Making eyes at the bigger prize

July 16^th. 2016

It has been a quiet week for me, with nothing to show in my diary except for one event that had nothing to do with writing. On Monday, my wife received a phone call at two o’clock from the local hospital in Chichester. Would she be available for her cataract operation that afternoon? Yes, I says (demonstrative!). So we’re there at three o’clock and home by six — cataract done. No time to worry, no long wait for the op. Now she can see through that eye almost perfectly and is looking forward to getting the other eye done. Marvellous.

Back to the writing and promoting. My WIP progresses and I have reached 35,000 words. I’m making bullet points as I go along because there are key elements in the story that may not be too obvious to the reader, and I will need to remember where they are so I can pull them all in together at the end. I have twenty nine so far after sixty pages, which may seem a lot, but in some cases they are reminders about an incident that I will need to revisit. Naturally some of these will be dealt with before the denouement; they’ll have to otherwise I’ll end up with a kind of table of events and their results. But the plot thickens and there will be more bodies, of that I have no doubt.

I mentioned my Facebook campaign in my previous post. So far it has been fairly successful with regard to sign-ups. My subscriber list now sits at a shade below 1000. When my campaign began eleven days ago, I had about 550 subscribers. That was an organic growth of about one a day from the beginning in March, last year. Now, after an initial surge, I am adding on average about 15 per day. I get no financial return on this because the subscribers are downloading The Devil’s Trinity for free, but I hope that in time they will begin buying some of my other titles and also letting their reader friends know what a spiffing writer I am! I haven’t looked in on Mark Dawson’s Facebook course for a few days, but will need to get back to it to see how much longer I should hold this campaign. I am tempted to start a new one with a couple of ads aimed at America and UK separately. Not sure yet.

My low price promotion for Hell’s Gate yielded one sale last week. This is the problem with scattergun marketing; not aiming at the right targets or using the wrong weapon (promoter) to fire the shots. One of my titles sold forty six copies in four weeks, that’s without any promotion. So the poor attempt last week was down to — who or what, me or the choice of promoter? But the reality must be my standing as an author. If I’m good, more people will want to read my stuff. If I’m bad, they won’t. I believe my reviews stand up against the kind of reviews I’ve seen for other authors, so I must hope my lengthening subscribers list will eventually lead to a boost in sales. It’s simply a case of getting it right. Wish me luck!