Never knowingly oversold

When you're an indie writer, you're something of a one (wo)man band.  You can rope in other people for some of it, of course.  I can't design covers for toffee (or for books, come to that) so I was overjoyed when a kind gentleman did it for me after a timely intervention by the wonderful Norfolk Bookworm.  But the bulk of it falls on the writer.  Ah, cries the voice of reason, you wrote the book, so why not?  After all, it's all your fault and it's entirely self-inflicted.  But, oh, I do have trouble with promotion.

Partly it's down to inherent bashfulness, which is why most of my family have no idea that the book even exists.  I've managed to overcome this to some extent, irritating my Facebook friends* with intermittent chirpy enticements to buy the book even though all the ones that are going to have done so already (a few are still talking to me).  But selling myself doesn't come easily.  The only way I can bring myself to tell people about Looking for Buttons is if I've got a free promotion running.  The Valentine one went so well I extended it into a four-day extravaganza and the book hit Amazon's humour top twenty in the UK charts.  I was bold that day and actually told a few colleagues, who got quite excited and told more people and so I shifted about five hundred books in a short space of time.  Word of mouth does work, and it's the best sort of advertising.

It seems I am going to have to work on developing an outgoing character.  This is going to be harder than writing the Difficult Second Novel.  Perhaps I should just strap on a bass drum and cymbals and march down the High Street blowing my own trumpet.

* apparently this still isn't an oxymoron, even though I never see most of them for years on end

Busy doing, well, a little more than nothing

There isn't a great deal of progress to report.  I've scrapped the initial attempt at an e-book cover image, mainly because it made Looking For Buttons look like a seventies bonkbuster.  I can only think that most of what passes for my creative brain was tied up in 1978 working on the thriller when I did it.

Otherwise it's been business as usual:  tweaking the text after Norfolk Bookworm's feedback and submitting to another agent.  The thriller staggers on and the new romantic comedy is percolating nicely in the depths of my subconscious and should start to take shape on the page soon.

Right, can't hang around here all day.  I have to eavesdrop on some imaginary people and see if I can make a book out of it.

Money has not changed hands

... although I did send homemade chocolate chip cookies in the post, which may or may not have influenced the outcome.

The first review of Looking For Buttons, by the charming and erudite Norfolk Bookworm can be read here.

I think I should probably go and bake some more biscuits.