The Appeal of Doing Nothing

Another week starts. There's no such thing as a Bank Holiday Monday when you're self-employed. (Ok, I'm working today because I won't be tomorrow).

I left off Friday having just killed someone. I'm sure there's a lot of you who feel like doing that at the end of the working week. For me it was purely fictional. A character needed to die so (in a sinister voice) "I dun 'im in!"

Obviously that wasn't a humorous part of the novel. He wasn't killed by a custard pie or anything like that.

Today I continue on with the fallout from that death and how it moves the story on. (I know things are working well when I'm excited to see what happens next!)

I'm glad that I'm excited about the new novel. I've been in one of those, 'Why am I bothering' moods for the last couple of weeks. I'd had a five/six week period where I hadn't sold any books and a discounted price promotion on Nothing Ventured; advertised on Facebook and Twitter, resulted in a total sale of one copy!

I wasn't happy as I'd pretty much done everything that marketing articles advise a writer to do to get their books noticed. I had my website, a Facebook & Twitter presence; I wrote a blog and did some online paid advertising. It wasn't going well. I didn't know what to do next and then towards the end of last week it came to me. I understood what it was I should be doing...nothing.

That was it. Why hadn't I thought about it before? It was so simple. I realised I needed to take the slow path and allow my novels to be discovered gradually. It's only just over a year since my first novel was published and less than six months since my second one was. It's going to take time for people to notice them. It's happening, I just need to be patient.

So, apart from my blog I'm not doing any more advertising at present. I'm just going to concentrate on writing number three and leave the rest to word of mouth. I've had a lot of positive feedback from those who have read my novels and if those people rate/recommend on Amazon or just tell a friend about the novels then the news will spread.

That's going to take time. Just because my books are the most important thing to me it doesn't mean they're going to be to anyone else. Why should they be? For example I've had friends/family members say, "I haven't got around to getting your second novel yet" which is absolutely fine. When I read a novel by someone I don't necessarily want to read their next one straight away or even read another in that genre, no matter how much I enjoyed it. I like to read something different and then come back to it.

Ironically, as soon as I made this decision to take the slow path, I sold two copies of Driven to Distraction. Doing nothing has started reaping rewards already.