Despite having done very little to promote my book - including failing to keep this blog up to date - I have continued to pick up slow but steady sales. In my last entry I had reached a milestone of 20 sales of Smugglers at Whistling Sands. This tally has now leaped to 31 - well I say leaped, it is after all nearly a fortnight since I wrote that entry!
On Saturday evening I had two sales and this afternoon I had another two, which pushed me up to #35 in the top 100 in children's fiction action & adventure category on Amazon's Kindle bookstore.
I badly need to start pushing the book again to build on this - selective use of Twitter and Facebook spring to mind, but it all takes time and I've been very busy with work and also family matters over the last few days.
My very first buyer, fellow fledgling novelist Martin Jones in Toronto, Canada, has done me an excellent analysis of the first chapter of my book, which I'm very grateful for. The value of having a fresh pair of eyes can be summed up in just one observation alone of his - something no-one else has spotted, including my wife! I was selling my ebook with one of the principal characters, 12-year-old Jack, referred to in the first chapter as "John".
John was his original name, but I changed it to Jack ages ago, and thought I had altered every single reference in the book - but clearly I missed one. As soon as I read this, I changed the hard copy of the novel in Word format on my desktop, converted it to ebook format and uploaded it to Amazon to over-write the original file. I am not happy that a good few people will have bought my book with that mistake contained in it - that said, it will create no more than a momentary confusion and I don't think anyone will be that furious with me. But certainly I feel a little furious with myself!
There are three or four other minor changes I intend to make arising from Martin's analysis. And a number of his suggestions I will reject and leave things as they are, grateful though I am for them. It's a sign of strength to listen to criticism and be willing to change your novel - but it's also a sign of strength to reject certain observations and say, "well, I'm the author, that's how I want it!"
I shall soon be sending Martin a little analysis of my own of his part-written book, and I expect him to do the same - maybe take on board some of what I say, and reject some of it. Talking of which, I think it's time I plugged his book in this blog which I am very much enjoying. I find it's whole basis is highly original and unusual. It's called They Shoot Birds Don't They? - and you can find a long extract from it on the writers' site Authonomy.com run by HarperCollins, under Martin's author name MP Jones. Click here to go directly to it. Martin's book is now ranked very highly by fellow members, up to 117 as I write this out of several thousand other books. So take a look!
Talking of which, the Authonomy website is very interesting, not had time to get my head round it properly yet, but looking forward to delving into it in more detail. And I promise not to leave it another fortnight before updating this blog!
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