This Little Piggy

  About six months ago, I remember reading one of Jack's posts about the post-publication experience. Hmm... I thought, bit negative. I thought he'd be over the moon at having a real book with his name on the cover. To tell the truth, I have no doubt that he was. The thrust of Jack's post was that publishing was all very well, but it really was all about sales. And marketing. Because marketing = sales (if x = y, where x is the author and y is very, very lucky). Furthermore, if you don't do any marketing there won't be any sales at all, because no marketing = no sales who- or whatever x or y are.

Anyway, post publication, your time is subsumed in writing:

a) twitter posts that no-one reads because you don't have the secret hashtag that ensures your tweet is read by every prospective buyer of books in the world.

b) Facebook posts which all your circle of friends "like" but never share because, well, of course, there is no cat on your picture illustrating it.

c) blog posts that the three people who follow your occasionally diverting blog don't plug or comment on.

d)  e-mails to independent bookshops begging them to stock your book (they won't answer so you can assume they won't. Honourable exception : Cogito Books, Hexham who replied and did).

In addition, you lose hundreds of hours grappling with new skills like photo-shop so you can find out that you can't even manage to make an image like the one above. Then you discover a web-site which will do it for you.

So what you don't have is time to write.

All this aside, Unbound have an agreement with The Three Marketeers - Laurie Avadis, Jack O'Donnell,& Yours Truly - and ABCTales, wherein ABCTales gets a cut of the profits. Now I don't care about what money I make, and I seriously doubt whether Laurie or Jack do either. What we do want is to have our books read by as many people as possible. Buy one of them, buy an e-book (although all three books are beautifully designed and a pleasure to own, even if you didn't write it), or buy from one of the cheaper suppliers the Amazon page links to. Every sale will keep ABCTales going. Go on, give it a go, make it worthwhile learning how to get my novel's cover artwork in a picture with some goats.

Ewan

Jack

Laurie