Royalty and royalties

One event this week pricked my memory, taking me back to my early teenage years. It was the arrival of Prince George at his new school, St. Thomas’s, in Battersea. Watching the news item on TV, I noticed an arch behind Prince William (George’s father), and thought I recognised it. Then there was a shot of the school front, and I knew it had to be my old school, Sir Walter St. John’s, known as “Sinjuns”. I Googled it and, sure enough, there it was. It’s a Grade 2 listed building now. I left that school when I was fourteen, in my third year, because we moved down to Portsmouth. I took Pat up to the school once. This was before the M25, London orbital motorway was built. We always travelled through London when driving to see family or returning to base. I detoured up to Battersea High Street and stopped outside the school. The name had been changed, much to my disappointment. It was named after some councillor: almost certainly a political decision by a socialist council; after all, the founder, Sir Walter St. John, was a wealthy man. He set up the school in 1700 for the village of Battersea and the surrounding area. I’ve now joined the Sinjuns Facebook group.

On the book front, I came up against a hurdle with CreateSpace I haven’t encountered before: changing one of my titles from a 9x6 size to 8x5.25. The book had to be unpublished (deleted), and the new size listed as a new book. This was explained by CS. After doing the necessary, and approving the proof, I received an email from the “Content Valuation Team” saying I had to prove I had the rights to do this. The title has been available as a Kindle and paperback for a few years now, so it seems a bit odd that I had to go through this rigmarole when it was CS who explained what I needed to do in order to change the book size.

I’ve started dabbling in some research for my latest WIP. The working title is Conor Lenihan Revival because I am bringing the character back from the dead. No, it’s isn’t fantasy, but using editorial licence I have been able to start the novel with Conor almost breathing his last breath. I’m researching Cyberwarfare. It’s something of an eye-opener, being made aware of exactly what’s going on out there. I used cyber warfare in the prequel novel The Eagle’s Covenant, so it makes sense to dabble a bit more. The trouble though with research is that it tends to take you away from the reason for it all, and you end up reading stuff you can never use. It will be a while yet before I can say I’ve enough material to make the bare bones of a good thriller.

My Facebook advertising campaign is dragging its heels a bit. I’m performing better with the American audience than I am with UK. The ‘relevance’ factor for USA is 7/10, while UK is a lowly 4/10. I’m spending more than I’m earning, but I’m gritting my teeth and holding on. However I will be having a look at the UK audience and seeing if I can improve the relevance somehow. Could take a while. Hopefully I’ll get there before I run out of money. Wish me luck!

Forging ahead, come rain, come shine

As we roll on towards autumn, I look back over last week and see the highlight was the amount of money Chindi authors raised for Cancer_UK: a magnificent £482 ($624). The Arundel Festival certainly proved a winner for us because we managed to beat last year’s target of daily sales and the money raised for the Cancer charity. A lot of credit has to go to Carol Thomas who worked jolly hard, supported by her husband, Mason, to bring this to fruition. Carol is a self-published author who writes clever stories. You can see a short trailer of one of Carol’s books, Crazy Over You here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfA-RjTDI94

A number of us took a turn on the stall, which meant we all endured the heat (and the rain), and managed to sell some books. The next big event for us, unless we squeeze one in before Christmas, will be the UK Southern Book show at Worthing on the South Coast. This will be in March, so more of that next year.

I have posted two Facebook adverts for my thriller, A Dangerous Game. I put the promotion price back up to £2.99, and targeted audiences in North America for one ad, and UK for the other. I’m switching the ads off and on according to the time of day, hopefully trying to avoid nights when most of my targets will be sleeping. So far I have just managed to sell enough books each day to cover the daily cost of the campaign. I know I will have to keep an eye on the ROI, but equally important at the moment is learning how to “tweak” my adverts for maximum benefit.

I have also teamed up with four other authors to promote a box set of cross-genre novels. It’s a bold attempt at drilling into the hard earth and uncovering readers who prefer to read across the different genres. It’s risky, because not everyone wants to buy a set of books that probably contain three of which they would never read. Contracts have been signed, and brain-storming has begun on the how, why and what of the campaign. Launch date is probably going to be around the end of October. Price will be at something like £0.99 for a short period, and then will go up to around £3.99. One of the things we’ve been asked to do is get ARC readers for the box set, and pick up some reviews. So if any of you who are reading this blog would like to have a stab at being one of the ARC readers, contact me at www.michaelparkerbooks.com/.

I had another go at my current WIP. I keep getting pulled away, sometimes because I find other jobs to do, but more so by the absence of any real plot structure. I could fill it with a load of nonsense and call it a thriller, but I wouldn’t be true to myself if I gave in to that little demon. I was tempted to kill one of my characters off, simply because the way in which I had composed the paragraph demanded that it ended dramatically, and this person’s death was the only way. The trouble with that, and it would have been fairly dramatic, is that I need this character later in the story.

Our Chindi group have an on-line meeting on Monday evening. I hope it doesn’t take too long; England are playing Slovakia, and it’s on TV. Hope I don’t miss it (the game, I mean) Wish me luck!

The Hard Yards

The weather is warming up along with our sales on the Chindi book stall at the Arundel Festival. Each day those manning the stall manage to sell more than on the same day last year. Tomorrow, a bank holiday here in UK, is the last day, and we hope to be able to declare a real bonus for the Cancer_UK charity we are supporting with our book sales. I popped along last Thursday. Got there early and left at mid-day. Sales were so slow that we only sold one book; fortunately it was one of mine. Sales did pick up during the afternoon though. The photo on the left was taken yesterday. It shows Carol Thomas, Helen Christmas and Dan Jones, all members of Chindi, hard at work in the sunshine. You can see more of them and our work at www.chindi-authors.co.uk.

I’ve also been keeping an eye on my book sales on-line, and can see the benefits of using an ongoing advertising campaign like Facebook. Although I’m not quite clearing my investment, sales have been good enough to make it worthwhile. However, I now need to reconstruct the advert and target another audience. I received an e-mail alert from Facebook during the week telling me that there had been a sudden change in the activity on my advert. Trouble was, they didn’t say if it was good or bad. I had to decipher all the metrics to make sense of it. I believe I was being told that they had more or less exhausted my chosen audience, which is why I will be changing tack.

I have registered my interest (and paid) in a Literary event at Crawley Library in October. It’s about an hour away from here, but I’m quite happy to make the journey and, hopefully, find more readers. There’s also a chance I can meet my son for a late lunch if he isn’t working, but the main reason is to sell books.

But it hasn’t all been about selling books. Last Friday, we went along to Petworth to meet our No.3 great grandson, Orin. He is six months old. He brought his mum, Gemma, along with him. We had a picnic in the grounds of Petworth House. It was lovely sitting under the shade of the trees and having him and Gemma to ourselves for a while.

As a result of all that is going on in my busy schedule, I haven’t put pen to paper; so my latest thriller is gathering dust on the electronic bookshelf. I can’t see me making much progress in the next few weeks either, so perhaps I have resigned myself to the fact that there will not be another Michael Parker release for the foreseeable future: certainly not this year. I do run ideas over in my head, but I suspect that’s the same for all writers; how else would we fill our thinking moments? Something will turn up though, I’m sure it will. Wish me luck.