I met my current guest a number of years ago – not many months after we had both decided to move into independent writing and publishing. We connected because at that time, there weren’t a lot of Australians treading the independent path and the friendship has seen much laughter and happiness as we share in each other’s successes.
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.
I have a need to concentrate on word-count for quite some time and please forgive me for re-publishing this https://pruebatten.com/2010/11/18/a-convenient-marriage-unplugged/
The Naxos audiotapes were wonderful and introduced me to Georgette Heyer who was a writer I had never bothered with previously. After finding her, I then found the refreshing and worthy Lucinda Brant and who has featured in Amazon’s Top 100 for a few weeks now. All in all, I owe Naxos a great deal!
For a little while recently, I had observed increasing fascination with Pinterest but had never bothered to look at it myself. My writer’s life is full of research, writing in longhand, transcribing, editing, my blog, Facebook-Writer, Facebook-Private, Twitter and a writer’s office business. I felt introducing any more online bit and bobs into my life would cause my writing to suffer.
“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read. “ ~Attributed to Groucho Marx
It’s been ages since I had the time to enter an old-fashioned bookstore. I had to go to the city the other day to have repairs run on my specs and because I was in the city, I decided to visit my two favourite bookstores. One is a café/bookstore and I spent a long time sifting through the coffee-table titles. One called The Treehouse Book.
By some strange chance I was sent an email the other day which was semi-spam, but the article was terrific. Writers’ spaces. Now the ones they showed were quite simply wonderful. Inspirational. The source of great literature. And I wondered why I couldn’t have such a space… a cottage on a deserted estate on a distant island. And if I did, would my writing actually be any better?
