...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

Dragon Dreams by Dusty Lynn Holloway
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The story of Dragon Dreams centres around two young people Auri and Nachal and how their lives become intertwined in their quest to stop an evil dragon and cure a dying world.

Dusty does a great job of creating a detailed world in which the protagonists' adventures take place. She also creates a cast of believable supporting characters although the dwarf feels under used given the importance placed on his being a part of the ensemble.

As a fellow author of dragon stories I love the way Dusty handles her dragons, they are very understated until the story required otherwise.

There were a couple of points that niggled with me that meant this book didn't quite make 5stars, if I could give it 4 1/2stars I would have; there's a prop that appears out of nowhere and the final chapter discusses a a place with a name that lacks all inspiration. After the wonderfully named Elven, Dwarven and Human lands and cities it seems so out of character that it jarred with me just at the point the book was ending.





View all my reviews

Good evening dear reader.

First an apology, no not to you, but to my blog.  I am sorry, my blog, for neglecting you for this past week.

I feel like it's been a busy week but not one that feels like it has been fantastically productive.

I've started to put out feelers to find legitimate sources to review my book.  Hey I know I can pay $5 on Fiverr and get a review.  Hell I can pay $15 and they'll buy my book too.  Makes me wonder how many sales I could rack up and then claim against advertising expenses.

As part of this process I have offered to read another writers book, which I purchased, and he has purchased mine to reciprocate the review.  Only I find myself reading a book in desperate need of proof reading and editing.   Now I am wondering how do I handle this situation.  I am thinking I may offer to proof and edit the novel for them rather than give them a review but we shall see.  I don't think I'm the sort of person that can give a book like this an above average review and not say anything as well.

This week also my attention has turned to competitions.  I have entered George and the Dragon into the Guardian Self Published book of the month competition and I have also found a US short story competition I am particularly interested in.   So my thoughts have turned towards writing an 8000 word fantasy story before the end of June.  I've got a couple of ideas for that so now I just have to get on a write the story.  Shouldn't be too hard.  Perfecting it, however, maybe.

I'm slowly closing in on 4,500 Twitter followers and continue to use several different third party pieces of software to do everything from find my un-followers to ghost tweeting for me.  Like Justunfollow and Pluggio.

I have also started to really make a good go of expanding my presence on Google+  hopefully that will pay dividends. I've also been trying, slowly, to increase my Facebook page likes but as I say it is very slow.   However, I will keep on trying

Looking forward to the week ahead I'm hoping to start studying, writing my short story and maybe even creating a new author photo for myself.

I hope you have a great weekend.

Phil

Even though I want to be writing and working on new projects I really can't help thinking about marketing George and the Dragon.

So there are three ways that my book could be made available to prospective readers;

1. Digital
2. Physical
3. Audible

George and the Dragon is already available on Kindle, B&N (Nook), iTunes, Smashwords and the Play store.  I chose this option first because the benefits are obvious.  As the author and rights holder I get to keep the lions share of the money raised from the sale of the book across any of these formats.  There are also other added advantages.  I have just uploaded slightly new versions of the book to both Smashwords and Kindle and will be doing so shortly to the copy uploaded to the Play store.    So I have the digital aspect covered.  I'm ignoring Kobo they are taking a ridiculous amount of time to upload my book from Smashwords.

Then we have physical.  I've been playing around with Createspace today and the book seems to work nicely in their designer.  I just need to go back to my cover designer and get him to create me a cover for the book and George will be all set for physical copies.  However, physical copies are not cheep and the royalties returned are not great.  I've been playing with the pricing and a £7.49 copies yields a royalty of £1.03.  The one benefit of this is that bookshops can then stock the book or at least order it in and I know of a few people that prefer physical copies.   So it will happen it's just a matter of paying the extra for the new cover.

Finally we have the audio version of the book.  I found out today about ACX.  ACX allows you to put your book up for tender to audio production companies who then create the audio version of the book and you can split the royalties 50/50.

I couldn't resist and have listed George and the Dragon.  Hopefully someone will like the idea of the book and I can enlist a production company to help me create the audio version.    The whole process takes 3-8 weeks it says so it'll be a while before you can listen to the book while travelling to work.

So hopefully before the school summer holidays George and the Dragon will be available in all three versions.

Phil

George and the dragon was written from scratch without any plans, character details etc.  I did the sum total of zero work before I started writing the book and just let it lead me where it may.

Along the way much as been lost; characters have been sacrificed and chapters have been deleted or smashed together.   Much work was done to turn it into the book it has become today.

Now with George available for anyone to buy I can start thinking about my next writing projects.  There two of them;  an untitled cyberpunk novella and Nicholas North: Schoolboy Detective.

Both of them have had a little more work and attention given to them before I started writing.  I've got a better grip on the characters and locations for both works.

What I am really lacking is a coherent plot for Nicholas North.  I know small parts of it but I don't yet know enough.  So again I find myself writing whatever comes into my head.  What I hope is that I'll write enough that something like a coherent plot will start to form.  This can then be moulded into a finished work.

We shall see what happens over the next few months.

This week I have learnt that the Kindle Direct Publishing software does not handle Word docs particularly well.

Am now in the process of replacing the uploaded doc file of my book with a .mobi created with Calibre.

I've been having some fun playing with a couple of marketing 'images' I've created:

Blitzkrieg; just the name should send a chill down your spine.

This red, mutated monster has two heads, a split personality and can breath both fire and lightning.  Half as big again as Spitfire and full of cruelty and menace Blitzkrieg as he is now known is not to be underestimated.

It is his relationship, or lack thereof, with his rider the evil Nazi Colonel von Vogler that if anything makes him less powerful than he would be on his own.

If you want to know what evil he gets up to you can buy the book on Kindle, iTunes, Play Store, B&N and Smashwords.