Sales this month

So, we're nearly at the end of March.

Before the Kybosh was put on sales of The Haunting in the UK (and bizarrely Australia) it was selling well. The total figures for March are

Paid:

USA - 262
UK - 194

Free
UK 197
Australia ! 5

In total - 656 copies gone out this month and about 200 last month.  That's quite good.

I got a one star rating as you know, but I've had two people email me to say it was fantastic. Who knows, I'm just glad they liked it.

Zventibold! Complete!

Here learn the tribulations of the boy-child Zventibold - how he rose from the grimy rags of his bastard birth to fight against injustice but how he was thrown down. How he turned to sorcery and raised the dead; how eventually he led an army of hamster men and kangaroo boxers to wreak vengeance upon his enemies. But there is more inside. Much more. 

Father murdered 
Step father murdered
Himself exiled
Only love ravished by his sworn enemy

Can he win her back?
Can right prevail?

Download this tale now. Every download helps good defeat evil.

Healthy Times - Hard Times

Went for a walk yesterday - here's some pictures:

I wanted to post these to say how much better I feel when I'm getting some fresh air. That and being Mindful. When I'm doing both of those things, the world is good. I learn to let go of things that bother me - like the 1 Star Review. In fact that's hardly on my mind at all now.

Funnily enough, I was reminded of it yesterday when I came home from my walk. After The Haunting

Stopped selling in the UK, I decided to make it free. This is what I'd always intended for this story anyway but when it started selling well, I thought I'd postpone the freeness thing. So I changed the price on Smashwords to free. Now, you should have to let Amazon know there's a cheaper price, but someone did it for me...

Does Amazon have a set of robots that search this stuff out, or as the helpful person who gave me my 1 star review done it to try and scupper me further.

Paranoid? Hmmm.

But since it became free about 16 hours ago it's shipped 60 copies so it's getting into peoples' hands and my hope is that someone will write a better review. Of course they might write more shit ones then I'll have to jump off the ridge featured above.

Not really. I'll not be ground down like pepper.

The Exorcist - My New Story

Here it is. Fresh meat. 

Laurent Binet: HHHH

Loved this book. It reads like a blog about someone writing a historical novel about the assassination of Heydrich in Prague. As such we have the writer's musings about what he should put in and some hints at his personal life - the mysterious Natacha for example. I enjoyed that "meta-novel" but I quite like quirky post-modern stuff. Binet calls it an Infranovel (in the Eng. translation anyway). The best bits are about the story of the heroic Czech resistance and the gut wrenching vileness of the Nazis. I will admit that I wept.

And guess what? He's got some 1 star reviews.

Moaning isn't attractive at all

Whining, moaning, complaining - that's not me.

Did I say about the one star review? It has totally killed sales in the UK.  And, it's unfair. I mean - "no direction" and "predictable" - you either don't know where you're going or you do.

I'm listening to Hawkwind so that makes me feel better. Also I think I have a bone in my mouth. This is probably good you're thinking - otherwise my mouth would be floppy and I couldn't eat. I had my tooth extracted the other day and they had to drill into the jaw. I think a fleck of bone is working its way out. They had to file the jaw bone smooth too so that maybe did it. Anyway the surgeon said I had a high pain threshold. I wish I'd taken that career as a bare knuckle fighter up now.

My daughter says I should get a tattoo 'cause I'd obviously laugh the needle off. But what kind of tattoo?

I know - I'll get that f****** one star review tattooed on my arse.

Falling like a stone...

So, this month up until the 1 star review (hiss, boo) The Haunting Sold 350 copies, and then after that, nothing. Dead in the water. I weep. I cry, but what can I do but write a better story?

So I am.

But that isn't why I wanted to blog tonight. I was discussing how our house would be quite good against a zombie apocalypse. It is part of a courtyard. At the top end there is a door onto the main street that you wouldn't know was there from the other side. Good. Zombies are unobservant and stupid. The other side there is a gateway for cars which is locked with iron gates and a car. My daughter said we could park the car against it and we'd keep them out for ages. We also have a secret room. Nuff said about that.

But then she said, "and we're close to the river and zombies can't swim...."

Bingo!  Of course they can't. Stupid, slow things that move with a total lack of coordination. How are they going to cross a river? How come no zombie series has thought of this before? How come the Walking Dead heroes didn't just blow the bridges???

The relief I am feeling now, is enormous. Just need to figure out how to keep the werewolves out and I will sleep easily for the first time in years.

1 Star Review

Just got my first one star review for The Haunting. Ouch. I even dreamed I was before a committee of wise old men who agreed to write me some positive reviews to balance it. Let's see if they keep their dream word.

What's worse is that it's the first review it's had. It starts off: "The story was well written, but..."  I don't agree with what she says (naturally), but what do you do about this? I guess you just have to move on. Maybe she's right? I should say that on Goodreads the same story got 4 stars. So there.

Ghost stories are tropes - the ones that do well such as the Blair Witch and Amityville get their buzz from claiming to be true, which they aren't.

The classics use the same themes over and over.  I watched the Tractate Middoth at Christmas which was really beautifully done, but still full of tropes - ancient manuscript, wicked necromancer, etc. I also read 3 Winter Ghosts by Gary Sargent recently and that was very well written but again, supernatural murderer etc.

(can't resist a plug)

But that isn't the issue here, it's my insecurity and wondering whether they are really shit...

Now when I write something truly original such as Zventibold! no one buys it!

Here's that link again.... 

:)

God loves a trier they say.

Amazon Ranking...

Hey, yesterday I was 16,890 in the Amazon Author Ranking. Today it is nosediving in the mid 20,000s. Yesterday I imagined myself the 16000th (I'm ignoring the 890) best selling author on Amazon. That is about twice the size of the town I live in at the moment, so it's like everyone I meet in town is a better selling author than me. And that includes the butcher and the Lollipop Lady at the school and Mad John.

Sobering.

Swapping Reviews

I've used Amazon's free book offer time with several of mine over the past couple of months. When I do that I tend to post a link to it on several of Facebook's "Free Book" groups. I think it helps. I get nice thumbs up messages from people and likes so it's good for morale if nothing else.

It also spawns offers to trade reviews. So typically I'll get a message or two from people I don't know who say that they have a free book and that they will write me a review if I will write them one. I have done this twice I think. At first I was naive, but then I began to think something fishy was going on.

These Facebook profiles usually have an attractive young woman, occasionally a man, as the avatar picture. When you click through most of them can't be viewed and have no history. This could be because of their privacy settings but I wonder whether it isn't because they are created specially for the purpose of promoting ebooks. Often the messages are written in an English that suggests that the writer isn't a native speaker or has mastered the language (no crime in that) but the books themselves are written in good English.

When you look at the books the author's name is not the name of the person on FB who has messaged you. And the books are always How To books. I've been asked to do reviews on How to Sing, How to Detox from Sugar, How to Meditate. Others have been recipe books about Paeleo diets and Smoothies.

They are rarely longer than 25 pages long and they say they normally retail for 5.99. For 24 pages? The content is usually grammatical and well written and with a broad brush approach - pretty much stuff that could be gleaned from the Internet.

When I queried one of the lovely young women who contacted me that her name wasn't the same as that on the book, she said that was understandable as she was merely a "Virtual Assistant". Does that mean she wasn't real at all?

I think that these books are of little real worth though they aren't bad as a general introduction or a basic source of recipes but I wonder whether you taint yourself with the 'infotrash' label if you exchange reviews with them.

While writing an honest review of a book can't be bad practice, I wonder what Amazon thinks about people spewing out hundreds of infotitles - recipes and how to books? Often the author claims to be a doctor or highly qualified nutritionist, but I have no way of easily checking these claims - my hunch is that they are fake authors with fake credentials ghost written by professional writers who regurgitate websites.

Zventibold!

I have just published the first installment of Zventibold! an epic fantasy comedy tragedy which I wrote way back when I was at University. I thought it was immensely funny at the time, as did my friends. (I think they really did)

I have uploaded the first 20,000 words as part of a serialisation. The rest is written but I wanted to see how Zventibold! (1) went. So far it is on free download and it isn't doing great. This is my experience with Desperate! (1) which was also humour and which also didn't work.

Funnily enough, I think Zventibold has the pzaz (sp - I know but I prefer my spelling tbh) to eventually become a cult classic. I hope to see that happen in my lifetime.

Here it is:

If you do download it, can you do me a review?

Remember this is the beginning of a cult: the cult of Zventibold!

Stories

I continue to marvel at how my story The Haunting is selling so well - 145 copies in 10 days. That's the most I've ever sold since I started this business. Some of my other little collections give three stories for the same price, but for some reason they don't sell a fraction of The Haunting. Is it the cover? Is it the description?

My fear is that I can't replicate this with another story as I don't really know why it's been so relatively successful. It can't be reviews because it doesn't have any so far.

So I wondered whether it was the fact that the title is a common one - you can't copyright a title so you can call your stories anything. I didn't do this on purpose with The Haunting, but maybe it has helped that there are loads of other stories/films etc, called The Haunting or the Haunting of...

So, I'm writing a story called The Exorcist. I want to introduce a character called Adam Meyrink who is a Chaos Magician and who is the only one who can exorcise the thing...

"Little Brother, you've been meddling with the Goetia" as Allen Bennett said to Aleister Crowley...

I'm quite enjoying writing it but as I sit here all on my own typing away in this quiet, empty house, I am getting a bit scared.

Moving House

I have moved house since the last post which explains my silence. All done now, mostly, still waiting for some mattresses to be delivered. Maybe today, maybe who knows?

Yesterday, another mattress was delivered (mattresses are big with me) and I got a text from the delivery company. I wanted to phone them to say I wasn't in but I couldn't do that. But what I could do was watch a great little  map on my phone which showed how my delivery driver Jim was edging closer and closer and all the time I'm wanting to yell "Jim! Don't waste your time - I'm not in!" But my yelling went in vain and Jim didn't know. I did send them an email which promised that it would be dealt with in three working days. That was no good for Jim.

In my youth we just used to phone people to arrange things. It was much simpler.

But anyway, by the end of February I sold 191 books.

This month so far (it's 8th March) I've sold 130 but the bulk of those - 100 to date - is

See how I did that plug? Subtle.

This is great. But I wish someone would give it a good review. It has one good review on Goodreads which again is fantastic.

I need to get back to writing now.