A year on...

It's coming up for a year since The Petrified World and other tales was published. I was tremendously proud to edit it, and prouder still to feature some excellent writers that I very much admire. What's more, since all profits went to charity, it has been able to raise some funds for a very deserving cause, Population Matters.

I guess my message here is two-fold - if you bought the book, would you consider heading back to Amazon and leaving a review for it? Reviews really help in our algorithm-led world of online shopping, and so far The Petrified World... has one five-star review and nothing else. So you can help the cause again, with a nice review, and it won't even cost you anything this time...

And of course, if you haven't bought the book already, what are you waiting for? Or maybe, in the run up to Christmas, you need some affordable gifts for the readers in your life...? So here's the all-important link:

bit.ly/petrifiedworld

Always nice to get a review

It's (nearly) always nice to get a review, in my experience, so whilst I promise I won't do this every time The Petrified World and other tales gets a write-up, I am going to reproduce this one, the first review to appear on Amazon for the various-authors charity anthology I put together and edited. Here it is:

★★★★★
I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of short stories. Whilst they loosely share a general theme of things unknown or unspoken there is great variety in the settings and approach, which really adds to the interest and had me looking forward to each new experience unfolding in the pages. Every one of the stories deals with something unsettling, something dark, with some rooted in contemporary reality, while others explore futuristic scenarios, many of them posing more questions than they deliver answers. All are thought-provoking for different reasons. A great book to pick up and put down at one's leisure – none of the stories are more than 12 pages long - and one which will have me looking out for more work by all the talented authors within it. Plus it’s for a good cause – and one which seems fitting to the book. Very happy to recommend this.

That's nice, isn't it?

You can read the review in situ here or, you know, just just buy the book straight off. What can I say, it's affordable, offers you eleven great short stories by new and emerging authors and benefits the Population Matters charity too - what's not to like?

Have a sneak preview

I might have mentioned, I'm quietly pleased with this book. Here's a little preview, to convince you of the need to buy it... As ever, with Amazon embeds, the formatting isn't perfect, but rest assured it is in the actual book. No go, buy, read, review, all that good stuff...

Post-launch analysis

Remembering that time when The Petrified World and other tales paperback edition was ranked 9,449 on Amazon, out of more than six million books...

You can read more about this book here or cut to the chase and just buy it.

A Drawn To The Deep End preview

It's not perfect, in that some of the format is a little out of whack (why oh why does this display the first paragraph of a chapter with a hanging indent, for example?), but Amazon offer an embeddable preview of the e-books they sell. So ... here's an embedded preview of Drawn To The Deep End. Enjoy. Then buy. Then review (like this... or these). Hey, it doesn't hurt to ask, right?

Drawn To The Deep End

So, a novel that I've been working at, on and off, for seven years is finally available for public consumption. Yes, seven years. More than five writing it, in fits and starts. A year of editing and reviews. Nearly a year trying to find an agent and/or publisher. You might infer from my failure to do the latter that the novel isn't very good, and you're entitled to your opinion. I think it's alright. Not very marketable, perhaps, and a bit downbeat for some, but alright, nonetheless. You'll have to buy it and make your own mind up. Here are the links you'll need for that:

Paperback

Ebook

If you like the book, it'd be lovely if you could leave a nice review on Amazon or Goodreads, or wherever you write your reviews. Feel free to blog or tweet about it, if you like.

If you don't like it, well, silence is golden, eh? Or better yet, come on over to this blog or Twitter and let me know off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush ;)

My children need wine!

I self-published my first title, Dark Steps in August 2011. Since then, I have sold some books. Here's a graph to prove it.

You'll note that I have removed the scale from the Y-axis, but essentially this equates to just over 300 sales across five titles. In the same time period, I have given away, completely free, over 9,000 copies through various channels, nearly all Amazon Kindle Select promotions.

Giving books away for free is fine, I guess, and, barring miracles, writing is never going to enable me to give up the day job. That's fine, I accept that. Fortunately, that's not why I write. But, you know, <plug class="shameless">if you wanted to buy a book sometime, well, that would be fine too...</plug>

Footnote: wondering where the title of this post comes from? Wonder no more. And yes, Euro Itchy & Scratchy Land is a perfect metaphor for sales of my books.

I've looked at life from both sides (of the Atlantic) now

I looked at my Amazon.com and .co.uk author profiles yesterday specifically to see if they differ and they do, in one respect.

Over in the US, people who buy things I've written also tend to buy books by these good folk:

From my US Amazon author profile

Blimey! Stephen King, Joe Hill, Clive Barker and Dean Koontz! I'll take that, any day of the week.

In the UK, things are a little different.

From my UK Amazon author profile

Now maybe I need to get out more, because I don't think I've heard of anyone on this list. But there are two names that appear on both: Scott Nicholson and J. Thorn. I think I might investigate these guys further (though I'm really not sure about the latter's author pic...)

Don't get any big ideas - they're not going to happen

Regular readers might know that I recently hatched a scheme (for which, read desperate attempt) to crack the Amazon.com Top 100 Free list with one or both of the titles I currently offer under KDP Select. The theory goes that if you can crack that Top 100 list, even if only for a short while, a significant sales "bump" follows.

So I notified every "list your KDP Select promotion here" website I could find (and I found plenty). I blogged my plan wherever I could. I tried to build some Twitter momentum. I called in favours. Hell, I even posted to Facebook, something I am usually loath to do.

But I didn't spend any money.

A couple of Kindle author forums seemed to both suggest placing ad's with BookBub as a sure-fire way of cracking the list... but those ad's start at $70, and I had a promotional budget of precisely zero.

So, the promotion ran last weekend. What happened, I hear you ask?

Turn Around Where Possible got to #748 briefly on Saturday. Cold didn't even crack the top 2,000.

Aside from new levels of circumspection, what have I learnt from this? Firstly, that unless some of the big boys (ENT, Pixel Of Ink, and so on) actually run your promotion, it doesn't matter how many free "list your KDP Select promotion here" websites you notify. Most of the rest are small-fry, by comparison. Secondly, if you're running a two-day promotion you need to achieve in excess of 2,000 downloads to get close to the fabled Top 100 list. I managed a shade under 400 in the US.

There were some positives. I logged my first downloads in India which is great, as Amazon.in is surely a massive potential marketplace. I made the US Top 10 Free Short Stories list (indeed, I sat at #9 on that for much of the weekend). Oh, and Turn Around got as high as #652 on the Canadian Free list on the strength of just nine downloads. Yes, nine. The rewards from cracking their Top 100 might be a lot smaller, but equally making their chart without spending any money might actually be achievable.

Before I close, can I just quickly take this opportunity to publicly thank all friends and acquaintances you helped, retweeted, liked, posted, forwarded and, ultimately, downloaded? Thank you all. And if anybody has $70 to spare, I'll place a BookBub advert next time, save myself going to all this trouble...

Footnote: the title of this post comes from here. But then you knew that already...

The Last Crusade...

... in which I pursue the Holy Grail (geddit?)

Getting onto Amazon.com's Top 100 list is a big deal, I reckon. A lot of Kindle owner's check that on a regular basis. I'm not talking about genre-specific lists, I'm talking about the big guns: Amazon's top 100 paid-for Kindle books and the top 100 free.

It's a big deal because once you're on there, lots of downloads follow and, presumably, book sales of other titles too. That's the theory anyway.

I run two titles under Amazon's exclusivity programme KDP Select, namely Turn Around Where Possible and Cold. Periodically, I give these away free. The nearest either has ever got to the top 100 list was when Turn Around... peaked, for a few short hours, at #113. To get that high, more than 2,200 free copies were downloaded.

What's all this building to? Well, I'm going to have one more crack at the Holy Grail, the top 100. I've scheduled for both titles to be free on Amazon, simultaneously and worldwide, on the 31st of August and 1st of September. I've submitted my promotion's details just about everywhere I can think of. I've given plenty of notice to untold Twitter book promotion accounts. I've scheduled a number of promotional tweets myself on a (hopefully not too annoying) regular basis. And now I'm blogging about it.

So I need your help. If you have a Kindle, Kindle app or Kindle for PC, you can download either or both of these short stories. I hope you do. I think you might like them. But also please tell your friends. Maybe flatter me with a retweet when you see me plugging the big push. And if you run or write for a book review website or blog, please let me know and maybe we can do something.

Think of this as an experiment. Can a little known indie author crack the top 100 free list with a self-published short story or two? Let's find out...

EDIT: I should add that I have no promotional budget for this: zero, zilch, zip, and other words beginning with zed. So to those that have suggested I place an ad with Bookbub (starting price $70), well, it's a nice idea and everything so thank you, but no...)

Halloween... and I'll scratch your back, etc

As a writer with a couple of titles enrolled in Amazon's KDP Select programme (which gives the retailer exclusivity), I am able to offer those titles for free every now and then. The idea, I guess, is that the rush to download a freebie leads to a "bump" in downloads, a momentarily higher profile and then residual sales in the aftermath. To be fair, that has been my experience, although I should point out that the law of diminishing returns certainly applies - after four or five freebie weekends it seems that pretty much everybody who wants your story on their Kindle already has it.

Having said that, I'm planning one more freebie, and am writing about it here in advance in the hope of maximising the take-up. Turn Around Where Possible, my old-school horror yarn, will be available for free on Amazon on Wednesday, 31st October. Yes, a horror story free on Halloween. I'm nothing if not original.

Anyway, since I'm not only giving you stuff for free but also giving you plenty of prior notice, can I ask a favour in return? Two of my short stories, the aforementioned Turn Around Where Possible and Cold, are eligible for Wattpad's Watty Awards 2012. No, me neither, but hey, an award for a story would be nice to win. So can you help me get in the mix? It won't take much of your time, just a few mouse clicks really.

You can vote for Cold here: http://www.wattpad.com/8276776-cold

And for Turn Around Where Possible here: http://www.wattpad.com/8276710-turn-around-where-possible

If you don't have a Wattpad account (which I'm guessing is most of you) you can use your Facebook credentials to exercise your right to vote - exercise is good for you, right? And enjoy Turn Around Where Possible for Halloween.

Free as a bird, apparently

First off, two points* to anyone who identifies the film dialogue from which this post's title is taken.

Secondly, in honour of having a nice long Bank Holiday weekend, I figure you need some short stories to read. So, today and tomorrow, Turn Around Where Possible will be free over at Amazon. Then, on Sunday and Monday, Cold will be free.

Here are some links:

Turn Around Where Possible: Amazon.co.uk • Amazon.com

Cold: Amazon.co.uk • Amazon.com

And as I've said before, don't worry, you don't need a Kindle to read e-books bought from the Amazon Kindle Store.

* Points have no value but hey, you earn my respect.

Coincidentally, it's also International Short Story Day

Today is International Short Story Day, apparently. What better time to launch a new short story then?

Cold is published today, exclusively available through the Amazon Kindle Store (at first, at least). It's a short, dark tale of what happens when a woman breaks her own rules about office relationships and married men. When she realises she can't get her man back she decides to get even instead. So begins her thirst for revenge... and as we all know, revenge is a dish best served cold.

Cold is available right about now, on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk - please do read and enjoy!

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!

On getting reviewed (or, the hard slog, the wait and the pay-off)

For the struggling independent like me, getting reviewed is hard. Yes, the Internet is awash with book review blogs, journals and websites but once you knock out those that don't accept self-published works and those that don't accept books with less than ten Amazon reviews, you've halved the list. Then take out all the ones that have currently closed their doors to new submissions, usually because they've been inundated, and the list shrinks further. And of course you only want to consider review channels that fit with the genre, theme and tone of your work.

Looking back through my e-mail sent items, seems I've sent out 30 review begs, jumping through whatever hoops are deemed necessary: the book must be a PDF; the book must not be a PDF; links to Amazon must be supplied; send no links or attachments; a recent photograph of the author is required; the author biog must contain inside leg measurement (only one of these was made up). It's been a giant faff, in short... but a faff that is starting to pay off. Take a look at my Media page - reviews for Dark Steps are starting to rack up, and I've just had emails promising me two more imminently. Good news. When it comes to promotion, it really is a case of "every little helps".

I'm starting to accumulate more customer reviews too - three on Amazon.co.uk, two on Amazon.com and, most satisfying of all, my first five-star review anywhere, on Lulu. Happy days.


First review on Lulu... and my first 5-star anywhere!



New cover art for Dark Steps

Dark Steps has new cover art!

The third edition of Dark Steps features the new design, shown right, which hopefully will help the book stand out a bit more.

To ensure a bit of continuity from the artwork from previous editions (which you can see here), I've stuck with a broadly similar palette of colours, and have used the same story from within the book (Waiting Room) as inspiration for the picture, specifically the EARN YOUR PLACE slogan.

So what do you think? Better? Worse? Hopefully the former, as the new cover will start filtering through to various outlets from today, and is already live on Lulu. Experience suggests Amazon will be next, and then all the channels that are fed by Smashwords.

P.S. In case you were wondering about the second edition... it fixed a solitary typo.

Si vous habitez en France...

Si vous habitez en France, maintenant vous pouvez acheter Dark Steps (ça c'est-a-dire Étapes sombres) chez Amazon.fr (et je suis désolé pour mon Français écolier...)

Another nice review

One of the hardest things about getting publicity for a new book, especially if you are an undiscovered writer doing his own PR, is having your work reviewed. I mean properly reviewed too, where the reviewer actually takes the time to read the whole book and construct their own opinion about the contents, rather than just cobble together a 50-word summary based on the Amazon synopsis.

Imagine my delight, then, at having Dark Steps reviewed by well-read (in both senses of the phrase) blogger and professional word wrestler Rol Hirst at Sunset Over Slawit.

Not only was Rol very complimentary, he also offers interesting perspectives on some of the stories in Dark Steps that are perhaps different from those you'd get from me. And that's one of many beauties of story telling - each reader adds their own layer of meaning to those intended by the author.

Rol has also added the nuts and bolts of his review to Dark Steps on Amazon.co.uk and given it four stars - result!

Dark Steps gets its first review on Amazon

The great thing about buying and selling on Amazon is that people can, and do, leave reviews.

For someone who's published a book on Amazon, this could be a double-edged sword though. Okay, so nothing is going to appeal to everybody, but what if you get lots of negative reviews? Unhappy days...

Having said all that, I'm pleased to report that Dark Steps has got it's first review on Amazon (here) and it's a good one - four stars and lots of nice comments ("an excellent collection of short fiction", "didn't want to put it down", and so on). Happy days...

Dark Steps published

Dark Steps, my collection of eight short stories, is published as a Kindle ebook on Amazon today. Take a look if you don't believe me.

The eight stories included therein are Waiting Room, Dream Feed, Egg, Near-Death Experience, A Bit Christmassy, Resolution, The Inheritance and an extract from the forthcoming novel Drawn To The Deep End.