Finding reviews, sales and publicity.

January 17, 2015

I’m in the process of re-publishing seven of my titles which up until now have been published under the name of Acclaimed Books Ltd. The reason is simple: I want to manage my own titles now that me and my wife have settled back in UK. One of the problems with changing the name of the publisher — in this case from AB.c to Michael Parker — is that any reviews accumulated can be lost unless you keep the same ISBN number and don’t change the edition number. I learned the hard way with my first title and lost the reviews. But another oddity has cropped up: I have a different number of reviews for my titles depending on which Amazon site I log onto. In US for instance, my latest upload, Roselli’s Gold, has thirteen reviews, with an average showing of around four stars. But in UK there is only one review. It makes me wonder if my reviews are determined by the website from where the titles are purchased. I’ll have to ask Amazon. I suspect that my ‘readership’ in UK is very low, and I’m hoping that now I am living back in England, I can build my following.

I was once advised by someone in publishing that unless you’re on to a major thing with a publisher; the only way to build is to begin locally. It has to be the way now for a lot of self-published writers, and to begin my building project I am hoping that membership of the Chichester Independent Writers group will help me do that. I’ve only attended one meeting so far, but I am impressed with the current members who have achieved something quite significant in the twelve months they have been in existence; so much so that I am really looking forward to being a part of their programme for 2015.

I do feel as though I have a foot in two camps though, because I am traditionally published as well as being an independent. My latest novel, Past Imperfect, will be released on January 30^th. while my latest title to be uploaded as an indie is Roselli’s Gold. Although I have seven titles on Amazon for which I own the rights, until now all seven have been published by Acclaimed Books Ltd. Now three of them have me as the publisher, and within a couple of months I expect to have all seven under my name. I am also using Smashwords because I want my titles available on as many platforms as possible, and Smashwords are bigger than Amazon when it comes to e-books, according to their statistics. Can you believe statistics?

I have reached something of a milestone with my current manuscript: I have run out of ideas! I finished transferring the 50,000 words I had completed thus far to Scrivener and now have no idea where or how to take the story forward. My wife says that I am like this with all my books, and this one is no different. She could be right, but I am concerned about this one because I started it about three years ago, interrupting it to write Past Imperfect. Oh the things we writers put ourselves through.

Looking ahead, I have to pick up on my promotion and social media stuff. Tomorrow I am at hospital for my ongoing cancer treatment, although this is simply medication and not chemo, thank God. And I have a couple of thoughts running around in my head with regard to local publicity etc. Maybe I'll contact some friendly radio stations. Must prepare a sales pitch though and offer my book for review. Wish me luck!