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...
No comments:
Post a Comment