When Gremlins attack

Just when you think things are running smoothly, a gremlin hops into your daily routine. My PC went belly-up on Tuesday: it wouldn’t boot up. Took it into the shop, got it back on Friday and now I can’t access the internet. I’ll be going back to the shop on Monday to have a “talk” with them. Obviously I’m not without a PC or the internet, but I have to use my laptop, which is not geared up like my main PC. These problems, when they come, always seem to pick the most inopportune moment. I am supposed to be preparing a Newsletter promotion for a fellow author. In return he will be posting about my book, A Dangerous Game. It means seven days of tweets, FB and social media, and now I have to come up with something satisfactory so I don’t fall short of the agreement I made.

Another hurdle I have to cross is that my church has asked me to preach on Sunday week (October 29th). No big deal really, but the access I have on line to research the stuff I need is already part of my ‘Favourites’ on the main PC. So now I’ll have to go hunting via my laptop.

On top of that, a very close friend of ours has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. I had to give up two mornings this week to ferry a very distraught husband in to the hospital. Plus I was asked to sit in with him when the doctor delivered the sad news. His grief, and my friend’s condition, make my problems pall into insignificance.

Naturally I have made no progress with my WIP, but it has never been too far from my mind. My foray into Facebook advertising was pretty disappointing too, but I’ll survive the trauma of handing Jeff Bezos (FB founder) my money for so little in return. I will do nothing now until next month because I reached my self-imposed budget limit. I’m thinking of having a look at Amazon ads. According to Mark Dawson, a prolific user of FB and Amazon, they offer a more direct way of directing your potential readers straight on to your Amazon product page. It makes sense: an FB ad asks someone to click a link to an Amazon product, whereas with Amazon Ads, the product appears and the click takes the reader to the place where they can purchase the book. Plus the fact that the product page contains so much more information about the author, the book, the also-boughts, the reviews, and a host of other stuff, which would cost a fortune to place on an FB ad.

We took our dog down to the beach for her routine walk this afternoon, but had to turn back because the beach has been battered by the strong winds brought on by “Storm Brian”. I despair of the naming culture for hurricanes and storms etc. The name ‘Brian’ suggests a gentle nature. I have a couple of friends with that name, and neither of them is violent. Why don’t they pick names with connotations of strength and danger? Attila, Ghengis Khan, Napoleon, Brian? Spare me, please.

So what happens next week? I might have a serviceable PC, and I might even have got back to my WIP, but whatever happens, as always: wish me luck!

Mystery upon mystery

We all like a mystery, right? Well, I was walking along the beach with my dog, Tuppence, the tide was out and just a couple of dog walkers around. I trod on what I thought was a plastic bottle, but when I looked again, it was more like a gun than a discarded piece of plastic. I picked it up. It was quite heavy. There were a couple of dials on it, and also some switches. Plus, a port that looked the same as the one on my phone. It was definitely something electronic. I wondered if it was some kind of signalling device; you know, a short wave transmitter. Perhaps there had been some illegal activity on the beach. Smugglers? I pulled out one of Tuppence’s poo bags and put the device inside, and looked forward to discovering what this mysterious object was. When I got home, I showed it to my wife, but she couldn’t help me out there. So, using my research skills, I went on to Google and began dialling in some of the letters and numbers that were barely discernible on the side of the object. And as I got closer to the truth, I began to wonder what planet I lived on. Am I so far out of it now that I couldn’t recognise an electronic cigarette? A vapour thingy? Ah! Then I thought about how life changes, pulling the rug from under your feet. The world and his dog would have known what it was. But I likened the reality to my Granny and her hearing trumpet. What would she have made of my modern hearing aids? When I smoked years ago it was a packet of cigarettes with twenty fags inside. I’ll just have to keep taking the tablets. Oh, and the vapour thingy has gone into the bin.

Yesterday I went along to Crawley library for their ‘Book Fest’. It was a first for the library, and they made a good show of it too. It was limited to twenty authors (all pre-booked). We had our own allotted space with a small, printed poster attached to the front of the table. I only sold one book: one of my religious books. It was only £1, which is practically the same as giving them away. My son and grandson came along for an hour. They live close by, so that was a bit of a bonus. It was good to meet other writers, many of whom only had one or two books to show. I think I made a mistake by taking too many book along, but it’s all part of the learning curve. I’ll have to remember that “Less is more” in future. I left two of my hardback titles behind for the library. They accept donated books.

I don’t know what Facebook are up to, but they suddenly ‘disapproved’ one of my ads for “profanity”. The ad in question was one I ran through September and had been inactive for two weeks, and contained no profanities at all. I let them know in their ‘appeal’ box that they had made a mistake. So why is it that big companies can’t apologise? They sent me a response to say that my ad had been approved and I could view it etc., etc. The ad wasn’t even running! I’m still failing miserably with this advertising game, but I will persevere. Yesterday I had an ‘uptick’ (I like that word) in my sales, so perhaps I’m doing something right.

My WIP moved on a notch, and I have managed to get to the fifth character that needs introducing. It’s still early days and I’ve only written about 4000 words. Just 76000 to go and at least eight or nine months maybe. We’ll see. Wish me luck!

Disingenuous freeloaders

I have to start this week’s blog with a little rant against the freebie again. I mentioned two readers last week who had won a copy of my ebook, The Eagle’s Covenant. A day or so after writing that piece, one of the ebooks was downloaded from Instafreebie. Three days ago a second was downloaded. This told me that the winners had picked up their prize. I didn’t end the giveaway there and then, knowing I had only given the free link to two people. Yesterday I discovered that the book had been downloaded four times. I ended the giveaway straight away. It suggests to me that one of those winners passed on the link to others, which is against the spirit of the free book idea; the link was not theirs to give away. So be it, but I will keep a closer eye on this practice in future.

I made some small inroad into my current WIP. I said in my last post that figuring out a back story was almost like writing a novel, but I bit the bullet and persevered. I was amused by a post I read today on an author forum where a question was posed on what is making us happy today. One writer was excited because she had book 4 being published, book 5 with her content editor, book 6 with another professional and book 4 (yes) being prepped for something else. I got exhausted just reading that. Where do these people get their ideas and stamina from? Must be my age because I can never see a novel taking less than a year to write.

I was once told by my London publisher that there are only about nine stories you can write, but many, many ways of telling them. My current effort is about a girl going missing. No, it isn’t Gone Girl, but simply another slant on a missing person. She is sixteen years old and the daughter of a notorious London crime boss. Sounds exciting? No, not yet, but it’s my job to make it so. How do I do that? If there’s a recipe book out there about writing the perfect plot, let me know please. Meanwhile I’ll struggle to come up with something to stretch between the beginning and the end.

My venture into Facebook advertising doesn’t look too promising at the moment. One of my ads achieved an audience relevance of eight, which is good, and the other ad was wilting fast. I tried a tweak and immediately lost the plot. So much for carefully following the good advice I found in Michael Cooper’s book. I will persevere and make every effort not to give Facebook too much of my money.

This time next week I will have spent four hours at the Crawley Library book fest trying to persuade people to by my paperback books and maybe even venture into my electronic pile and download some ebooks. But at least I will be meeting people who are there because they are book readers, and are interested in talking to some real live authors. After that I will be meeting my son for a spot of lunch, and that’s a bonus. Hopefully I’ll be able to brag about how many books I sold. Wish me luck!