Ups and Downs

June 11^th. 2016

Interesting week for a couple of reasons: progress with my WIP and our puppy. I have re-worked my novel, and am slowly putting together something that should make a reasonable mystery/thriller. There is still a long way to go of course, but the end of the year is my target. The Skype interview I mentioned in last week’s blog did take place, but not on the day we planned. The Canadian writer, Alexandra Amor (alexandraAmor.com), contacted me on the appointed day, but the transmission link was so poor, we had to abort the interview. However, Alexandra contacted me the following day and it was totally different: good reception and a twenty minute, uninterrupted interview. It will be released on YouTube and Alexandra’s website. I’ll be putting it up once I receive a copy. Although I am very pleased to be interviewed, it’s always too short. I can understand the need for brevity, but when I get the chance to talk about myself and my writing, I could gabble away for hours. Probably bore the pants of a lot of people.

After the article about my latest book, A Dangerous Game, appeared in the local Press, I was contacted by a chap living locally. Like me he was ex RAF and had written a book. We met yesterday in the local pub for an hour and talked about our RAF careers, our civilian jobs and, of course, writing. He hasn’t published his book because he has no idea what to do. I was able to give him plenty of advice on that score. Hopefully, what he is armed with now will help him find a publisher or publish the book himself. I expect to be chatting with him again sometime. He’s about my age, so we have a good many years of life’s experience to fall back on.

I am now a student of Mark Dawson’s Facebook advertising course, and hope to achieve much more than I could possibly achieve on my own. I did create a FB campaign last week before starting Mark’s course, but have since stopped it. It made sense to wait until I had learned more about the intricacies of the advertising game. One promotion I signed up for which isn’t bringing me any real sales, is a year’s link to BookGoSocial. There is a money back guarantee, which I will probably have to invoke, providing the BGS idea of success is not lower than mine. But in the three weeks of daily tweets (eleven or twelve a day), all retweeted, I sold fourteen copies of the promoted book. At the same time I sold eighty six copies of one of my titles over the same period with no promotion at all. So, it isn’t rocket science: the promotion isn’t working. My book will still be shown on their website somewhere, but I can’t see that making much difference.

One surprise I had was the increase in my Facebook connections. The ‘insights’ into my Michael Parker page on FB showed an increase in reach figures of 21,127%. Sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? My post engagement went up by 100% too. This was because of my dalliance with FB advertising. But imagine how much better I could do with Mark Dawson’s advice. Hope it works. Wish me luck!