Which lottery are you in?

Life is a lottery, so they say, and there’s no question that some people draw the winning ticket and others do not. Sadly, most do not. What we have to look at, as Eric Idle’s song tells us, is to always look on the bright side of life. So drawing away from the daily horrors of this world; horrors that are constantly in our newspapers and on out TV screens, I want to talk about another kind of lottery: producing a best-seller; a book, naturally, seeing as my blog is connected to the written word.

Yesterday, Amanda Hocking’s name came up in a forum post. Amanda is a self-published author and now a wealthy woman because she cracked it: broke the million sales on Amazon. She did that within about two years I think, but don’t quote me on that. Today I read in the Mail on Sunday of another writer, Andy Leeks, who has cracked it. He has sold over 40,000 e-books and is quoted as saying it was easy to publish an e-book. And he’s dead right about that: it is. But it isn’t easy to reach sales figures that put you near the top of the Amazon best sellers list. Andy was soon selling 500 books a day, but he didn’t manage this by luck; it meant hard work after the book had been published. He handed out leaflets on his train journey to work each day because his book was about commuters. It’s called ‘As They Slept’. How many of you would be authors have done that? I haven’t, but my excuse is that I live in Spain and none of the passengers would understand my leaflet. What a poor excuse. But there’s a simple truth in the way in which Andy went about part of his marketing: start local! If you have a book available on Amazon, make a start with a Press release and get yourself in the local newspapers. Have some bookmarks printed with your details on and leave them lying around at strategic points. Ask the local library if you can do this. There must be many ways in which you can begin a ‘local’ campaign.

You might be formulating a question for me: if you’re so clever, how come you haven’t done this? Well, living in Spain doesn’t help an English language writer like me, so I’ve had to rely on promotions through the web. But next month we will be back in England permanently, and I hope to begin a local campaign of my own, once we have settled in. It will cost me time and money, but the length of time and the amount of money I spend is down to me. Meanwhile I have another promotion purchased for the month of November. This is for my thriller, The Devil’s Trinity.

I am making slow progress with my current WIP (work in progress). The working title is ‘The Gatekeeper’. Whether I’ll keep that or not remains to be seen. But I have reached 50,000 words and can’t afford to give it up. I did it last year with this WIP, and wrote a romance instead. That will be out in January, published by Robert Hale, my London publisher. I won’t get much done now on my WIP because we are now into the last four weeks of our tenure in Spain, and the social diary is filling alongside the appointments we have with bureaucracy in order to legally extricate ourselves from the Spanish authorities. All good fun. And I’m still on medication for my cancer, but only medication; the chemo finished five months ago. Wish me luck!

When a glut can spoil the whole barrel

I sense a slowing down of indie book sales; not just here in the Parker household, but generally across the whole spectrum. I could be wrong and way off beam, but I have read opinions on the web from people working at both ends of the publishing industry. In the continuing battle between Amazon and Hachette, a claim has been made that they are each trying to eliminate the other. This sounds like one trying to gain a territorial advantage over the other. The product, i.e. book sales, is being spread too thinly. I also read yesterday of a publishing company laying off staff and generally rearranging the furniture because of the sales drop off they are experiencing. But their genre authors write mainly erotic romance, and it is there that I suspect the underlying malaise in sales can be found. Since Fifty Shades of Grey took the world by storm, a lot of writers (hacks?) jumped on the bandwagon and wrote steamy novels. The result meant the genre was over populated and effectively sewn up, leaving little room for writers who were more or less mainstream in this area. Their world has been overtaken and their market ruined.

It isn’t just the implied overstuffing of that genre that leads me to think the indie business is going down the tubes for many, low ranking authors: I believe most of the other genres are suffering too, and the mainstream publishers are reasserting their dominance. They are responding to the challenge and reducing their prices, offering quality against quantity; and once again leaving the low cost indie writer, particularly writers without any backing, floundering deep amongst the bottom feeders.

Another problem for the writers who publish a book and hope to see it do well, is the advent of box sets. Just over a year ago I purchased a box set of nine thrillers. Each one was purported to be a gem: top of the genre stuff by established thriller writers. I think I read one, got half-way through a second and realised I’d been sold a dummy. How much did I pay? $0.99. I won’t buy any more and yet see a definite explosion of box sets (and not just books by the way).

So what does the future hold? Which is the best way to sell a book? Well, think about the old days when we had book stores and libraries. You could go in, browse, flick through the pages and make up your mind. I know, they exist still but not in the same quantities as they used to. And they exist on line I hear you say. But how many allow you to browse the entire book? It should be technologically possible to block several sections of the book while it is being looked at. The Amazon ‘Look Inside’ facility comes close, but never enough. So we need some entrepreneur to come up with an on-line library that stocks quality authors in all genres giving the reader an opportunity to browse and buy. Would it solve the indie road block? I don’t know, but I would like to see some significant change where the good stuff comes to the top. An unanswerable puzzle.

Five weeks to go now and me and Pat will be heading back to England for good. I hope to reinvigorate my writing career and have some ideas running around in my head. Finishing my current WIP would help. Wish me luck!

Puzzles, chaos and planning

n the midst of all this chaos is a writer trying to sell books. I have a book promotion running with Best Indie Books for my novel, HELL’S GATE, but how successful has it been up to now, or will it be? Well, it’s been running for a couple of weeks and I have sold zero. I suppose it all comes down to marketing again. Without a professional approach, or at least a pseudo professional approach, I suppose my sales will reflect my ability as a market man and not the quality of the book. So now it’s about a plan, and this is something I have to leave on the back-burner until we are settled in UK again. I need to bear in mind that the weeks leading up to Christmas, and the few days after, are a good time to promote. So once we have arrived in UK, and I can sneak into my room without my wife knowing, then I can bury my head in promotional work. But it’s not all about paying for an advert to appear on someone’s website: it’s also being able to get the best out of social media marketing. And if, like me, you are a bit of a web dummy, there will be plenty of hurdles to overcome, and most of them will have you calling for help. For example: I tried to download a social media app for my other website (www.michaelparkerbooks.com), hosted by Wix. The e-mail advertising the app came from Wix. When I was asked to enter my e-mail address in order to download the app, I was told that I wasn’t recognised on their system. So how did they manage to send me the e-mail in the first place? But it might be that I have misunderstood the process and hence the need for professional help. I’m waiting for a return message now from Wix.My next difficulty is trying to upload a book jacket to CreateSpace for my title: The Eagle’s Covenant. This is a book that was available on Amazon kindle and Createspace, but because I have taken over the rights for this book, I have had to renew the files. So what’s the problem? I used the original jacket file; one that was used by Createspace, but now they tell me it is unacceptable because there is a bleed problem or something, and I have to adjust it. I’m struggling to do that, and no doubt will have to ask my son, who designed the original jacket, to help me out. All this takes time and often sees me sitting in front of my laptop for hours. And have you noticed how the experts respond when you ask for their help? If it isn’t a list of FAQs that they encourage you to search, it’s an explanation of how to achieve what you want that can only be deciphered by a university graduate or a ten year old grandson or grand-daughter. One day I will be master of all this. I may not be able to sell any books, but as sure as the sun rises I will be able to use the social media like a pro.I often smile at my own disingenuousness (is that a word?) when it comes to competing with my fellow peers in the book world. I thought a blog tour would be a good idea and signed up for one until I discovered I had to read someone’s pornographic romance. I pulled out in the nick of time, particularly when I realised I would have to read the book, promote the author and only get a mention myself. So it has to be a case of back to the drawing board and think seriously about spending some money and giving books away. I’ll do that when I’m back in UK. Now, where was I? Oh yes; back to the plan. Wish me luck!