A year on from self-publishing my first novel, what lessons have I learned? What would I do differently next time? What mistakes did I make? Even though my sales have been pretty poor, I don’t think I made many mistakes. I experimented and as a result there’s a few things I won’t be doing again,
AuthorBen
Self-Publishing: Paid Advertising, Is It Worth It?
Once you’ve written a book, edited a book and published a book, you need to promote the book. We know this, but how? You can go asking and begging for book reviews, you can try marketing/PR stunts, you can go on a social network and blogging frenzy to drum up some business and you can
Amazon, Let Me Give My eBook Away!
I finally get a Bookbub promotion approved because I said I’d give it away for free. Goes against my Taylor Swift-like instincts but I put it down as a marketing cost. I’m selling fuck all at the moment anyway, so profits aren’t going to be hit. (profits! lol!) I set a date and then log in
Self-Publishing: ‘In A Right State’ 1 Year Review
6 months ago I reviewed the progress of my debut self-published novel, ‘In A Right State‘, here. It weren’t pretty. The second half of the year didn’t go much better, in fact, probably worse. I’ve sold 11 copies over the last 6 months on Amazon, 27 in total for the year. I doubled the amount
An Alternative to Word Count Targets; Writing Legacy
I’ve never liked word counts. The pressure if you’re not on your game, grinding out words as you push your story uphill, or, blasting past your target easily but with the nagging feeling that tomorrow might not be such a cake walk so should you stop and save some momentum for tomorrow or carry on? If
My vote for Helsinki to host Worldcon in 2017
I recently spent a weekend in Helsinki and someone I follow on Twitter, Crystal Huff, is involved in the sci-fi community plus she’s Finnish! She gave me some great pointers of where to go and also let me know about Helsinki’s bid to host Worldcon in 2017. Crystal also tweeted… @b3n3llis Yay! If you blog about
‘Blindsided’ sent out to Beta Readers
As you can see, I’ve produced some printed versions of my latest novel, ‘Blindsided‘, to give to beta readers. I’ve also put together a PDF version to give to those beta readers who prefer ebooks and to email readers overseas. I’ve got 10 beta readers so far. I may get a couple more, but I think
‘In A Right State’ on iBooks, Nook, Kobo and more…
I’ve done my penance on Amazon KDP with pretty poor results so the next step was to spread my wings and get submitting to the other online retailers. The problem with this idea is that submitting to these sites would take time and is about as much fun as chicken pox. Fortunately, I’d met the people
Shortlisted for SFBook Book of the Year 2014
Well, this is a bit of a result. My debut novel, ‘In A Right State‘, has been shortlisted for the SFBook Book of the Year 2014! I got a good review from SFBook a few months ago but to be shortlisted by anyone, let alone a respected sci-fi book blogging site, is brilliant. A nice
My Writing Goals for 2015
Everyone else is at it so I thought I’d write a post about setting goals too. I was also inspired by Sophie Playle’s post on ‘Writing Goals – What Are They Good For?’ which talks about how to set goals and what goals to set, eg. be flexible and don’t aim for the impossible. I’ve always had yearly