Autumn in Canada is beautiful, just wish my camera picked up the colours more. Still it's been a great working holiday. And thinking of work it's been fun watching the ebooks sale online.Both Tizzie and Bittersweet soared into the top 100s lists which boosted PR from Amazon and so boosted sales again.

Seems to me though that the problem is maintaining those levels between sales without advertising in readers' newsletters.

Ah well. I'm learning.

READERS PLEASE NOTE:

only two days left of the sale, Monday 16th and Tuesday October 17th. My novels in ebook form: 'Jacob's Justice', 'Tizzie', and 'Bittersweet', will be on sale for 99 pence or cents at Amazon and Smashwords. Print copies will also be on sale at Amazon.com and .co.uk.

Life moves on....?

September vanished in a flurry of trips and the new novel setting in to its stride. The series of short stories has been out with editors for weeks. The competition stories are safely posted. So September should have been a good month for writing. Instead it's been on to one aircraft, off, then on again.

Australia was destination two, a conference - the Historical Novel Society - and family time. Canada has been and still is destination three. More writing work and talk! I do enjoy conferences even if the flight is 18 hours!

But the first destination was a place of such outstanding peace and soul soothing that I will have to make a yearly trip. I cruised Doubtful Sound in a charming river boat and we glided down that fiord in blissful peace. On the last day we sat for ten mins without engine on, dynamo pumping or cameras clicking and heard the birds singing at us. It had been quiet even with those noises, without them it was a silence you could feel and touch. I sat on deck on the last evening and my new novel, which was off to a bumpy start, simply fell out of the pen and onto the paper.

We all need such places to recharge ourselves. I am still carrying a little kernel of peace within myself and it's a good feeling.

READERS PLEASE NOTE:

1 a.m. Wednesday 11th of October to 1 a.m. Tuesday October 17th all my novels in ebook form: 'Jacob's Justice', 'Tizzie', and 'Bittersweet', will be on sale for 99 pence or cents at Amazon and Smashwords and https://coverblurb.com plus various other book site. Print copies will also be on sale at Amazon.com and .co.uk,

Three Cheers for Smashwords.

Smashwords have just found their authors three new markets. I love these guys. They do a good job finding ebook markets and are a pleasure to work with.

Here is the extract from their newsletter giving details of the new markets.
The full story is over at the Smashwords blog.

The new partners include:

• Odilo - Will expand our library distribution to 2,100 additional libraries in North America, Europe and South America.
• Tolino - Tolino will bring Smashwords titles to Germany's largest retailers, including Thalia, Welbilt, eBook.de and several others that collectively account for over 35% of Germany's ebook market.
• Yuzu - Yuzu is the the digital education platform and retailer operated by Barnes & Noble College, which operates 743 college bookstores serving 5 million college students and faculty members. The agreement will make it easier for a wide range of Smashwords Premium Catalog books to be assigned for classroom use by educators. The agreement also opens up exciting opportunities for self-published authors - especially college instructors and other educators - to publish low cost learning materials for the higher education market.

All Smashwords authors are automatically opted in to these new channels with the exception of authors who've selected the preemptive opt-out feature in the Smashwords Channel Manager (this feature prevents books from being opted in to new, unannounced channels). For all other authors, you'll have at least three weeks to opt out if you don't want distribution to any of these new partners. Obviously, we think all these channels are worthwhile because more distribution equals more sales opportunities!

Shipments will begin in January with books expected to first appear during the first quarter of 2016.

One year on.

It's October. And this time last year we were just launching Writer's Choice. I'm now organising a birthday party to celebrate a successful first year.

We had no idea, last year, that we could beat the gloom and doom sayers, that we could take on the role of publisher of our own books and make it work. For me in New Zealand, where literary snobbism is rife and indie publishers like us are regarded as degrading the standard of New Zealand literature overseas - that's a quote from the NZSA person heard on National Radio - it was a real risk. I do quite a bit of tutoring of writers and it is hard to get that tutoring work when you are branded as a failure because you don't have a 'proper publisher.'

But I aim to stand tall in our library at the birthday celebration and skite - boast - about our successes. We published three novels in our first year and G.J. Berger's 'South of Burnt Rocks West of the Moon' has sold steadily. It also won the San Diego Book Awards first prize for historical novels. Superb success and a real boost to our moral. Then Sharon Robard's 'A Woman Transported' began a sales climb on Amazon which put it way up in the top fifty (and eventually higher) historical novels landing a delighted Sharon in the midst of well known historical novelists. My 'Jacob's Ladder', because of a publishing problem which only saw the print version released in September, has just begun to collect positive reviews and is about to be entered in a couple of competitions. I hope I can join in with my colleagues' successes.

Whether I do or not, their successes do reinforce our Quality Fiction claim, and my next novel, 'Tizzie', will be launched on February 13th 2014. I've a better idea of how to and where to do PR this time round and hope the book reaches a lot of readers. It's quite different from the 17thC 'Jacob's Ladder', as it's set in 1887 in the Yorkshire Dales.

I am still involved with the indies group under Tui Allen. we are hoping to work with the Book Council who have gone on line with their newsletter and are trying to be less elitist. It will take some work. For all my short story publications in respected journals and magazine around the world I was not allowed to be registered on their author's list because my novels were 'self published.' Never mind the fact that Writer's Choice was a writers' publishing co-operative and our books were selected or rejected, edited properly and well designed. Nope, I didn't have a 'proper publisher'. Tui and our group has a long way to go.

Cooperation?

Steam has been pouring out of my ears all week. In one of those coincidences which seem to happen as a needed push or kick, tales from writer friends who have publishing contracts with the traditional big name publishers popped into my inbox or post box and all of them conspire to shove me towards self publishing.

I cannot believe what publishing companies can do. Apart from the one friend who been dumped because of lack of sales I have been steaming over the editing done to another writer pal's first novel.

This writer's editors chopped the really marvellous ending and insisted on a smaltzy, sloppy, not accurate historically ending be written instead. The novel is a great literary historical. The bloody fool editors keep trying to turn it into a Hollywood action adventure. Quite spoilt the story with their additions which are supposed to make the novel sell more! I seriously doubt they will help sales.

But from all this fury has come the determination to join with a couple of writer friends and make a self publishing cooperative. We aim to run an experiment and see if our novels, the ones agents and editors like but..., will sell as ebooks.