A Busy, Busy Boy

I missed the July blog deliberately for all sorts of reasons, which is why I was determined not to let August go without at least writing something. A lot has happened in the last eight weeks: medical consultations, lengthy emails, books, family visit, wedding (not mine), having a friend stay with me for a couple of weeks, and eventually agreeing to sign up with a book marketer through Reedsy. Oh, and getting into step with the modern world by buying an Alexa and an Amazon TV Fire stick.

At the beginning of August, my ‘International’ family arrived for my grandson Adam’s marriage to his fiancée, Agata. What can I say? It was a really great few days. I did no work on my advertising campaigns, which was to be expected. After the wedding was over and the family had departed, I went up to Lincolnshire and brought my friend, Pauline, down here for a ten day holiday. We do this every year. The only fly in the ointment was the heatwave, which prevented us from doing much touring around. But we managed to meet family and friends, have an evening out, meet my son, Terry and his wife, Claire, at Petworth for lunch, so all in all it turned out okay for us. I took Pauline home, which more or less brought me to the end of the month.

I’ve been communicating with two authors: Lindsay Buroker in Seattle, and Marian Keyes in Ireland. The talk has been about me, my books, my life and one or two other things. The chats have come to an end now, but they have been worthwhile.

Another connection I made, deliberately, was with Leslie Sainty, a book marketer who works through Reedsy. Leslie will be taking over the Facebook campaigns for my WW2 series. This will begin at the end of September. Lesley sent me a book marketing audit, which was very comprehensive, pointing out ways in which I could improve one or two things. One thing she said about my books is that with all the back titles I have, it was a book marketer’s dream. Who knows? One day I may be a lot higher up the rankings than I am now.

And curiously, I have been steered towards a non-fiction literary agent in the oddest way. I received an email from a woman (Mary Colgan) wanting to know if I would like my non-fiction work published in Chronicle Books. I ignored the email because I get several of these every day, and none of them ever mention which book they are talking about.

Anyway, some days later I received the email again, but as a reminder. I replied, politely, and said I wasn’t interested. Mary got back to me and suggested I send her the links to my non-fiction books.  I had nothing to lose, and the only two books I would offer probably wouldn’t sell anyway. I told her that it would be a waste of time, but I gave her the links. She replied and suggested I get in touch with a particular literary agent, telling this agent I had been referred by her. This I did and the consequence is that this agency now have two non-fiction books of mine, which they would almost certainly have rejected out of hand. I never intended these for mass publication anyway. I’m not expecting anything to come of this, so I have nothing to lose.

Another avenue I’m exploring is writing a sequel to The Eagle’s Covenant (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00LZRKJ4O), something I half planned a few years ago but gave up on the idea. It came about because I was checking my book sales over the last ten years (for another reason), and found out, quite to my surprise, that The Eagle’s Covenant had sold 22,000 books. It happens to be the highest of all my books. Whether I’ll get round to doing it of course, is a different matter. One day, maybe.

I’ve no campaigns running now. My WW2 books are trickling along, notching up a couple of sales every day and adding to the page reads number. If I had the time and the money, I would probably invest both those things to capitalise on the attention I’m getting. But I’m still down there among the bottom feeders on Amazon, but hopefully that could change. It will be a few months before I’m likely to see anything significant, so I’ll just soldier on keeping bodynd soul together and hoping for the best. Wish me luck!

                                                                                                                   Michael Parker