Another month in my writing life has gone by, and at times, it feels like I don’t have a lot to show for it. However, all the marketing work I’ve been doing this past month will hopefully yield some results in the very near future.

Author Talks

Firstly, I gave a talk at Flitwick Library at the beginning of May, which I had been really looking forward to. Then on the morning, it absolutely bucketed down with rain. I knew that as the talk was free, this would probably put a lot of people off from venturing out. And sadly, I was right. I had the grand total of 4 people at my talk and one of those was a lady from the library! However, they were a lovely group of people and all very interested in my writing and how I self-publish my books. The lady in the front row was in her eighties and still adamant that she would finish writing the book she’s been writing all her life. She was such an interesting person and asked lots of questions about self-publishing. I wouldn’t put it past her to finally get her book out there now. Having so few people in the audience does at least mean they can stop you and ask you questions when they want to, and the time flew by. I sold a couple of paperbacks to that same lady and I enjoyed giving the talk, so it’s never wasted. But it would be nice to have a few more people at my next library talk.

Then towards the end of May, I was invited by a former teaching colleague and friend, to come and talk to her book club. They’d all bought and read The Vineyard in Alsace before I came, and they were all very keen to talk about it and my writing. This time, there were a good dozen people there and we had a great chat about writing, in general and mine specifically. It was a really good atmosphere, even when they gave me some critical feedback. It was useful feedback though and delivered kindly so I took it on the chin 🙂 One of the book club members was a man, and he made my day when he said he’d read my book in one sitting, even though romance isn’t his preferred genre. He gave me some useful feedback too so overall, it was a great experience.

My next talk will be at Hitchin Library in Hertfordshire on 28 July. My Society of Authors group is running a Saturday Series of talks at the library over the summer and into the autumn. I went to the first one given by Hugh Bicheno, a military historian and fiction writer, and he had a full house in the audience. The talk he gave was absolutely fascinating, all about the Wars of the Roses in Hertfordshire. I even got to try on a sallet, which is a medieval helmet! Here’s Hugh wearing it on the day. I couldn’t even see out when I put it on 😉

The full list of talks is very varied and you can see it here on The Society of Authors’ website. If you are nearby or in the area, it would be lovely to see you in July. There’s even a Facebook event page in case you want to show your interest!

Marketing

Over the past month, I have finished off two courses I’d enrolled in from The Self-Publishing Formula team; one was about cover design and the other was a self-publishing 101 course. I took the cover design course so that if I did ever want to have a go at creating my own covers, I’d have a better chance of knowing what I was doing. I’ve worked in marketing myself for many years, either side of being a teacher, and so I have quite a bit of experience of designing things, but it’s one thing to be doing posters and leaflets, or even annual reviews but it’s another to do your own covers so that they look professional. It was a great course, led by Stuart Bache of BooksCovered, and it was very practical so I had a go at making a fair few covers of my own. But, crikey, it is really hard work! Just sourcing the photos could take a whole day. I really learnt a lot and I think I could have a good go at a cover in Photoshop now. However, I don’t think I could ever do as professional a job as the designers I have used to make my covers for me. It gave me even more respect for those professionals, and a better understanding of what they do for me at the other end.

The Self-Publishing 101 course seems a bit crazy for someone who has now self-published 5 books, I know, but after the success of The Vineyard in Alsace, I wanted to be working out how to move myself up to the next level. It was a big investment but it has already proved useful. So this month, I wrote a prequel for my From Here to You series, and I’m offering this free to people who sign up to my email list. Once written, I had to commission a cover for it, and send it round to my wonderful beta readers to get feedback on it. Then I had to advertise it in the back of all my other books and set it up on Book Funnel so that readers could download it. Then I had to advertise it on my website, and set up automated emails for new subscribers to make sure they received it! In the middle of all this, we had GDPR-mageddon (as Book Funnel called it rather wittily) and I also migrated this website over from a free site to a self-hosted one. So now you know what I mean by a crazy month! I’m very pleased with the finished novella though. Here it is in all its glory:

On top of this, I was finalising the last novella in that same From Here to You series which is now up for pre-order here, and updating all my other books with details of this new one, Finding You. The final piece of the plan will be the issue of a box set of all three books in the From Here to You series. The cover isn’t ready yet so I’m thinking carefully about when to release it but it will be soon-ish!

I have learned all these things from that course, and more besides, so it has already started paying for itself. But it is fair to say that I will be glad to get back to editing my third novel when all this is done, and you never thought you’d hear me say that! It just goes to show though how much more I could have been doing to market myself and my books. I’ll let you know how that all goes next month.

One thing you learn very quickly as an indie author is that there is always something else you could be doing. I just hope that some of this activity will pay off soon!

Thanks for reading, and if you go ahead and download Before You after signing up to my list, do please let me know what you think of it.

Until next time.