I feel the need to apologise

I am somewhat appalled that the last post to my blog was over a year ago.  I very much feel the need to apologise!What excuses do I have?Well, remarkably few that I find even the slightest bit compelling which makes it worse.  My trouble is that I find taking time and space to attend to Blogs and Social Media when I am also trying both to research and write a new novel very distracting.  It is made worse since, in the absence of any feedback from any of the reading public out there, there is always part of one's mind that niggles with the thought: "is any one going to read this stuff anyway?" which is never an excuse not to write anything or to seek to inform people what is going on, but gnaws away.  So, no more excuses.  I apologise and will try and do better.  Here goes!Last time I blogged, I was launching my second Ben Lewis book The Gambit.  I had some lovely initial reviews and it sold well initially.  My problem was, and remains, Amazon.  Unlike with my previous book, The Dossier, where Amazon promoted me as a monthly deal in month 3 after launch and I hit the #1 slot for six weeks as a result, this time around, Amazon chose not to promote The Gambit at all.  It was very frustrating for what I still believe is a strong book with a credible plot.So, The Gambit did well, but not nearly as well as I would have liked.  That also required a lot of digging deep and made me reflect whether I needed to change my whole writing to see if I could write fast-paced, suspenseful novels but based around a different set of characters.Anyone living in the UK this last 12 months knows that it has been a roller coaster time politically.  We have had a referendum in Scotland, another one recently about the UK's membership of the EU.  We have had an oil price that has hit the floor and is now slowly rebounding, politicians and Prime Ministers changing left right and centre.  In the Middle East, ISIS has moved off the front foot and is now being bombarded not only by the US and its Allies from the air, but also by Russia.  Then, in amongst all this, we have the Panama papers leak, and a huge media outcry about tax evaders using offshore tax havens for all sorts of nefarious activities.  What an amazing backdrop for a new novel, I thought . . . .So, the good news is that I have now completed my fourth novel.  I put the finishing touches to it last week and it is currently with Sonia, my agent, to see whether she likes it.  At the moment, it has the working title "The Reluctant Trader".  I will tell more as soon as I get some feedback from Sonia.  If she likes it, I hope to get this published sometime in September.