Supporting Cancer research and KIA car sales

August 27^th 2016

I had an interesting week, what with a trip to the dentist to begin with and finishing by ordering a new car. In between I was at Arundel in West Sussex doing my shift on the CHINDI book stall supporting Cancer research in the UK as part of the Arundel festival. I also managed to publish my three book box set on Amazon, but have so far failed to get it right for Draft2Digital, but more of that later. Oh, and I did manage to write a bit. For the benefit of Carol, who I know reads this blog, I added another 500 words yesterday, just to make sure I’m ahead of you!

I was able to resolve the formatting problem I had with the middle novel of my three book box set. To do that, I had to save the Word doc. in html as a web filtered document. This took me back to the early days of Kindle when it was necessary to go that route before converting to Kindle. Even then you had more work to do to get it right. Now, thankfully, Amazon convert the document automatically (unless you have an ancient document that their conversion software doesn’t like).

With D2D it’s a whole new ball game. I already have my titles with them and have had no conversion problems that I know of, but for some reason the box set came out all wrong. I have been in touch with D2D who have pointed me in the right direction. Hopefully I’ll have it right within a couple of days.

The book stall at Arundel has proved eventful and reasonably successful for the CHINDI group. We are raising money in support of Cancer Research UK and attracting some rewarding interest. About four of our authors are doing well. I have sold two paperbacks to date (three days to go), but I don’t look at it as a competition between us, simply a joint effort to promote our group and raise money for charity.

The weather has been good; too hot much of the time for the poor book sellers, but it does lift your spirits. My spirits were lifted by a small result after e-mailing my subscribers with the news of my box set. I sold eleven that day (Kindle). That may not sound like a lot, but the three books are my lowest sellers, and I’m trying to persuade people that my stand alone, cross genre novels are really worth reading, hence the reason I lumped them together and launched them at a rock bottom price. I’ll be spending some money next month on a Facebook advert, and hopefully visitors to my website will be intrigued and persuaded by the offer.

The car? Well, I had to finally admit to myself that my KIA Sportage was really too big for me and Pat, and it’s a devil of a car to park straight! My boy racer days are over and I have to be sensible, so we went to KIA this morning and ordered a sensible, Kia Venga automatic. Had a test drive and liked it immensely. Pat can actually see out of the front windscreen without having to stretch her neck, and the seat height for the two of us is just about right. We have to wait a while though because there are no Infra Red Venga automatics available, so it’s likely to be November before it turns up. Must look after my Sportage now until the deal is done. Wish me luck!