Yes, well, it's July! Didn't make the weekly blog again did I? I will make the effort. But right now I am trying to get my arthritic joints working so I can jump for joy.
Writer's Choice started in October 2012 and we have published three novels. In June G.J. Berger's novel 'South of Burnt Rocks, West of the Moon' won the historical fiction award at the San Diego Book Awards. We Writer's Choice members shared virtual champagne and enjoyed a virtual party. Then Sharon Robard's novel, 'A Woman Transported', started a sales run at Amazon which placed her in the top 100 of historical novels, somewhere around 50th I believe. Virtual Champagne flowed again as we cheered and whooped. Not yet a year old but already our promise of Quality Fiction is being reinforced by the readers' and judges' reactions.
Now I'm quaking because mine is the third novel and I have to do something to give my colleagues another virtual party. Must hunt up a couple of competitions and hope the readers in the UK start buying. I don't hold out much hope of American readers understanding the language or the history. The only American readers I've had so far have all been bored by the complexities of the history and puzzled by the language. Very rude a couple of them were, poor souls, because they found the novel a hard read. My UK Beta readers have all raved, and the novel was short listed in three unpublished novel competitions, so obviously my market is not the USA.
And on the subject of my novel, both I and those people who won a free copy in the Goodreads giveaway are yelling, 'Where is my copy?' The darned POD publisher, CreateSpace, suddenly said they couldn't print off copies because the cover wasn't right. As I already had proof copies with that cover I was confused. The end of May and all of June I was downloading altered covers and being told they weren't right. Argh! Fury and frustration. Finally I got hold of the manager, who sorted it out and now I have my copies ordered. But what a wait and how stupid when there was nothing wrong with the cover at all!
It seems to me that whether it's trad publishing or indie publishing there will always be problems.
