Forging ahead, come rain, come shine

As we roll on towards autumn, I look back over last week and see the highlight was the amount of money Chindi authors raised for Cancer_UK: a magnificent £482 ($624). The Arundel Festival certainly proved a winner for us because we managed to beat last year’s target of daily sales and the money raised for the Cancer charity. A lot of credit has to go to Carol Thomas who worked jolly hard, supported by her husband, Mason, to bring this to fruition. Carol is a self-published author who writes clever stories. You can see a short trailer of one of Carol’s books, Crazy Over You here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfA-RjTDI94

A number of us took a turn on the stall, which meant we all endured the heat (and the rain), and managed to sell some books. The next big event for us, unless we squeeze one in before Christmas, will be the UK Southern Book show at Worthing on the South Coast. This will be in March, so more of that next year.

I have posted two Facebook adverts for my thriller, A Dangerous Game. I put the promotion price back up to £2.99, and targeted audiences in North America for one ad, and UK for the other. I’m switching the ads off and on according to the time of day, hopefully trying to avoid nights when most of my targets will be sleeping. So far I have just managed to sell enough books each day to cover the daily cost of the campaign. I know I will have to keep an eye on the ROI, but equally important at the moment is learning how to “tweak” my adverts for maximum benefit.

I have also teamed up with four other authors to promote a box set of cross-genre novels. It’s a bold attempt at drilling into the hard earth and uncovering readers who prefer to read across the different genres. It’s risky, because not everyone wants to buy a set of books that probably contain three of which they would never read. Contracts have been signed, and brain-storming has begun on the how, why and what of the campaign. Launch date is probably going to be around the end of October. Price will be at something like £0.99 for a short period, and then will go up to around £3.99. One of the things we’ve been asked to do is get ARC readers for the box set, and pick up some reviews. So if any of you who are reading this blog would like to have a stab at being one of the ARC readers, contact me at www.michaelparkerbooks.com/.

I had another go at my current WIP. I keep getting pulled away, sometimes because I find other jobs to do, but more so by the absence of any real plot structure. I could fill it with a load of nonsense and call it a thriller, but I wouldn’t be true to myself if I gave in to that little demon. I was tempted to kill one of my characters off, simply because the way in which I had composed the paragraph demanded that it ended dramatically, and this person’s death was the only way. The trouble with that, and it would have been fairly dramatic, is that I need this character later in the story.

Our Chindi group have an on-line meeting on Monday evening. I hope it doesn’t take too long; England are playing Slovakia, and it’s on TV. Hope I don’t miss it (the game, I mean) Wish me luck!

The Hard Yards

The weather is warming up along with our sales on the Chindi book stall at the Arundel Festival. Each day those manning the stall manage to sell more than on the same day last year. Tomorrow, a bank holiday here in UK, is the last day, and we hope to be able to declare a real bonus for the Cancer_UK charity we are supporting with our book sales. I popped along last Thursday. Got there early and left at mid-day. Sales were so slow that we only sold one book; fortunately it was one of mine. Sales did pick up during the afternoon though. The photo on the left was taken yesterday. It shows Carol Thomas, Helen Christmas and Dan Jones, all members of Chindi, hard at work in the sunshine. You can see more of them and our work at www.chindi-authors.co.uk.

I’ve also been keeping an eye on my book sales on-line, and can see the benefits of using an ongoing advertising campaign like Facebook. Although I’m not quite clearing my investment, sales have been good enough to make it worthwhile. However, I now need to reconstruct the advert and target another audience. I received an e-mail alert from Facebook during the week telling me that there had been a sudden change in the activity on my advert. Trouble was, they didn’t say if it was good or bad. I had to decipher all the metrics to make sense of it. I believe I was being told that they had more or less exhausted my chosen audience, which is why I will be changing tack.

I have registered my interest (and paid) in a Literary event at Crawley Library in October. It’s about an hour away from here, but I’m quite happy to make the journey and, hopefully, find more readers. There’s also a chance I can meet my son for a late lunch if he isn’t working, but the main reason is to sell books.

But it hasn’t all been about selling books. Last Friday, we went along to Petworth to meet our No.3 great grandson, Orin. He is six months old. He brought his mum, Gemma, along with him. We had a picnic in the grounds of Petworth House. It was lovely sitting under the shade of the trees and having him and Gemma to ourselves for a while.

As a result of all that is going on in my busy schedule, I haven’t put pen to paper; so my latest thriller is gathering dust on the electronic bookshelf. I can’t see me making much progress in the next few weeks either, so perhaps I have resigned myself to the fact that there will not be another Michael Parker release for the foreseeable future: certainly not this year. I do run ideas over in my head, but I suspect that’s the same for all writers; how else would we fill our thinking moments? Something will turn up though, I’m sure it will. Wish me luck.

My engaging selling technique

The good news from the previous seven days is that the follow-on effect from my BookBub promotion is still working: I have achieved 25% ROI at the moment, and I’m still selling books. Now the really difficult bit starts: how to keep the balls in the air. My Amazon ad. was a disaster, and now I’m hoping I can achieve better results with my latest Facebook advert. It’s too soon to make an appraisal, but early results show I might need to put my learning cap on and start tweaking. I’ll let the weekend through before trying anything.

Today I was at Arundel for the Festival. Our Chindi group (www.chindi-authors.co.uk) have book stall there in support of Cancer_UK. I arrived early and helped Carol Thomas and her husband, Mason, set up the table (in the road), and waited for the punters to roll up. I managed to sell five books before finishing at mid-day. Quite a result for me: it really put a smile on my face. I enjoyed talking with the people who came up to the stall, even the elderly lady who passed by pushing her walker with a few sticks of rhubarb sticking out of her shopping bag. It made for an interesting conversation on how cheap the rhubarb was just up the road. And no, she didn’t want to buy any books.

I was asked what the “mark-up” is for our books. I explained to the man who asked the question that we make nothing from paperback books because we are self-published authors. We would have to set up table top sales every day of the year and hope to sell a few books every day to cover our costs. But the important point is the engagement we have with the public, getting our name into their minds and hoping — hoping — that they look us up on our respective websites and buy our ebooks.

I had two copies of my hard edged romance, Past Imperfect, with me, and managed to sell them. My sales skills can be unbelievable at times. I just wish I knew what I said that made these lovely people buy them.

We also meet other writers who tend to be very shy in admitting they are writers too. Once we’ve dragged the truth out of them they are quite happy to talk about their work. It isn’t unusual to learn that they have written one book and are quite happy with that. One lady I spoke to had written an autobiography of her short, three month spell working in a Palestinian refugee camp. The conversation looked like it might be heading towards a political narrative, so I steered away from the subject and talked about the various books we had on display. If any of you are interested, her name is Alice Merrill and her book is called Quiet Resistance. It’s available on Amazon.

And almost as trustworthy as a reliable clock, the British weather let us know it was not to be laughed at. It chucked it down for about ten minutes. It cleared the streets and made us throw a protective sheet over our books. Eventually the table was pulled in off the street and into the shelter available in front of the Cancer charity shop we are supporting.

Now I need to think about writing again and steering my main character, Conor Lenihan, into trouble with the Israelis and anybody else who dare steps in his way. He’s pretty tough, you know. Wish me luck!