Thursday 23 February 2012

Dundee International Book Prize

Evening kids,

Bit of unexpected news tonight. I have entered The 24 Hour Jazz Cafe in the Dundee International Book Prize. I'm big enough to admit I'd never heard of it until today. However, I happen to follow Stephen Fry on Twitter and he mentioned it as he is one of the four judges.

The prize is a book deal which is the goal as regular readers will know. The winner is announced in June so fingers crossed as June is already shaping up to be a big month for various reasons.

In other news I have all but finished the formatting of All the fun of the fair with a view that I will publish it in the first week of March although I'd rather wait and get it just right rather than rush and regret it. After all, the plan this time is to be number one on Amazon UK and US at the same time. Aim high, dare to believe etc.

Until next time...

Thursday 16 February 2012

Latest Kindle Sales Report

Evening/Morning folks,

Since I'm off work I've reverted to type and am existing in the small hours of the morning. It suits me and I'm getting loads done and am far happier. I feel a tiny bit sorry for my colleagues as they will have to tolerate me failing to tolerate them when I go back to work next week following about two hours sleep.

Still, in more interesting news I have some sales reports to report!

Overall, in the 3 months I've been an indie publisher I have had 1800 copies of my books downloaded of which about 160 were paid sales (the rest being free promo copies). These figures don't take into account books which have been lent to people via Kindle but a quick glance at the report tells me that almost a 100 folk have borrowed my books off someone else who has a copy.

This means that about 1900 people have a copy of something I've written and that this has happened in about 90 days. Given that my promotional efforts have been sporadic at best and non-existent since the 21st of January, I'm pretty happy.

Of course this doesn't translate into much in terms of royalties (an Xbox game, 3 cases of lager, one third of a Hugo Boss shirt, a month's water bill) but that's not the point at this early stage. To all those people who have made the effort to download, and more importantly, actually bothered to read, something I have written, many thanks. There is much, much, more to come! In years to come you will be the annoying, but cool, people, who will be able to say, "I read his debut novel, it wasn't very good as I recall. I never imagined he'd be as big as Stephen King!"

Until next time.

Tuesday 14 February 2012

Editing Complete!

Evening folks,

Despite many obstacles (children staying with us, a new front door to paint, sand, repaint) I have just finished the edit of All the fun of the fair, the latest novel from my back catalogue which I plan to launch as an ebook.

I'm hoping to start the formatting tomorrow and then will design a cover. As ever, I'll post cover version updates on here so you can see how it progresses. I'm going away for the weekend and I don't want to rush it and overlook something. But hopefully I might have it ready for launch by the beginning of next week. I will then do some actual promotion as I've done nothing since the 21st January. Thankfully, you wonderful people are still buying my books.

That's all for now. Keep your eyes peeled for All the fun of the fair!

Saturday 11 February 2012

Email from Bang Publishing

Afternoon loyal reader,

I received an email from Bang today. Sadly it was just an update to say they were still reading my manuscript but that they would be in touch. Stil, at least they bothered to let me know and it's better than a rejection.

In other news I'm still awaiting a response of any kind from Aitken Alexander with regard to the 29 pages of finely crafted prose I sent to them in early January.

Meawhile sales remain steady at just over 1 copy per day despite the fact that I haven't done any promo since January 21st. The reason for the lack of promo is that I'm still hard at work editing a novel from the back catalogue which I hope to launch in the next week or so. I've actually made the effort to draft a bit of a marketing plan for this one so hopefully it will mean bigger initial sales of all three books.

Finally, just for the sake of sharing, I bought a huge hardback copy of the collected works of Jane Austen which I'm going to display in my library as a pretentious talking point. I may even leave it open at a random page when visitors come, just for the sake of it. What a ponce they all cried!

Anyway, that's it for now. Just finished reading Peter James latest effort and very good it was too. Now I'm off to paint a wall Lilac.

Thanks for stopping by.

Friday 3 February 2012

More rejection and a bit of promo

Evening troops,

Thanks to an overkeen spam filter I have only just spotted an email from Lisa Graves (from the 23rd of January!!) saying that my novel Playground Cool is featured on her blog. It would have been a great time to actively promote the link (and it still is worth doing) but I'm annoyed I didn't get the email.

Anyway, the link to Lisa's awesome blog is here. If you scroll down you'll find my book with a link to Amazon to help you buy a copy. Hurrah.

One small negative, today I recieved an email from the Darley Anderson Agency very politely telling me they did not want to represent The 24 Hour Jazz Cafe. Ho hum! It's a long way from being the first and it certainly won't be the last.

In other news I have noticed a small increase in sales today. I generally average about one a day if I don't do any promo, which I haven't since the 21st of January as I've been editing another of my books. Today however I sold six which more than makes up for the agency rejection.

I'm hoping to launch All the Fun of the Fair on Kindle this month so I'll be on the promo trail big time. Keep your eyes peeled because there will an extract posted on this blog, as well as on You Write On where members can comment and review it.

Right, I've had a long week and it's late. So I'm going to drink some beer, play some Xbox and then perhaps a bedtime gin.