David Lea's Blog
July 3, 2019
Life imitating art!
If I have one thing to say to Leah Broussard, it’s ‘Don’t Do It!’.
Scientists are searching for a mirror universe. It could be sitting right in front of you.
August 1, 2018
New Book Cover!
Well it took about 2 months for me to get fed up with my old cover. It was a bit textbooky and didn’t really give an idea of the genre and feel of Entangled Earth so here were are on launch day for the brand new, sparkling (not really sparkling) cover!
Here it is!
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Ooh, the mystery! Who are those people? Are they alive or dead? How did they get trapped? All will be answered (well, maybe not).
Check it out on Amazon when it goes live (eventually) here.
July 26, 2018
Free Book!
Yup, today’s the day. Are we all ready?
Entangled Earth is FREE! No money down, pay in zero monthly installments of £0.00!
Oh, if you’re reading this after the 28th of July, sorry, bad timing! You’ll have to pay for your dose of twisty mazy madness.
July 24, 2018
An experiment in Free
Later this week I’m doing an experiment. Now admittedly I’m not a scientist. I used to be but that was a while ago so my skills are somewhat rusty but let’s give it a go anyway. Last month I ran a promotion to give away Entangled Earth for free for 2 days. I popped this on a few promotion sites and blasted Twitter and Facebook. In the end, possibly due to a tweet by Rufus Hound (thanks Rufus and my wife who knows him on twitter), I managed to give away 377 copies.
Hypothesis – Can I give away over 1000 copies of Entangled Earth in 3 days?
Now this time there are a lot of variables:
The promotion is over 3 days instead of 2
Instead of zero, Entangled Earth has ‘some’ reviews on Amazon.com now
The notification has gone out early and to a lot more promotion sites, hopefully covering a broader reach of people.
It’s on Thursday-Saturday rather than just a weekend, so should catch a better buying time for readers (apparently weekends aren’t great, who knew?
So what do I get from giving away my book? I know, it sounds counter-intuitive to give a book away when you are trying to sell it, but bear with me. I get:
Reviews – hopefully, a percentage of those who download it will read it, and a percentage of those will review it. Even if it nets 2 or 3 reviews it’ll be worth it, that’s how precious those verified reviews are.
Rankings – With a big push it might rise high enough in its category to get some notice and then after the 3 days it’ll still be there and get promotion by the great Zon and sell a few copies. This noticeably didn’t happen last time as it didn’t get far enough up, but we’ll see if there’s a post-sale bump.
Readers – after all is said and done, I really just want people to read it, so there’s that.
Results: Check back in on Sunday for a preliminary report!
July 16, 2018
Ahoy Pirates!
I love this so much. Some website (I won’t name it) has stolen Entangled Earth, not surprising as I’ve been chucking free copies around for reviews. I’d be mad but nah, it’s still publicity. The best bit is they’ve clearly run the synopsis through a thesaurus machine and what’s come out is brilliant! This is how you sell a book! Look at it!
“Physics isn’t effortless. Rule #1 must always be ‘Don’t wreck the world’, yet occasionally technology doesn’t stick with the rules.
An scan long past mistaken ability the Earth may possibly basically have days left. The planet is being torn aside through an invisible and lethal… whatever.
Physicist Mia eco-friendly needs to get domestic to England, from a devastated Paris, to discover her family members and perhaps, simply probably, cease the scan that’s finishing the world.”
I adore this. Illiterate pirates sailing the internet ahoy!
July 15, 2018
Escaping the masses through AMS
5 million. That’s a big number. Now imagine someone presenting you with a choice. Here are 5 million books, pick one to read.
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That’s what readers are now faced with when looking for a book on Amazon and, more pertinently, that’s the size of the task facing authors when trying to break out from the masses of published and self-published books that are filling up the behemoth. To make it worse, more are added every day and generally, the old ones don’t go away.
So how is a book, particularly one by a new author, supposed to get noticed? Well, it’s bloody hard. Getting reviewed is a biggie, but I’ve talked about that before, so let’s assume Entangled Earth has a healthy pile of 4 and 5-star reviews (and it’s moving slowly in that direction thankfully). What do you do with all that feedback?
Shove it in people’s faces! That’s what you do. Right in their face, just when they are shopping. In your face potential reader! In your face!
This is where Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) comes in. It’s the self-publishers main tool for getting your book seen. There are a hundred articles on how to go about doing it, and most of you will either know already or won’t care in the slightest about the details so I’m not going to go into them here. This is where I’m at now. Currently running is my first Sponsored Link campaign (Amazon US only as that’s the only place it’s possible for some stupid reason).
As of today, I’ve shoved Entangled Earth into 715 faces at a total cost of $0.76. Not bad value really. They haven’t all bought it, but you never know…
July 11, 2018
On genre
Entangled Earth is a science fiction horror apocalyptic adventure thriller.
There, that was easy wasn’t it? Genre sorted. Except that’s completely useless for categorization, and for telling someone anything about the book. That could describe The Passage or Turbo Kid (both of which are excellent by the way in their own way, buy them immediately).
Amazon have a wide, but also restrictive range of categories that you can place a book in. Entangled Earth currently sits in Science Fiction > Adventure, Science Fiction > Post-Apocalyptic and Science Fiction > Metaphysical & Visionary basically because there was no better place to put it.
Adventure makes sense, it’s one big adventure, and it’s happy alongside Ready Player One and All Systems Red (definitely read All Systems Red, best thing I’ve read this year).
Post-Apocalyptic on the other hand, does it count if the apocalypse is happening during the book? I’m not sure, I mean it’s definitely not The Road!
Metaphysical & Visionary was where I started taking the piss. What do we have in there? I Robot? The Bone Clocks? I didn’t think so either, but with the lack of an Invisible Planet Intersecting With The Earth Due To An Experiment Gone Wrong category it has to do for now until I find something better.
Since Entangled Earth was released I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time on various sites with book listings and the only place I see proper, flexible categorization is Listopia in Goodreads, and even there I can’t add Entangled Earth to any of the lists as I’m the author! I might have to rope in some friendly volunteers. Immediately lists like This is the End pop out and maybe even Best Science Fiction With a Female Protagonist.
So what am I trying to say? Genre is nonsense. I didn’t set out to write a science fiction horror apocalyptic adventure thriller. I had an idea for a book and wrote my story. I understand that maybe I’m making life difficult for myself. I’ve read the “I can write one novel every 2 months and make a fortune by sticking to a formula” stories. That sounds like the least interesting kind of writing process I could imagine. I have a folder full of ideas, most of which are nonsense or would make terrible books, but there might be some gems in there. None of them are remotely like Entangled Earth, and yet in the past few days one has been running round my brain that might actually work as a sequel. Don’t worry, no resurrections, no retcons, and if I do write it it might even not end up being a sequel after all, but you never know. Besides I’m 50000 words into a science fiction post-apocalyptic space adventure about the nature of identity, so let’s get that finished first.
David Lea, clocking off.
July 9, 2018
Getting the word out
Publicity isn’t easy. Thousands of new eBooks come out every month and poking your head out of that crowd takes effort and a huge amount of luck.
The first major blocker to gaining traction might be a lack of review on Amazon. People use reviews as a gauge of quality, and quite rightly. I’d think twice about buying an unreviewed book. You might think “I know, I’ll get all my friends and family to review it”and this might help in terms of numbers, just a few gushing reviews raises suspicions for many potential buyers. Additionally I’ve heard, but not seen, that reviews from people in your social circle can be removed by the great Amazon machine.
The best route is honest reviews, but these can be trickier to get as they will generally come from people you don’t know and this is where, at first at least, you might have to go begging. My first step was to start contacting bloggers. This is time consuming and a lot won’t get back to you. Additionally many of them have huge wait lists for reviews, but it’s worth it as you’ll generally get a good, in depth review that’s posted to Amazon, Goodreads and social media. Based on various sources I’ve pulled together a list of about 200 blog sites that I’m working through to get in touch with. Each one has received an offer of a free copy of Entangled Earth and a KU link in case they want to use that (helpful for page reads!).
So far I’ve had 4 reviews come out of that work, which is a lot better than nothing!
The holy grail is natural reviews from random people who’ve bought the book. This will take a while, and from what I’ve read you might get one review from every 1000 downloads. This is where the KDP free days is helpful. Every 90 days I set the price of Entangled Earth to free for 5 days and, alongside a huge publicity drive on all the “free ebook deals” websites I can find, I see a huge spike in downloads (over 400 on my last weekend). The main aim of this is to get the book in people’s hands and hopefully drive some good word of mouth and eventually reviews.
The long term goal is to get to 30 and then 50 reviews on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. This is where Entangled Earth will start being promoted naturally by Amazon (apparently). At time of writing I’m sat at 1 review on Amazon.com and 4 on Amazon.co.uk, so we’re still a way away, but all those blogger e-mails will start to pay off eventually… I hope.
So, in conclusion, if you read a book, give it a quick review on Amazon. It helps massively and I for one would love you even more than I do now.
July 4, 2018
The first reviews are in!
Entangled Earth is averaging 4.5 stars on Amazon.co.uk right now and doing well on Goodreads. Nothing on Amazon.com yet (sad face) but a few bloggers have reviewed it. Here’s what they had to say:
“‘Entangled Earth’ by David Lea, is an enjoyable and thrilling apocalyptic story. The originality of the premise and the engaging and grounded characters drew me into a story that was compelling, and both exciting and horrific at times.
Physicist Mia Green is in Paris for a conference and whilst she is visiting the Eiffel Tower, the apocalypse seemingly descends upon Paris, destroying the world famous Tower and most of the city with it.
Somehow Mia escapes the destruction, and her only thought is to get back to her husband and son back in England, in the hopes that they are safe. Bruce, the only other survivor from the Eiffel Tower, and Abraham, a professor who knows what happened – it’s a scientific experiment gone horrifically wrong, join her on her journey back home. Along the way they find out that it wasn’t just Paris that was affected but the entire world, and they must try to survive the apocalyptic journey to Cambridge, England and hopefully rectify the situation.
I liked the way the main characters dealt with the obstacles that came their way. And there were certainly plenty of them to get through! It felt like they were very real-world solutions to their problems, with the characters actually having to think about what to do, and then still sometimes getting by with a sliver or two of good luck.
The world building was pretty good too, giving us a believable world of chaos and devastation, thanks to the lab experiment, and seeing how the world is coping with the dire situation. *Spoiler* Not very well!
It’s an apocalyptic sci-fi story that is fast paced and action packed. There are elements of horror, especially at the beginning of the destruction of Paris and the gory deaths, but it’s more of an exciting adventure story as Mia, Bruce and Abraham race against time and try to save the world.
Definitely a good read and one that I enjoyed.” Geeky Nerfherder
“When an experiment goes horribly wrong, three people must escape the devastation and reach the lab in Cambridge in time to save the world.
Physicist Mia Green is in Paris for a conference when invisible, indestructible intrusions from another world start colliding with things, resulting in destruction and gory deaths all round. Apparently this is all the fault of an experiment at her Cambridge lab, so the only hope is to get there (without being killed on the way) and turn things off.
Scientifically, the premise is a bit daft, but it’s carried through with a lot of thoroughness and ingenuity as the heroes navigate all manner of nasty invisible obstacles. The writing is slightly clunky in places, but with few editing errors and very readable. Personally, I could have done with less gore at the start, YMMV. Overall, a good apocalyptic adventure story enlivened by a clever ending.
Expect a lot of gory deaths. Also some sexual references.” Ingenious Cat
“Okay, that gave me serious chills and it had nothing to do with my confusion if this was a sci-fi or horror book. It’s probably the end that caused my hair to rise.
A trip to the Eiffel tower like no other.
Mia watches the Paris pause and crumble as all hell breaks loose. She tries to find her way back to her son while trying to stop the experiment that caused the work to entangle with a parallel universe, only to be entangled her self.
So, yeah. I confirm that this is just an end of the world book…. That may casually cause the hair at the back of your neck to rise. No big deal… I’m not afraid of a little scare…
…. Serious chills.” Pointy Hat’s Realm
