Cover of new book!

Evening folks,

The wife is currently ploughing through the draft version of my new book. Early reports are favourable!

I've spent some time on cover designs which will be used for both the paperback and ebook versions. Below is the first showing of the new cover. It will likely get tweaked as I get closer to publication, I'm still pondering the title!

Anyway, comments welcomed as long as they're constructive in some way. If I want someone to say they don't like it or say something daft I'll ring my mum!

Am I more successful than Michael Phelps?

The short and obvious answer is a loud and confident NO. He is, as of tonight, the most successful Olympian of all time in terms of medals won and it's a mighty achievement.

But humour me just for a moment. In terms of goals, mine is to be a published author. Done. I wanted to sell books. Done. In multiple countries? Done that too. So that's success right?

But of course we do rather need to quantify our success, to put a number on it and guage the degree of that success. So in those terms I'm something of a failure. I'm not a bestseller, I don't sell millions of books, I don't have a lucractive publishing deal with Hodder or Random House. I'm not Michael Phelps.

But to stick with the theme. I might end up being Michael Phelps. I still have time to sell more books, to become a best seller. At 36 I'm a long way from being too old whereas the most successful Olympic athlete in history is at the tale end of his glittering career. So I'll keep plugging away, putting in the hours, not giving up or being defeated and I will strive to achieve my goals. And that, folks, makes me Michael Phelps! Maybe.

One final note, and this will only mean something to UK readers. I searched for myself on the WH Smith website tonight and one of my books is listed. It was oddly satisfying to see my work being sold by such a British institution. Admittedly I have yet to sell any books through Smiths, but it felt good nonetheless.

Night folks, I think I'm going to do a book promo tomorrow to kickstart sales for August. I will decide exactly what format this will take during tomorrow and announce it after work.

Featured at Bibliocracy

Morning folks,

Just a quickie. A couple of my books are on the front page of Bibliocracy as featured books this morning which is nice. So if you don't fancy buying them from Amazon get yourself over there. All four of my books can be downloaded from Bibliocracy right now. Just search for Jamie Sinclair.

Will this Blog Post lead to a book sale?

Hi folks and welcome to my first post since announcing the relaunch of my blog. The purpose of this post? To see if a single post can lead to

a) more traffic to this blog
b) more followers of this blog
c) increased sales of my books

It's a big ask but here we go.

Today I changed the title and description of my blog. I am going to mention that I am an English author of crime thriller books in this post. I am also going to tell you that they are set in a small seaside town called Morecambe where I grew up. Hopefully you'll wonder where that is and click the link I put in the word Morecambe. The reason I'm sharing this is because it's relevant and also because I hope that people like you will search for these terms and find my blog.

If you're still here you might wonder what my books are about. You can learn about them from this very blog or from my Facebook page or even my Amazon author page. It shouldn't be a surprise that I've put links to all these in the text too.

If you are a fan of romantic fiction you'll hopefully like my book Playground Cool or All the fun of the Fair. If you're not sure why not download a sample? You can do that via Amazon or Smashwords and, soon, Bibliocracy.

Do you like crime thrillers? Great, try my latest book The 24 Hour Jazz Cafe. It's set in Morecambe and you can try a sample fo that for free too. If you've been paying attention you'll know the link was in the title of the book.

As part of my new strategy to meet aa many people as I can and introduce them to my books, today I aso updated my LinkedIn profile, did a press release and made sure that my entire online presence is linked. That means this blog post will go straight to this Facebook page. It will also appear on my Goodreads page too. If I post a Tweet that will appear on this blog and on my LinkedIN account.

Why? Because I want you to know about me and where I'm from. Then I want you to buy my books, and enjoy them. Then, finally, I want you to tell all your friends about me.

But it all starts with you reading this blog post. Welcome aboard.