777 Challenge

I was recently nominated to take up the 777 challenge by my good friend Scott Bury, and it seems all I have to do is give you seven sentences from page 7 or 77 of my work in progress.  Okay, challenge accepted!

I'm going for page 7 because I haven't hit 77 pages in Gray Redemption yet. Tom Gray is trying to get back to the UK, and his friend is negotiating with a Chinese people-smuggler:


Just a few moments earlier he had planned to have the four passengers thrown overboard once the money had been transferred, but now he would have to guarantee their safe passage lest this laowai insult him further by going to a competitor.

He took a few deep breaths to disperse the adrenalin coursing through his body before replying.

“Once they reach the UK they will call you to confirm their arrival. You will then transfer the money.”

“Deal,” Hughes smiled, offering his hand to shake on it, but Tang ignored the gesture.

“If the money isn’t in my account an hour after that phone call, you’d better pray that you’re already dead.”

That's the easy bit done: I now have to nominate 7 authors I admire to carry on the challenge.  The hard part was narrowing it down to just 7, but here goes (in no particular order):

Seb Kirby

Cinta Garcia

Dawn Torrens

Gae-Lynn Woods

David Leadbeater

Andy Lucas

MG Wells

It's all yours, guys!!

KDP Select: How was it for you?

Well, for me it wasn’t too bad. I had reservations when it first started because I wasn’t sure if taking my books off Smashwords and its distributors was such a good idea. However, as time went on and I read more and more success stories I looked at my sales figures and saw that a year on all the other sites had brought me around 30 sales, compared to hundreds on Amazon.

So, I took the plunge and enrolled on April 1st 2012. I then checked the borrows every 4 seconds but those zeros never changed. Sales didn’t pick up either, so I decided to use up some of my free days. Having read some other blog posts I thought it best to go for 2 days to start with, and found a few sites on the internet that would let me spread the word. I loaded up Tweetdeck for the weekend, let my friends on Facebook and Goodreads know about the promo, then sat back hoping to get Gray Justice into the hands of at least 2000 readers. I figured that might generate a few reviews and possibly some sales of Gray Resurrection.

Day 1 started slowly – so slowly that the promo started an hour late! Not to worry, it soon became free and the figures started to climb. By midday I had nearly 400! I was wearing out my finger, switching from the UK to US reports so thought it best to get away from the laptop and get some fresh air.

A couple of hours later the sales were climbing but not that quickly, but I went to bed having reached 3300 downloads for the day. I also had a few sales of Gray Resurrection, which was a bonus. The next morning the downloads had reached 3700 and I went to work hoping to reach my revised target of 5000 by the end of the promo.

I did. Plus another 4800 on top. That’s right, over 9800 downloads in two days. Once the promo ended, the figures kept ticking over, but this time it was paid sales. I went from a couple of books a day to over 100 and that took me straight into the number one slot in the Amazon UK Drama category, plus number two in thrillers, which is where I currently sit. I’m also number 12 in fiction and approaching the top 100 overall. Oh, and I was number 1 Mover & Shaker for a day!

Was it worth me taking the books off the other sites, even for just 90 days? Definitely. Would I re-enroll in KDP? Again, yes.

Would I do anything differently next time? Oh, yes! I will be booking a holiday for a start. It is nigh impossible to promote the freebie while at work, so I will be booking a few days off to plug the free downloads and deal with the aftermath.

I must stress that this success wasn’t all down to me. I had some wonderful help from my friends on Twitter and Goodreads and without them I would have been lucky to reach 2000 downloads. I won’t name names in case I inadvertently offend someone by missing them off the list, but you know who you are, and you will always have my gratitude.

Update: My second promo didn't exactly get me the same results. I gave away a similar number of copies of Gray Justice, but instead of leaping into the charts at number 325 as I did last time, I came back in at number 20,877. I have managed to drop a few thousand places instead of climbing them, despite giving away close to 13,000 books. However, over the next 24 hours I climbed up to the top 500 and on the 4th Gray Justice reached the top 100. The effect might not be as immediate as in previous months but I am still on course for some big numbers.

While you guys enjoy my books, I'll carry on writing GJ3...

Authors Helping Authors Update

Last week I came up with the idea of authors collaborating (please read it before continuing - opens in a new window) to get as wide a reach as possible on Twitter by creating the @AuthorTeam account and inviting fellow writers to follow, which gave them automatic inclusion in the AHA list. People could then search for that list and find tweets to retweets.

However, it isn’t working out a planned. First of all, I open the list every day and I get the tweets for the latest follower going back a whole week, which means I have to keep the list open for some time while the timeline fills up with new tweets. As anyone who has been on Twitter for a while knows, leaving it open soon cripples the browser by sucking the system memory dry (or maybe that’s just my laptop). It has also been brought to my attention that the #AHA hashtag has been adopted by others not involved with the group (even though a search for #AHA brought back no results last week!)

Besides this, the list is being filled with tweets that are not book-related, and it can take some time to find anything worth retweeting to the author’s benefit. That’s the case now with just 100 followers, but imagine how it will be when there are 1000 followers, or even 10,000!

Therefore, I plan to implement something new, but I need your help. It has to be something that remains free but doesn’t take a lot of maintenance (otherwise I won’t get to finish Gray Redemption, the third in the Tom Gray trilogy). I will give you my idea, but it would be wonderful if others could chip in and suggest something that would make sharing relevant tweets an easy and rewarding experience. In the meantime I will continue to run the AHA list.

My suggestion is simply to have a new hashtag: #HYFA2, which stands for Help Your Fellow Author Too. If you have a book-related tweet which you want others to share, just add the #HYFA2 tag. I have done a search and found no matches, so it will be ours for the next few days at least! All you have to do is click one of these #HYFA2 tags in a tweet (and preferably click the wheel next to the search button and select Save Search - that way every time you click into the Search box this tag will appear) and then pop back every day to find similar authors willing to share.

I really want this to work for everyone’s benefit, so please, add your ideas below or send a DM to my @Jambalian account.

Authors Helping Authors...

…is a hashtag I came across on Twitter a few weeks ago when I thanked a fellow writer for spreading the word about my novel, Gray Justice. His response was “My pleasure #AuthorsHelpingAuthors”. I didn’t really think much more about it until I decided to check out a book promotion website recently. I had been to the site before but had baulked at having to pay a fee, especially as I didn’t know if my book was ever going to sell. Now that I have some excellent reviews and a growing fan base (not to mention regular royalties) I looked again in more detail, and it struck me that something similar could be done quite easily (and most importantly, FREE) through Twitter.

Now some might think "Why should I tweet for other authors? I'll be pushing sales their way!" I had the very same worries when I first joined Twitter but the reader that buys their book isn't going to give up reading once they've finished it. They will simply go and find another book, and this time it might be one of yours. I regularly tweet for three authors, and all write in much the same genre as I do. That doesn't scare me at all, because I know that once the reader has finished their book they might go looking for recommendations from that author, and that leads them to me. Since I started taking part in the tweet exchange my sales have increased around 300%, and I hope theirs have gone up, too.

My idea is extremely simple. I have created a new Twitter account (@AuthorTeam - https://twitter.com/#!/authorteam) and in that account I have started a new list called AHA (Authors Helping Authors). You can find it here: https://twitter.com/#!/AuthorTeam/aha.

The plan is for as many of you authors as possible to follow this new account on Twitter (don’t worry, I will follow back and won’t tweet). I will then automatically add you to the AHA list. This might take up to 12 hours, so please be patient.

Once you have been added, here's what you have to do:

• Go to https://twitter.com/#!/AuthorTeam/aha and add it to your Favorites in your browser.


• Visit that page as often as you can (try to get there once a day if possible).


• Look through the list of tweets and retweet a few of them (and also check out what they are offering)


• If you get a retweet, please reciprocate


• If you have a tweet that you would particularly like to have retweeted, add the #AHA hashtag to it

In order to make this work we need all participating authors to try and go to the list once a day and retweets some of the posts. If we can get 100 authors to join in, the chances are your tweets could be retweeted to thousands of new readers, getting you more exposure. Even if you can only manage to visit the list a couple of times a week you will still be contributing to the author community. You might even want to schedule a few tweets a day to let others know about this venture.

I must have a thousand authors following me at the moment, and if they all joined in that would be an awesome network. So please, click the first link above and follow @AuthorTeam.

And don't forget to tell your fellow authors about it!

Gray Resurrection

This is a two-part post to answer questions raised during the launch of Gray Resurrection. I will first of all explain how the launch went, and then tell you about the cover image.

It is now 4 days since I released the sequel to Gray Justice and it’s time to reflect on how successful (or not) the promotion actually was. I set the price of Gray Resurrection to just 99 cents while at the same time offering a coupon to get Gray Justice free from Smashwords. It turned out that the promotion wasn’t that popular. Only 2 people took advantage of the free copy, yet actual cash sales increased, with daily sales up by 800%! That might sound a lot, but I think the figures have peaked and I expect them to fall back over the rest of the month.

It was fun while it lasted, but it does show you the value of a second book. I’m hoping to get another leap in sales when I release the last in the series – Gray Redemption – towards the end of the year. I’ll be back with details nearer the time.

As for the cover image, I wanted something really eye-catching for my second book. I recently interviewed Russell Blake on this blog and one of the things I asked was where he got his book covers from. While Russell couldn’t give me his/her name, he did offer to pass their email address along. I contacted the person and was given a great price for what I consider an outstanding image. I gave them the basics of the story and pointed out which elements where most relevant: the bolo (knife used for cutting your way through the jungle - or someones neck!); the protagonist in his battle to escape; and the attack on a military base. I was given a suggestion which I liked and asked for an example, which I got a week later. Unfortunately, the image of Tom Gray was all wrong. He had a normal nose, whereas Tom's was flat against his face. I pointed this out and three hours later I had the revised image you see here. That is one service provider who has found a customer for life! If you want a similarly stunning cover for your next book, take a look at Russell’s interview for details.

Ok, time to do some more writing…

Gray Resurrection is out on March 1st…

…but there’ll be no sampling.

What? Hang on, you just spent two weeks promoting your post Kids, Ketchup and Books which is all about giving readers a taste of what they’re going to get and now you stop doing it with your new book.

Hypocrite?

Well, not really. You see, while Gray Resurrection is a good little read in its own right, it is much better if you read Gray Justice first. Thing is, I can’t guarantee that readers will have done that, and I can hardly open the book with “Thanks for buying this book, but you’ll have to stump up even more cash to buy Gray Justice first” can I?

So I’ve amended the opening to say “If you haven’t already read the first book I strongly suggest you to do so by grabbing a free copy from Smashwords. Simply do a Google search for “Gray Justice Smashwords” and you should be able to find the page quite easily. Go through the purchase procedure and at the checkout enter code XXXXX and click Update. The price will be recalculated to $0.00 and the book will be yours to enjoy. You can download it in multiple formats for your Kindle, Nook, iPhone, etc. I promise, you will enjoy this book a lot more if you read Gray Justice first.” Obviously that’s not the real code.

“But wait! I’ve just paid a dollar for Gray Justice and you’re going to be giving it away to new readers! That’s hardly fair!”

And you are quite right, it isn’t fair. That is why, instead of throwing it onto Amazon at $2.99 as I had been planning since last year, I will be launching it at just 99 cents – the lowest price Amazon will let me charge – for the first 4 days, so you have until the evening of Sunday the 4th of March to grab your copy on the cheap. Instead of paying $3.98 for both books you will be getting them for less than $2, which is still cheaper than a Starbucks and my way of saying Thank You!

I hope you enjoy it and look forward to your feedback.

Kids and ketchup...

…go together like kids and sweets or kids and scraped knees. When I was growing up, everything had ketchup on it, to the extent that I couldn’t eat my fish fingers and chips if the ketchup bottle was empty. The thing is, my kids wouldn’t touch the stuff until last week. Whenever I offered them some to go with their burger they just said “EEUUWW!”

It was the same with gravy, ham and a host of other foods: they didn’t like it, even though they hadn’t tried it. Whenever the bottle was placed on the dinner table they would push it away from their plate in disgust, just in case their food became contaminated by its mere proximity. What I had to do was get them to sample a little ketchup on a chip. “Go on, just try a little, see if you like it.” They still refused, until I promised to open the sweet cupboard after dinner (that always works). With fear and trepidation, the youngest opened her mouth and squeezed her eyes shut, as if expecting the chip to explode. It didn’t, and her face instantly lit up. “Mmmmm, that’s delicious!” Her twin immediately dived in and now we’re moving on to the next battle: salad!

That episode got me thinking, though. Gray Justice has had 17 reviews on Amazon US and 14 on Amazon UK (at the time of writing) and only four have been 4-star, the rest of the readers giving it 5 stars. Yet it isn’t setting the world on fire. Sure, the reviews tell people how good it is, yet there is still that reluctance to dive in and spend 72 pence on a copy.

I’m sure it’s not just my book, either. Many a reader will have their favourite authors and have an unwillingness to try something new, which means there are so many great reads they could be missing out on.

Can a little tell you a lot?

I guess for me it can, just like it does for my daughters. Like the vast majority of readers, I want a book to grab me from the first page, or even the first chapter. Unfortunately, in recent years I have purchased too many books that have left me bored to tears. That isn’t to say they are bad books, but they are just not for me.

This doesn’t just apply to self-published books, either. I have read bestsellers from my favourite genres, sometimes even my favourite authors, and yet I couldn’t quite get engrossed enough to get past the first couple of chapters, try as I might. Since I bought my kindle late last year I have added and abandoned five works and I knew it was time to take a different – and cheaper – approach to book selection.

As a member of Twitter and Goodreads I get recommendations all the time, and as well as reading the reviews (which go a long way to telling me how good or bad a book might be) I download the sample from Amazon. This can be done easily by clicking the Send Sample Now button, and the first 10% of the story will be delivered to your Kindle. For me, that is more than enough to make a decision.

So the next time you get a book recommendation but you’re not convinced enough by the reviews to make a purchase, try sampling first. In fact, why not try sampling now? US readers can get a sample of Gray Justice here, while those from the UK (where the book is set) can get it here

Like my daughters and their ketchup, I’m confident you’ll be back for more!