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…
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…
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…
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…
I haven’t advertised my books for a while, kinda horrified at the amount of money I was spending. But sales stagnate when I stop – that’s business I guess. At least the monthly payments from Amazon are staying marginally ahead of advertising spend. So I’ve set up a few campaigns this morning, mostly for Glasdrum,…
I gave up many precious book-writing hours a week ago to submit my two published novels to various vetted book review sites. According to Author advice, this is what I should be doing. It was on my To Do list for a long time, and now it’s underway. But it’s left an unpleasant taste in my…
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