Getting 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!