Interest From a Publisher!

Evening all,

Exciting start to the day today, as the title of this post suggests.

A few weeks ago Ian Rankin (the tip-top crime writer famous for Rebus and now Malcolm Fox) retweeted a message regarding an up and coming publisher called Bang. They were asking for submissions of crime novels, ideally to form a series. They asked for five pages and a brief synopsis via email.

This morning I received a reply which said:

"...I think your novel shows real promise and would like to consider it. Please could you send me a completed manuscript...Please could you also give me more detail about how you see a series will develop from this title and how many books the series might be."

Now I'm not daft, or new to interest from a publisher. I suspect this might well be a standard email sent out to the majority of the submissions received as I know Bang are looking for clients. But it's still positive, obviously, and I'm just nicely excited by it. The plan now is to finish editing The 24 Hour Jazz cafe and email it to them as well as to continue to promote my existing ebooks. If something comes of it, great. If not, I'm no worse off.

As ever, I shall keep you informed on here.

(By the way, I was lucky enough to meet Ian Rankin late last year at a gig he did in Lancaster. He signed my copy of The Complaints. I was pathetically star struck so the wife had to mention my writing and he wished me luck and advised to keep going while I stood there grinning like an idiot. Good times.)

Next Big Author

Evening folks,

Our chums at You Write On are running a competition of sorts whereby the lucky winners receive a critique of their work by a leading publisher (Random House or Orion) via the Next Big Author website. I've uploaded the first few chapters of my upcoming novel The 24 Hour Jazz Cafe for consideration so feel free to go to the You Write On website and seek it out to review.

Ta for now.

Book Sales, Self Promotion and a Netbook

Morning dear reader,

This is the latest/earliest I've written anything on here and there are two reasons for this. The first is that it's Christmas so I'm off work and therefore up late making merry. The second is that I've bought myself a new netbook in the Christmas Sales. My laptop was four years old and struggling and, as my wonderful wife will tell you, I am not blessed with patience. As such, the laptop was beaten to death so I am now blogging on the new machine and very pleasing it is.

Anyway, first things first. A belated Merry Christmas and a pre-emptive Happy New Year to you all. Huge thanks to those who have bought my book, all thirty of you. I know this is not a vast amount, but my promo has been limited to posts on Amazon - lately via my phone - and it's only been available for a month. The fact that I'm averaging a copy a day thrills me as I think that with dedicated promotion and increased availability, my sales can only increase.

Which brings me to self-promotion. Amazon seem to have a real bee in their multi-billion dollar bonnet about 'indie' authors touting their wares. I would have thought that more promotion was a good thing as it benefits everyone. That said, Amazon are doing us all a favour by allowing us to sell in the first place so I'm not complaining. My plan is to make more effort via other means such as press releases and Facebook.

Finally, editing on my latest novel The 24 Hours Jazz Cafe is progressing with a view that an exract will appear on this blog soon before I send stuff to agents and then, depending on the results, publish as an e-book.

Stick with me, we're going places. Thank as ever for taking the time to read this.

The Trials and Tribulations of Self Promotion

Afternoon readers,

It's been a frustrating week. The books are selling which is, of course, fantastic and the whole point of the exercise. But the trick seems to be to constantly self promote via amazon forums, social media etc and I simply don't have the time to do that.

I have added my books to Goodreads and Librarything but without promoting this presence I'm dubious about seeing any benefit in terms of sales. So I'll persevere and see what happens. Hopefully being available in formats other than kindle wll help.