go to the status board and see which bits have been marked for major editing. A section can be blank (because you know something is needed there) or a sentence or a whole chapter.  Pull the cards around the corkboard and the sections will obediently drop into their new order.

All of those appealed.

My initial reactions:

  1. Wow, that’s a long tutorial. Bored now, and not halfway finished
  2. Let’s go live and pull in the book I’m currently editing, and learn as I go by looking things up
  3.  Okay THIS is clunky.

But, once the process of laboriously pulling in a fifty thousand word document was complete, I was quite enjoying spotting a bit that needed work, isolating it in a section of its own, and pulling a section I wasn’t sure about into delete. It isn’t actually deleted, it just waits. You can pull it back if and when.

Scrivener saves every few seconds. Nothing can get lost.

Still, I found it slowed me down as I bumped along;  I wasn’t that impressed, and I thought the Compile was rubbish, eeny weeny screen to see the overview. I still cannot find out how to set the project to UK English, which means lots of distracting spelling alerts because I use more u’s than Scrivener feels necessary.  I found out how to set an em-dash (easy enough, – – then space and it appears) but not how to set an ellipsis, and I’m far too prone to both. My word count is only by section and I had about twenty six sections.

As always when I am editing one book, ideas pop into view for the next.  Previously I would fix them on a document and file them into the next book’s folder. This time I opened a project and suddenly started getting keen.  That’s handy!

So my initial summary: I’ve still not read the whole tutorial. Scrivener, for editing an existing book, for me was a no-no. I’m about to pull the whole book back into Word where I can do a UK spellcheck, get a full overview and start checking my chapters and chapter breaks, and I don’t feel I got any real benefit from the detour.

However, as a drafting and creating tool, I think I may be in love. The new book project is fab. Ideas are jotted down in sections, whole chapters have grown and can be pulled into place as needed, my character notes and photos are right where I need them, and so are the websites that I will be checking again and again as I push through.

Twenty days to go on the trial.

by

Baby steps into POD

Considering my blog is for me, the most newbie of newbies, it must seem hopelessly naïve to the more experienced of you and yet every now and then I get a tweet on the lines of ‘hey, I never knew that, thanks!’

Which is of course very encouraging.  Perhaps in time it will become sophisticated enough that people would be prepared to comment on the blog itself that they hadn’t known something. We all start out knowing nothing, and we all learn. Some (usually me) more slowly than others.

Anyway, my latest field of learning has been the first cautious steps into POD. There simply isn’t a print-on-demand option out there that is praised by everyone, so it has taken a year to get this far, bite the bullet, and give it a try, one baby step at a time. I went with CreateSpace, because the ISBNs were free and immediate, and because the general consensus, after all my research, was that it was fairly idiot-proof, and even its most vocal critics weren’t saying too many alarming things. One downside is that I won’t be able to use the ISBNs outside Amazon but I’m only selling on Amazon anyway.

So, idiot-proof? Actually, yes. They supply a template, and you copy and paste your manuscript into their format, and spend hours (and hours and hours) formatting and tweaking and uploading to their previewer, and blushing over oddities spotted in the process. Repeat.

The cover options were pretty simple too. Choose one of their covers from scratch, or choose one of the template covers that permits you to add your existing artwork to the front cover (with some limited positioning and colour options) or expand your existing artwork to create your own back cover. They then have templates that will format it and add the spine lettering for you. Obviously these are the free options, and as always with indie publishing, the more money you have to throw at the process, the better the results.  But you can put together a fully formatted book, and cover, having spent nothing but time. Lots of time.

One reminder to the ignorant such like what I am. CreateSpace threw me slightly by insisting my artwork had to be a minimum of 300 dpi, but this just means you have to resize your pixels. I eventually resized to 4000 x 3048 and that worked quite nicely.

CreateSpace (and no doubt the others) then provides a full digital proof to gloat over online. They do recommend you get a physical proof, and that was a tiny setback, because one by normal post was pencilled in for January delivery. I can’t wait until January, not after getting this far! So I went for the most expensive option (about four times the price of the book) and received it in two days.  Joy.

Being a newbie, I had of course made several mistakes, so the joy wasn’t unmixed with chagrin. My title, although it had looked perfect on the digital preview, was slightly too far over, so the B of Buckle was crowding the spine and looked ridiculous. I had chosen matt over glossy; but with a very dark cover, there were odd shiny patches, and fingerprints showed up hideously. I think I shall be going glossy instead. I hadn’t sized my cover properly, so there was a deep black frame top and bottom, a skinny black frame either side.  And it was so dark, it looked really dull and glum.

Any decisions you take can be changed at any time, as can any errors you suddenly pick up in the book. (Despite all those hours and hours you spent, above.)

I went for 11pt (11pt or 12pt are standard) type, and a 1.15 line spacing, because it is a novella, and would have been quite thin using normal line spacing. It makes it light and airy to read, which considering it is ideally a weekend / holiday book, I think is better.  For the same reason I went for a 5 inch by 8 inch size (the default offered  is 6 inch by 9 inch, but with many other options) and I’m pleased with the size.  The book’s price is calculated by the page (hence the popularity of 6 x 9, a 12pt prize size, and regular line spacing, for word-heavy books). My book is around 42 thousand words, the proof copy is half an inch (around a cm) thick, and would be priced at $7.53.  That was having chosen cream paper, which is more expensive. Because I chose a light font, and more because some of the CreateSpace critics said that some local (book depository) printers had printed on white anyway, I will be checking the price difference if I go with white instead.  $7.53 is too high a price.

I played with a few generic cover options, because my cover was so dark, but they’re obviously not designed to, well, put professional cover artists out of business.  I tried about eleven, and have a photo below of one option – the pre-formatted author name went in an odd little hoop across the pic, but removing it (and pasting the author name on the pic instead) meant no author name on the spine.

Createspace cover genericFor a POD sale, no problem, the buyer knew the name anyway. But if there was ever to be a chance of bookshop sales? 4000 x 3048 2ndridiculous.  I fiddled a bit more with my own cover, and managed to improve it slightly. Enough to give it a try, anyway. Put it this way, I can’t shake the feeling I will be the only person buying it, after all.

At the same time, the whole point of printing copies is to be able to send them out for review, and I don’t want the reviewer rejecting it on sight. Decisions, decisions.

Anyway, that has been the POD experience to date. And to tell you the truth—so thrilling. I’m a paperback writer! One paperback so far, granted, and my sales will never threaten the forests of the world but a book in the hand is about the most exciting thing that has happened in this whole year of very exciting things.

 

 

 

by

Playing with punctuation; the hyphen, the n dash and the m dash

I’m really writing this just to get it straight in my own head, but perhaps others have puzzled over it as well. And maybe what I think I am now clarifying I have still got wrong, so please jump in if I have.

A hyphen is used in phrases like mother-in-law. There are no spaces.

The n dash is a hyphen (taking up the print space of an n), with spaces either side.  One – two – three – GO.

The m dash, as a punctuation tool, is virtually interchangeable with a semi colon – and oh dear WordPress is not allowing me to create it – and creates a sub-sentence.  It takes up the print space of an m, double the length of a hyphen.  In Word, you can specify an n dash using CTRL and the minus sign on your number keypad, and the m dash using CTRL, ALT and the minus sign. (Didn’t work in WordPress.) It should not have spaces, so in fact-ignoring what I wrote at the start of the paragraph-there should NOT be a space either side. When it is full length, it looks less cramped. My m dashes all need correcting, because I persist in inserting spaces and Word doubles or halves the dash sizes with gay abandon.

You may ask why this is suddenly of importance, and I’m glad you did; I am currently formatting the first of my books for CreateSpace, to try out POD. I want to get it right. Talk about sweating the small stuff. I may yet give up but so far so good.

As you were.

 

by

Results of pimping my book

I did a free giveaway much earlier in the year with Polly, my short story, and Amazon later gave me an analysis of how it performed in its category – into the top fifty, which, considering it was the most inept promotion of all time, wasn’t bad. I’m hoping they’ll do the same on One Two (nothing yet) but the figures below show how the books were performing against the million-plus-plus books eddying around in the Amazon ocean.

I spent the whole weekend pimping One Two at regular intervals and Monday adding in Five Six. This morning I counted up clicks on my Booklinker codes – which reflect the response to anything I have personally pimped  – then checked the books to see where they ranked on Amazon.com and Amazon.uk, and finally bravely went into sales / downloads to see the actual results.

One Two’s promo ended last night, and it achieved a personal best today with an Amazon ranking of #635 on UK.  It was down slightly on Amazon .com, where it never got higher than #2173 (Sunday). It racked up 548 clicks from my personal advertising.  The ranking is not, unfortunately, sales – it just reflects how popular it was proving with browsers.

Polly PW,  just to put the above into perspective, had no promoting at all this time round and remained below the #700K mark on Amazon.UK, (never breaking into the top million on Amazon.com) and never selling a single copy, yet swaying between #708808 and #711865.  Polly is joining the excellent Alfie Dog stories website (‘take your imagination for a walk’) at the end of November, at a lower price than Amazon, and will have her share of promotion then.

Actual downloads of One Two on all Amazon sites – 573 books.   Looked at one way – compared to the better known authors, who apparently give away 20 thousand books when they run a freebie, definitely deflating. Looked at the other way – potentially nearly two hundred new readers. That’s based on the theory that 30% of readers will hate your work, 30% will love it, and the rest will be completely indifferent.  (19 of those were in Germany, and definitely not related to my personal promoting, as I only had 8 clicks for Germany.)

Three Four only got one promotional tweet, but made a few unexpected sales. Its ranking never rose above 300 thousand on UK, yet oddly it is the only book performing better on Amazon.com. Its ranking there today was #181 440, but over the days I was monitoring it rose as high as #115 407. That does imply the cover is working, the blurb – or lack of reviews – is not.

Five Six achieved a respectable ranking, #32 659 today, well done the new kid on the block! The book got 93 clicks in all from my personal  promoting.  I do have two fabulous reviews on Amazon.com, the kind of reviews that a writer (well, this writer) dreams of, and I suspect Five Six’s high ranking has much more to do with them than with anything I was puddling about doing.  Sales were okay. Better than any previous book of mine has done in its first few days, but not everyone who looked, bought.  The books are definitely off-trend, you only have to look at the top hundred books to realize how far off.  Celebrities, autobiographies, cook books, diet books, children’s books and a slim sheaf of very loud novels from well-known authors are a far cry from cosy whodunits. I’m grateful anyone bought!

If it had all gone brilliantly I would now have launched into a breakdown of where I did all my promoting but under the circumstances, I doubt it would help anyone planning a campaign. I don’t think I’ll do it again, but if I do, the following will remind me not to make the same mistakes twice.

Promoting on Twitter

I did find, as I said in an earlier blog, hashtags were extraordinary. Although I only have a handful of contacts on my author Twitter account (@EJLamprey), using the hashtags took me into the general ocean.  The Booklinker click count definitely showed more reaction to #whodunit, #newrelease #freekindle  #freekindleread, and #ebook than to some of the others that had been recommended.

Promoting on Facebook pages

I had joined about twelve Facebook sites for readers, reviewers, writers, and various combinations of same. Some will only feature free books, and were a bit crowded – post an entry, and in minutes it was five, six, seven posts down the page and lost for ever.

Some FB pages are only for new books, and weren’t as hectic, although Five Six’s cover was rubbing shoulders with a lot of naked gleaming torso action, and intense stares from beautiful males / females with too much makeup, pointed chins, and probably even more pointed teeth.  There was a lot of Young Adult stuff but I was the only Old Adult whodunit, so far as I could see.

Promoting through other writers, and friends

I got an author interview from the successful and talented romantic comedy writer Patsy Collins, some retweets on Twitter from friends, and some shared posts from my author page, grateful thanks to those too, so very much appreciated. It is a lonely business, pimping, and moments of interaction are very welcome. One lovely fellow writer spotted one of my promo posts on a FB site and put a comment on it to say how good the book was, huge hug!

Promoting on websites for free books

I had applied to about ten different websites that list freebies while they are on promotion, and three of them definitely ran the book, grateful thanks to the following:

http://addictedtoebooks.com/free – you can’t book in advance, you have to remember to post on the first day, but they’ll keep it live while it is on promo price. I have no idea how powerful it is, but I loved that you can tick categories, and therefore readers can search by categories and filters, and I picked up a few free books while I was there!

http://snickslist.com is also one to list at the start and I forgot, such an idiot. I listed it for the last day only, but liked the website, which also tells you how many times viewers have looked further – 14 readers clicked via it to Amazon, not bad for a Tuesday. So I would recommend this one too.

http://www.talismanbookpublishing.com did list the book, but have a very odd system – actually finding the books was tricky, and then they had no covers, and no clickable links, so not really of any use.

http://ereadernewstoday.com didn’t run it – I was sorry about that, they are a top website and it looks well run and well managed.

The sour grapes section of promotional websites:

http://pixelscroll.com didn’t run it – or if they did, I couldn’t find it. The section called ‘free Kindle books’ had quite a few with prices and although I filtered by ‘mystery’, there were some heavy clinches going on, and nekkid people, so I wasn’t particularly impressed.

http://www.indiesunlimited.com didn’t run it and when you click into Freebie Friday all you learn is how to submit your book, not what actual books are free that Friday, so ditto.

http://www.pixelofink.com didn’t run it – no big surprise there, as they are supposed to be one of the best websites and run two bargains, and two freebies, every day, which must have good ratings and good reviews on Amazon.com already. Their main feature was “what happens after Fifty Shades?” – that was never going to be a good match!

http://freebooksy.com doesn’t have a search facility so you have to scroll through the website to find the type of books you like – it also has no history, just the books on offer for the day. I checked Friday, and today, but I didn’t remember to check over the weekend so if you apply to this one, check every day. I have no idea if they ran the book over the weekend, but probably not.

http://www.fkbooksandtips.com is a bit clunky and I’m assuming didn’t run it – couldn’t find it but because of the clunkiness, didn’t search each day.

Summarising the promotion

All in all: 46 promotional tweets (it felt a lot more).  26 posts on FB pages for One Two, and 17 for Five Six. Submitted details to 10 websites (that’s quite a lengthy process, as it includes a bio and synopsis and mini author interview on some) and definitely featured on 3.  Looked at that way, I got a good return in sales / downloads.

And now – we wait. Will One Two’s visibility help Five Six before the impetus wears off and it fades back into the sunless depths? Will Amazon let me know how the books performed in category? Will readers become fans and follow the series? Will there be any reviews?

And can I face NaNoWriMo for the first time (this time last year I was way too busy on One Two) or is it time to take a month off altogether?