Yes, you're right, I haven't been very active on here this year. Look, it's not easy being a jet-setting multimillionairess best-selling author. Or so I imagine. It's certainly complicated enough being a disorganised (im)mature student and semi-professional hermit.
And no, I'm not going to make up for my absence with an extended post full of seasonal jollity. You know where you keep the mince pies and alcohol, you can fend for yourselves, seasonal jollity-wise.
What I can do is offer you a Festive Freebie, with Looking for Buttons available to download for nowt but the price of your internet connection from Christmas Day until 29th December.
Ho ho ho.
Showing posts with label free promotion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label free promotion. Show all posts
Tuesday, 24 December 2013
Monday, 26 August 2013
Never mind the quality, feel the gigabytes
Here in England it's a Bank Holiday weekend, which for those of you outside the UK means a national holiday in which people tackle home improvement projects quite beyond their capabilities or queue in endless streams of traffic to go to beaches packed with people huddled miserably over sandwiches now containing real sand as the wind lashes them with the driving rain. It's a cultural thing.
So as usual I'm having a Bank Holiday Bonanza and giving away free copies of Looking for Buttons on Amazon.
Which is fine, except I'm not really sure anyone actually reads them.
When books are so cheap, even free, you can pretty much download as many as you like, memory permitting. Never mind the quality, feel the gigabytes. But when it's so easy to pile up the words, it loses meaning. You get the buzz of a download without the deep financial commitment of, say, an enormous hardback to compel you to actually read the books you've amassed so avidly.
I might shift a few hundred books during this promo if I'm lucky but those stats are meaningless if no-one gets any enjoyment out of it beyond those fleeting seconds of the download rush.
So if you're reading this I hope you're here because you've read the book and you've enjoyed it.
Please tell me if you have.
And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to find my adjustable spanner...
So as usual I'm having a Bank Holiday Bonanza and giving away free copies of Looking for Buttons on Amazon.
Which is fine, except I'm not really sure anyone actually reads them.
When books are so cheap, even free, you can pretty much download as many as you like, memory permitting. Never mind the quality, feel the gigabytes. But when it's so easy to pile up the words, it loses meaning. You get the buzz of a download without the deep financial commitment of, say, an enormous hardback to compel you to actually read the books you've amassed so avidly.
I might shift a few hundred books during this promo if I'm lucky but those stats are meaningless if no-one gets any enjoyment out of it beyond those fleeting seconds of the download rush.
So if you're reading this I hope you're here because you've read the book and you've enjoyed it.
Please tell me if you have.
And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to find my adjustable spanner...
Sunday, 26 May 2013
Another cover story
Yes, you're right. It has been a while. And while I'd love to have something exciting to report, it's actually all been terribly mundane. Life as an author is not all one giddy social whirl, you know. However, I do have a few nuggets of information to impart:
1. If you have nothing to say, don't say it.
It's not terribly helpful when one has a book to plug, but as I hadn't anything worth posting, I didn't.
2. The Difficult Second Novel lives!
It has revived and, what's more, I'm off to work on it in a minute so I can't hang around here chatting all day.
3. Looking for Buttons has had a facelift.
Now I'm against facelifts on principle (putting a bag over one's head is so much cheaper, and reversible). On the other hand, marketing Looking for Buttons as a romance wasn't doing it any favours, so I'm putting the emphasis on its humourous side, with a recategorisation on Amazon and a new cover.
It's an experiment to see how these changes will affect sales, if at all.
4. And it's FREE!
To kick-start the new look, I'm holding a three-day Bank Holiday Bonanza from today until Tuesday, so get it while you can. (Or wait until Wednesday and pay for it, that's fine by me.)
Right, that's it for now. I've got another book to write. Over and out.
1. If you have nothing to say, don't say it.
It's not terribly helpful when one has a book to plug, but as I hadn't anything worth posting, I didn't.
2. The Difficult Second Novel lives!
It has revived and, what's more, I'm off to work on it in a minute so I can't hang around here chatting all day.
3. Looking for Buttons has had a facelift.
Now I'm against facelifts on principle (putting a bag over one's head is so much cheaper, and reversible). On the other hand, marketing Looking for Buttons as a romance wasn't doing it any favours, so I'm putting the emphasis on its humourous side, with a recategorisation on Amazon and a new cover.
(A new cover, pictured sometime today.)
It's an experiment to see how these changes will affect sales, if at all.
4. And it's FREE!
To kick-start the new look, I'm holding a three-day Bank Holiday Bonanza from today until Tuesday, so get it while you can. (Or wait until Wednesday and pay for it, that's fine by me.)
Right, that's it for now. I've got another book to write. Over and out.
Tuesday, 12 February 2013
I'm only doing this because I love you
It's that time of year again, a time for love, a time for hearts and flowers, a time for showing affection through little, or not so little, tokens of esteem, a time for being sold overpriced tat by ruthless flint-souled commercial bloodsuckers exploiting your panicked need to conform to an artificially inflated non-festival. And I know you feel that need to buy something, anything, no matter how pink, how tacky, to show you care. So, yes, you could shell out thirty quid on six crispy roses and a card that will go straight in the bin because she really doesn't want to date a man with no imagination.
Or you could gift your beloved a copy of Looking for Buttons.
It's FREE to download from Amazon on February 14th, but I won't tell them if you don't.
Happy Valentine's Day.
Or you could gift your beloved a copy of Looking for Buttons.
It's FREE to download from Amazon on February 14th, but I won't tell them if you don't.
Happy Valentine's Day.
Sunday, 10 February 2013
Getting technical
No matter what non-scribblers may think, writing is a technical occupation. You don't just dream up characters and storylines and nurture them into a novel. Before that happens, you have to get to grips with the tools of the trade.
I suspect as long as people have been writing, there have been writers muttering dark imprecations about those tools. There must have been stone tablets that shattered just as the chisel was reaching the good bit. For every breathtakingly illustrated medieval bible, there must have been countless sheets of screwed up vellum lobbed into the fire by a frustrated monk. The advent of the printing press must have created so many new ways for things to go wrong that Caxton must have been cursed in the same way as a Windows fatal error that occurs just as you were about to save that crucial file.
Which brings me (clumsily) up to date: the writer's relationship with modern technology. Now you may have noticed by the paucity of illustration and zippy effects on this blog that I am not the techiest of people. For all their shiny futuristic glamour, computers are merely tools, albeit less straightforward than a hammer, sometimes to the point where I am tempted to juxtapose the two. But when you dip a toe or ten in the chilly waters of self-publishing, you need to get to grips not only with word processing but with creating a cover image (OK, I ducked that - thanks Graham!), maintaining an online presence and grappling with uploads and downloads, all the time suspecting something somewhere has gone arwy (I'm yet to receive any royalties from Amazon, not sure if that's because I haven't earned enough or because I did something wrong when I put the book up for sale).
Regular writers have publishers to worry about that sort of thing. When you're a one (wo)man band it can start to creep in and suck out the time and enthusiasm you were saving for the actual writing.
So what I think I need is something to take the next book out of my head and drop it straight into yours, for a small fee of course. I'll see what I can dream up.
PS Looking for Buttons will be FREE from Amazon this Valentine's Day. That's got to be better than some wilting roses and an overpriced box of chocolates.
I suspect as long as people have been writing, there have been writers muttering dark imprecations about those tools. There must have been stone tablets that shattered just as the chisel was reaching the good bit. For every breathtakingly illustrated medieval bible, there must have been countless sheets of screwed up vellum lobbed into the fire by a frustrated monk. The advent of the printing press must have created so many new ways for things to go wrong that Caxton must have been cursed in the same way as a Windows fatal error that occurs just as you were about to save that crucial file.
Which brings me (clumsily) up to date: the writer's relationship with modern technology. Now you may have noticed by the paucity of illustration and zippy effects on this blog that I am not the techiest of people. For all their shiny futuristic glamour, computers are merely tools, albeit less straightforward than a hammer, sometimes to the point where I am tempted to juxtapose the two. But when you dip a toe or ten in the chilly waters of self-publishing, you need to get to grips not only with word processing but with creating a cover image (OK, I ducked that - thanks Graham!), maintaining an online presence and grappling with uploads and downloads, all the time suspecting something somewhere has gone arwy (I'm yet to receive any royalties from Amazon, not sure if that's because I haven't earned enough or because I did something wrong when I put the book up for sale).
Regular writers have publishers to worry about that sort of thing. When you're a one (wo)man band it can start to creep in and suck out the time and enthusiasm you were saving for the actual writing.
So what I think I need is something to take the next book out of my head and drop it straight into yours, for a small fee of course. I'll see what I can dream up.
PS Looking for Buttons will be FREE from Amazon this Valentine's Day. That's got to be better than some wilting roses and an overpriced box of chocolates.
Wednesday, 19 December 2012
Looking for Buttons is free for Christmas - oh yes it is!
The curtain rises to show a simple domestic scene of pre-Christmas pandemonium. Downstage a young(ish) woman (LUCIE) sits amid a sea of wrapping paper. She has bits of sticky tape in her hair and is sobbing brokenly into a piece of tinsel.
LUCIE: Less than a week until Christmas Day! How will I ever get it all finished in time? I must wrap all these presents and get them to Father Christmas without delay, yet there is also the laundry and the cleaning and to do that I must find the floor under all this paper. The tree is drooping and the Christmas cake is not made. All I want to do is read a book! (She sobs.)
Enormous flash, stage left. Enter FAIRY GODMOTHER, with Kindle.
FG: Oh, do stop snivelling, woman! Buck up and pull yourself together. You'll get it all done, because you always do, and if you don't, well, quite frankly, does it matter? You don't even like Christmas cake and there's a packet of Cadbury's chocolate fingers in the cupboard.
LUCIE: I've already eaten most of them.
FG: There were two packets, so nil desperandum. Unless you've already eaten both, in which case you are a glutton and I have no sympathy. Now put down that sticky tape -
LUCIE: I can't, it's stuck to me.
FG: I shall ignore that remark. Shut up and listen. While you shall not go to the ball -
LUCIE: Why not?
FG: You're a hermit. You hate parties.
LUCIE: Oh yes.
FG: Where was I? Oh yes. While you shall not go to the ball, you shall have a good book to read over the Christmas period, for - tra la la and abracadabra - Looking for Buttons will be free to download from Amazon for five days, starting on Christmas Day!
LUCIE: Oh.
FG: You're supposed to leap about for joy at this point.
LUCIE: But I've read it several times. I wrote it. And I don't have a Kindle.
FG: Flaming heck, you can't please some people. All right, here's a second hand boxed set of Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense. You can have an hour off from the chores to watch the one with David McCallum and then you'll have to get back to work.
FAIRY GODMOTHER waves wand and turns LUCIE into a teapot before turning to beam at the audience.
FG: Meanwhile, those of you who love romance, happy endings and aren't whinging hermits can download Looking for Buttons free from Amazon, 25th-29th December. Merry Christmas!
LUCIE: Less than a week until Christmas Day! How will I ever get it all finished in time? I must wrap all these presents and get them to Father Christmas without delay, yet there is also the laundry and the cleaning and to do that I must find the floor under all this paper. The tree is drooping and the Christmas cake is not made. All I want to do is read a book! (She sobs.)
Enormous flash, stage left. Enter FAIRY GODMOTHER, with Kindle.
FG: Oh, do stop snivelling, woman! Buck up and pull yourself together. You'll get it all done, because you always do, and if you don't, well, quite frankly, does it matter? You don't even like Christmas cake and there's a packet of Cadbury's chocolate fingers in the cupboard.
LUCIE: I've already eaten most of them.
FG: There were two packets, so nil desperandum. Unless you've already eaten both, in which case you are a glutton and I have no sympathy. Now put down that sticky tape -
LUCIE: I can't, it's stuck to me.
FG: I shall ignore that remark. Shut up and listen. While you shall not go to the ball -
LUCIE: Why not?
FG: You're a hermit. You hate parties.
LUCIE: Oh yes.
FG: Where was I? Oh yes. While you shall not go to the ball, you shall have a good book to read over the Christmas period, for - tra la la and abracadabra - Looking for Buttons will be free to download from Amazon for five days, starting on Christmas Day!
LUCIE: Oh.
FG: You're supposed to leap about for joy at this point.
LUCIE: But I've read it several times. I wrote it. And I don't have a Kindle.
FG: Flaming heck, you can't please some people. All right, here's a second hand boxed set of Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense. You can have an hour off from the chores to watch the one with David McCallum and then you'll have to get back to work.
FAIRY GODMOTHER waves wand and turns LUCIE into a teapot before turning to beam at the audience.
FG: Meanwhile, those of you who love romance, happy endings and aren't whinging hermits can download Looking for Buttons free from Amazon, 25th-29th December. Merry Christmas!
Monday, 15 October 2012
Why I'm choosing to self-censor
When I started writing Looking for Buttons seven years ago (I know, I know), it was just a throwaway line, one that would mean little to anyone not growing up in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s.
When I published the Kindle e-book on Amazon in June, it was still just a throwaway line that would mean little to anyone not growing up in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s.
Then the Jimmy Savile scandal broke and suddenly a fleeting reference to Jim'll Fix It no longer seemed right for a lighthearted book meant to entertain.
I've edited the text and uploaded the amended version to Amazon this evening (would have done it sooner but life was a bit medical for a while). I think Amazon will let those who have a copy download the updated version; not having a Kindle myself I'm not a hundred per cent sure on this. Either way, I'll be having another free download day before long, which I'll flag up here, and anyone who wants the new version can get it then.
When I published the Kindle e-book on Amazon in June, it was still just a throwaway line that would mean little to anyone not growing up in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s.
Then the Jimmy Savile scandal broke and suddenly a fleeting reference to Jim'll Fix It no longer seemed right for a lighthearted book meant to entertain.
I've edited the text and uploaded the amended version to Amazon this evening (would have done it sooner but life was a bit medical for a while). I think Amazon will let those who have a copy download the updated version; not having a Kindle myself I'm not a hundred per cent sure on this. Either way, I'll be having another free download day before long, which I'll flag up here, and anyone who wants the new version can get it then.
Sunday, 26 August 2012
Never too late to jump on a bandwagon
Looking for Buttons now has its very own Facebook page!
Apparently, this means that you can 'like' the book, as opposed to before the Facebook page, when you just liked it (or not - you are of course welcome to your opinion). There are probably other things the page will do but I haven't worked it out yet. Do please bear in mind that I am a neo-luddite and left to my own devices would probably still be self-publishing with crayons.
I'll be posting updates on Facebook from time to time and will continue to witter on Twitter as @looking4buttons.
Isn't modern technology grand? All these ways to avoid actually talking to people...
[Don't forget Looking for Buttons is FREE throughout the Bank Holiday weekend!]
Apparently, this means that you can 'like' the book, as opposed to before the Facebook page, when you just liked it (or not - you are of course welcome to your opinion). There are probably other things the page will do but I haven't worked it out yet. Do please bear in mind that I am a neo-luddite and left to my own devices would probably still be self-publishing with crayons.
I'll be posting updates on Facebook from time to time and will continue to witter on Twitter as @looking4buttons.
Isn't modern technology grand? All these ways to avoid actually talking to people...
[Don't forget Looking for Buttons is FREE throughout the Bank Holiday weekend!]
Saturday, 4 August 2012
Freebie Friday - the aftermath
I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I put Looking for Buttons on a free promotion yesterday. I hoped to get some more readers and to get some feedback - and, with luck, some positive reviews. (My sole, cherished, five-star Amazon review is very kind - but the reviewer is an old friend and I'm not sure how much her kindness can be put down to liking the book and how much to the fear that I might turn up at her house and wail plaintively through the letterbox if she said she hated it.) I suppose what I wanted was to find out if there was a market for the book at all.
I checked the book's progress mid-afternoon and it had shifted a couple of hundred copies. I was pleased with that.
I checked again just before I went to bed. Looking for Buttons was at number ten on Amazon's free Kindle book Humour chart. As I stared, it moved up to number nine. It was at number 147 on the general chart.
Through sheer ill luck I wasn't able to log on to check the book's performance before the promotion ended this morning, so I don't know where it finished in the Humour chart, but the stats I could access showed it ended the promotion at number 111 overall. In one day, nearly a thousand people worldwide had downloaded Looking for Buttons. I'm still boggling about that. Hopefully, some of them will actually like it and recommend it to other people.
I'm told word of mouth is the secret to marketing an indie book successfully. I really hope that's true. If I start to see an improvement in sales, I'll consider holding another free promotion. Watch this space.
I checked the book's progress mid-afternoon and it had shifted a couple of hundred copies. I was pleased with that.
I checked again just before I went to bed. Looking for Buttons was at number ten on Amazon's free Kindle book Humour chart. As I stared, it moved up to number nine. It was at number 147 on the general chart.
Through sheer ill luck I wasn't able to log on to check the book's performance before the promotion ended this morning, so I don't know where it finished in the Humour chart, but the stats I could access showed it ended the promotion at number 111 overall. In one day, nearly a thousand people worldwide had downloaded Looking for Buttons. I'm still boggling about that. Hopefully, some of them will actually like it and recommend it to other people.
I'm told word of mouth is the secret to marketing an indie book successfully. I really hope that's true. If I start to see an improvement in sales, I'll consider holding another free promotion. Watch this space.
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