Blogger’s Bash

On Saturday the annual Bloggers Bash was held in a hotel in London. It was the fifth running of the event, but my first. I attended with my wife, she’s not a blogger but it was a great chance for us to escape the kids together and let our hair down. I met a load of people who usually reside behind their screens and spoke to a lot of people who I didn’t realise I was already friends with on social media! I’m pretty sure I can count a handful of new friends and I’ll be booking up the next bash when the details get released for 2020.

I didn’t really know what to expect, only going along because I was one of the two judges for the blogging competition, but I found it was basically a whole load of friendly and supportive people in a room listening to some really great talks, both of which were very interesting, plus lots of chatting and getting to know people.

• 

• 

These are of some ejit reading out the winners of the blogging competition and then handing over the prize. I’m glad they sprung this on me at the beginning of the event so when it was over I could relax!

• 

• 

• 

This is the wonderful G X Todd who is the author of the Voices series of books and gave a great talk about her journey to becoming a published author. She also just happened to be interviewed by me in January and one of my best friends is a big fan of hers. Not only did I say hello, stopping for a chat when she remembered me, I also got a picture with her and she kindly signed a bookmark for my friend Sarah!

I also got the chance to take this great apocalypse-style deserted scene photo as we waited for the train the next morning. Later in the day I turned it into this ad!

Before The End

I had some very critical feedback for BEFORE THE END from my beta reader who I think is actually turning more out to be a development editor. I’ve taken her great points on board and within another week or so the edits will be made. One scene has been changed drastically and some of the tone of one of the key relationships has changed.

Publishing

I’ve now published on Smashwords and been accepted into the premium catalogue, so that means IN THE END is not only available on the Smashwords retail site but also on a whole list of sites which I never would have thought of signing up to. I will still be going direct to a lot of the major players, with Apple and Google Play the next on my hit list.

What I already like about Smashwords is the easy way you can run promotions and I’ve set IN THE END to $0.99 until the end of June to celebrate its launch on the store. Check it out here and if you fancy a punt you could be my first Smashwords sale!

Promotion

I have been exploring the Kobo Writing Life platform, investigating the promotions and I’ve been successful in securing a promotion for IN THE END in the their Independence Day promo. The charge is a reduced royalty of 60% instead of 70% on $0.99 for 27th June to 4th July. It will be very interesting to see how this works for sales. Watch this space!

EVENTS

This Saturday I’m back in WHSmith, this time in Fleet, Hampshire for what I think will be my last WHSmith event until the end of the summer. I’m hoping to run another pop-up shop soon but the availability of the site is out of my control.

Other Matters

One of the other things I’m working on at the moment is to take my last pre-publication checklist for IN THE END and updating it with my experiences since, plus how I’m changing things as I work towards publishing BEFORE THE END.

I got my first review for SURVIVOR on Amazon this week. It’s great to see someone gave it five stars and of course you can get your free copy just by signing up to my mailing list here.

The mailing list is growing nicely and sales are relatively high with selling a book almost every day for the last couple of weeks, which is high for me! I love seeing a new sale on my amazon dashboards! I haven’t been able to squeeze out time for new ads this week (apart from the one above) but I’m thinking of ad ideas and getting things prepared targeting the launch of BEFORE THE END when I do get time.

There’s been no progress on new works yet, neither SURVIVOR Volume 2 or the third novel, which is quite frustrating but at least I can say I’m using the time I have where I should be.

That is me for another week. Suggestions and feedback are welcome as always in the comments!