"The Great Absolute" featured on Freebooksy

The Great Absolute has been out on Kindle for a few months now and has gathered a handful of very nice reviews. It's recently been available to download for free as a special promotion and has been downloaded over a thousand times. It's gained new readers in America, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Japan and India!

The book was also featured on Freebooksy who hand-pick all the books featured on their website (so I must be doing something right). To celebrate this, they gave me this lovely digital badge.

If you hurry, you might be able to download the book for free before the special offer ends (don't worry if you're too late, the book is only 77p). Click here to be taken to the Amazon store.

John Barleycorn Must Die

I hate editing. It's brutally difficult, painfully dull and utterly soul-destroying.
I recently decided to go back to the first novel I wrote, The Great Absolute. I knew it needed a lot of work before it was ready to be set loose on the world but it was only when I started re-reading the weighty manuscript that I realised quite what I had let myself in for.
Don't get me wrong, I'm hugely proud of this book and I am really looking forward to getting it out there on Kindle. The problem is, the current draft of the novel is a bit of a mess. It has been over four years since I last tinkered with it and it's fascinating to see how the book suffers terribly from "First Novel Syndrome". It's funny when it should be serious. Slow where it should move fast. Worst of all, it's hugely over-written and spends far too much time telling the reader what is going on rather than just showing them. Needless to say, I've got my work cut out for me over the next few weeks as I whip this unruly beast into shape.
English folk customs play a huge role in the novel and for that reason I think it would be great to launch the book on Mayday. It remains to be seen whether I'll actually manage to hit this frankly ludicrous self-imposed deadline. Given that Strange Cases: The Adventures of Edmund Forrester arrived fifteen months later than I had hoped, I wouldn't hold your breath. In the meantime, here's a teaser poster I put together this weekend.

"The Sound of Shiant" goes viral!

It's been a really exciting week. On Friday 1st February, "The Sound of Shiant" and "Strange Cases: The Adventures of Edmund Forrester" were made available for a free promotional download on Amazon Kindle. I've done this sort of promotion before and they've been fairly successful. I've normally seen 200-300 downloads over the course of the promotion and a slight bump in sales when the promotion comes to an end.
"Strange Cases" did pretty well... 188 downloads from Amazon.com and 139 downloads from Amazon.co.uk. Add in the handful of downloads from other countries and the total was a pretty respectable 335. At its height of success, the collection reached number three in the free kindle short story charts. Not bad going for a book with no reviews at present.
I'm not quite sure what I did but "The Sound of Shiant" went nuts. By the afternoon of Saturday 2nd, the book was sitting at the top spot in the Amazon.co.uk free kindle fantasy chart, a position it held until Tuesday afternoon. It also reached third place in the free kindle action and adventure chart. Downloads from Amazon.com totalled 782 but the downloads really went crazy from Amazon.co.uk... 2,314. Add in the downloads from other countries and the total was a jaw-dropping 3,112!
What does this mean? Well... nothing, really. The book has enjoyed a bit of success and will hopefully get a few more positive reviews from those kind enough to take the time to post them. If I'm really lucky the sales in the coming weeks will benefit from a boost from all the publicity. I doubt any big name publishers are going to be coming up my driveway with a wheelbarrow full of money in the near future.
Of course, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't thrilled to bits with these numbers. I'm also kind of terrified by the sudden spike in popularity. Still, this is what it's all about, eh? I didn't start writing with the aim of making a lot of money (that's never going to happen when I only make 23 pence per paid download)... I write because I want to entertain people. As of this week I've got thousands of new readers, I just hope the novel will entertain them.