10 years of facebook posts about the battles, sorry I mean delights, of raising 2 boys… 24 Nov 2010 (age 1 & 2) Andrew’s lesson for today: don’t use Robert’s potty as a hat when you don’t like getting your hair shampooed. 6 July 2011 (age 2 & 3) A bit of muffin caught in…
Chapter One – MEGAN Friday, 6 May 2005, 10.30pm Megan was drinking beer in the kitchen with a few friends when her collie, Glen, ran through the open back door with a muddy stick in his mouth. When he dropped it at her feet, she stared in disgust. It wasn’t a stick; it was a…
Prologue The stench made her gag. For a moment she was transfixed by the room’s awfulness; the gloom, the paint peeling off the walls, the thin foam mattress covered by a filthy blanket. Behind her the door slammed and she turned. But it was too late. She heard a bolt being drawn on the other…
Better than nothing? All authors, but especially self-published ones, lament the time and expense required to market books. Your book could be a fabulous read, well-reviewed, and enjoyed by most people who read it… but unless you have a means of making it visible to potential readers, then you won’t sell any. This is an…
Book 3 sagas… In the last year I’ve written 80k words of my third book. That’s an average sized manuscript (both my other novels are about 78k words) so I should be celebrating. But unfortunately those 80k words are spread across two different novels, both of which I’m ditching. So no celebrating just yet. I…
Originally posted on fionamacbain.com:
Ben MacDui, Britain’s second highest peak, was shrouded in mist when my fourteen year old daughter and I set off to climb it. Neither of us were hill walkers – this was a new activity. We had been drifting apart, as mothers and teenage daughters do, and when we weren’t…
Originally posted on Kelly is Reading:
Glasdrum by Fiona MacBain My rating: 5 of 5 stars “Life is not easy for the women of Glasdrum… A skeleton is unearthed, too many walkers are falling to their deaths off mountain cliffs, and the local pub doesn’t know how to make a decent raspberry daiquiri. Single mother…
I published Glasdrum, my second novel, on 1 April 2017. It had taken me about two years to write, and my first novel took me three years. Aha, I thought, a pattern of book-writing efficiency. Logically Book 3 would only take me one year. Nope. Maybe I got the pattern wrong. It’s not 3-2-1, it’s…
Blimey, I haven’t written a blog for 3 months. I’m definitely not getting my money’s worth from the £89 per year I’m paying WordPress for the domain name… I’ve not been blogging because I’m trying to write my third book – but progress is slow. I’d hoped to have finished my first draft by now…
This post might be of interest to fellow Indie Authors who are wondering how to use facebook adverts, although bear in mind I’m a complete novice just guessing my way through it. If you are an expert, please feel free to leave any tips! I’ve been selling my books for almost a year now (I…
I tried to write Book 3 as one document, simply because combining the chapters for the other two books had seemed huge tasks at the time (it really hadn’t been, maybe it had been the last straw at the end of a long process). But around about the 20k word mark of Book 3, the…
Yesterday I gave a talk about my books. In a major book store (Waterstones). As part of a book festival (Ness Book Fest). And people came to listen! It was awesome (from my point of view anyway – I can’t speak for the audience). I was nervous as had been given an hour slot and…
I just put my washing machine on and was thinking about how I only ever use one setting. Even if my life depended on it I don’t think I could be bothered finding out what the difference between all the settings is. It made me think about how we have so many pointless choices to…
Some more book sale number-crunching for those interested… Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing allows authors to offer their ebooks at a discount or free for limited periods of time. The free promo is only available for 5 days out of every 90 days. I can’t find how often the author is allowed to run a discount,…
It’s been ten months since I self-published my first book, Daughter, Disappeared, and six months since the second one, Glasdrum. After a few months I lost track of how many I was selling; it’s surprisingly hard to monitor because the dashboard sales reports are mostly on a rolling 30 day basis and each category of…
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