Tuesday 17 April 2012

Help me out, and you could win Dark Steps!

I want to understand my readers better and, to that end, I've put together a little survey. If you need an incentive, one lucky respondent will win an e-book copy of Dark Steps. I know, I spoil you!

The survey will run until 12 noon (UK) on May 11th, so hurry, hurry, hurry. Here we go...

The survey was here but it has now closed so, you know, this is just a place-holder... you can view the results here.

Saturday 14 April 2012

The great Twitter experiment is, mercifully, over

Last month, I wrote about my great Twitter experiment - a somewhat cynical attempt to gain more followers. I felt a bit uncomfortable about doing it, but at the same time it seemed a viable way of attracting new readers.

Because I felt uncomfortable though, I decide I would only actively hunt followers in this way for a month, and that month ended at midnight last night. As the clock struck twelve, I had amassed 1,361 followers - and increase over the month of 1,254. Not too bad, I guess. On the downside I was following 1,995 people (as opposed to my usual 77), leaving me vulnerable to spam DMs and making my timeline so hectic as to be almost worthless.

The month's up now though, so (nearly) all bets are off. I have already dispensed with all the new people I followed who did not follow me back, making my timeline marginally less frantic. Beyond that, I've decided:

  • if you tweet anything I find offensive, I'll unfollow you.
  • if you tweet predominantly in a language I do not understand (i.e. not English, French or pigeon-Russian), I'll unfollow you.
  • if you spam DM me about weight loss programmes or the fact that someone is spreading bad rumours about me (spammers, you can think of something better than this, surely?), I'll unfollow you.
  • if you don't tweet for a month, I'll unfollow you.
  • if you tweet anything about Bieber or One Direction, I'll unfollow you.
Seems reasonable, doesn't it?

You can find me on Twitter here.

P.S. None of those bulletpoints apply if you're one of the original 77. You know who you are.

Wednesday 4 April 2012

I'll take that!

As you may know, when you look at an author profile on Amazon there is a sidebar that shows you other authors whose books were bought by customers who bought work by the author you're looking at. I know, that's not a very elegant sentence but my point is this: today, I took a quick look at my UK author profile and that "also bought" sidebar showed this:


Yes, a whole load of authors I've never heard of, but Dean Koontz and Stephen King at the top of the "a bit like me" list? I'll take that!