Making progress and meeting other authors.

I made some progress last week with my manuscript, but it was more of a reviewing of my work and learning to put it on Scrivener at the same time. It will take a while yet, notwithstanding the fact that Christmas will get in the way. I’ve no trouble with that. After all; Christmas is to be enjoyed and used as a time to forget the pressures, whether self-imposed or not, that we all have to endure throughout the year. I also resurrected my attempts to get an acceptable, book jacket uploaded to CreateSpace for the paperback version of The Eagle’s Covenant. I’m still struggling with that, but I will persevere.

Last Friday I met a local author, Christopher Joyce, in Chichester. Christopher is a founder member of the Chindi Writers group, www.chindi-authors.co.uk. This is the group of self-published writers I mentioned in my blog last week. I missed them last Monday, so caught up with Chris at Carluccio’s in town. I was encouraged by what he had to tell me, particularly in the way the group promote themselves publicly. They are not a collection of writers who meet to praise each other’s work, but use their collective skills to bring their books and their group to the public. This week they have a stall open in Chichester promoting their books and providing help, advice and encouragement to whoever wants it.

I’ve noticed a movement in my book sales on Amazon over the last couple of weeks. Nothing dramatic but certainly an improvement on November. There won’t be much more now until I begin pushing the boat out in the New Year. Hopefully my efforts will yield some positive results. Maybe my bookmarkers will help too. I sent 100 out to our youngest son in Australia. Some of those will go to America and hopefully nudge people over there into looking at my website and checking out my titles. My eldest son, whose job takes him all over the country has promised to put some about. He’ll be receiving his quota shortly. One of our grandsons works in Scotland, running his own business, www.brokenblonde.com and often meets up with people who might be interested, so he has agreed to help. And so it goes on. Whether it will make much difference remains to be seen, but I live in I hopes.

This week will be a mixture of visiting family, shopping, decorations (putting up) and all the usual things that we fit into the build-up to Christmas. Then it gets manic. Lovely! If I don’t get round to publishing my blog next week, although I will try, I want to wish you all a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Active again

I decided to write my blog a little earlier today because I find myself making excuses for not getting the entry out on a Monday. Last week has seen more activity in the promotion and marketing effort I’m putting to my books. One major achievement for me was the production of one thousand bookmarkers. I designed them myself, although I listened to constructive criticism from family and friends, and had them printed at a small printers in Bognor. I picked them up last night and am delighted with the result. Why a thousand? I want to distribute them in places where people will pick them up and maybe look at my website, find out who I am and perhaps buy a book. I plan to use my family in this (they already know), and expect the distribution to cover about six areas in UK, couple of places in Sydney and one, at least in America. This isn’t about distributing leaflets and flyers, and sticking them under car windscreen wipers: it’s more of a kind of subliminal advertising. It isn’t something that has been suggested to me; quite the opposite: I dreamed this one up on my own. Bookmarker advertising isn’t new, I know, but with luck I can get a kind of placement advertising simply because my bookmarkers will be found in unexpected places. I hope so, anyway.

I have also cranked up my promotion for The Eagle’s Covenant. I have had four, five star reviews posted on Amazon, but there has been no quantifiable result in the numbers I’ve sold, so just how effective those reviews will be I’ve no idea, but I’ve decided to concentrate on pushing the title until well into the New Year.

Another step in getting myself known among the community is to go to a meeting of the Chindi Authors Group. This is a group of Chichester Indie authors who meet once a month in Chichester. Their aim is to help each other with promotion and to generally encourage each other. I will be there on Monday evening and I hope I can learn something from them and perhaps help anyone there to learn from my experience as a long time writer. I’ve looked at their website and seen the good reviews their books have attracted on Amazon. Earlier this month they had a seminar in the Chichester library where about seven of the group were doing a Q & A session. There were quite a few people there in the audience. It’s this kind of event that can only help writers like myself to become established in the local, book loving community, and I hope we can all profit from this.

I began tentative steps with my dusty, old manuscript yesterday. Having now purchased the Scrivener programme, I began using it yesterday. I will be compiling my research material into separate sections first. Then I will begin reading through my manuscript to bring my mind back to the place I need to be with regard to the story line and character profiles. I expect to be entrenched again by January and push on from there: hopefully completing the novel by the summer. Wish me luck!

Looking ahead to glancing back at 2014

Once again another gap between blogs. No excuse, but then I don’t have a great deal to say at the moment. I have been brushing up on my Scrivener project. This is a writer’s work tool to help in the building of a manuscript. It’s extremely useful and popular with a lot of writers. I’ve just about worked my way through the course, but have promised myself to go through it again. It’s not a long course, and the project is loaned on trial for thirty days. That’s thirty days that are not necessarily consecutive. Theoretically you could download one page a year for thirty years; not that it would be much help. I will purchase it once I have grasped its finer detail and got used to the way it which it functions. It isn’t expensive either. I plan to read through my manuscript from the beginning and use that to get my thought process back on track with the story line, and to build it with Scrivener. I can see Christmas interfering with my plan, but I do intend to try.

Next week, December 1st. I plan to visit the Chindi writers group. This is a group of local authors who meet in Chichester once a month. Their aim is to help fellow writers in the group in any way they can with promotion and marketing ideas, and generally to encourage each other in their work. I’ve looked at the group’s writers on the web links and can see that they are all similar to me in that they are ‘indie’ authors and all have respectable reviews. I’m looking forward to it

I have received a couple of five star reviews for The Eagle’s Covenant, which I hope will give it a kick start. When I removed it from Acclaimed Books and published it myself on Amazon, I lost all the reviews. It has been a pain trying to build it up again, so hopefully the five star reviews will be a great help.

Coming towards the end of 2014 will see me (and Pat) regarding the year as one of the most traumatic in our lives. I battled chemotherapy and the subsequent problems associated with that. We sold our house and moved into rented accommodation in Spain, and then moved to England where we are happily settling into life here and enjoying every minute of it. I will be having my next session of treatment, my first in UK, at the local hospital in Chichester tomorrow, and this will continue for another eighteen months. I’m looking forward to 2015 and the hope that my progress, both in my health and my writing will be upward, fruitful and positive. I have a marketing idea for my books which I hope to have ready before Christmas, and will explain more once I have it up and running. I have my December 8th promotion coming up and the hope that this will boost my rankings. Let’s hope so. Wish me luck!