From BT to Infinity, wireless and powerless

February 18^th.

My Wi-Fi became Wi-Fi-less last Monday, due to the incompetence of BT. There probably isn’t the right time to lose your Wi-Fi, unless it’s during the night when you’re asleep. I had decided to change from SKY to BT, and sorted that out over the phone. The planned change was to be 24^th. February. But in their wisdom, BT sent an engineer on the 13^th. to make the change at 8am (eleven days early). He brought an old router and spent an hour and departed an hour later. We went out, came back two hours later, but had no Wi-Fi. Engineer came back and apologised for leaving me with an old router with a dodgy password. I had to phone BT for a router which arrived two days later.

Two days without our modern crutch: Wi-Fi! How we need it. Well, maybe not everyone in the world. My elderly sister doesn’t own a computer and doesn’t need the miracle of Wi-Fi. She wouldn’t know what to do with it anyway. But my two day loss came at the wrong time. It was the beginning of the week when I had arranged to do some cross promotions with two different writers, and also to support the Valentine’s Day competition that my writers’ group, CHINDI (http://www.chindi-authors.co.uk) were running. I felt as though I was letting a lot of people down because of what I had promised to do. I had a huge backlog of work to catch up with, but got there in the end.

The cross promotions I did were with Paula Wynne http://paulawynne.com/the-grottos-secret  and Paul Casselle http://amzn.to/2lu1SkC . I’ve no idea how successful they’ve been, but together those two writers have about 80,000 subscribers they can reach. It’s all subjective at the moment: a case of finding my feet working with other authors this way. I have noticed a slight, daily increase in my book sales, but I can’t dismiss the follow-on effect of my Bookbub promotion. We shall see.

Another let-down was the rejection by Kindle Scout of my latest novel. I wasn’t surprised at all when I received the news, and it was something I expected anyway. Now I can set about publishing my book and get down to some advertising. I haven’t quite worked out how I’ll go about this. However, I do know that once it is published, and Kindle Scout have been informed, they will e-mail all the people who voted for me. With luck some of them will buy the book. That will be a kind of free advertising, courtesy of KDP, that I couldn’t put a price on. I’ll probably use Facebook, but will be looking into doing it through Mailchimp.

Looking ahead to my next book, I have a nodding acquaintance with some ideas, but in truth I don’t see much developing. I have been asked to write a sequel to The Eagle’s Covenant, but that would be difficult. I’m sure those of you who have read the book will know why, but to write it would be one helluva challenge. If I could pull it off, I would be well pleased.

Tomorrow, Sunday 19^th. my box set comes out of Kindle Select. I will use cross-promotions to advertise the set now and at a reasonably low price. It did nothing in KS compared to other results I have read about. I think I managed a total of 1800 pages read over the ninety days, so I can’t consider that a success.

I looked at my sales figures for the last two weeks yesterday, and was surprised to see The Devil’s Trinity was selling more than Roselli’s Gold. The irony is that TDT is available free if the buyer signs up to my subscribers’ list. They can unsubscribe at any time. That way they would have saved £2.99. I’m not complaining though.

If you are reading this and haven’t read The Devil’s Trinity, you can download it at http://eepurl.com/bgYKMj

Looking ahead to next week, there’s nothing in the diary other than my BT TV is due to come on stream! Perhaps they’ll turn up with a load of gear and wonder why I’m now with them. We’ll see. Wish me luck!