A small article about me leaving Last Things in places in Solihull centre before it comes to our local Waterstones store has appeared in our local paper. I say small advisedly because it was so easy to miss. No photograph this time which makes a big difference so don't expect much publicity from it. i ahve started to leave books in Solihull and actually saw someone pick one up and take it with them this morning. They actually took it with them! Looked inside and carried it away. Just hope they read it and tell others. Still no guarantee of a sale though. Have you read this does not mean someone goes and buys it. They either borrow or read and hand on. Still it means it is being read. A big difference though between 'being read' having thought it worth buying and being read 'cos someone gave you it. No sign of it appearing in Waterstones yet and so sign of any order. Don't see my contact around much. perhaps she has already moved on and was just trying to be nice. Still I suppose the 'ordering process' can take a long time. It did for Herod Dreams.
My brother phoned and said he read it in two nights and enjoyed it. Wondered if it was true as he had heard of a girl going missing and someone being found hanging. Assured him it was not true at all, I had made it up.
Asked him to let his friends know about it and perhaps encourage them to buy it. Didn't fell too god about that, rather cheap, but what else are you supposed to do? I am writing and trying to become an author. Won't be that until people are not just reading what I have written but are buying the stuff!
No sales for the month on kindle. Found a discussion forum on ebooks and it is full of people like me, trying to promote their book and having very little success. One or two you find have sold thousands. Maybe marketed at 73p but they are rare and have not created that market by promoting their work on the discussion site. They seem to have found that right moment, right tag, right review that enables their book to suddenly take off. The rest of us just complain about the injustice of big publishers' influence and the need to keep plugging away, believing that one day...
Any progress on Authonmy site seems to have stopped and I am gradually losing interest and so the book begins to fall from its dizzy heights of 143.
Found Alan Guthrie, who is keen on crime novellas, on the discussion site. His blog is worth looking at again, perhaps, although his success is based on a long career in writing and he has a well organised publiciy machine worked out. Steven Leather's advice about to become a write you have to have been writing for 10,000 hours and stop writing shit is a bit hard.
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