I’ve been off work most of this week, so between Christmas shopping and spending quality time with my wife, I’ve been squeezing in writing and publishing plus an awesome event.

Ashford Author Signing

On Wednesday evening I attended the Ashford Christmas Fair. My author friend, Suzanne Rogerson, organised this one and all I had to do was turn up with my gazebo and few boxes of books. I had no expectations for this event so I viewed it as an experiment.

As the event was held at night I’d prepared with a flashing sign and some LED lights for the table, plus it was the first use of the ‘Author Signing’ banner to go across the gazebo.

Despite the freezing cold, the night was a great success. Using two boxes of sweets to attract people to the stall, we sold a total of 18 books, including 11 of mine! All but one person bought both IN THE END and BEFORE THE END at a discount, which was a great feeling.

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Next year I will be looking into more of these Christmas events as the people there were in the buying mood and loved my line of ‘The Perfect Christmas Present!’

I plan a few more tweaks to the setup, including installing ‘eye holes’ in the gazebo cover so I can mount the sign on the fabric surface. If anyone knows of any events we can attend from February onwards we’d definitely be interested!

Operation Dawn Wolf & Fate’s Ambition

With the proof read of OPERATION DAWN WOLF going well I made a decision to get it ready for FREE release to my mailing list subscribers in time for my WHSmith appearance on 14th December. This will allow me to give out my FREE book folding business cards to drum up more support for my mailing list.

In order to do this I will also be setting FATE’S AMBITION available to pre-order from the same day. This is so that anyone who enjoys ODW may wish to pre-order FA. If you didn’t notice, earlier this week I posted the cover reveal for FATE’S AMBITION.

This has meant a bit of frantic work in preparation (proofing, editing, formatting, mailing list landing pages, website updating) and leaving writing to one side for a few days. Yesterday I have also pressed the publish button on ODW on Amazon as a paperback in order that I can get paper copies, with a slim chance of them arriving before my next event. Watch this space…

I’ve known all along due to the nature of the book, it’s written in the form of a transcript, it was going to be difficult to convert to an eBook, i.e. plain flowing text which is resizable on the kindle / eBook reader, and yesterday I found out just how much of a pain it will be. I have decided I will be offering a plain old PDF, a .mobi version with a fixed page format (like a textbook) and a .epub version. For the epub version I will have to reformat the entire book to contain tables to ensure consistency of the text and tabs. During my testing I couldn’t get this working on the .mobi format in a consistant way.

If you’re interested in taking a look at OPERATION DAWN WOLF then just sign up to my mailing list here and you will get a free copy delivered by email on Friday 13th December. I will be blogging about it in more detail nearer the date, but for now here’s the paperback jacket.

Sales And Marketing

I’m back on Facebook ads again, after having some initial success with a post boost, I’m now switching to a full blown ad to see where that gets me. I’ll keep you up to date with progress!

I’m also preparing for the Facebook ad campaign for OPERATION DAWN WOLF and driving people to my mailing list with the reader magnet. I have a load of themed items on their way from eBay so I can play around with new photos for the ads.

I have also been making contact with Instragram book bloggers, or Bookstagramers and asking them if they want to review IN THE END. I have a couple of takers who I’ve sent the book off to and I’ll be looking for more when I get a chance.

That’s it for today. It’s back to work for me next week so I should be able to get back into the swing of writing AFTER THE END. I really must if I’m going to hit my release targets!

Comments and questions welcomed as always!