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…
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…
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 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…
I started writing this at 5.30am, having spent the previous hour working through my ‘writer’s’ To Do list. It’s quite long – and writing another book isn’t even on it. One of the tasks is finishing a script for an Xpo North promo clip, which I’ve promised to do for a long time to thank them for the support they’ve…
I am having a fabulous visit home to Glasdrum country (Lochaber on the west coast of Scotland), the highlight of which is getting stocked in the new Highland Bookshop on Fort William High Street (http://www.highlandbookshop.com/). It’s so nice to see a new independent bookshop, and what a fabulous selection they have; I’m honoured to be…
I’m having a weekend of nothing but writing the sequel to Glasdrum, and after the first seven hours I have mixed feeling about how it’s going. One the one hand, after several weeks of painful early morning plotting, I have at last got the whole story for Book 3 mapped out – and this is…
This post is about my experience of using Amazon and facebook advertising for my two self-published novels. Disclaimer: this is not a guide to them in any way – I’m fumbling in the dark here, guessing as I go. It’s just a summary of my own experiences of using them. I’ve been using facebook adverts…
I wrote about my self-publishing journey for the Reedsy blog: https://reedsy.com/stories/debut-authors/fiona-macbain
fionamacbain.com 