The Time Bubble

I've had a tremendous response to the last blog entry I made on marketing and selling Kindle books. One kind respondent on one of the Facebook groups I participate in even went so far as to say:  "that was one of the best blog articles on marketing books that I have ever read" Encouraged by this, and with the risk of ending up with egg on my face, I've decided to put my money where my mouth is and "go live" throughout the month of June when I'll be tracking what I'm doing via this blog. Apologies to readers who don't follow me for the book stuff but I'll endeavour to entertain too. To make it more interesting, I am going to set myself an extremely ambitious target, that target being to sell 1,000 copies in total of all my books during the calendar month - that is including borrows which pay out at just under a quid a shot, so they all count. If you'd said to me a year ago I'd ever be contemplating selling 1,000 books in a mont...

I can't believe it's barely 18 months since I published my first book on Amazon. I also can't believe how naive I was back then. In fact I almost cringe at the mistakes I made at rushing out that initial draft. I thought at the time that it was OK to paste together a set of blog entries and various other bits and pieces of writing I had knocking about, shove any old cover on it, don't bother proof-reading it and call it a book. Then try and market and sell it to family and friends without even thinking about the bigger picture. That the book sold at all was a minor miracle, but in fact it was relatively successful. However, the book's shortcomings were soon picked up on. I went back, cleaned it up, put a new cover on it, edited it into some sort of sensible format and put it back out there. That first book, Fortysomething Father has attracted more reviews than any other (well it has been out the longest), and is also the only one that has 1* and 2* reviews. ...