Authors Electric

I've been a blogger for a dozen years now--I started blogging in 2008, as a daily writing practice. Daily (w)rite has grown since then--from the initial days of crickets to the more than thirty thousand followers today. That sounds like a half-decent number, but engagement is always much lower than the number of followers. It took years of blogging to build the small community I have today-- of all my followers, I possibly have about 200 bloggers who I regularly/ semi-regularly interact with on the blog and over social media. Others drop by less often, and my interactions with them is sporadic at best. The best thing about blogging was the amount of information exchange. The guidance on book marketing and the writing life has also been invaluable. I follow blogs by other writers and publishing professionals, and the generosity of their sharing has made it possible for me to carve out a path for myself as best as I could, learning from others' mistakes, and hopefully, ...

In the last two months, I haven't had an entire night's sleep. I'm lucky if I have five hours. No weekends. No evenings out. Almost no cooking or gardening. The worst thing? No creative writing, and almost no reading. I'm on a hamster wheel and the faster I run, the faster it spins--the book tour gig is not for sissies. I'm traveling to various cities in India with You Beneath Your Skin , attending panels and discussions and lit-fests and all throughout an inner voice that remains calm and detached keeps asking me when I plan to get back to my current WIP again. I'm fundraising for two charities I've volunteered with for a while: Project WHY and Stop Acid Attacks : all my proceeds go to them. This adds an impetus--I'm pretty sure if this was a normal book, with no causes attached to it, I would have bolted into a hidey-hole a long time ago. To de-stress and keep myself functional, I've turned to meditation--just learning to breathe and rem...

I tried the free book giveaway marketing tactic earlier this year. Gaining a following of supportive readers motivated me to do it.  Far more successful self-published authors used the “perm-free” model to gain new readers, new markets and a lot of brand new pounds and euros in their bank accounts. Why not try it? If they achieved greater book sales using the model of giving away their equity for free, surely it should work for me. The experts claimed  giving away one of my books for free helped me gain the all important newsletter subscriber, the holy grail of author-driven book marketing. They are worth gold! They sell your books! They give you reviews! I wrote copy for my automation sequence, tweaked my landing page and wrote copy for Facebook ads designed to entice readers to give me their email address in exchange for a free copy of my book. The future looked so bright, until it dimmed. Over time a sense of crudeness creeped over me.  With each free ...

Has our lovely summer really drawn to a windy end? Can we not hope for a few more surprised, hot days before we dig out the thermal vests and furry slippers? What have you done this summer? Me? I’ve spent a lot of it thinking. What a glorious way to spend one’s time: reflecting. Not only on the work in progress, the cricket scores, the Brexit shambles - but everything in between. From the outside, nothing has changed, but I feel enriched by the hours of silent thought. But, while I’m revelling in all this thinking, I’m not selling books. There are no Facebook smiles for posting, ‘I’m living in my head for a while, and I’m very happy there.’ Stepping on from that, there are not Facebook emojis for, ‘I want to go away and think about this, and then maybe decide for myself’, nor , ‘This is complicated, I’m going to read more about the subject and come back to you.’ Nor, ‘please can give me more evidence.’ I’m fighting a soundbite world. We are repeatedly asked to sign thi...

Until three weeks ago I had never heard of a book blog tour. I had also never looked at many book blogs. When I was raising the funding for my memoir 'Dead Babies And Seaside Towns' I had some great support from book blogger Isabel Costello at The Literary Sofa. I was also asked to write for various book blogs. But still the whole world of book blogs remained a bit of a mystery to me. Then I realised that authors now often have a book blog tour and so I thought - why shouldn't I do that as well? It turns out that basically a book blog tour is a schedule of 'visits' which a book / author makes to a number of blogs. It is rather like the traditional book tour but instead of going to physical bookshops you are 'visiting' blogs. These visits might involve a review, an author interview, books being given away or an author Q & A / interview. I asked a number of writer friends for advice. I soon realised that the problem for me is that not many book...