Category Archives: indie authors

How having goals keeps me motivated

Posted in Blogging, Books, Editing, Freelancing, indie authors, Marketing, Self-Publishing, Writing by

Having goals gives you a focus

The UK lockdown began on my 55th birthday – what a way to celebrate… At first, I found it a bit of a novelty to have the rest of my family at home, but I realised pretty quickly that I would need to use goals to motivate myself if I was to get any work done. Thankfully, I had the final edits of my latest book, Starting Over at the Vineyard in Alsace, to work through and send off to my editor and proofreader. Those deadlines are actually a lifesaver if you’re a full-time author. Without them, I might not have got so much done. But I gave myself those deadline goals, knowing that they would motivate me, and I published my book on 14 July, 2020.

Establishing a routine

As an indie author, I’m very familiar with self-discipline anyway. After reading some good advice from marketing guru, Nicholas Erik, I have always aimed to spend one hour a day writing or editing, one hour a day on marketing, and one hour a day reading non-fiction books associated with my writing. I also work part-time as a freelance proofreader and self-publishing consultant, so I factor in at least one hour’s freelance work every day as well. I’m usually doing some kind of training associated with my writing or other skills, so that adds another hour. And so you can see, I have pretty full days, and that’s what gives my day structure.

The benefit of daily exercise

However, as you’ll know, being stuck indoors all day during the lockdown was very hard. Thankfully, I wasn’t someone who had to shield and so in the beginning, I made sure to go out for my one hour of exercise every day. I started with a daily walk, and often my younger daughter accompanied me. Then one day, when no-one could see us (!), we tried running for a short distance as part of our walk. No-one was more surprised than me when I found I could run for short bursts without collapsing in a heap. So I decided to download the Couch to 5K app and to give it a go, never expecting to finish the 9-week course. But I liked the format of running every other day and building towards that final goal, and I liked the fact that I could do it even more! The last time I did any running was under duress at secondary school (37 years ago!)

After my very first run

My Couch to 5K graduation message

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I write this post, I have just started my 20th week of running. I run three or four times a week now for a minimum of half an hour, sometimes longer as I chase the elusive 5K. I’m almost there but I’m not despondent about it because at the beginning of April, I couldn’t run for five minutes, let alone 5K! After all these years, I’ve realised something that they don’t teach you at school – it’s not about being the fastest. It’s about building your stamina and sticking at it, qualities that have also stood me in good stead as an indie author as well. So I know I will crack 5K eventually because I have the persistence to keep showing up.

Finding new challenges

This month, to give myself extra motivation, I signed up for a Race at your Pace challenge to run 35 miles in the month of August. When I complete it, I’ll get a medal, which is motivation enough for me! Seriously though, it’s about finding interesting ways to keep challenging myself because I really want to continue with this habit and as we still don’t have the full freedom to go wherever we want yet, it’s important to keep finding new ways to motivate myself. I have also been eating more healthily and this has helped me to lose some weight as well, which was an even greater bonus, and certainly helps with the motivation.

Goals = Motivation

So, just like writing a book, I’ve had a goal and I’ve had motivation to achieve it, despite the conflict the lockdown has brought. I still walk on the days when I’m not running and I thank goodness every day for the countryside where I live, and I appreciate how lucky I am to live here. I miss travelling but I’m grateful for all the wonderful places I’ve been in the past that I can look back on. And I can look forward to visiting new places again in the near future, I hope.

I hope you and your families have found a way to get through lockdown, and that you’ve all been keeping well. Let me know in the comments if you’ve found a way that works for you.

 

The Excitement of Publication Day for my Latest Romance

Posted in Blogging, Books, indie authors, Marketing, Self-Publishing, Travel by

How the excitement of publication day never gets old

I’ve been writing since 2013 and indie publishing since 2015, and in that time, I’ve published six romance novels/novellas with two more coming very soon. You’d think by now that I’d be getting used to publication days and maybe feeling a bit blasé about them, but I can honestly say that I am just as excited about the one that’s coming up, as I was about my very first one back in 2015.

Five years ago in the summer of 2014, I was just finishing editing my first romance novel, From Here to Nashville, and I was about to commission my first cover design. It was a really exciting time, and although I hoped to sell some books, I had no idea that I would go on to write and publish so many more books, and to still be publishing new ones five years later.

This time round, a lot of things have changed. Now, I have a list of advanced readers and I was able to send The Bistro by Watersmeet Bridge out to them for advance feedback. I also have a good sized list of newsletter subscribers and I’ve been able to do lots of promotion to them in advance of the book being published. I’ve received three times as many pre-orders this time as I did for my first book because my audience has grown, and this has helped my book to race up the charts, and even to be listed by Amazon as a Hot New Release! I’m so grateful to all my readers for helping me to achieve this. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a bestseller tag for this book when it comes out 🙂

 

I’ve also scheduled a blog tour a couple of weeks after publication day, and I’ve been delighted to see so many book bloggers sign up for the tour that Rachel of Rachel’s Random Resources has very kindly arranged for me. I’ve also put my book up on Net Galley with the help of a co-operative press in the hope of gaining even more reviews this time round.

So this has all added to the usual excitement of publication day which is fast approaching on 6 August, 2019. I’m very lucky to be part of such a friendly writing community online as well who have also been supporting me by sharing the news about my next book. I know they will also be there for me on publication day and beyond as well. I have a lot to be thankful for, and I’m so glad that I’ve persevered with my writing, even when at times, it has been tough.

If you would like to read the first chapter of my new book, and you still haven’t done so, you can find it here. If that whets your appetite so much that you want to pre-order The Bistro by Watersmeet Bridge at the special low price of 99p/99c, you can go ahead and do that on that page too. I hope you enjoy reading and I look forward to reading your reviews once the book is published. Let me know what you think of that first chapter by leaving a comment below 🙂

Podcasts and Promotions!

Posted in indie authors, Podcast interviews, Self-Publishing, Writing by

This month I have news about podcasts and promotions for you, as well as the latest news about book three.

My first podcast interview is now live

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I recently gave my first podcast interview to Paul Teague for his selfpublishingjourneys.com podcast. Since then, I’ve been waiting with bated breath for the interview to go live so I could listen back and see how I sounded (good or bad!). Well, thankfully, I can now confirm that it went as well as I thought it had just after I’d finished speaking to Paul. I am even prepared to give you the link so you can listen to it yourself. You can find it on Paul’s website here. Do let me know your thoughts about it here after you’ve listened 🙂

I really enjoyed talking to Paul after listening to his podcast for such a long time, and it was great to be able to talk about our shared experience of trying to make a living from our writing. I have picked up lots of tips from Paul’s podcast diaries which he releases every Saturday, and sometimes, he has given me the courage to do something which I may have been thinking about for ages but have never got round to.

Running my first free promotion

One of these was running a free promotion. In the beginning when you self-publish your first book, it’s so hard to contemplate giving it away for free, and so although I had often thought about it, I’d never actually taken the plunge. But I finally decided to put From Here to Nashville  wide on all platforms and then to offer it free for a short promotion. Well, it’s actually ended up being free for quite a while now as I struggled to get Amazon to price match the other sites it was already free on.

Anyway, I got there in the end and finally, the week of promotion via various email lists arrived last Monday. I chose to promote it via five different sites, starting with the smaller sites first and rising to the biggest one on Friday. As I write this, there have been over 6000 free downloads of From Here to Nashville most of which came through Amazon but there were also a good number through Apple Books and Barnes and Noble. I have also seen some good read through purchases of my other books, especially the two sequel novellas. However, these sales have not yet been enough to cover my costs although this may come in time as people finish reading the first book in the series.

I was very glad to have given the promotion a try and the greatest thing about it was that I really improved my rankings across all the main Amazon sites but especially on the US one. By the end of the promo, I was at number 49 in the whole of the free Kindle store which was amazing. Even better than this though, I was at number 3 in the women’s fiction category, number 5 in romance and number 14 in contemporary romance. This felt amazing, especially because I had managed to achieve this all on my own. It will hopefully be a huge benefit to my overall visibility.

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Latest News

Apart from that, my other good news is that I’ve finished editing my third full-length novel, otherwise known as my Bistro book. This book is now with my editor and I’m taking a short breather while I wait for it to come back to me. Hopefully, I will have more to tell you about all that very soon!

Thanks for reading as always. By the time of the next blog post, it will be nearly Christmas!

My First Indie Author Podcast Interview!

Posted in Blogging, indie authors, Podcast interviews, Self-Publishing, Writing by

MXL Microphone for my first indie author podcast interviewAs some of you may have seen if you’ve liked my Facebook page, this week I gave my first indie author podcast interview. Paul Teague from the Self-Publishing Journeys podcast invited me a few weeks ago and I said yes before I could talk myself out of it! If you click on the link above and scroll down the page, you will see that my interview is coming up on 5 November. When it goes live, it will move to the top and you can listen to it there on your computer.

Subscribing to Podcasts

Alternatively, you can subscribe to Paul’s podcast on your phone or other mobile device to listen to it while you’re on the go. A couple of people told me they weren’t sure what a podcast is so I hope this makes it clearer for you.

You can listen to podcasts on all kinds of topics these days, anything from comedy to politics (you may consider these to be the same right now!) It’s so handy for the commute to work or even to while away the hours (!) spent cleaning, gardening etc. My husband listens while he’s at the gym but the thought of the gym just makes me shudder 🙂

Podcasts I listen to

I mostly listen to mine on my commute and while driving here, there and everywhere. I tend to listen to writing podcasts only – apart from Paul’s, I listen to the Self-Publishing Formula and The Creative Penn. If you already listen to podcasts, which are your favourites? Do let me know in the comments or by sending me an email to julie@julie-stock.co.uk. I’d love to hear your tips.

Preparing for the interview

And so, to the interview. Well, I was delighted when Paul asked me to be a guest on his show. I’ve listened to his podcast diary and his interviews for a long time now. So it was a real badge of honour as an indie author to be invited to chat with Paul about my self-publishing journey. However, I was also quite nervous. Paul is a former BBC man with lots of experience so I wanted to make sure I came across as professional and not like a bumbling idiot! (Only time will tell…)

Anyway, Paul was very organised and I didn’t have to do much beforehand except to make sure that my Skype account was all set up properly. (The last interview I did over Skype was in February 2016 and you can read that post here). My husband sorted me out with a decent microphone from his own supply at his business, and once I had my earphones, I was all set. I did spend a bit of time thinking through the questions that Paul might ask me but not so much that I would sound rehearsed when it came to it. Paul advised me to think of it as a chat between us rather than an interview so I tried to focus on that.

How did my first indie author podcast interview go?

When we finally did the interview, Paul was so easy-going that my nerves melted away and soon we were chatting like we’d known each other for years, which in a way we had. The time passed very quickly and we had a short break after the main interview where I breathed a sigh of relief. Then we carried on chatting about all sorts of things. We recorded another short interview of quick fire questions afterwards, which is for Paul’s Patreon supporters first of all but will be available generally at a later point. And then it was time to say goodbye. I was buzzing for a good hour afterwards because it had been such a great experience. I did then start to worry whether I’d said anything I shouldn’t about anyone or anything (!) but I’m reasonably confident I didn’t…

Should I start a podcast?

As you can see from this link, my husband now offers a podcast bundle of gear you’d need to set up your own podcast. It’s professional gear so it is a bit expensive (cheaper options are available) but since he put that bundle together, I’ve been thinking more and more about whether to do a podcast myself. I’ve thought about it for a while but always decided against it because of lack of time and skill, but who knows? Maybe one day I will give it a go.

Anyway, don’t forget to let me know your favourite podcasts and to tune in to my interview on Paul Teague’s Self-Publishing Journeys podcast on 5 November. In the meantime, it’s back to editing book 3 for me!

Author Talks, and a Crazy Month of Marketing

Posted in Blogging, Books, Editing, indie authors, Marketing, Self-Publishing, Writing by

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.

A Month of Learning Opportunities

Posted in Blogging, Books, Editing, indie authors, Self-Publishing, Writing by

March has been another busy writing month for me but this time, it has mostly been because of so many new learning opportunities that have presented themselves to me. One of those has been being invited by Amazon to have The Vineyard in Alsace included in a Prime Reading promotion for three months. Since I signed up, my book has risen up the charts to a high point of no. 7 so far, which as you can imagine, has been fantastic to see. I am learning new things about how it works all the time and delighting in the recognition my book has been getting. I have Amazon Prime myself but I had no idea that it included books! How mad is that? So if you do too and you want to read my book for free, get yourself along to my book page here and download it! And if you could please write a review when you’ve finished, that would be even better!

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So what else have I been up to? Well, first of all, I decided to sign up to the Self-Publishing Formula Podcast’s Cover Design course. I do some design work in my day job, and I used to do design when I worked in marketing before I became a teacher many years ago. I enjoy doing it but have never taken any courses, and as I enjoy the cover design process so much, I thought it would be useful. I don’t really have any plans to make my own covers, although there might be some circumstances when I could in the future, but I thought it would help me to understand the process a bit more. And it really has. The course is delivered on behalf of the SPF team by Stuart Bache, who designs all of Mark Dawson’s covers. Stuart’s own company is called Books Covered and you will see many familiar covers there from the romance genre. You do need Photoshop to get the most out of the course but you will then get such a lot of practice in from trying to create your own covers and seeing what goes into the process. The course is still open but is a bit more expensive now. I’m still working my way through but enjoying it immensely.

Then after I heard about the Cover Design course on the podcast, they re-opened their Self-Publishing 101 course. Hopefully, you’re thinking ‘Why would you need that course, Julie?’ when you read that! Well, that’s a good point and one I had worried over myself since I first heard about the course opening late last year. It’s quite expensive and I didn’t want to make an investment like that if I wasn’t going to learn anything new. However, even after indie publishing three books now, with a couple more to come this year, there are still things I’m not doing to best effect. I haven’t really built a proper mailing list and for that you need a reader magnet (which I haven’t written yet!) and to promote that in various ways to encourage people to sign up. One of those ways is via a landing page on your website, which is when you realise that a free WordPress website doesn’t have the scope for you to do that kind of advanced stuff. It has been on my mind for a while to migrate my website again but I just haven’t done it. So really, doing this course is about helping me to work out what I still need to do to move myself to the next level, writing a checklist and then doing it! Fortunately, you can pay monthly for the course and it is still open for a few days. If you should want to take a look, the link is here. If you can’t stretch to that kind of investment, you should listen to the podcast because there are so many useful hints and tips in each episode – it really is great!

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Finally, this month, I went on my first ever writing retreat, just in time for the second wave of snow. It sounds terribly self-indulgent but I was given it as a birthday present from my family! Last weekend, I drove up to Warwickshire to a lovely hotel and joined about a dozen other writers at various stages in their careers for a weekend of writing and learning. The course was run by two RNA members, Alison May and Janet Gover. You can find out more about their courses here. They’re both traditionally published and have lots of experience between them.

Before I got the schedule, I was expecting to spend most of the weekend holed up in my room, bashing away at my laptop in isolation. However, that wasn’t the case. There was writing time, of course but there were also tutorials and workshops, which were really helpful. The most helpful ones for me were the ones on plotting and editing. I also had a one-to-one with Janet about there first three chapters of my next novel which I’m calling The Bistro for now. One of the things I struggle with is knowing where to start with the editing process when I get my first manuscript appraisal back from the RNA. It all seems insurmountable! But as a result of this course, I now have a proper plan to work to and I made a start on the plan while I was there so when I come back to it, I feel that I will be better prepared to make a start and not as daunted as I normally feel.

I learnt a lot from my fellow writers too, and the weekend was a very sociable experience that I would really recommend to you. I switched everything else off and just spent time on my writing, and that felt wonderful!

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I can’t finish without mentioning that I also published a new book this month! Over You (Sam’s Story) was published on 12 March, 2018, and already has a few good reviews. It means that I now have a series – the From Here to You series – and this is book 2 following on from the end of From Here to Nashville. The third and final sequel will be out around May, I hope. If you haven’t downloaded Sam’s Story yet, it’s only 99p on Amazon and tells a story of heartbreak, love and healing. You can get your copy on Amazon now.

If you want to know when my next release is out, why not sign up to my mailing list here?

 

 

Until next time, thanks for reading!

 

 

Short Story Writing Challenge 2018

Posted in Blogging, Books, indie authors, Self-Publishing, Writing by

Followers of my Facebook page will know that I have signed up to write 12 short stories this year as part of a short story writing challenge. You can find out more about the challenge here. I’ve written a few short stories but I’ve never really felt like I’ve cracked the art of writing them so I decided to sign up to this challenge to make myself do it, and hopefully, get better at it as the year progresses. When I’ve finished, I will then have 12 stories to publish together in an ebook, which will be an added bonus!

The first story came out on Wednesday last week, 24th January. The prompt this month was ‘The Bridge’ and the limit was 1200 words. You can write in any genre. Being a musical kind of person, I went for a musical link to that prompt. I asked people on my Facebook page to see if they could guess what I’d written about and it turns out that they know me quite well! Most people guessed that I’d choose something musical and some even said I’d write about the bridge in a piece of music. No-one knew though that the bridge in songwriting terms can also be referred to as the Middle Eight, meaning the middle eight bars that link back to the original verse/chorus style. Often they’re unsung but not always. You can look at pretty much any song by The Beatles for a good example of how this works.

When we post our story for this challenge, the idea is that we comment on four other stories so by return, I have had a good bit of feedback on mine so far. This month, I’m going to post my whole story here for you to read. I won’t do this every month because I’d like to keep a few back for when I publish but I would really welcome your comments on this first story to see if I can improve it. Remember that fulfilling the story arc in just 1200 words is not as easy as it sounds! And next month, we have only 1000 😉 Thanks for reading and good luck with your short story writing too 🙂 Until next time.

*****

Middle Eight by Julie Stock (All Copyright Reserved)

Josie stared at her notepad willing inspiration to strike so she could finish the final eight bars of her song. She’d been staring at the paper for several hours now and she still had nothing to go with, not a single note, let alone a bar. She threw the pad down on the table in front of her and stood up, stretching out the kinks that had developed in her neck as a result of sitting in the same position since lunchtime – hunched over with her hand poised above the page for when the first seed of an idea appeared.

She made her way to her kitchenette, realising she hadn’t had a drink for hours which might explain why she was so parched. She poured herself a long, tall glass of water from the fridge and downed it in one. It was a steamy hot summer’s day and she’d been stupid not to rehydrate herself throughout the afternoon. That was the last thing she needed when she was due in the recording studio first thing tomorrow to start laying down the tracks for her new album.

She’d never experienced a block like this before. She’d written a catchy chorus and several verses which told her story so well but she just couldn’t find the contrast she needed for the eight bars that would make up the bridge. She wanted lyrics as well as chords, and she had some minor chords in mind but she simply couldn’t find the words to say what was on her mind. She usually had no problem deepening the emotional impact of her songs in those middle eight bars; in fact, she thrived on it. But she was starting to worry she might be losing her touch. She looked wistfully at her battered old acoustic guitar. She loved it like a member of her own family. It had seen her through all the good times, as well as the bad. But today the magic was missing.

She decided to go out for  some air. Maybe she just needed some time to think away from her notepad, her guitar and the confines of her small apartment. She picked up her purse and keys, slipped on her sunglasses and headed out.

She made her way down to the river bank, her favourite place to think when she was struggling musically. She sat down on the parched grass and stared out at the water bubbling over the rocks on the river bed. The flow of the water soothed her spirit and her eyelids began to droop as the calm washed over her. She lay back on the grass, looking up at the cloudless sky – such a beautiful day. In no time she was asleep. The next thing she knew, something wet was nudging her arm and as she came to, shielding her eyes from the afternoon sun, she saw a small dog had appeared next to her.

‘Hey, where’d you come from?’ She reached out her hand and the dog sniffed it and gave her a lick, encouraging her to stroke his sleek, red coat.

‘Brandy! Where’ve you gone, boy?’

A man emerged from behind a tree and stopped in front of her. His intense, dark-brown eyes appraised her and she didn’t know what to make of his scrutiny.

‘Hi there. Is this your dog?’ She went for the friendly stranger approach, rather than ‘I was about to kidnap your dog and you caught me.’

’Sure is, I’m sorry he bothered you.’ The man smiled revealing a set of almost startling white teeth.

‘No bother, he’s lovely. Brandy, was it?’

‘Yep, not very original, I’m afraid.’ They both laughed then. ‘Well, I’ll let you get back to your day. Bye.’

Josie watched as he went on his way with his energetic little dog, and she missed them at once. She stood up and brushed the grass off her dress. She needed to get back and she wasn’t sure she had found any more inspiration down at the riverside. The air grew heavy as she made her way home, a sure sign that rain was on the way. As she approached her apartment block, she felt the first raindrop and picked up speed to avoid getting drenched when the inevitable downpour came. She ran the last few yards but when the raindrops fell, it was so refreshing to feel the water on her skin that she stopped, allowing the rain to soak into her. She turned her face up to the now overcast sky and gave herself to the elements.

Josie was up early and into the recording studio long before she expected anyone else to be there. She’d brought her guitar with her so she could do her final practice on her own. By the time the sound engineers and the rest of the band turned up, she was more than ready to start laying down the tracks for her album.

‘Hey, Josie, how’s it going?’ Her manager, Brad, was the most positive person she’d ever met and whatever her mood, he was always upbeat.

‘I’m so good today, you won’t believe it when you hear,’ she replied with a conspiratorial grin.

‘D’you finish that final song you’ve been struggling with?’

‘Sure did.’

‘Well, I can’t wait to hear it.’

The morning passed quickly as they laid down the songs telling the story of her life. By lunchtime, Josie was tired but happy with the progress they’d made. She went to speak to Jed, the chief sound engineer, to see what he thought of what they’d done so far.

‘You should be real proud, Josie. You sound fantastic out there. I don’t say this to many but yours is one of the best début albums I’ve ever heard.’

She blushed at Jed’s praise knowing she must have really earned it for him to speak so highly of her work. She touched him lightly on the arm to convey her thanks, and went back to the live room to lay down the final tracks. They’d made a conscious decision to go with the first take of each track without revising it at this stage. They’d listen back to the album as a whole before deciding whether to make any changes.

It was finally time to sing the final track, the one she’d struggled with for so many days – until she’d met Brandy. She’d been so hung up on finding the right words for her middle eight but as Brandy had come bounding into view, the burbling river providing the backdrop to her story, she’d realised that words weren’t necessary. Her guitar did the rest, and although it had taken her most of the previous night to note it down, she’d known in her heart that she’d cracked it. She only hoped Brad agreed with her. As she played the last note, she looked up into his eyes. When he didn’t give any indication of his feelings, she glanced over at Jed, before looking round at the rest of the band. Silence. Silence, followed by rapturous applause.

‘That one’s a winner, Josie. For sure.’ Brad beamed at her and so did everyone else. If only Brandy could see her now.

Another Year Over…

Posted in Blogging, indie authors, Self-Publishing, Writing by

Happy New Year to you all – I hope your Christmas time was a good one. This time of year is always a good one to reflect on what has happened in my indie writing life over the past year and what I hope is to come in 2018.

Looking back over this past year, I have been very proud of the success of my second book, The Vineyard in Alsace. As you’ll know, it took me a while to decide to self-publish again but it seems that this is a common difficulty for many writers. The trouble is that we all want validation in some way or another, and in many ways, that’s what a traditional publishing contract gives you. However, seeing my book sell so well and start to bring in a decent income for me, has given me a good sense of my potential as an author. There is no doubt that it is hard to self-publish and it’s also expensive. It can also be difficult to keep your spirits up when you have no-one fighting your corner and telling you that you’re great. However, when you do succeed, the satisfaction is still as good and deserves to be celebrated. The publication and subsequent sales of my second book, have now allowed me to become a full member of both The Romantic Novelists’ Association and The Society of Authors, and that has made me proud of myself for persevering.

I finally finished writing, editing and proofreading my first novella sequel to From Here to Nashville, my début novel, in 2017 as well. I had planned to publish it straight away but then I decided to go straight on and write the second novella about a different pair of characters from the story, with a view to publishing them both together at the same time. This will allow me to make the novel and two novellas into a boxed set too, as a kind of mini-series. The only downside with this plan is that I will need three new covers – one each for the two novellas and one for the boxed set – which may end up being prohibitively expensive. As I am only just over halfway through the first draft of the second novella, I may change my mind on the plan to publish them both at once. This is my dilemma for January 😉

I was pleased to have blogged more consistently throughout 2017, until I reached December anyway! I managed to have a nice mix of author spotlight posts and posts I wrote myself. Most of my own posts were also sent to my newsletter subscribers and I managed to double my newsletter list during the year as well using Instafreebie.

I also tried out advertising From Here to Nashville on Amazon, Facebook and BookBub during the year, none of which was spectacularly successful but when I consider that I sold five times as many copies of FHTN during 2017 than in 2016, maybe it was more successful than I’d realised. Admittedly, having a second book come up did help, too.

I managed to attend a good number of writerly events during the year, which I thoroughly enjoyed as always. I loved going to the Deepings Literary Festival in April, and then in July, I spoke at my first ever Literary Festival in Hitchin, near where I live. This was a great experience, although probably not one that will happen again in the near future, sadly. I did get accepted by the WI this year, which was an exciting experience as well, although I’ll have to wait till 2019 to actually give a talk!

So, all in all, it has been a good year. In the coming year, I hope to publish my two novellas and also my next novel. I’ve already made a good start with one novella finished and the other halfway done, although that is only the first draft. I’ve also written the first draft of my next novel and received a positive report on it from the RNA New Writers’ Scheme ( my last one). It needs work but it’s not insurmountable. I’m going on my first ever writing retreat in March and hope to make a head start on that second draft when I’m there.

The other main thing I would like to do this year, is to upgrade to a paid WordPress website. I tried this once before, some of you may remember but it was all a bit scary for me back then. Now, I think the time is right to try again. I’m not quite sure whether to do it myself or to get someone’s help but I’m going to take my time and see how it goes.

All of this will keep me busy of course and then there’s my day job and the new voluntary role I’ve taken on as the RNA’s Social Media Co-ordinator. One of my good writing friends asked me how I fit it all in – and the truthful answer is that I’m not really sure! To be honest, sometimes I bite off more than I can chew and that has caused me a few anxious nights but I’m just going to keep doing what I’ve been doing and hope it all works out! Wish me luck 😉

Happy New Year to all of you and I hope that 2018 brings you all you wish for in writing terms and otherwise. I read this wonderful quote on Emma Darwin’s blog the other day, from Ray Bradbury in Zen and The Art of Writing, which I shall leave you with until next time: ‘Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come.’

 

 

September Brings a Fresh Challenge

Posted in Blogging, Books, Editing, Freelancing, indie authors, Marketing, Self-Publishing, Writing by

My Indie Writing Life

I’m going to be trying a different format for my posts from here on, making them a bit more like a diary of what I’ve been up to between posts. I hope you find it useful 🙂 You may also have noticed that I’ve changed the title of the blog – it seemed like as good a time as any!

 

 

Writing

This is what I imagine Sam to look like *swoon*

The good news is that, as promised, I started editing Sam’s Story this week, one of the sequel novellas I’ve written to From Here to Nashville. I don’t really enjoy editing as I may have mentioned before (!) because I find it much harder than writing the first draft. When you’re writing the first draft, you can let your imagination run wild but once you get to the second draft and you already have a story in place, it becomes much harder to make changes without it having an impact on lots of other parts of the story.

This was the first book I wrote in third person so it was always going to be a challenge for me and I sent this one in to the RNA’s New Writers’ Scheme for its first read in 2015, two whole years ago now. My writing has changed a lot since then, improved even and so it is hard to deal with some of the simple mistakes I was making back then. For example, head hopping, where you switch from one character’s point of view to another’s right in the middle of a scene, making it unclear who’s talking. My RNA reader mentioned this and so did one of my beta readers so I didn’t have to wonder about whether they were right – if more than one person mentions it, it’s clearly an issue and you just have to accept it. And for the most part, it wasn’t actually that hard to deal with but I was annoyed with myself for having done it. However, I think I have moved on from this now and will be able to spot it more easily in the future.

The hardest thing to deal with has been the fact that, as always in my happy ever after world, my characters fall in love far too quickly. As Sam is only just getting over the loss of Rachel to Jackson, it’s important that he doesn’t come across as shallow when meeting someone new, and perhaps falling in love on the rebound. This means that I have to make it all take a bit longer – I have this problem all the time – and in having to do that, I have to change lots of other things as well.

Unfortunately, what I find when I reach a difficult point with editing is that I just stop doing it altogether. It’s simply too hard and I will never be able to master it, is what I tell myself as my excuse for not doing it. I have been trying to do an hour a day but honestly, by the end of the first week, I have the attention span of a gnat and I’m starting to get very frustrated with myself. I’m forcing myself to stick with it because I want to get it finished but it really is proving hard!

Upcoming WI Audition

The other thing I’ve been working on this week is my 15 minute talk for my WI audition next Saturday. They are very strict about timings and I won’t have a full 15 minutes so obviously, I can’t do the full talk I would normally do. I started off by paring down my usual talk about my self-publishing journey to the bare bones confident that this would be more than enough. Then I practised saying it out loud using a stopwatch only to find that I had the grand total of just three minutes! So I have spent the whole week adding content back in – this was only supposed to be a flavour of the talk, not the whole thing! I have now reached seven minutes and I am desperate to get to 10 but I can’t think what else to put in. I never thought I would struggle to find words 😉 Anyway, I will have to plod on as best I can and finish it because the audition is next week and I want it to go well of course.

Marketing

I have been experimenting with Amazon ads again this week for From Here to Nashville with some success but it’s not been brilliant. It is a constant challenge to keep the momentum going with sales of both books really and I feel that I am now approaching the end of the peak for The Vineyard in Alsace so I need to think carefully about what to do next.

Social Life

I am looking forward to another meeting this week of my Society of Authors group, where we’ll be discussing the topic ‘What Makes a Good Story?’ I will also be attending my first RNA AGM this week now that I am officially an independent member. The meeting also includes a talk by Julie Cohen on Pacing and how not to let your reader get bored, which I’m really looking forward to as Julie is always interesting and helpful. I’m travelling down to London with another RNA friend so it will be good to catch up and be writerly for an afternoon 🙂

Freelance Work

Finally, I started a proofreading job this week for an author who writes courses on Teachable and who contacted me as a result of seeing my name in connection with the Open Book festival. It’s funny how you make these connections quite out of the blue but I’m very glad I did.

 

Thanks for reading. Please do leave me a comment if you’d like to talk about anything I mention in the post. It’s always good to chat 🙂

An Eventful Summer in my Indie Author Life

Posted in Blogging, Books, Editing, indie authors, Marketing, Self-Publishing, Writing by

As always, it has been a busy time since my last post. I have an update about the talk I gave at my first literary festival which took place at the end of July; news of how book 2, The Vineyard in Alsace, continues to do well; progress with book 3, and finally, what I have coming up.

Open Book Literary Festival, Hitchin

It has been a bit of a while since my last blog post because I have had such a busy summer in my writing life. As I told you then, I was going to be taking part in my first every Literary Festival in Hitchin, near where I live. Before the event, I was incredibly nervous, not knowing whether anyone would turn up for my talk about my self-publishing journey. Well, the day dawned and it was rainy, just for a change. Our festival was mostly indoors but it would have been nice to have a bit of sunshine! Still, my talk was a great success with lots of people attending and a knowledgeable, interested audience who asked good questions.

We had a good turnout for our first ever festival and I spoke to a lot of people on the day. I definitely noticed an impact on my ebook sales afterwards too, and it looks like we will be doing the festival again next year. So all in all, a good thing to have done to raise awareness of my books. And look at this lovely cake made by Carol Deacon especially for the occasion!

 

The Vineyard in Alsace

My second book continues to sell well and if you are a regular visitor to my Facebook page, you’ll know that I’ve had some wonderful guest posts and interviews over the summer. First of all, I was on the lovely Tara Greaves’ website in her excellent A Look Behind the Book feature. You can read it here. Shortly afterwards, Tara posted a glowing review of my book on Amazon, which I was delighted with:

A story that warms you, like sitting outside in the late evening sunshine

More recently, I was on Linda Hill’s blog here, with a post about why I write Happy Ever After endings. I got a lot of feedback about this post because I think it struck a chord with a lot of readers. One of my writing friends even chose this theme for his MA in Creative Writing! Linda has also very kindly offered to read my book so I’m looking forward to reading her review sometime in the near future when her TBR pile has gone down a bit!

I also heard this month that my book is going to be featured in Living France magazine’s October issue as a result of me sending a paperback copy to one of their editors for review. I have absolutely no idea whether they liked it but I’m keeping my fingers crossed! I’ll let you know when I find out.

I had another milestone with The Vineyard this week when I woke up one morning to find my book in the top 100 Holiday fiction list on Amazon. It’s still hanging on in there for the moment, which is wonderful to see.

Book 3

Once the LitFest was over, I had to knuckle down in my writing cave to finish the first draft of my third book by the deadline of 31st August. It was a bit touch and go at times but eventually I did it and sent it off to the RNA’s New Writers’ Scheme for its first professional read. By the time I got to the end, I honestly felt it was the best first draft I’ve ever written but only time will tell! It will be interesting next year when I’m no longer a member of the NWS and I will have to find someone else to fulfil that function. I will be a fully fledged Independent Author member by then and will have to find my own way with that first assessment of each manuscript. There are no shortage of people offering that service but they want a lot of money for doing so. Anyway, that’s something for another day 🙂

Coming Up

Next week, I will begin editing (I will, I will) the follow up novella I wrote for From Here to Nashville some time ago. I have booked this in with my editor so I really can’t afford to put it off any longer. Anyway, I do want to get on with Sam’s story now because I hope to publish it before the end of the year – ambitious, I know. Ideally, I would get it off to my editor before book 3 comes back and demands my attention. When it’s ready to go out, I have a plan for its launch that I’ll be looking for people to get involved with so keep an eye out for my next post!

 

I think that’s all the news for now, and is probably quite enough to be going on with. Do leave a comment here on my website if you’d like to or alternatively, contact me on Facebook or Twitter. Thanks for reading. And if you’ve recently read either of my books, do please take a moment to leave a review – they’re so important for indie authors especially 🙂