...selling that book is hard.

 Okay you might disagree with me that writing a book isn't easy, but compared to persuading people to buy your book it's child's play. At least that's what I'm finding. People who have or are reading it are providing me with positive feedback. I've not found anyone that hates the book..yet.

 But I need to find ways to convince more people to read it. The difficulty with this is I only have so much free time and I want to be writing other work and yet constantly I find my attention turned to George and the Dragon and ways to generate more sales.

 I read a while ago that you needed to have a plan A for marketing.  Then when plan A didn't work you needed a plan B.  If plan B failed you needed a plan C and so on.

To date I have used pre-launch marketing in the form of the London Evening Herald newspaper mock-up I placed on the George and the Dragon website.  I've created a couple of images, that I think of as being digital posters, that I've shared on Facebook, Twitter and most successfully on Google+.   The idea of this was to try and get them to go Viral.  Not something I achieved but I was slightly set back by Facebook's page boosting policy.  With the 'What's your dragon name?' poster there's too much text on the image so it  fails their page boosting policy so they blocked me from boosting it.

I also created a group on Facebook called Dragons Are Not Just for Christmas.  But that hasn't taken off in the way I had hoped and I am still the prime contributor.  However, I have since discovered Google+'s communities and several similar Communities over there on which I have become more active.  It's how I achieved greater sharing of my posters on Google+ that Facebook or Twitter.

I designed this as my Facebook, Google+ and Twitter background.



Since January I've amassed 4,500 twitter followers on twitter.com/PhilipTolhurst and 2750 on the Empyreal Sun account.

I've registered on various websites that provide a permanent record of the book.  Such as the Author's Database.

I've created a publishing and promotions company, Empyreal Sun, just for the book, so far but I have plans for this new venture.

I entered the Guardian Self Published Book of the Month competition, fingers crossed with that as the entries for May end tomorrow.

All of this you have to take into context has only been in effect since I launched the book on St Gorge's Day, 23 April 2014.  I even tried to rename that George and the Dragon day.

So what's next?  Physical copies of the book.  Yes I'm finally going to go the create space route.  I know of a few people that are interested in a physical and that is enough for me.  All I have to do now is pay for the development of a full sized, rather than digital, cover and the book will be available.

So watch this space and I'll let you all know when it's available.

Phil