WORK IN PROGRESS

Scarlet Rain – Weather Apocalypse Series – Book 1 – I’m 16% through the latest editing passed and the manuscript is shrinking further, it may be that I’m going to get it below the target of 90,000 words. Progress is pretty slow with an average of a chapter completed each day, which seems to be the way no matter whether I’m writing or in the early to middle stages of the revision process.

MARKETING AND PROMOTION

I’m only concentrating on promoting my short stories at present, in particular running competitions to give the books away with the aim of those people turning to the novels. This is going okay and feedback on all of the stories has been great. Reviews are coming in but hopefully more will come soon.

I’m always looking at websites where I can post short stories for free in order to promote my work and this week I came across a great article listing out a load of websites that allow you to do this. Running through the list I managed to post on four sites so far, with Booksie being the most effective, certainly if you look at the number of reads and people now following my stories. After a little while I will add some of the other short stories to the sites where I gain a following.

Here’s a list of the sites and links to check out HARM’S WAY.

• Wattpad – With only a few reads, most from when I promoted it on Facebook.
• Inkitt – No reads after a few days.
• Commaful – Only accepts stories up to 10,000 characters. Harm’s Way is 24,000 characters (4,000 words)
• Booksie – 15 reads and 2 ‘Fans’ following me, but as you look into the detail, these two just appear to be trying to market themselves, much like many do by following on WordPress.
• Medium.com – No reads since I posted the story.

I’ll keep an eye on these over the coming weeks to see if any actually finds the story. I don’t want to do any promotion outside of those sites otherwise I might as well just market direct with the link to the Bookfunnel download link.

Here’s others that made the list but I have yet to try.

• WorkKrowd
• Tumblr

EVENTS

I was meant to be having a helicopter flying experience, a gift from my company back in 2020 for 20 years of service, but it’s been postponed until July. As it’s a bank holiday weekend I thought I’d instead take advantage of the extra day and I secured a craft show table in Hungerford on Saturday. So if you’re in the area, why not pop along?

For this event I’ll have A6 booklets of STOPPING POWER, plus the short story bundle. I’m going to try to upsell people if they buy a book. “Would you like to add three short stories for £1.99?”

Let’s see if that has any impact.

BENCH UPDATE

For a bit of fun, and just so you know I do other things other than drone on about writing, I thought you might like to see where I am with the bench I’m making with leftover sleeps from landscaping my garden last year.

It may look pretty similar to the last photo, but that just showed everything cut and resting on top of each other. In this photos it is all secured together and it’s very strong! This weekend I hope to start the more delicate process of planing and sanding down and routing the edges for a decorative finish.

That’s about it for this week. Comments and suggestions welcomed as always and I’ll catch you on the flipside!