Can Acer’s exploits, one day soon, enable me to live in the style to which I aspire? For more on this and other topics that hold little importance to anyone but me, read on…

Not much more than a week back ‘home’ after six months away and Dymchurch and DIY are already a distant memory.

As mentioned last week, I’ve been having a look at what I can do about flagging sales figures. Here’s what I’ve done?

1. I dropped the price of Dirty Business (The First Acer Sansom Novel) from £1.99 to £0.99 to try to generate some interest. Four days later and no evidence, sales-wise, to suggest that had any effect other than a negative one – the title dropped a few thousand places in the Amazon sales ranking figures. Doh! But dropping the asking price was only intended to be a temporary stop gap. (See 2)
2. I went through the rigmarole of of getting Dirty Business  listed as a free download on Smashwords, Apple ibooks, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and a few other e-book sites in the hope that Amazon might respond and price match and list it as a free download. (They do that sometimes.) Amazon did indeed respond to being made aware of competitors’ prices, and the notifications they received from my wonderfully supportive readers (thank you all very much) who answered my cry for help. The book is now FREE to download all over the world. Now I have to hope that Dirty Business will attract some downloads from readers who will not only read it but be encouraged to download others in the series.
3. When I posted the news on my Facebook author page yesterday a link encouraged me to ‘Boost’ the post for a nominal fee for 7 days. Suck it and see, Granny Tidy used to say. Usually I ignore that option but this time I sucked it up. We will see what happens. (Not that I can see how any effect could be measured with any degree of reliability or validity – too many variables in play.)
4. I submitted Rope Enough (The First Romney and Marsh File) to Bookbub for a promotion. Bookbub are THE e-book recommendation site. When they promoted Rope Enough before it was quickly placed highly in the Amazon top 100 free downloads. (Was it #1? I can’t honestly remember.) Anyway, Bookbub were charging over $500 for this service. Not cheap but the rewards in downloads of other books in the series are often worth it. The series received a decent spike in sales before. Bookbub declined to promote the book this time. Crap.
5. Plan B: Submit Making a Killing (The Second Romney and Marsh File) to Bookbub. Because MAK would not have been free but only reduced in price in the promotion this campaign would cost me over $1000. Gulp. I went for it for those knock-on sales. Bookbub declined again. Double crap.

Bookbub are notoriously difficult to get promoted by. See their stock email response below:

Thanks for your submission. Unfortunately, our editorial team has not selected this book for a BookBub Featured Deal at this time.

Due to limited space in the email, we’re only able to feature about 20% of the books that get submitted to us. Our editors review all the submissions that meet our minimum guidelines for a certain category and price point, and select the books within that group that they believe will perform best with our members. Other books the editors reviewed were better fits for our readers’ current tastes.

I was pretty gutted by this. Making a Killing meets all their minimum requirements for promotion in spades, in fact the reviews and average rating of the book should have made it a certainty, I thought. Shows what I know. (Maybe one of them has read it.) All in all a right waste of time, as one of my ex-wives once remarked on our blessed union. I’m looking into other book promotion websites for the R&M Files.

Not done with Bookbub, as soon as Dirty Business went live for free I applied for a promotion for it. Third time lucky, perhaps. I’m waiting to hear.

I made another big decision this week. I’ve also mentioned here recently that I have a book written outside of my normal fare that I’ve touted to a few literary agents. They all rejected it. No surprise there and no tears. I was preparing to send it to a few more. And then I realised that the last agent took over four months to respond. And making a submission is such a process, darling. You know what? I can’t be bothered to wait that long again and again and again for more of the same. Life is too short. By the time every literary agent in the land has rejected it I could be dead… of old age, and then no one would get to read it and I don’t write books for them to be not read. I’m self-publishing it. It is called Cold Kills. I’ve ordered the cover from my guy this week. The book will be available for Christmas, which is rather appropriate. More on that next post. Lots more.

PS A loose end I’ve been meaning to tie up for some time: I posted here a while ago that I was reading American Psycho by Bret Easten Ellis and enjoying it. I was. I was about halfway through it at the time. And then I finished it. In the second half of the book the author changed up a couple of gruesome gears. The descriptions of the central protagonist’s brutal deeds became more explicit, more graphic and more depraved. I want to go on record as saying that in light of my overall reading experience I would not recommend this book. I’m glad that I read it. Parts of it were engaging. Parts of it were quite funny. The writing was largely very good. I finished it. But in recommending a read it can reasonably be assumed that the recommender would want others to read it. I would not want any female I knew in my real life or my virtual one to expose themselves to what Ellis writes about. It would make me uncomfortable and Dog knows I’m no prude.

Have a great weekend, everyone.