Happy New Year

 

Bit late with this, but it’s still the first month of the new year.  Happy New Year all!

As usual, remember, Alyssa can be purchased at Amazon.co.uk HERE and at Amazon.com HERE

So, a lot has been happening in the last few months.

With book 1 out and launched, I spent most of the last few months of 2021 pitching Alyssa and hoping for sales.  I did indeed get sales but not as many as I had hoped.  Still, I learned a lot.

All of January I ran a series of Amazon free book deals for all 3 of my other books. I likewise advertised on Facebook and A LOT on Twitter.

The results were mixed.

On the one hand, I sold over 200 ebooks (as in they were picked up free.) And also a few people downloaded my books on kindle unlimited, reading well over 500 pages.  Additionally, my work on Twitter raised my follower count to nearly 4400.  And this time, not all of them were other authors!

But so far I’ve only seen 1 ebook purchased and no copies of Alyssa seem to have sold yet. I had hoped that purchases of the other books would in turn make people curious about book 1.  Still learning experience.

I intend to use February to concentrate solely on pitching Alyssa, but also, I hope to write book 5.

Yes, book 5 is officially being written!  I have a new idea on an old story plan and am now modifying and improving it.  A couple of thousand words already.

If I can maintain momentum, I hope to release it sometime toward the end of 2022 but I will see how things go.

Anyway, that’s my brief blog update.

Take care all of you.

Haldred Chronicles: the series expands!

For those who have been following my social media accounts, you’ll have noticed I’ve been busy.

So yeah, all my books are now available in both eBook and paperback

What happened back in the day is that I did have Alyssa, Kalla and Shade (my first 3 books) in paperback via Amazons ‘CreateSpace' platform. This worked for a spell, but there were 2 big problems.

First was that whilst the first 3 books were in paperback, my fourth book ‘Anna' was not. In addition, due to the way I formatted the books, they came out very big and expensive to produce. Hence, not a lot of them sold.

However, now all that has changed.

I have been able to use Amazon KDP to reformat the original paperbacks and also set up a paperback version of Anna.

As a result, all 4 books are now available alongside the recently republished Alyssa in a similarly size format.  And better priced.

 

You can now buy all 4 books in paperback and they will look pretty good on your book shelf!

Link to Amazon.co.uk HERE and link to Amazon.com HERE

Enjoy! 

Haldred Chronciles: two months on

Haldred Chronicles: Alyssa UK editions are HERE and US Editions HERE

In this blog I thought i'd talk about what worked and what didn’t in my efforts to get the word out about my book.




First to purchase were my wonderful friends and family, who bought a whole raft of electronic and paper copies. And also told people about it on Social media!




I then gave ‘Facebook advertising' a go with a few test posts that were promoted for short periods. The posts had a ‘buy it now' option which according to analytics was clicked a good few times. However, as to just how effective this was I won’t know until December when the first sales report comes through.




I also became highly active on Twitter and a few book advertising sites. I’ve now around 3700 followers on twitter but I’ve found that particularly social media avenue better for ‘writers encouragement' as apposed to selling books; the majority of my followers are other writers!




Finally, throughout the month of October I ran a series of ‘Free’ ebook promotions for my original books. The idea was to generate some renewed interest in the series. Certainly this seems to have worked as my Amazon ranking for all 4 books have improved a lot.




The question now is what to do next. I really want to have an official ‘book launch' but I’m also hoping to contact a few newspapers with press releases. I have a nice big list of additional advertising ideas, but the issue will be getting the time and resources to implement them!




Overall, I’m happy with how things have started off. The book is out, people are buying it and most importantly, people like it!




On to the next phase!

More Progress!

Well there has been progress, and good progress, all around.

I've been working away on the second draft of the second novel now, already starting to tighten up the story structure and define the characters more clearly. Everyone has their part to play. The plan now is simple:

End of March 2013 = finish second draft.

End of April 2013 = finish third draft and get cover sorted.

End of May 2013 = deploy draft to proof readers.

June 2013 = complete final draft with proof reader comments.

1^st July 2013 = book released!

Yes I know, very ambitious of me. But I've got to have something to work toward to drive me and get this next book finished. I'm determined to finish it in 6 months and 2 months have already passed.

I have also taken another step toward making the current novel more widely available by enrolling with Google Books, part of the Google Play system. Hopefully, once my current agreement with Amazon expires the book will be available on the likes of Nexus 6 devices as well as Kindle. When I signed up with Amazon I agreed to only distribute the electronic version of my book with Amazon. This agreement is due to expire shortly so i'll have more freedom as to where the book is distributed from.

I'm also continuing to hunt publishers for the current novel. Only problem has been just making time to research and contact. Hopefully I will have more time over this weekend.

Finally, I'm hoping to update the blogs to make them a bit more interesting to read. At present they just update on the books progress, which is good, but I want to give people a bit more for taking the time to read the blogs. Plan is to start posting up short stories again, like I used to, to give people a bit more to work with.

Some stories will be old ones that I have updated whilst others will be completely new. Should be interesting for all of you either way and I welcome any comments!

Till next time.

The good and the bad

Its has been a busy week, with many ups and downs.

The IRS got back to me about getting me a tax code so I can at last get a printed version of my book from Amazon.com. Sadly, they said no. Something about the required documentation I sent through not being sufficient, despite the fact that I sent them my passport (which fortunately, they returned). So yet another delay on the road to getting the first novel into printed form. However, undaunted, I intend to give the IRS a phone on Monday and discover what the problem is and maybe move things along. Just means that sorry guys, those waiting on a paperback version will have to wait a little longer.

I also didn't get to finish the latest writing challenge of writing a short story based on a song. My choice, Johny Cash's legendary song 'Boy named Sue' just didn't work out. I just can't write a story that gelled properly; my attempts didn't do it justice. Going to go back to the drawing board and find a different song to write on. Just means I'll have to play catchup for a bit.

However, got good news too. I'm making good progress with going over what I've done so far on the second novel. Already got a lot of new ideas, just have to finish going through my little paper draft and we'll be back in business.

I've also been doing a couple of pieces of new fiction.

One was for Bad Company Redux, the wargaming club I'm with. They are running an Infinity the Game 'Paradiso' campaign and I put up my first blog post about the campaign on their website with a little fiction to tie things together. Check it out at http://badcompanyredux.com/ in the 'Badlands' blog (in the future this will be entitled the 'Paradiso' blog)

I've also done a little fiction piece for a mate of mine, which i'll post up sometime in the future. I think people will like it but I want him to see it first.

Another big update is my actions on Twitter. I've now decided not to advertise my book on Twitter anymore as I’m convinced its not really working. Instead, I'm going to concentrate on connecting with fellow writers / interested parties and retweeting whenever I can, as well as just updating people about my blog posts. I've over 1700 followers now so that's good, plenty of people seem interested in my little corner of the internet.

So that’s the update this weekend. I hope to keep writing and get a bit more done on the second novel. Stay tuned everyone!

A good start to 2013!

Well despite a shocking busy few days in work, and a lot of post-Christmas activates, I still managed to get a bit of work done on the book / books.

The big news is I have taken a big step toward getting the paperback version of Haldred Chronicles:Alyssa sorted by sending the required documents to the IRS in America.  Hopefully by now those documents have got to the US and are being processed.  I don’t know when the processing will be complete, but once done I’ll have a tax code and so be able to finish the set up of the book on Createspace.com.

Then we got ourselves a paperback version.  Happy days!

As well as this, Twitter work has received a boost.  ‘Alyssa’ is now being advertised by a very nice advertising company called Kindle Book Promotor, who are putting the word out much better than I have been. I’m still not convinced Twitter is the most wonderful of social mediums but it’s getting there.

I now have 7 reviews of ‘Alyssa’ on Amazon.co.uk which is just fantastic.  To those who have put up reviews, again, thank you so much for taking the time to help out. It’s really appreciated.  Plus pretty much every review has asked about a sequel.

The sequel, Haldred Chronicles:Kalla, is coming along nicely.  9500 words done and it’s only the start of January.  I am very pleased with progress.  If I can keep up the pace I should definitely have the first draft done by the end of the month, as was originally planned.

A darn good start to 2013.