Paula R.C. Readman's Blog, page 36
October 21, 2021
For the amazing price of 99p/c you can own 13teen dark tales.
Today you can buy my collection of 13 dark tales for the amazing price of 99p on Kindle. Maybe Something dark for you to read over Hallowe’en 
If you’re not sure if this book is for you then read this review first. https://scifiandfantasyreviewer.com/2020/07/09/days-pass-like-a-shadow-paula-r-c-readman-review/
Thank you so much if you do buy it. 
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0897SV5RH#SalesRank
https://mybook.to/dayspasslikeashadow
Days Pass Like A Shadow 13teen Dark Tale
October 19, 2021
The Magic of Editing
I love editing. For me as a writer, it’s where the magic of writing happens. It’s when your first rough draft becomes the story you really want to share with the world. We’re all under pressure to get the job done and move onto our next project, but taking some time out to focus on editing your book [short story, poem, play, etc,] will save you from a lot of heartache, if your work is rejected because it needs more editing.
Patience is the key to good editing. Taking your time to think about what you want your story to say to the reader. What’s at the heart of the piece. Are you showing enough, rather than telling. Are you immersing your reader into your plot. What will they remember most? Are your characters developed enough? Is the setting well-drawn? Will the story make them feel happy, sad, scared etc. Is there enough action to keep them turning the pages. These are some of the things you need to think about while editing. Make sure there isn’t any unnecessary description or long-winded dialogue which might kill the flow of the story.
Before you start work on editing your manuscript the most important thing is to take a break from the piece. You need to clear your mind, and put on your editor’s hat to look at it with fresh eyes. I suggest either work on another piece of writing, do some gardening, housework, or go on holiday. Anything that can help you empty your mind of the piece you’re wanting to edit.
For me, I don’t like to focus too much on the opening chapter when first editing my manuscript. The opening paragraph is the most important paragraph in your book, (story, poem, play, etc). This is the hook which will grab your reader and keep them turning the pages. It needs to be a powerful opening line or paragraph. You need to create a question in the reader’s mind which will drive them to continue reading as they seek out the answer. Of course, as the reader finds one answer you’ve already created a series of questions and answers along the way that makes your book into a page turner. To really be able to create a brilliant opening chapter you need to know your story inside out first.
Starting with your second chapter check for overused crutch words and phrases. Keep in mind the series of questions I’ve already spoken about by asking yourself whether each sentence is saying what you want it to say. Does it makes sense? Does it carry the plot forward? Are you writing in the right tenses? Are you listening to your characters? Are they interacting with the plot, setting, each other in an intriguing and realistic manner? Are they either necessary to the plot?
I find reading three chapters ahead and then going back over them sentence by sentence, stripping out anything which is repeated information helps to bring clarity and consistency to the manuscript. Strip out unnecessary words too. Are you telling your reader things they already know? If a character is to sit down, the reader knows to sit the character must go down. Like wise to stand up a character needs to be upright. So you can lose the words up and down. Think about this as you work your way through the whole novel. Are you telling your reader something they don’t need to know. Think about losing the obvious. If your character is sitting and you want them to cross to the window. Don’t say: James stood up and walked across to the window. Your reader already knows for James to reach the window he has to stand up in order to walk. Therefore it is better to say James crossed to the window Unless, of course, your character is in a wheelchair, but you would have already shown your reader this.
Once you have gone through your whole manuscript a few times. This is when you need to check that your opening paragraph is as strong as you can make it to hook your reader. Once your reader is hooked, you’ll need to deliver an outstanding last chapter. After all, you’ll want the reader to reach for your next book.
It’s important to remember editing is seldom a one-step process. This means to take your rough draft and turn it into a finish, well-polished manuscript you’ll need to read through it multiple times when editing. This is when I use a feature on Microsoft Word that reads my document to me. If you don’t already have it on your computer, it’s very easy to set up. I’ve created a video below to show you how to do it for yourself. I found it speeded up my editing process and helps me find the clunky sentences too.
I hope you found this interesting and helpful.
Have fun editing.
October 18, 2021
The Numbers Are In!
What a crazy weekend! Over the last few days I’ve been so focused on promoting my novel over the internet so I wasn’t able to concentrate on my editing. Saturday and Sunday was taken up with promoting Seeking The Dark across a large number of Facebook groups, Instagram and Twitter, while doing a hundred and one other things us women have to fit into a day.
UK Amazon seemed late waking up on Saturday, and I felt they had change their way of working too. Last year when Stone Angels was available for Free over a weekend, I was able to watch the book climb the chart, where this time you couldn’t follow the changes. Anyway, it was fun seeing my first novel on Amazon in the number one position both in the UK & USA free chart over the weekend. It will be sad to see when it starts tumbling out of the charts by the end of the week. Seeking the Dark made it into quite a few different categories. First these are the UK 
ones it appeared in.
In the USA, 
it appeared in these categories.
I used the services of two marketing companies over the two days, both of which I’ve used before. Book Cave and Fussy Librarian. The end result was I gave away 1,091 copies of Seeking the Dark.
Looking on Goodreads this morning, I found six readers now have it on their to-read list. Three were added on Saturday, but I’m not expecting any reviews from them any time soon as they all have a large number of books on their to-read list. One reader downloaded over twenty books on Saturday and more on Sunday.
Watch this space to find out whether I’ve made the right choice in giving my book away for free and if Free-downloads are a positive marketing tool or not. 
Keep on Writing.
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October 17, 2021
Free Download Results so Far
After a slow start to the day it ended on a high note. Seeking the Dark rose to number 1 on both the UK & USA charts my publisher had placed my book in. Yes, I did get excited because it was a bit of fun, and I did enjoy watching my book climb the charts, but unfortunately this will all be short lived.
Do I see a free-to-download weekend as a positive exercise for authors? I’m not sure. In reality I think its more beneficial to the readers of eBooks than to us writers. As long as you’re not expecting any miracles from the event, and haven’t invested too heavily financially in hope of seeing a great return for your money, I’m sure you’ll be okay. I look upon the weekend as a brief moment of fun. The weekend is more like a giant billboard on the side of a freeway. You see it briefly as you drive towards a more rewarding destination. It isn’t somewhere you stop off in hope of seeing something amazing. It’s there, and gone in a flash. Any positive results will appear long after the event. You may gain one or two new readers, and if you have other books available, you may see some sales on them.
[image error]Pexels.com" data-medium-file="https://paularcreadmanauthor.files.wo..." data-large-file="https://paularcreadmanauthor.files.wo..." src="https://paularcreadmanauthor.files.wo..." alt="" class="wp-image-10351" width="371" height="247" srcset="https://paularcreadmanauthor.files.wo... 371w, https://paularcreadmanauthor.files.wo... 742w, https://paularcreadmanauthor.files.wo... 150w, https://paularcreadmanauthor.files.wo... 300w" sizes="(max-width: 371px) 100vw, 371px" />Photo by Marcus Wu00f6ckel on Pexels.comFor me, the only real winners from a free-download weekend are the readers. Going by what happened after my first free-download weekend, with Stone Angels, I saw no real return on giving away over 4k copies of the book. On Goodreads, many of the readers who have it in their to read-next list won’t be reading it in the near future going by the numbers of other books they already have on their list to read.
So why take a gamble giving away another large number of books for free? I see the free-download weekends as more of a publicity stunt rather than something which will generate large number of sales. It’s about sparking the reader’s interest in your books by tying your promotion to an event. It gives you a reason to do a bit of hard selling without the readers’ feeling under any pressure to buy your books. If you generate enough downloads it gives you something to talk about as your book climbs some obscure category to sit at number one on the Amazon Free Kindle chart around the world. Of course, you can share screenshots of your book at number 1 across the internet too. This will help you to promote your work too.
The real benefits to a free-download weekend comes when you have a back catalogue of work to sell. If a reader new to your writing style download a free book, and enjoys it they are more willing to buy other books by you. It will be very interesting to find out from my publishers how many downloads Seeking the Dark generated this weekend. Of course, any pages turned, or new reviews I receive in the future will make me very happy, so all I can do for now is just keep on writing.
If you are still interested in picking up a copy for free click on this link Seeking The Dark (Tomorrow British time the book will no longer be free.)
October 16, 2021
Seeking The Dark: A Free eBook to Download This Weekend.
When I first wrote Seeking The Dark it was at the beginning of a long journey to become a published writer. I never stopped to imagine where it might lead me. It was as though I was just along for the ride. Seeking The Dark is the first book I wrote though it has become the fourth to be published. I hope to write many others and see them published in my life time. I have six other books on my computer, all in varies stages of completion. Sometime in the not too distant future, I will complete them and hopefully see them published too. At the moment, I’m working on two other books. One is another time-slip novel, and the other is a sci-fi time-travel novel.
Sometimes my journey feels as though I haven’t achieved much, and then on other days I realise just how far I’ve come. At the beginning of this week I received a message from a reader who had just finished reading Seeking the Dark to tell me what she thought of it. I was taken back and left speechless, as she said in her message that horror wasn’t her normal choice of reading matter. Hopefully, this is the beginning of what I hope to achieve with my writing. I wish more mainstream readers would explore their darker side. Here is the message I received. Click on second image to read it in full.
Click on Image to read it. Today (from 9.30 UK time) and tomorrow you can download a free eBook from Amazon just click on this link: Seeking the Dark for free.
Seeking the Dark Free to Download Weekend from Amazon Click HereOctober 10, 2021
Time Waits For No Man? Sorry, No Woman!
For the last couple of months I’ve been busy knocking my fifth book into shape. It’s a book I wrote in 2013 that has sat on my computer since. I had always hoped and dreamed that one day I might be in a position where I could send it to a publisher, not that I hadn’t tried before. It was rejected a few times and I received a strong negative response to the idea behind the plot line by an agent at an RNA meeting I attended in London.
That’s when I set it aside and wrote Stone Angels, a crime novel. At the time I was writing The Phoenix Hour crime novels were on the rise in popularity, where sci-fi novels weren’t. The Phoenix Hour is set in the future and is a time-travel novel. The main theme is about the struggle of women and their sense of having no power over their own lives. I had hoped by using a time-travel plot line, it would highlight the fact that nothing has really changed much for women. That the same old attitudes towards us still exist in the world today as it was in the past. Though my novel isn’t a protest statement, but just a work of fiction. There are, of course, other themes running through the book, too.
Doctor Louise Brimstone finds herself caught between a rock and a hard place as she tries to solve a problem created by the research company she works for, Hartley Research Centre of Excellent. The company is a world leader in genetics. Louise hoped she could escape the growing problems in her own time by creating a new life for herself in the past. It is only then she discovers that she has in fact walked blindly into a common situation most women find themselves in, and then realises it’s too late to save herself.
I’m hoping to have the book ready for submission by the end of November. Then I can give one hundred percent of my creative time to working flat out on my first Granny Wenlock novel. I just needed to focus 100% on The Phoenix Hour as it completes the set of the first three books which were my learning curve to become the writer I am today.
I’m not sure what the book cover will look like, but I love this image.
September 24, 2021
A New Bookshop in Town
The pandemic brought around a lot of changes for us all. It was as though the old way of doing things had suddenly without warning made way for the new. One of the biggest changes which had been hovering on the horizon for quite a while was online shopping. Now most people buy and sell this way.
Amazon is one of the biggest online bookseller and most authors will, of course, have an online author’s page with them, but now there’s a new player in town. Online bookshops. This is a site which allows readers to access and support independent bookshops across the country by shopping on this new website
During the first wave of Covid-19 many people ‘rediscovered the pleasure of reading’ and sales of books soared as we were all forced to stay at home. Reading gave us the opportunity to escape into a safer world were the reader was in control. Despite a huge surge in reading lots of independent bookshops, like so many other small businesses, struggled to stay afloat during these difficult times.
That’s when https://uk.bookshop.org/ stepped in to bridge the gap and throw a lifeline to independent bookshops. So if you would like to still keep your online shopping experience as easy and convenient as it would be with a huge retailer like Amazon but want to help small independent bookshops check out the bookshop.org link.
My single collection of short dark tales is available to buy through The Bridge Town Cafe Books Shop http://www.thebridgetowncafebooksshop.co.uk/2021/04/days-pass-like-shadow-by-paula-r-c.html
If you would like to find out more about the stories in this collection, please read this review of Days Pass Like A Shadow here. https://scifiandfantasyreviewer.com/2020/07/09/days-pass-like-a-shadow-paula-r-c-readman-review/
Thank you,
Have a great weekend and keep safe.
September 21, 2021
One never knows.
My school friend, Alison always said, you never know who you might meet. The person you pass on the street could become your best friend, or your worst enemy, but you would never know unless you spoke to them. This has stayed with me throughout my life, so I’ve always treated everyone I meet as though they would become my best friend, unless, of course they behave in a negative way towards me.
Alison’s words rung true yesterday morning while I was out walking with my friend, Ana. We decided to stick to the roads after the heavy rains over the last couple of days in an effort to arrive home with dry feet. Our route took us to Bradwell church. Normally, we don’t see anyone, but on arrival yesterday morning there was a lady with her two dogs. We chattered briefly and then Ana and I wandered around the church taking photos.
As we came back to the front of the church the lady was still there. We started chatting about the building and whether any of us had been inside the church. The lady said, it was a festival church and was only open at certain times of the year. Then we spoke about other things, like where we had walked from, and the lady said she had only lived in the area a couple of years. We explained, we normally walked the footpaths and took photographs. Ana explained that we posted the pictures on our village site on Facebook. The lady then took out her phone and hunted for the link to join it. I explained that I posted articles about the local buildings and places on my blog. She asked for the link to my blog and I explained that I was an author.
Are you self-published? she asked.
No, I write for five different publishers.
Are your books available in the Essex libraries.
Yes, they are.
Would you be interested in giving talks in the Essex libraries?
Yes I would. I have made enquiries in to giving talks at the Essex Book Festival, but I thought I had to pay.
No, you don’t. I organise the talks for the different libraries, and we are always on the look out for new authors. Could we exchange details, I will be in contact with you so we can sort out something for next year.
This is a shorter version of a long chat we had while standing in the early morning sun-soaked Essex graveyard, full of ancient history. So next time you meet a stranger, remember to have a brief chat, because you never know where it might lead you.
Of course, always be cautious too, especially if you are alone.
September 18, 2021
If you’re a vampire lover…
Are you a vampire lover looking for your next read. Then Seek the Dark out, he’s dying to meet you https://mybook.to/seekingthedark #vampires #readingforpleasure #HorrorCommunity #writerslift #BookRecommendations
Check this video out. Press play….
Seeking the Dark: Enter if you dareSeptember 14, 2021
Two More Sales
Yesterday in the evening I received a request to buy two copies of my books after I had posted about my work online. Sally and her daughter, Chelsea asked if they could pick up the copies from my home while on their way elsewhere.
Of course I said yes.
It’s quite magical meeting readers to be able to chat with them about your work. Sally said her daughter is an avid reader, and they had checked out the reviews on my books before coming to collect them. “If the reviews had been awful, we wouldn’t have bothered coming. My daughter was given a book by someone at a craft fair. It wasn’t very good.”
I look forward to seeing what Chelsea’s reviews on my books say, though, I’m quite nervous really. 
Now it’s back to writing and editing my next book.
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