This is the first post of my writing diary – an insight into how I am researching, writing, promoting and selling my books.
While most people were taking advantage of some rare Bank Holiday sunshine to get outside, or perhaps catch up with friends and a plethora of sporting events going on, I spent a good couple of hours in our local library trawling through old copies of the Grantham Journal.
It was something I had been meaning to do for some time, to fill in a number of gaps in my memory of matches played for Grantham as I continue writing 1,309 Days Later. It was quite amusing to read details of a match I had no recollection of, assume I couldn’t have played and then find my name in the team list.
My five pages of scrawled notes from the 2006/7 season should now enable me to put in a good shift and move the story forward significantly.
In other news, I have placed both my cricket e-books – 546 Runs Were Enough and Return To The Crease onto Amazon’s KDP Select programme. This means that users may loan the book for free, and if they do so I get a cut of a fund available each month for this purpose.
It also gives me the opportunity to make the books available for free for five days in the next three months. I shall be using this to ask people on my Facebook / Twitter feed / email lists to download the book, have a read and hopefully review and rate it for me as these are the things that will help me appear on best-seller lists.
I have already managed, with minimal promotion, to get both books into the top 20 of cricket e-books at various times so I am quietly optimistic that I can further increase the profile of the books, and also myself and the hockey book.
The dates that you can download my e-books for free are as follows:
546 Runs Were Enough: 17th-21st May to coincide with the first Test of the summer
Return To The Crease: 8th-9th May, 26th-27th May and 19th July.
Happy reading!