Lots to talk about this week.

Book Signing Tomorrow

I’ll be at my book signing tomorrow (Saturday 16th Feb, WHSmith Uxbridge High Street from 11am until 3pm). I’m all prepared and the radio interview went out on Wednesday. You can listen / watch along here if you want to see how that went. Feedback has been good so far so I don’t think I made a fool of myself and may be some people would have heard it and turn up!

I’ll be posting plenty of photos on Twitter throughout the day and no doubt I will put a post out about how it went and what I learnt from the experience next week.

Anthology

I submitted a short story, a companion scene in the universe of In The End, and it was accepted. More details to follow!

Bloggers Bash!

I posted about this earlier in the week, but to recap, I’m a judge for a competition to find the best blog with the theme of five as it is the fifth year of the event being hosted in London on 15th June. You don’t have to come to the event to enter the competition, but if you are then say hello as I will be there!

In other news hot off the press, I have been, or rather my blog has been nominated for the Best Book Blog Award, which is just one of the awards being given out at the event. I don’t have much detail, but I’m super proud to be nominated and I get to adorn my site with this shiny badge!

I checked first that I was eligible as I will be judging the competition, not the awards!

Marketing, Advertising & Promotion

Following advice from last week’s post, I’ve put In The End back to £2.99/$2.99 and I’ve also stopped advertising on Amazon. I have been using a very low budget to see how that faired, but it still wasn’t worth it for the volume of sales.

I’m seeking out my audience too. I’ve started joining forums whilst making sure I don’t overtly scream at everyone to buy my book!!

Companion Novella

I posted last week about my ideas for a companion novella to drive mailing list signups and sales to my books. After some amazing advice, I will now be producing a short book containing a mixture of survival / bug out bag guidance and fiction. The content will be based on my blog posts for the Bug Out Bag series, my short stories, flash fiction I posted on Twitter and the first ten chapters of In The End (Which it is important to note, is fully compliant with Kindle Select’s rules as you are allowed to give away up to 10% of the content). I will just need to re-edit to fit the new style and narrative plus formatting an producing a book with photos. More posts to come on that!

Here’s a look at the structure so far:

• About the Author
• Contents
• Introduction
• SECTION 1 (The Set Up)
• Ten Minutes to Go
• Short Story
• Your Ten Minutes are Up
• V1 Kit List
• SECTION 2 (Testing and Refining the Kit)
• Short Story
• Fire – A test for survival
• Very short story
• Cooking for Survival
• Very short story
• Bartering
• Very short story
• Alone on a cold night
• Very short story
• Water Water Everywhere
• Very short story
• Food Glorious Food
• Very short story
• Survival Skills
• Very short story
• When there’s no one to call
• Very short story
• V2 Kit List
• SECTION 3 (Test the Kit as a Whole)
• Putting it to the test
• What if you can’t run (A kit list for your house)
• In The End Chapters 1-10
• Join the discussion and Call to action
• In The End Blurb

I’ve started putting this together when I’m not in the mood for editing and it’s coming along well.

Before The End Progress

The first edit is now done (plot & general structure) and I’ll be finished the second edit today which is just using ProWritingAid to file the edges off the obvious grammar issues. Then it will be a read through and it’s off for manuscript evaluation / development editing and the cover process can start.

That’s me for this week. I think that’s enough and thanks to everyone for their comments last week, more always welcome!