Christmas shopping!
My hist fict trilogies have been reduced to a gobsmacking 99 cents until Christmas Eve.
My hist fict trilogies have been reduced to a gobsmacking 99 cents until Christmas Eve.
A week-long Countdown Sale for Tobias…
starting at the miraculous price of 99 cents and rising daily to it’s current RRP.
Starting Tuesday 8th March.
Be in it!!!!
Over the weekend, I conducted a HUGE promotion of three of my five novels – two hist fantasies and one hist.fict. They have had the time of their lives breaking into the German, French and Canadian markets significantly and partying madly in the UK and USA.
The silver medal from the Readers’ Favorite’s Book Awards 2012 arrived in the mail yesterday! The REAL THING!!
It’s heavy, it’s on a grosgrain ribbon which spookily are my own nation’s national colours. I hung it round my neck and it sat more perfectly than a diamond necklace. I feel very honoured and have to say that this is the apogee of my writing life.
Last week I bought a word.
I did … a three letter word.
I paid for it, received a receipt, and the word was wrapped in tissue and placed in a brown paper bag.
It was a curious feeling. As though I alone now had ownership of the word. But of course that is definitely not the case. In fact, I think the word might just have ownership of me.
Those of you who know me will know that Gisborne: Book of Pawns had its first ever free promotion last weekend.
So what, you might say?
Indeed, so what?
It was an enormous thing for me to do as an independent author. The KDP Select programme is a scheme devised by Amazon to potentially give a book high visibility – a chance to advance in the ratings. For the writer, (more so for me because I am essentially an anxious individual) it is quite nerve-wracking because one worries if anybody will download the book to their Kindle. Or if one will have any sort of ranking. Or if any sales will follow-on to other books.
Bells ring when I read Michelle Muto’s story of how she came to be published. I often say of my books, when I see a wonderful spike upward 
in their sales, that they remind me of the little engine that could, puffing up the hill and saying ‘I think I can, I think can.’
I’ve never really wanted to get into the mainstream vs indie argument that has waxed and waned over the Net for the last couple of years. To me all writers are just that – writers.
How they are published is immaterial. What matters is if either have readers and if they can entertain. But this is Read an E-Book Week and somehow it seems appropriate.
Gisborne: Book of Pawns
The book that has dominated my life for the last eighteen months has finally been published as en e-book with the print version following in May. To say that I have enjoyed writing it is a given – Guy and Ysabel have become very close friends. But as with any book I write, whilst I have a loose plot outline in my head, I always love seeing where the characters will take me. At its inception there was absolutely no chance that there would be a second volume. But a chance writing of a tiny short-story for a miniature book laid a whole new plot in my head. And thus volume Two will be available in early 2013. This current e-book will be available at Amazon.co.uk within the week in an enhanced form with colour plates throughout: designed for the new colour e-readers. It will be available for all other e-readers (eg: Kobo, i-pad, Nook etc) in the next week.
There’s something unerringly familiar about Sarah’s epiphany. Who amongst us hasn’t burst into tears at the realisation there is another life, a dream that could become a reality if only the fairy godmother would wave her wand. The trouble is that the fairy godmother is actually hidden deep inside our own psyche. Sarah tells us her story, showing that is entirely possible to wave a wand and step out of the kitchen into a world we can only read about in books…