Monday 30 July 2012

Writer's Block

The last few months have been difficult.

Perhaps I could have said that at almost any point in my recent life... I don't know. Anyway, in this case, having been made redundant last March, and still being out of work now (with a family to support) is not conducive to getting a good night's sleep, and as the time ticks past, it's not getting any easier!

I mention this, not in the hope of garnering sympathy, but so that I can try to explain somthing of my writing habits. I'd thought (or at least hoped) that some of the last few months would have been spent writing my latest novel - I know I've also been working on the house (in case I have to sell it, but the work needs doing anyway), but that doesn't take up all of the day. And yet I have hardly been able to bring myself to write a word in four months. What a waste!

Looking back though, this was entirely predictable. I've been here before. I can write when I'm happy, when I'm sad, when I'm neither. But I don't seem able to write when I'm worried - preoccupied with something that seems bigger than me - when I feel that I've lost control of my life, and it's been taken over by some sort of malevolent force...

It's a shame - The Watchmaker's Chain was coming on well. I'd written eight chapters - my main character had taken shape, he'd introduced several other significant characters, been presented with some shocking news which had developed into a lot of questions that demanded answers, and... well, you get the idea. Anyway, at the end of last year I'd left things rather up in the air, and poised to explode in several interesting directions, and there they've stayed.

I've managed to read it through (in the hope that I would be inspired to write again), and I did expand the last chapter a little (to explain some things that needed explaining) but so far the whole writing thing just doesn't want to happen.

I'd love to think that my next post will start with 'I've written chapter nine...', and perhaps it will. I hope so. As I say, I've been here before, and I know that I sometimes have to have a break from writing, but always come back to it, refreshed and itching to be at it. Failing that, perhaps my next post will start with 'I've got a new job...'.

Saturday 21 July 2012

An Amazon Adventure (Part 8)

I think I'd better start by explaining up front that I'm probably going to have to reduce the frequency of my posts. Unfortunately, there are only twenty-four hours in each of my days (or so I'm told), and into those hours I also have to fit rather a lot of other things (writing my next book, trying to sell the last one, renovating an old house, being a husband/father, trying to find a job, and countless other things - and not necesarily in that order).

Blogger lets me see how many views my blogs are getting, so I have a pretty good idea how popular/lacking in popularity they are - I have two blogs here (this one plus The Trenchfoote Legacy) and an Author Blog on the excellent Goodreads website. There has been a constant trickle of views over the last month to my two Blogger sites, but it appears that I have a small number of interested individuals (and thank you if you're one of them) who return every so often to read my new posts. I'd love to keep posting every couple of days, but I just can't sustain that level, given the other priorities I have to manage as well. If you are one of the interested ones then I hope you will still continue to find posts here to entertain/inform you, even if they are less frequent than before.

Being new to blogging (and not having followed any myself before) I don't know whether it's normal not to receive any comments on your blog. It has to be said that I haven't particularly encouraged contributions from readers to this blog (although perhaps The Trenchfoote Legacy was specifically intended to encourage reader participation), and if no one has comments to make then that's fine, but without feedback I can't tell whether what I'm posting is of any real interest, or whether there are areas you might like me to cover as well or instead.

So if you do have any thoughts, suggestions, questions or contributions you'd like to make about my books, my approach to writing or other related stuff then I'd be happy to hear them.

In the meantime, a brief update on where The Testing of Archie Rathbone is currently:

A few days ago I received an update on myAlex Hunter (Meet the Authors) thread on Goodreads, thanking me for my book (the writer having taken a chance on it as it was available free during a two day promotion). This person explained that the book wasn't one they'd normally have chosen to read but had really enjoyed it (against expectations). They went on to write a similarly complimentary review on both the Goodreads and Amazon sites.

This wasn't The Testing of Archie Rathbone's first review, and nor was it the highest rating it has received, but it was the first that I could categorically say had been unbiassed and objective. It's not that the other reviews aren't objective - I'm sure they are - but even I can't play down a review from someone who's never met me, seen me, or didn't even know who I was before downloading my book.

The Testing of Archie Rathbone it currently languishing on Amazon.co.uk at around the #50,000 rating mark (last night inexplicably it went from around #160,000 up to #27,000, but this morning back down to #47,000), and consequently it's showing up reasonably well on UK searches. The US (Amazon.com) rating is nowhere near as good, but it has yet to 'sell' a copy there, to date only having been downloaded when free.

So, at least one independent review suggests that it's not complete rubbish (oh, alright then - that it's a good book), it's currently priced at £1.99 on Amazon.co.uk (not dirt cheap, but hopefully affordable), and it should nw be showing up on searches, so...

We shall see.

Thursday 19 July 2012

Is your book any good?

Seriously though - how do you know? Let's face it, when you're writing a book (or at least when I'm writing a book) you start off with heaps of enthusiasm (without which the book would never get written), and if you're lucky, you manage to fight off the mid-book blues, the writer's block and the 'I've just had another great idea for a book' inspiration that strikes at just the wrong moment, and get to that important final THE END.

But unless you are supremely self-confident (and simply know that your book is brilliant, regardless of what the critics might say), the reality is that without feedback you just don't know. So what do we do? We get our friends and relatives to read our work, and wait to hear their feedback. But it's a brave member of that group that will tell you the unvarnished truth, at least if it's bad!

So there you are - you've written your tome, you've taken into account whatever feedback you can get your hands on, and doubtless you've applied all relevant filters to that (don't believe that...he's only saying that because it's me...she would say that because she doesn't like sci-fi...etc) and you're left at that uncomfortable point in a book's life - do you publish or not? Well you do, of course.

That's the real crunch point - that's when you find out what (if anything) your proto-readers think of your creation. I say if anything, because first of all you've got to persuade someone to take the plunge - to buy or download your book, to open the cover and read, and to keep reading until they too reach THE END. Not only that, but they've also then got to comit that unselfish act of submitting feedback.

I'll leave you to look back through that list (including the bits I've missed out or glossed over) and count the number of points at which the whole process can fall flat, but let's just agree that it's fraught with potential for failure. For many, the thought of writing a book is daunting - thousands upon thousands of words, hundreds of pages - it's not for everyone. It doesn't end there either - you ask just about any writer, or anyone who writes about how to write and they'll almost certainly tell you that you have to redraft. Not just once, or twice, or three times...but lots and lots of times - you have to hone the plot, fine-tune the characters, cut the surplus, sometimes even scrap whole sections and rewrite them. Eventually, if you're sufficiently determined, you get to the point where you press the 'Publish' button. (That's always assuming that like me, you're going to publish an ebook, and to publish it yourself. If you're going to approach literary agents or publishers then there are another couple of chapters to this painful process.)

The point is though that people assume that the writing part is the difficult bit. It's not that writing isn't difficult, or hard work, it's just that it doesn't end there - so we're back to the point where we're trying to get feedback.

Without feedback, many potential readers won't buy a book.
If potential readers won't buy a book then they can't give feedback on it.

I'm sure you can see my point.

So let's assume that your precious creation is sitting there, waiting for someone to read it. But they don't. What does this tell you about your pride and joy? What can you conclude? Can you assume that it's no good - that all those friends and family members who read your work only told you what they thought you wanted to hear? Is it really just that there was no way of knowing that you just don't (yet) have what it takes - until now...?

Well, all of those are possible of course. But until someone with an unbiassed viewpoint takes the plunge, reads your book, and then tells everyone what they thought, only then can you really know.

Wednesday 18 July 2012

More about The Testing of Archie Rathbone

Over the last few months I've imposed on the good will and generosity of friends and family by asking them to proof-read The Testing of Archie Rathbone for me. They have done this without complaint, and have also been brave enough (at my insistence) to give me feedback, even when it might not have been what I wanted to hear.

It occurs to me though that without realising it, they have also provided another great service, in that they have asked me questions along the way - some of them ones I would have expected, and others that caught me a little by surprise.

So, for anyone who looks at my book and wants to know more, perhaps these questions and answers will help. If however there are any questions you'd like to ask (that aren't covered here) then feel free to ask me by commenting on this blog, or on my GoodReads Meet the authors thread
Alex Hunter thread.

Where did you get the inspiration for The Testing of Archie Rathbone?
I started writing this book in 2007, so it's difficult to remember exactly, but two things stick in my mind - firstly, I have a clear memory of sitting at my desk, gazing out of the window and thinking 'what would happen if you woke up one day to find yourself somewhere completely alien to you, with no memory of how you'd got there? What would you do? How would you go about getting back home?' That starting point begged loads of other questions about who was responsible, what their motives were and so on. The other clear memory I have is of a flash of inspiration for some character names - Bolt, Upright & Clench. I don't think I even had a clear idea as to who these characters would turn out to be, just that they would be important to the plot. The rest of the story all followed from those starting points.

Do you have your plots planned out before you start to write?
No, or at least not in detail. I've read about writers who approach writing in that way, but I find that too much planning gets in the way of the creative flow. That said, although as I say it doesn't come naturally to me, there are times when you have to plan your plot structure very carefully. Although The Testing of Archie Rathbone doesn't have a particularly complex plot, there are a number of twists and turns, and interdependent strands that needed to be introduced at the right times, and linked in the right ways. It's also really important to drip-feed little hints and clues about what's going on beyond the obvious in order to pose questions for the reader to want to answer, to increase tension, to sustain interest and so on. I don't know if anyone could to that effectively without some careful planning, as you need to know where the plot's heading in order to judge which clues to introduce at which points.
When I started writing the book I'm working on at the moment (The Watchmaker's Chain) I wrote the first sixty or so pages straight off, and then felt compelled to write the very end of the story as I realised how important it was to the rest of the plot. Having done that, the remaining plot will be formed by the beginning and the end! I suppose that for me, no two books require the same approach.

Which writers/books have influenced your writing?
I suppose that's not quite the same as which writers do you particularly like?... Well, my sense of humour has been influenced by Monty Python, but I don't think there's much evidence of it in my writing. I was a teenager when the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy was first broadcast on the radio, and I suspect that there are hints of that influence in The Testing of Archie Rathbone (one of the book's reviewers flatteringly commented that Archie Rathbone was "...very much the Ford Prefect of the twenty-first century...", but I certainly didn't set out to creat something in someone else's style). I also loved the Reggie Perrin novels of David Nobbs, but again I'm not conscious of being influenced by him. Although The Testing of Archie rathbone wasn't the first humorous novel I've written, I've written in other genres too - The Watchmaker's Chain is much more of a science fiction novel. On that side, I suppose I read quite a few sci-fi writers when I was younger - Isaac Azimov, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, John Wyndham foremost among them.

Your writing is full of characters with amusing names - what's the thinking behind that?
I suppose I'll have to blame Charles Dickens for that. His writing depends on the use of names that in some way tell yuo about the character they belong to. Sometimes he used these to provide humour as well, but even in his non-humour fiction he seldom missed an opportunity to use a character's name to add colour. I don't set out to be quite a calculating as that, but if I'm writing something that I want to make the reader smile then my characters' names are a good place to start.

Did you set out to write this book for a particular age group?
No, but then in most cases I write a story because it gets inside my head and won't leave me alone until I give in. I did once set out to write a chidren's story, but that was the exception. I suspect that whatever age group(s) The Testing of Archie Rathbone appeals to is largely accidental, or at least a product of my own tastes.

Do you plan to write a sequel or a prequel?
I have thought about it. Although I did try t make sure that most of the loose ends were neatly tied up at the end of the book, it wouldn't be difficult to envisage a little judicious unravelling. There are also lots of questions that could be asked about the lives some of the characters lead before the book starts. That said, I have no plans at the moment.

What do you find easiest and hardest about writing books?
Easiest - thinking of ideas for stories, particularly the start of the plot.
Hardest - being objective about what I've written (able to tell how it is likely to appear to others), dealing with writer's block.

Sunday 15 July 2012

An Amazon Adventure (Part 7)

July Promotion Update


I thought I'd update you on how The Testing of Archie Rathbone is doing. A two day free promotion on Amazon has just come to an end, and resulted in about fifty downloads. I don't have much information to go on, but from what little I do have that's a pretty poor showing (but maybe all the promotions I don't hear about remain a secret precisely because they don't achieve good results).

Several things have changed recently though:

For a start (and perhaps most importantly) the book now has three reviews on Amazon and as these are positive, perhaps in time they will encourage potential readers to take a chance. (If you haven't already had a look, and there's even a remote possibility that you might be interested in downloading my book, then please read them.)

Secondly, I've tried a few experimental changes in Amazon tag words for the book in the hope that these changes will make it a little easier to find.

Thirdly, there's been a change in the way TTOAR is showing 'customers who bought this item also bought...' - after I ran the previous free promotion (in June) there were only half a dozen books linked with it, and they were almost exclusively free too. This suggested to me that my book had only been picked up because it was priced at £0.00 (or $0.00 if you're the other side of the Pond - apologies to those of you in Russia, Germany and elsewhere). This promotion has resulted in a list of 34 linked books that are predominantly not free, suggesting that whoever downloaded TTOAR found it as a result of searching for something they wanted to read, rather than something that was just free. The other thing I notice from the list of linked books is that at least some of them are of a similar genre, so perhaps my changed tags words are working better.

To those of you who are of a cynical persuasion this may all seem a little like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic - The Testing of Archie Rathbone doesn't show much sign of becoming even a better seller, let alone a best seller! Perhaps you're right.

Either way, if you were one of the generous souls who has downloaded The Testing of Archie Rathbone (there are now over a hundred of you out there somewhere), then I hope you enjoy it, and if you do and would be kind enough to add a review and rating on Amazon then I'd be very grateful.

Friday 13 July 2012

The Watchmaker's Chain

Is it me, or has there been an increasing trend of late for books to be written as part of a series?

I suppose the reasons for doing this are fairly self-evident, and difficult to argue against - if you have a successful book then producing a series of sequels allows each to benefit from the exposure of the one that precedes it - and of course having developed a strong character (or characters) in one book that you can then develop further in subsequent ones obviously has advantages over starting from scratch each time.

I'm certainly not going to suggest that this is in any way a less worthy approach to writing - readers might buy a second book on the strength of a first, but they'll soon say what they think if it's rubbish, so the writer still has to work hard for their readers' loyalty. The thing is though - for me at least - so far, I haven't actually chosen what I'm going to write about - it's always chosen me (as it were).

I've written before about how I love waiting to see how a plot will develop once I've given it a bit of a helping hand. It's a bit like tipping over that first domino and watching the chain reaction that ensues. The way I come up with ideas for books is a bit like that too, but only a bit. Sending the dominoes toppling requires a conscious and premeditated act on your part, but that's not how my ideas for books arise, (even though that's part of how the plot then develops). For me, the process that gives rise to that initial eureka moment is not (or at least until now hasn't been) a conscious one.

Somewhere in the dark and dusty recesses of my mind there's a tiny office with a door marked 'Private', in which the inspiration machine chugs away, sifting information, conjuring original thoughts and looking for the seeds of stories. Those seeds are planted in what in my brain passes for fertile soil - they are tended and watered, and then, when the moment is right some sort of mental minion gives my conscious self a sharp nudge before quietly but forcefully informing me that here is another story that needs to be written.

But should it always be like that?

I've been wondering about this for a few months now - on and off. I've wondered whether The Testing of Archie Rathbone has a sequel in it, and I confess that the jury's still out. To a large extent I know that the book readers of the world occupy the majority of the seats on that jury, because it's fairly safe to say that if the current book doesn't sell then I probably wouldn't venture a second. That said though, although most of the strands of the plot are resolved by the end of the book, there is always the question of what happened next? and equally, what happened before the book started?

In the meantime though long before I'd even finished writing The Testing of Archie Rathbone one of those mental minions came to me with another story that had to be told. Shortly afterwards I started to write The Watchmaker's Chain, and the dominoes started to tumble.

Monday 9 July 2012

An Amazon Adventure (Part 6)

July is showing no sign of bucking the trend where this country's (the UK's) dreadful summer weather is concerned, and I know that other countries are faring badly too. This miserable showing started me wondering several weeks ago whether perhaps there is a link between a country's climate and the literature its writers produce. If so, then as the climate changes, should we also expect the writing to change too?

Although I've read fairly widely by some people's standards, I'm quite sure I'm not qualified to comment on the writing and writers of other nations. I'll probably expand on this idea in a subsequent post, but if it's to be a meaningful 'discussion' then I may have to rely on your contributions to it!

Meanwhile, I thought it was time to return to the perennial subject of my successes and failures in trying to get The Testing of Archie Rathbone convincingly off the starting blocks.

You may be aware that by my own admission this book has not exactly been a roaring success so far. There has been a mere scattering of downloads, and most of those were when the book was available free of charge. The highest ranking it has achieved on Amazon's ebook store was about 25000, and it currently languishes at around 115000 (after more than a week without a single further download).

Am I disheartened? Well certainly I was, but there's only so much one can do about an ebook that doesn't sell, and although I do still have a few things left I can try, I do feel I'm approaching the very bottom of the barrel, and will hear the sound of scraping at any moment!

There is a small morsel of comfort that I can draw from the situation today though - I notice with considerable gratitude that someone has read my book and been kind enough to post a review on the Amazon Kindle site. Moreover, the review was complimentary and they gave it a positive score as well. Best of all (in my mind) is that this review seems to have come from a teenager - my (and the book's) target audience. Until that review was posted, I had no real objective basis for supposing that the main reason my book hadn't sold wasn't that it just isn't good enough. At least one person likes it, so perhaps there's still hope...

What else have I been doing to promote The Testing of Archie Rathbone? Well, for those of you who have been following my voyage through the turbulent seas of self publishing, you'll know that the greatest battle has been getting the book to show up sufficiently high in people's selections. It doesn't matter how good a book is if no one can find it to read it. My first free promotion did (as I've said) produced a flurry of downloads, but either my book is now sitting in the darkest recesses of assorted Kindles, gathering cyber-dust, or those who downloaded it didn't like it (or at least not enough to write a review).

Anyway, I have decided to carry out a second free promotion this coming weekend, and it will be interesting to see whether the recently added review encourages any readers to take a punt. I shall report back to you on this in due course.

In the meantime, (as reported in my previous post) I'm getting a little twitchy from not having done any writing for too long. I had written the first sixty (and the last five!) pages of my next novel when I decided to divert my attentions to publishing The Testing of Archie Rathbone, so over the weekend I've been reminding myself what I'd written. It's an interesting feeling actually - I suppose it's a bit like giving a hound a sniff of the scent you want it to follow - my mind has had a sniff of the plot so far and now it's straining to be off...

Thursday 5 July 2012

Mind over Mind

I've been thinking about that last post - do I really believe that I write primarily for myself?

Well, as I said, the evidence certainly seems to support that conclusion as it took me more than twenty-five years even to consider trying to get anything I'd written published. That said, I suppose I did occasionally ask friends or family to read what I'd written...

I think there's another factor involved. Let me try to explain:

Have you ever been emersed in a book and read a passage that has made you experience an intense emotion? Or have you read a passage that evokes the sights, smells and other sensory delights of a place you've never visited, but leaves you feeling you now have? Have you picked up a book feeling sad but put it down feeling happy - or vice versa? In any of these instances, have you ever gone back over the text and tried to see where the words were that had such a profound effect on you?

There are many things in life that can be broken down to their component parts in order to understand them - in order to allow us to analyse the processes necessary to recreate them - to allow others to replicate the same end result, time after time. You can follow instructions to produce the perfect boiled egg, you can buy a manual that will tell you how to construct a car, or follow a textbook to learn how to use a wordprocessor. But can you construct an inspirational piece of prose? Can you provide instructions that will make the difference between a descriptive piece of text, and one that makes the reader experience an emotional response, but (and this is critical) do it in a way that isn't obvious to the reader?

There are loads of teach yourself how to write books out there - I've read some of them, and they were very good. They offer advice about plot structure, characterisation, maintaining suspense and a hundred other important considerations when constructing your novel. But what (in my experience at least, and in my humble opinion) they can't do is to tell you how to create that magic.

Let me go back to that inspirational text... There is (was, sadly) a writer who produced a series of thirteen books, all about the same character, all set in the Victorian era. I have every one of those books, and periodically I start at the first one and work my way through the lot. They are highly readable, commercial, and not (on the face of it) likely candidates for receiving praise for their literary content. There are lots of reasons why I like those books, but one of them is their ability to transport me back to a time, and to places I have never experienced. This is a compliment for any book I suppose, but what (for me) makes these books rise above the norm is that when I go back and look at the text I've read, there doesn't appear to be sufficient description to have resulted in the clear mental image that has resulted. I feel the detail, my senses tell me that I've experienced something colourful dramatic, new, but when I look at the words, there's no sign. It's like looking at an impressionist painting - stand too close and all you see is individual brush-strokes, daubs of paint - but when you stand far enough away to see the whole, you feel you can see every intricate detail, even though you know those details aren't actually there.

Anyone who's read about how to write will probably have read that 'less is more' - don't use too many adjectives, adverbs etc... and of course the human mind is very good at filling in gaps, so there's nothing new there either. For me, the genius is in knowing which words to leave in, and which to leave out, and if there's a set of instructions somewhere that tells you that then someone's succeeded in carrying out alchemy!

So, going back to where I started - I do still maintain that I write for myself, but over the years I've come to appreciate good writing more, and so I have strived to create good writing myself. One aspect of what I consider good writing is that which provokes a response in the reader (emotional perhaps, or some other sensory reaction), but where the effect of the writing is greater than the sum of the component words.

I suppose that most (if not all) writing makes us feel. We experience something. Good writing (in my opinion) does it more, and does it better, and usually with fewer (better chosen) words.

I write for many reasons - first and foremost I love inventing and telling stories, but also I write so that I can get better at it. I'd like to be able to make readers feel. I'd like to know that someone has read something I've written and as a result has felt that they have been somewhere they'd never been before. I'm not talking about what's generally regarded as Literary Fiction - any novel can transport the reader, whether it's to a different place, a different time, or to experience existence as a different person.

I may still write for myself, but unless others read what I write then I'll never know if I'm getting closer to my goal...

Tuesday 3 July 2012

Why Write?

A good question, or so it seems to me...

I mean, ok there are people who write and you could be forgiven for assuming that they do it for the money, but that's like saying that Picasso painted for the money, and anyway what about the rest? The vast majority of people who write never make any useful money out of it, but still they write.

Is it like buying lottery tickets then? Do we write in the hope that the next book will be the one - the best-seller that makes millions - the one that will change our lives for ever...? Well, maybe, but I'm far from convinced.

As in most things I'm not qualified to comment on why other people write, but I know what motivates me... well I think I do.

Let me start by telling you what doesn't motivate me to write. I don't write for the money - I've been writing for thirty years and only even started to contemplate trying to get something published in the last twelve months. To be frank, the sales of The Testing of Archie Rathbone wouldn't pay for a packet of cigarettes (just as well I don't smoke I suppose). I'm not motivated to write by a need for external validation - most of what I've written has never been read by anyone other than me, and the rest has only had a very narrow audience.

So if it isn't acclaim, and it isn't money, then what...? Is it the thrill of seeing your name on the cover of a book? Is it the hope of some sort of imortality - leaving something behind for posterity? These things are all factors I'm sure, but none of them on its own persuades me to write.

I'm afraid that this is going to sound pretentious, but however uncomfortable I may feel in saying it, I know it's true: One reason I write is that it's a form of self-expression. For some people it's music, for some it's painting, for others it's kicking a football around a field that lets them feel that they know who they are, and tells anyone else who's interested. For me, it's writing. That said though, it's not that my stories tell the reader much about me (though I suppose that might be the case), more that the creative process itself acts as a form of therapy - a release of the pressures of modern existence.

Over the years (and increasingly so more recently) I've found that if I go for long periods without writing (more than a month or two) then I start to feel unsettled - I experience very real withdrawal symptoms. The pressure starts to build...

Now you may be wondering what's brought on this self-analysis - why all the navel-gazing? Well, I suppose I feel that if I were you, and I'd read my earlier posts about my attempts to get my novel selling on Amazon I'd be beginning to wonder - why bother? I'd estimate that The Testing of Archie Rathbone must have taken at least six months to write (if you include all the redrafting and other associated activities). Based on current showing, it looks as though downloads are going to struggle to make it into three figures (and the majority to date have been free of charge) so you can work out for yourself that writing (in this case at least) doesn't pay much per hour!

So, for me at leat, that's the answer - the reason I write - I need to. I can go for days, weeks without letting my mind emerse itself in that heady, intoxicating creative smog, and then one day I'll suddenly become aware of feeling a little edgey. I won't know why at the start, and it will just linger for a few days, getting steadily more pressing, insistent, harder to ignore. Then the penny will drop - realisation will dawn, and I'll look for opportunities to start writing. Sometimes it won't be possible - after completing the first draft of The Testing of Archie Rathbone I had to force myself to carry out several redrafts, but after the initial creative process has run its course these largely editorial exercises are staid and suffocating by comparison. Unhappily then, the clock that times when I'll need my next fix usually starts its count soon after the first draft is filed...

It's been quite a while since I last did any writing. Although I had written the first sixty pages of my next novel when I decided to go back and put the effort into getting The Testing of Archie Rathbone ready for publication, that was last year.

And now? Now I'm starting to feel edgey...

Monday 2 July 2012

An Amazon Adventure (Part 5)

Well I can't claim that as an unqualified success!

First, some figures: Over the entire promotional 48 hour period about fifty copies of The Testing of Archie Rathbone were downloaded (free of charge). Of those, eighty percent were downloaded in the USA, the remaining twenty percent downloaded by Amazon's UK customers. Unfortunately I didn't have access to the internet over the weekend so I couldn't check to see what the book's rating was as a result of these downloads. At the end of the promotional period the price returns to what it was prior to it starting, so it's only possible to see its paid ranking (currently about eighty-nine thousandth).

So what conclusions do I draw from this exercise?

Well, for starters, I hadn't realised that any improvement in ranking would only apply to the 'free of charge' league table, so in terms of improving the book's standing in the paid list this has been a fruitless exercise. That said, there are other potential benefits, and they are ones that may take a little time to materialise (if indeed they do):

Firstly, any Amazon customers who have downloaded my book, and also download other books, may contribute to the 'customers who bought this also bought...' information. As a result, The Testing of Archie Rathbone may appear on people's searches as an incidental by-product.

Secondly, there are now over fifty more copies of The Testing of Archie Rathbone out there than there were a few days ago. Hopefully some of the people who downloaded the book will read it, and some of those who read it will write a review. I realise that I'm piling up the 'hopefully's but hopefully any reviews will be positive, and these in turn may entice potential customers to buy the book.

Coming back to the low number of downloads; I can't pretend I wasn't disappointed at the level of interest shown, particularly as I've heard of other similar promotions resulting in thousands of downloads. Unfortunately I'm not sufficiently well-informed to be able to judge whether this poor showing was as a result of the quality of the book, the cover, the blurb, or perhaps just poor marketing on my part. Worse still, I don't suppose I shall ever know.

Anyway, the next step in this process is to see if any of the potential benefits do materialise. How long that might take, I just don't know, but I'll share the results (and my reactions to them) with you.

In the meantime, I can at least report a very small trickle of new sales since the promotion ended. Whether or not that will be sustained, only time will tell...