A.B. Syed's Blog

Attending A Writers' Conferences

I did that thing where you line up an event or occasion, and then you pin all your hopes on that one event. This one was a writers' convention in York. I spent 120% of my writing budget for that month and booked a room for 3 generations of people :) myself, my father and little kids and drove the 6 hours up the country to where it was being held. York was buzzing. The sun was shining. It was wonderful to drive around the cobbled streets and peek at the quirky shops. Father and little kids set off on an expedition to find some adventure - they trekked along the wall and generally had fun and ice creams. I took my vast preparation and set off, tummy gurgling and hands sweating, into the conference venue. Vast preparation involved printing off about 50 copies of Chapter ONE of WIP and 250 newly minted calling cards, painstakingly designed with scrupulous word choice, honed to pull the reader in and want more, in a little silver calling card case.  I had networked vaguely on Twitter so I was hopeful of some interaction with other writers. Writers are generally either shelled hermit recluses or flamboyantly gregarious types, I reasoned. I would find my crowd and happily follow in the wake of purple boas and excited chatter all day, I thought. Judging by my Twitter networking. Not one single person spoke to me or caught my eye. I'm not a backward type. I don't shrink in violet; so I tried to engage. But it was a vain hope. The writers had guilded their cliques and polished them up well before they came. I attended the talks and drank some solitary coffee - that's the kind they sell in coffee shops to those individuals who shroud themselves in a cloak of isolation - and then went to 'Meet the Agent', which is why I was there, really. I thought, this person is going read Chapter ONE and be so dazzled by my marvellous writing that she is going to agent all over me. It's a dream we writers have - someone to agent all over oneself.She hadn't read it. She had just got off a plane in fact (she was American, is American) and had a very busy schedule. But she was very nice and got me to explain the story and asked pertinent questions and then she gave me her card - and then the sun shone down through a chink between the bricks of the building - and asked me to contact her when I finish. Glory! The rest of it was a squib: I did manage to speak to one person - a lovely, older Asian lady who was published and very accomplished and masterly. I gave her a copy of my WIP and she promised something vague.In the end I left almost half my calling cards on a bench in one of the lecture theatres, only realising weeks later that someone must have tidied them into a bin at the end of the conference and not, as I had hoped, found them and distributed them among the top agents of the world. 
Oh well :)

Advertising and Promoting Prompted

 I need ideas on how to advertise and promote Prompted, which is a book of 32 short stories that span many different genres and themes.

I've added it to GoodReads (of course!)

I've run a KDP free promotion already.

Today, I've listed it on LibraryThing, which is a website that sends your book out to their readers for free.

https://www.librarything.com/ner/u/AnilaSyed

I hope someone asks for it.

If there are other ideas for promotion (when) then I will blog them here.

Don't forget, a review is very very helpful. If you love the author in your family and want them to succeed and do well, go onto wherever their book is for sale online and write a few words about it. It will only cost you a few minutes out of your day and will make the world of different to them!

Much Love,

Anila!

What is a Review?

 A review is what you thought of the book.

Prompted has 2 reviews currently!

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R1UVCDBQ3UL5K/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B0CNRGTWLX

5.0 out of 5 stars Inspired

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 September 2024

Verified PurchaseA wonderful collection of short stories. Dib in and choose from sci fi,mystery,humour,sorrow,romance, fantasy- there is something for everyone. Each story is intriguing and compelling, "prompted " by a selection of unrelated words. Who would have thought that " Ben and the Pen of the World" would emerge from the prompt, ( a long distance phone call, set in a city, an explosion), or that there was the possibility of a story inspired by ( banana bread, petting zoo, action) !
Anila Syed is an amazing storyteller with an equally amazing imagination.
and this one:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R29MTMQRLVGE78/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B0CNRGTWLX 
P. E. Cuberos5.0 out of 5 stars Most imaginative writing ever!Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 September 2024Verified PurchaseAnila Syed is my favorite short story writer ever. Never read a short story collection as extraordinary as this one. Extraordinary in its depth and sensitivity, and yet, able to surprise you with the originality and variety of the
themes and characters. I particularly love Black Kitten, The Drive Home, How to Rob a Candy Store and Where Superheroes Go To Die. It's the third time I read this book and I highly recommend it. I eagerly await a new collection soon!
I'm pasting them here for you to enjoy!
You can write anything you like in your review: it doesn't have to be a literary masterpiece or even a critique of the writing!It is really only what you, yourself thought of the book."I liked this book" is a good review."I liked this book because..." could be a better review."I liked this book because it reminded me of a book I read when I was at school." "I think people who like Ursula Le Guin, would like this book."
You can write anything you like.and it really helps the author for more reasons than you can imagine!It helps other readers to find a book they would enjoy.It helps the author publicise their book because Amazon and other marketplaces show that book to potential audiences based on the reviews it has.It might even encourage your favourite author to write more books!Write a review for a book you read today!

Prompted is Published!

Prompted has been published in both paperback and hardback!

It is available here:

 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Prompted-Synaesthete-Stories-Anila-Syed-ebook/dp/B0D8HFLKT3/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

and here:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Prompted-Eclectic-Short-Stories-Syed/dp/B0CNRGTWLX/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

This is the blurb: 

In creating Prompted, Anila Syed has pulled together a collection of short stories she has written in response to writing prompts from various competitions over a period of 12 years. She covers a wide range of genres from romance, sci-fi, fantasy to political science and all points in between, over, under and back again.

Come and meet a magical black kitten, or how about The Creator of all things in a creation myth?
Why did an alien try to run a petting zoo, and how does a music buff, desperate to catch the latest download organise all his friends? - he's not that bright to be honest!

There is also a man transcending space and time as a result of a gift from the gods, an astronaut, disillusioned by time dilation, and some very naughty residents of a care home.

These 30 stories can be read in the order given, or dipped into from time to time.
Make new friends, find new adventures and then be inspired to write your own with the writing prompts at the end!

Past Present Future Fantasy Dystopian

Black KittenBugexit Means BugexitCaught in the ActBen and the Pen of the WorldsWhere Superheroes Go to DieHow to Rob a Candy Store in Three Easy StepsTaxi HaroldCongratulations, Gina, Your Name Was Chosen…How the flowers becameCanoevia2035 Cola-SG1Elena and the Fork of JusticeWhispers of EternitySynaestheteWhen Sally Met HarrySpace, Adventure and Lithium MiningBeautiful Beard DayThe Drive Home with Yellow BreadAlien AddictionThe Stop of Alessa CassalvaImmortalFive Cheese and Pickles and the End of the WorldThe RingI, monster?Well!Sam’s CakeCan Aliens Think on Their Tentacles?Rich!PranksterVegan and the VegetarianEmbersMars

Prompted, Short Stories by Anila Syed

If you read it please please please leave a review. An honest review is worth your weight or my weight in gold!

If you would like a free copy, just send me a message and I'll send you a pdf. And if you like, you can leave a review!

The first illustration is here!

I've taken a step into the pool of illustrators who are available on Fiverr.com and now have the first illustration for one of my stories! The first story to be illustrated is How the Flowers Became and I've always thought that the mice in the story would make a great image, so after searching through the various styles on Fiverr, I liked the ones by Asmita Kaushal. https://www.fiverr.com/inbox/asmitakaushal She has made a great image of the first mouse for me. The one thing I'm really conscious of is to not make the book file too big or to make the book too expensive, so I am going to add around 10 illustrations in total.

How Did I Add A Poll to My Blog?

Every part of this process needs to be transparent so that anyone can follow it.

I don't know what the success rate will be, or even whether I will have to rename my success rate later on to reflect the actual acheivement - little statistical joke there, but because this is the very beginning, it is easy to catalogue all the elements.
How I added a poll to my blog post was as follows:
I wanted my poll to appear in the form of the different themes that I had thought about for my blog background.

* So first I set each theme and used print screen to paste each image into a word document.
* Right clicking each image let me 'save as picture'

Then I found a website called www.poll-maker.com*

It was really easy to upload my images and add a question. Then I had to select a background.
To get it into my blog post, I clicked 'Share' and then 'Embed' and just pasted the whole thing into my blog.
The amount of html was a little bit daunting, but there you are! It worked!

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*No affiliate links, no connection to this blog apart from using it to make a poll.

The Paradox of Choice

Fisrt thing to do is set up this blog so that it looks nice. Regular visitors will notice that this blog now has a new direction. The update will make it a good central location - like a central headquarters from which to do all the marketing, planning and diarising. A great place for me and my visitors to find out the progress and for me to keep all my thoughts in one place to strategise and plan.

I realised I need a new theme, but how do I make it sing so that visitors will be instantly enamoured by it's elegance?

After spending nearly a whole day playing around with only a minute fraction of the available themes, colour palettes, images, fonts and layouts, it occurred to me that what I have is the paradox of choice. Or, as Barry Schwarz called it in his book of the same name, the tyranny of choice. Here is his talk about it:

The more options there are, the easier it is to regret the option that you choose! Adding choices increases the expectations that one of them should be perfect and so incrementally increases anxiety levels - what if I choose the wrong one? When I thought of the title for this blog post, it was as a half-hearted joke that, man, I had a hard time picking a theme I liked, I had no idea that it was a major psychological research topic in it's own right.

So, anyway, after a lot of fiddling around, I've stuck with this theme with this background.
I hope you love it!
Does it really matter? :)

The Beginning

This is the start of the journey.
I have been writing these short stories for nearly 10 years and have decided to bring them all together into a short story collection. The stories were written for various writing competitions, so there is an eclectic mix of genres and styles. But rather than sending them off on their own into the world to see if they could get published in magazines or websites, I wanted to keep them together as my stories - in a collection.
That is how Prompted was born.

The book is written completely and here begins its journey through finishing and polishing, publishing and marketing.

Short Stories

Did you know that there is a short story competition out there at the time of writing (June 2021) where you can win a potenital $20,000 for one story that is 1000 words long?