Adrian J. Walker's Blog, page 3

Chilly

It’s been a little over a year since I self-published From The Storm on Amazon.  Since then, roughly 15,000 people have either bought my book about a one-legged hitman and a French farmhouse buried in snow,  downloaded it during a free promotion or found a copy sitting by a statue.

It’s reached a lot of people, and those people have been very kind with their reviews, so thank-you very much.

Now the work begins on my second novel, which I’m planning to release later this year.

Last weekend, to celebrate, I promised that if I got 100 likes on my Facebook page in a single day, I would take a picture of myself running around the garden in my pants.

I know this may not seem like a good incentive, but we live in Aberdeen and it’s been snowing heavily.  I got 112 likes.

Enjoy.

Like my Facebook page here

Put the Nano in WriMo

Today, an old friend told me that she was going to take part in National Novel Writing Month. This November, she plans to write a story that’s been knocking about in her head for a few years, putting down 50,000 words in thirty days.

1700 words a day is a good target to aim for if you’re writing full time, so I said that I would aim to do the same. I want to kickstart my next book and it sounds like a good way to get into a routine.

However, I’m not convinced that these writing-surge challenges are altogether a good thing, at least not for me. I like to stare out of windows most of the time, then spend five hours whittling a sentence till there’s nothing left but bare meaning. Many writers will tell me that’s not a healthy way to work, and maybe they’re right, but here’s the thing: I don’t like being told what to do or how to do it (handbags down please.) I have a three-year-old daughter who handles that side of things quite adequately. Seriously, if I do NaNoWriMo, that’ll be 30 days of being told what to do. By myself. And I hate it when I tell me what to do.

This is apparently a short story by Ernest Hemingway:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

That’s pretty good isn’t it? Packs quite a punch. I’d wager it says more than the result of most 30 day surges. So this is what I think: whether or not you’re planning on writing a lot of words in November (and I think I am) consider trying something else as well: writing slowly, with thought and care.

‘Nano’ writing.

This November, write fifty words. Make every one count.

(And good luck Lindsay!)

Edinburgh Festival Secret Books!

Fly my pretties!

Whilst the Olympics draw to a close in London, the Edinburgh Festival is just getting going north of the border.  This year, I shall be hiding copies of my novel From The Storm around the city, with a handwritten message inside each.

If you find one, it’s yours to read, keep or pass on to a friend!

There will be one copy left every day in venues, bars, tourist attractions and the odd bus shelter.  I’ll post a photo of each ‘drop’ on Twitter.  Follow me here: http://www.twitter.com/adrianwalker

Where will you find one…?

If you do, please leave a comment below and tell me where you found it and where you’re from.  If somebody gave it you, do the same.  I’d love to be able to track the books as they start their journey (hopefully) around the world.

And don’t forget to review on Amazon! http://amzn.to/wnCrAL

Have a great festival everyone, and go Team GB!

Interview with Susannah Radford

Journalist Susannah Radford was kind enough to interview me for her blog, Z.N.A, this week.  Here is the result:

http://susannahradford.wordpress.com/2012/04/23/interview-with-adrian-j-walker-author-of-from-the-storm/

Thanks Susannah!

The Long Run: How FROM THE STORM went from 0 – 14,000 in 3 days.

Shoe

My efforts at maintaining this blog have so far been abysmal.

No more!

This is a long overdue post that was originally going to be about Amazon’s KDP Select scheme and how its free promotion worked out for From The Storm. It’s still going to be about that, but a little more besides.

So, how has From The Storm been doing in the last couple of months?

What’s that saying about March coming in like a lion and out like a lamb?

Well that, but backwards.

The book launched in January, and over the following 8 weeks it would sell a few copies, mostly to family and friends. During that time I set off along the unfamiliar but now well-trodden path of marketing, building a platform, tweeting, retweeting, shouting-out, emailing, sharing, Facebook, the works. I met some interesting, helpful and like-minded people (mentioned below) and became more and more convinced that self-publishing was the right way to go.

But I still wasn’t selling any books. At some point in mid-February my sales flat-lined and it wasn’t difficult to see why. For all of my efforts to get noticed on Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere, I wasn’t getting any exposure on the one essential platform: Amazon.

I wouldn’t say I was feeling frustrated. Someone told me that the process of getting your book noticed was a marathon, not a sprint, and as a distance runner this appealed to me. I know that the early stages of a long run can be daunting.  Your head is filled with voices telling you to give in, telling you that you’re wasting your time and energy and you’ll fail before the finish.  I also know that these voices fade as your momentum improves. I wasn’t frustrated, I knew it would take time.

However, I needed a boost. A sip of water, a good track on the ‘phones, one of those horrible energy gels (bleugh), anything to pick me up and tell me I could do this.

I had read a couple of posts by other authors on the KDP Select free promotion, most notably this one by Jeff Shelby on his book Thread of Hope:

How Thread of Hope Hit #1 At Amazon

I had signed up for KDP Select when I published: there seemed no reason not to as I wasn’t yet on any other platform. After a few more passes at the text, I republished with an updated cover and set the date of my first free promotion for three days in early March, happily coinciding with World Book Day. I was not expecting anything like the amount of downloads experienced by Jeff. To be honest, I would have been happy if only a few more people had my book on their Kindles.

Thursday 1st March arrived and I started to watch the stats.

By Sunday, my book was owned by almost 14,000 people around the world.

I can’t really begin to explain how that feels. To know that I suddenly had an audience of that many people, that folk I had never met and would never meet were about to read something I had poured my life into – now that’s a boost.

OK, so there was no financial reward yet – effectively I had just completed a spectacularly successful bout of flyering – but that didn’t matter. My book was being read. It got into the top 10 most popular free books on Amazon. At one point it was the third most popular thing on the Kindle Store period, beating even the Kindle itself.  I had exposure.

Things started to go very well after that. The visibility of From The Storm as a ‘recommended’ book meant that people started to buy it too. After a torrent of sales in March, things have now settled into a comfortable, steady stream. Nothing life-changing yet, but I’m still selling books.

I also started to get reviews, really nice reviews. These have been another big boost and I encourage anyone who has read and enjoyed an indie book to review it on Amazon. I’ve read two such books in the last two months and happily both have been great:

Music or Death by David Owen

Crow Wing by Jesse VanDerWalker

There is still some divide over whether or not KDP Select is a good thing.  Of course it ties you to Amazon, but only for a short period.  I’m not sure I can see any long-term benefits yet, but to my mind there’s no better way for independent authors to increase their readership, at least when you’re just starting out.

More nice things happened in March. From The Storm was awarded ‘Best Book of the Week’ by @citygirlnomore on her blog, http://citygirlturnedsuburbanmum.com, was featured by Jenny Richardson on her blog Renaissance of Reading and was listed as a featured book on Kindle Promo.

I was also reviewed and interviewed by Susannah Radford, a Scottish reporter interested in the Indie Author phenomenon, on her Z.N.A. blog.

Oh, and my son Joe started crawling. So we’re no longer safe in our own home.

The early stages of my long run are over and I’ve now settled into a comfortable pace. There’s still a long way to go, but this is do-able and I’m enjoying it.

After all, the long run is not about the destination or the speed, it’s about the…

…Time On Feet…

A clumsy bit of crypticity which helps me say that I’ve also started writing my second book, aiming for completion this year.  More on that in later posts.

I’d like to thank the following people for their help and encouragement over the last few months:

Rachel Abbott (@Rachel__Abbott)

Emily Tippets (@EMTippetts)

Jesse VanDeWalker (@TheVanDeWriter)

David Owen (@dnjowen)

Jeff Shelby (@jeffshelby)

David Gaughran (@DavidGaughran)

Dennis Coughlin (@DennisJCoughlin)

Jenny Richardson (@Jep2218)

CityMom (@citygirlnomore)

Ashley Barron (@dcPriya)

David Weeks (@dw269)

If you don’t already follow them, you should!

Finally, here’s a tenuous quote to round things off.  If anyone knows the source, please comment and let me know.

Pain is weakness leaving the body.

Reviews that Stick

Juno the Monkey

One of the things that worried me about writing a blog was that it would not be useful.  I didn't want to write drivel, I wanted to write articles that answer questions and hopefully help authors who are publishing independently like me.

I've written a handful of posts which I hope will provide insight into what it's like to start out in the world of selfpub.  This one, however, will be a straight-forward answer to a question I had a few weeks ago, to which I couldn't find an adequate answer at the time.

As well as writing books, I also write software.  Last year, a good friend and I embarked on the process of creating an App for the iPhone.  You can read about our exploits here.

Apple's App submission process is infamously scary.  You don't just throw your App up there, you offer it for review. Whether or not it gets accepted depends upon how well you've stuck to their design and quality guidelines. It can take a week, sometimes more, to get a response, and that response is quite often one of rejection.

It's a bit like waiting to hear your exam results, or whether or not you're getting sent to hell.

Another cruel part of the process is that, if you decide you want to update your App significantly, you can lose all of your reviews. It's a new App: what people said about the old one no longer stands.

So, when I began the submission process of From The Storm through Amazon's KDP, I faced it with the same apprehension I had when we submitted to Apple last year.

I needn't have worried.  The process is far easier and much less detailed.  However, I still had the hangover fear that if I had to republish the book at any time, I would lose the handful of excellent reviews I had already built up on Amazon.co.uk.  In order to fix a typo, I would be back at square one!

Sure enough, just as with software, as soon as the book went live I found some mistakes.  They were few and minor (the book had been well-edited prior to publishing) but I still wanted to fix them.

But were they worth losing reviews over?  I searched the web for some reassurance, but nothing came up.

So, I published anyway, and here's the answer:

When you republish on Amazon, you don't lose your reviews.

Phew!

I hope this simple post helps some other Apple App Vet. overcome their PTSD.

Incidentally, the one blog post I did on Juno Tree was all about the power of collaboration, and I have to say that there's no better group to collaborate with right now than the selfpub tribe.  This is especially true of the last few days, during which From The Storm has been enjoying a surge of interest in its first free promotional period…

More to come on that one in the next few days!

The Social Network

FACT.

You have written a book.  You like it, you're proud of it and you think people should buy it from you.

What to do?

Two options.

Option #1: Google every literary agent in the country and spend your days crafting slightly different letters to each of them.  Send them off in clean brown envelopes, accompanied by a double spaced copy of the first 3,000 words of your work, PAPER-CLIPPED, NOT STAPLED, a synopsis and a CV that makes you want to cringe.

Option #2: Go to Amazon KDP, write a blurb, upload your book and feel a bit odd.

If you choose option #1 and you're successful, then things are looking up.  Literary agents know the right people to talk to, publishing houses mainly, and these publishing houses have the money to invest in getting your book sold.  They know how to do this; they've been doing it for a long time and they're very good at it.

Choose option #2 and you face the challenge of selling your work alone.

But you're a writer, what do you know about marketing?  You look online, you find advice.  It tells you to build a brand, write a blog, use social networking, shout as loudly as you can, do everything in your power to get yourself noticed.  It feels weird again, but you do it.  Twitter seems to be OK, lots of people on there trying to do the same thing, HEY! Someone just followed you!  Definitely follow them back.  And another!  Your followers are shooting up!  You're popular! Looks like this might just work!  Tum-te-tum…hmm…hold on a minute, everyone seems to be just talking about themselves..why is nobody talking about you?

Why?  Because they're busy building a brand, writing a blog, shouting as loudly as they can…  Meanwhile, a fifty foot poster advertising the latest Times bestseller is being pasted up in Leicester Square.

What's wrong with this picture?

The answer, I believe, is that the perception of self-publishing as 'going it alone' is wrong.

If you are taken on by an agent and a publisher, then you have money and expertise on your side, but you also get something much more important: people.  You get people who instantly believe it is in their interests to sell your book.  For as long as your contract exists, they will dedicate at least some of their time to making sure you have as loud a voice as possible in the public domain.  Why do they do this?  Because they're paid to.  They may also like your book, and they're probably very nice people who lead decent lives.  But they're still paid.

If you self-publish, the chances are you don't have the capital to spend on marketing experts and posters in Leicester Square.  But you do have one of the most powerful things on the planet at your disposal and it's absolutely free: the internet.

The problem is, it's not being used correctly.

Take Twitter.  I'm a novice.  I only have 59 60 followers as I write this, which is three times the amount I had two weeks ago, but which still makes me a very tiny Tweep indeed.  I follow quite a few self-published authors and they seem to belong to a friendly and varied community that expands into a vast network of other people.  I can see the potential.

So far though, and I must stress again that I am a novice, it seems like it is not always being used the right way round.  People are tweeting about themselves, when they should be tweeting about each other.

I don't just mean re-tweeting, which is great in itself, I mean actually constructing a tweet about something you've read from another self-published author, whether that's a quote, a paragraph or a whole book.  I don't know about you, but I'm far more interested in the Tweets that say "look at them" than the ones that say "look at me".

Social networking is the most useful tool, perhaps the only tool we have as self-published authors, but it only works if it's used socially – it's a network, not a mass of unconnected megaphones.  It only works if we give more than we expect to get, otherwise we're just shouting into the darkness, aren't we?

So here is a reminder to myself and a suggestion to you.  Try this: look up someone else's work.  Download samples, check out their blogs, maybe even go crazy and buy a book or two.  Give them feedback.  Tell them what's good and bad about their work and if you like them, shout it out.  Tell your followers how good they are and try to get them noticed.  Believe that it is in your interest to promote your peers.

Publishing houses have posters, we have Twitter.  Go forth and Tweet.

Star Reviewers

A BOOK ON AMAZON. TODAY.

As I write, From The Storm sits patiently on Amazon wearing five gold stars from six reviews.

I know all six reviewers. They are my friends and family, and each of them offered their review without being asked.

Should first-time authors accept the help of their friends and family to give their book a boost?

I don't see why not.  There's no doubt that, in doing so, you are bringing bias into the equation, but if you have good friends then you are also bringing honesty.  I couldn't have finished the book without the encouragement of my family, and I know that my friends would not have let me get this far if they didn't genuinely believe in what I was doing.

The argument against 'friendly' reviews is that they are misleading to the potential reader and an obvious indication that you are not yet established, but as an independent author you only have a few tools at your disposal to get your book noticed.  Those precious stars, lined up next to an appealing cover, are vital if you want to attract potential readers.    They are the book's one and only advertisment.

Wouldn't it be nice if all adverts were like this one?

Coke Advert from 'The Invention of Lying" (You Tube)

Sadly, they're not.  All marketing is a form of calculated deceit; whether it's a celebrity who's paid to endorse a product, a film trailer that's better than the film itself, a publishing house that prints the best snippets from the best reviews on the back of a book, or a self-published novel that accepts friendly reviews.

Of those four examples, which sounds the least dishonest?

Finally, as a reader, the thing that should really drive you to buy a book on the Kindle store is the sample, not the reviews.  The writing itself is always where the buck stops.  It is the only thing that can, the only thing that should make the difference between somebody either buying the book or moving on.

I'm very grateful to my reviewers.  They've made the book stand out and their feedback has given me confidence.  The test now is to see how those stars change over the next few months.  Encouraging this change means encouraging strangers to read and review: scary but necessary.

For anybody doing anything similar, remember the following:

To escape criticism — do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

Elbert Hubbard

Be brave!

The Vanity

VALIDATE ME!

This week I self-published my novel, From The Storm, as a Kindle book on Amazon.

Depending on who you talk to, this either makes me an 'Indie Author', brave, rebellious, living by his own rules and sticking it to the man; or a Vanity Press hack who couldn't get the attention of an agent.

I suppose I fit both descriptions.  I still seek representation, but I'm also very drawn to the idea of writing as an independent author.

It already feels good to have completed and published a book, but to have successfully marketed one without the help of a corporate PR engine must be an incredibly satisfying experience.

(If there are any corporate PR engines reading this, by the way, you're awesome.  Let's talk.)

Writers like John Locke and Louise Voss and Mark Edwards have done a huge amount for the credibility of self-published authors, but their success stories are as much about their talent for self-promotion as the quality of their writing.  Locke himself has written a book about this process called How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months!

So it's with some trepidation that I begin the next phase of my self-publishing journey: marketing.  I am new to the process and not particularly adept at self-promotion, but I have two things in my favour.  The first is that I understand computers and I understand the web.  The second is that I believe I've written something good enough to sell.  If you're reading this, I hope you think so too.

Self-publishing is a brave move.  You expose yourself to criticism without any kind of backup.  My hope is that it is the book, not my approach to getting it read, that receives the criticism.  May I live to regret saying that.

From The Storm

FROM THE STORM BY ADRIAN WALKER.

Published 3rd Jan 2012.  Available on Kindle from Amazon.

We don't know what his name is or where he came from, but he is living in my room.

In the near future, a young man seeks adventure in the French Alps. Lost, feverish and caught in a freak snowstorm, he finds refuge in a lonely mountain farm where he stumbles upon a young girl's diary from eighty years before. Claudette tells of farm life disrupted by a blizzard and the arrival of a stranger with a terrible injury.  With her father sick, the eight-year-old chronicles her struggle to look after the farm, and its unwanted guest, alone.

Present day London.  Joseph Martin has screwed up.  Once he was a lethal assassin, the best gun-for-hire. Now, in his autumn years, even he has to admit he is losing it. His failing skills have landed him in trouble with a dangerous client. Only the successful completion of an eerily familiar mission can save his skin; a mission which takes him into deepest Asia, where he must face a past he has long tried to forget.

He's not the only one on the road in Asia.  London city boy Ashley Gritten is travelling.  Shedding the challenges of his privileged life in Kensington, he's off to 'find himself' in the drugs, girls and debauchery of the backpacker trail.  But something else finds him.  Something much, much worse.

Who would have thought that a rich kid and an ageing hit man would have so much in common? And what does all of this have to do with Elmo, a pianist on his death bed in Venice?

From The Storm is a dark and humorous story of how selves are lost and lives are found.

Read a sample.