This week has been all about writing, oh and a load of other stuff that no one tells you about when you say you want to publish your book!

Wokingham WHSmith After Action Report

I had a steady signing event on the Saturday just gone. Wokingham is a lovely town and the people were very nice too. It wasn’t very busy and the placement of the table wasn’t optimal but I still sold ten copies and signed up six mailing list subscribers! Ten is currently my average, so I’m happy with that. The next event will be in a couple of weeks time in Fleet.

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Publishing

I’ve been exploring publishing IN THE END to new markets this week along with looking in more detail at the options available with the Kobo Writing Life platform.

With a bit of research I found I can start submitting books to various promotions they run. The first thing to do is to email customer support to get them to enable the promotions tab.

After around an hour I had the access I needed and could explore the options. Everything is very straightforward. They provide a list of the promotions running within the next period, identifying any cost for joining the promotion (which could be a fixed fee, or a reduction in the royalty you receive from each sale. Most were around 10%). A lot of the promotions are for free books, and as you would expect, these attract the fixed fee.

I have applied for two promotions that are relevant to IN THE END. I now have to wait to see if I am accepted. I don’t hold out much hope as I don’t have any reviews on the platform yet and I have still only made one sale despite running a Kobo specific ad on Facebook for a couple of weeks. The ad got lots of likes and attention, but only converted once!

I’ve begun researching other platforms, namely Apple and Google as I will be going direct to these. I have also uploaded the book to Smashwords but I need a minor cover change to be made, my cover is 35 pixels short of their requirement! Otherwise the first part of the process I have gone through has been pretty straightforward.

Sales, Marketing and Promotion

I’ve sold my first Large Print Edition of IN THE END, yay, plus my sales are up around 50% this last week, but still not a significant number. I put this down to my increased activity, mainly posting videos to Facebook and the other social sites.

Here’s the latest video which is designed to work with the series of books and not just IN THE END.

And the Facebook post I put up yesterday.

Mailing List

My continued Facebook advert for a free copy of SURVIVOR is continuing to bring in a steady number of subscribers, around two to four a day. I’m up to a total 430 subscribers at time of going to press, so I’ve only got 9,570 left to get the magic number where they say the list becomes an effective tool for sales!

Before The End

The main progress this week on BEFORE THE END is getting the back cover artwork signed off. It’s done consistent with IN THE END and everything is slowly taking shape.

BOOK THREE PROGRESS

Writing the dirty draft of my current work in progress is where the most effort has been this week. I’m up to 25,000 words and have now completed the draft for the first of four planned acts.

Bloggers Bash

Tomorrow (Saturday) I will be attending the annual Blogger’s Bash event in London where I get to meet some lovely people who I’ve only known online. I’m taking my wife along too and we’re staying out for the night, so it will be an excellent time to relax and unwind with a few drinks. That is once I have announced the winners of the blogging competition that I co-judged last month! [Deep breath]

Maybe I’ll see some of you there and you can see how nervous I get saying a few words to a load of people I’ve just met!

That’s it for me until next week. Comments and suggestions welcomed as always!