With my new website, fictionfaction.com, I’m acutely aware of maintaining a fine balance between keeping in touch with those kind enough to subscribe to my mailing list, and not overdoing it with info and feedback. In this modern world, we are constantly bombarded with requests for reviews, and with my books being sold on Amazon, I also realise the importance of getting those ratings to push my novels up the rankings to make them more visible to the public, but in this forum, my blog, I want to keep it as a relaxed, personal way to stay in touch, only responding to questions rather than me asking them directly. This is our special little club, built up of friends, readers and writers all over the world.
And it’s the writer’s I’m going to concentrate on this time round. Now that I have the website built and online to compliment my author business cards and word of mouth, I’m finally pushing back against the struggle of getting a traditional publishing deal without being some form of celebrity with a big social media profile, and going whole hog down the self publishing route.
To this end, I am founding a club night twice a month for anyone in my local area (Surrey) who has finished writing at least 1 book and is also finding the push to get it published hard. It’s a support and advice group where we can help each other out and hopefully learn tricks.
We’ll discuss the merits of self published vs traditionally published in terms of royalties and creative control. We’ll go over the basics of getting your manuscript proof read and formatted for publishing. And there is the warning that it is absolutely essential that you get a good cover for your book – yes a book really is judged by its cover but don’t forget the blurb on the back and a spine that stands out when stacked on a bookshelf!
Advertising on Goodreads, Amazon, BookBub, Facebook etc is also important, but how do you avoid getting ripped off or just wasting thousands of pounds by not having a clear, effective strategy? I don’t know anyone who has personal experience of this, so I’m hoping at least one person in the new group is going to know.
We’ll check out which self publishing books are out there that work and are set up for the UK market? And how to get a website and what to call it? Am I being too clever by calling it fictionfaction.com where it might get lost in translation or in a sea of similar named sites? Some years ago, I set up a photographer’s website called, thesharperimage. I was amazed I could get it, as that used to belong to a huge gadget company in America until it went bust. Only later did I find out that even if you typed in my website perfectly, it would bring up lots of other older sites with big budgets to optimise their name when trying to pick off the aforementioned company’s customers. No one was finding my site. Maybe mwtbooks would’ve been more direct and less crowded, even if it doesn’t sound so flash.
So how to promote my new club? I only want a maximum of 12, so we can all be heard and meet up somewhere informal, like the Tattenham Corner pub by Epsom Racecourse. Hopefully I can put out an invitation on local sites like neighbour or meet-up, and FaceBook local, and use a few friends who know a lot more writers than I do – if you are interested and local or know someone who is, then please contact me via this site. I’ll keep you up to date on this topic.
And if you want to start any other topic, or ask questions about Adam Capello or Jack the Ripper, or maybe about my varied life led so far, then please, get in touch – the more the merrier.
Oh, and I’ll soon be posting a few short stories on the site, until I figure out the best time to run an offer on my first book, The Many Lives of Adam Capello.
Until then, all the best,
Mark