Cracking On

How time flies: November already and Christmas round the corner. We bought our first Christmas present today: something for our great-grandson, Harrison. He lives in Cyprus with his mum and dad, but will be in England this month for a couple of weeks. More photos for Facebook!

I’ve finished cutting the word-count on manuscript for my publisher: managed to get it down to the required notional count of 110,000 words. Now I have to read it through just to make sure I haven’t left any ‘holes’ there or doubled up on sentences. I suppose most writers are the same: the novel looks brilliant until you been through it several times. But no matter: if I expect efficiency from others in the profession, I have to be prepared to work at it myself.

The BookBub promotion for my novel, NORTH SLOPE looks to have been successful. Although I don’t have access to the sales figures yet, I do know that I passed the 1000 sales figure within 48 hours, and have seen the “guesstimates” on novel rank showing increasing sales throughout the week. The promotion ended last Friday and I’m still selling. I had planned to put the price back up to $2.99 (it’s currently $0.99), but will wait a while until I see a fall off. My main aim was to cover my investment ($360) and get more readers, and I have achieved that. I even attracted a sales pitch from someone who tried to interest me in a promotion with no ‘upfront’ costs. Goes with the territory I suppose. I’ve also noticed a lift in sales of my other titles: nothing dramatic, but an overall improvement on September’s figures. Now, of course, I have to think of ways to keep that going. I’m not planning another promotion for a while, but I will probably try to come up with something in the run-up to Christmas. Any ideas out there?

So what now for this writer? A trip to the hospital next week to find out what’s in store with regard to my Lymphoma is next, but before that I will spend time reading my MS, learning more about nutritional foods and keeping faith with God to bring me through.