Back in July, I did an author get-together at our local book shop Cover2Cover in Northwich. The weather was beautiful and it was artisan market day so good footfall in town and we had a great day. Didn't set the world on fire - although fantasy author Danny Williams did well. But we had a great time and it was good to meet other local authors.
Cover2Cover has been great at getting us all together. I know many local writers and I go to a writing group, but these are mostly people I've never met before and I honestly didn't realise there were so many of us! The shop is also fantastic at promoting our books - we don't have shelf-space, we have an entire bookcase for us all! And there are frequent talks too. Pretty sure I posted a while back about the one I did.
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But one of the things I did get out of a Saturday morning sitting outside a bookshop was inspiration! It was refreshing that - for once - we were dealing with physical tangible paperbacks and not ebooks. Ebooks can be cheaper to produce with no print costs, but having a few postcards and bookmarks can't compete with a real book you can hold in your hand, sniff (come on - we all do it. Admit it!) and carefully thumb through. Though it doesn't always help when parents stop to chat and their children pick up and finger everything with their grubby little paws.
Anyway, the inspiration I came away with - thanks, Danny! - was to finally get around to doing a paperback of my YA fantasy Edge of Dreams. This was one of my first forays into self-publishing way back. The novel was almost picked up by Chicken House (got all the way to an acquisitions meeting, apparently), but like a lot of my earlier work, nearly was never quite enough back in the days when I had an agent.So I tracked down my cover designer JT Lindroos which was an achievement in itself as I couldn't find an email anywhere. He couldn't find the original files for the ebook cover, so made me a new more modern paperback wrap and threw the ebook in for free. And I love it.  |
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Note to self: when commissioning a paperback cover, make sure you have justified the text! By the time I got a proof copy and realised my mistake, justifying the text reduced my page count by about 7 pages - way too much of a risk of reducing the spine width. I tried starting my chapters further down a page, starting on odd-number pages, but ended up about 7 pages over the limit. Then I had a brainwave and added the first half-chapter of the sequel. Page count back to 232. Result!Which leads on to the second take-away from the book event. I'm now motivated to finish the sequel Flashpoint. I was about 3/4 through, so it's had a good edit/rewrite and I'm now about 10k left for the climax. I'm quite fond of the branding of the new cover, so will probably go the same way, but with darker covers.
And finally, after spending a day merging my two Draft2Digital accounts (one being a legacy Smashwords migration on a different email so nothing pulled through automatically), I was motivated to trawl through KDP, D2D, Smashwords legacy reports and ACX and chuck some spreadsheets together to show that in the 15 years I've been self-publishing, I've sold nearly 9k books. That doesn't include giveaways, free-first-in-series or shop/hand selling paperbacks.
And now I am thoroughly motivated to write again!
Comments
Thanks for your post. Meeting local writers as you say is a great way of upping the ante on your writing work. I'm going to look out for some in my own area.
Encouraging to see the overall sales numbers too - well done!