Authors Electric

Last month, XPO North sponsored the Indie Author Fair 2015, at Foyles Bookshop, Charing Cross Road, London…which meant me heading south for 8 hours by an interesting east coast line Virgin train ride, that passed through Newcastle and some great undeveloped farming countryside I’d never seen before… It’s a bit surreal to arrive at a big station like King’s Cross in London after travelling backwards for 8 hours by train…it reminded me of Robert Pirsig’s description, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , of how ancient peoples used to encounter the future…as though proceeding up a river of time in a boat, with their back to the future as they rowed, facing the past, and only seeing the new territory of the encroaching future in small manageable segments appearing over their shoulders gradually… In his book, Pirsig presents this backwards approach to moving forward as the healthier way to travel…rather than the modern method of turning our back to the past, and facing ...

Reviews for The Survival of Thomas Ford have been popping up quite quickly lately on Amazon. The 200 th one came in on Amazon.com, the U.S. site, around Christmas Day, and then the 207 th review appeared there a few days ago. On Amazon.co.uk, the UK site, The Survival of Thomas Ford has 93 reviews now. That amounts to nearly 300 reviews total if Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com are combined (though not quite 300 as there are a few reviews duplicated on both sites). It has taken 3 years for the 300 or so reviews to accrue on Amazon for The Survival of Thomas Ford, so roughly 100 reviews a year, or 1 review every 3 or 4 days, on average. Noticing this led me over to Goodreads, to seek out some other 3-yearly statistics for The Survival of Thomas Ford. The “Rating details/Book data” section there tells me that: 1053 people on Goodreads have “added” The Survival of Thomas Ford 276 have “rated” it 63 have reviewed it And that “81% of people liked it” O...

I hadn’t given away any free ebooks for a year, so I did a 5 day Kindle Select Free Promotion of The Survival of Thomas Ford from 16-20 October. I paid for a Bookbub ad, going out to their Thriller subscription list on 16 October. Luckily, I was able to get my order in during the first month of Bookbub’s new UK-specific listing, which sends the book out to a list of their new UK subscribers when you pay an additional 5 per cent on top of the US Bookbub fee for your genre. In the past, a Bookbub promotion would result in mainly US downloads with not much result in the UK, but I noticed right away that the new UK subscription list resulted in the strongest UK downloads I’d ever had during a free promotion. I also took out a $20 Ereader News Today ad on 17 October; a Dailyfreebooks.co.uk ad at £10 on 18 Oct, along with a Kindle Nation Daily FreeBookHighlighter ad on same day at $30/and a $10 eBookSoda ad on 19 Oct/with a Freebooksy ad on October 20. As previously, ...

Having made several thousand dollars profit last year from a series of Amazon Kindle Select free promotions, and three Bookbub promotions, I had been waiting for a chance this year to combine a 99 cent Bookbub promotion with a Kindle Countdown Deal for my novel, The Survival of Thomas Ford. On 24 th March, Bookbub sent The Survival of Thomas Ford out to their thriller subscription list. I combined this with a Kindle Countdown Deal ad which ran on the Kindle Book Review site on 25 March; also, a Kindle Nation Daily Special Sponsored Post Triple Play ad which ran on 26, 27, and 28 March; and a Bargainbooksy ad and mail-out to their thriller subscription list which ran on 27 March. This involved an outlay of $625 for advertising in total, which, although it was a relatively small percentage of the profit made from last year’s promotions, was still the most I had spent on advertising for one promo to date, so there was a degree of nail-biting involved. Soon, though, the s...

Author, Linda Gillard, has written on occasion about the constraints of genre on fiction, or, more particularly, the problems “genre-busting” books can present to publishers, and their marketing departments. I’ve mentioned previously that my literary agent sent The Survival of Thomas Ford out to publishers, sometimes as literary fiction, and sometimes as a commercial thriller, and sometimes as a “literary thriller”.   In June, I wrote here about the Bookbub promotion I did in April, to Bookbub’s Mystery, Thriller, Suspense subscription list (which is now no longer available and has been split into two lists). This had a successful post-promo effect of about 50 new Amazon USA reviews, and 1000 sales at the $2.99 post-promo price. As a further experiment in “genre”, I submitted The Survival of Thomas Ford to Bookbub’s literary fiction list at the end of August. On this occasion, I also used EBOOKBOOSTER, which Mark Chisnell had mentioned using in an earlier...