Happy New Year

All the best for your writing endeavours in 2018!

I'll be busy writing a sequel to The Tomorrow Child (in fact I've already started!).


Have a good one!!

Humble Beginnings

So, it's been two weeks since I released The Tomorrow Child on Amazon Kindle, and in that time I've sold 18 copies.


It's a slow start, as anticipated. Most of the sales came in the last week when the Kindle edition was available for free. Albeit small-scale, it shows that promotional activity will have an impact on sales. It was enough to elevate The Tomorrow Child to #1 in the free e-book chart for a couple of hours!


So far I've only marketed The Tomorrow Child through this blog, Facebook, and a link on Twitter. The next step will be to post about it on Linked-In. I also need to find the right channels to reach the book's intended audience - the teen market.


I am encouraged. I thought I would be sat here with zero sales. For now, I wait in anticipation of The Tomorrow Child's first review on Amazon. If and when it appears, and if it is positive, it will be interesting to see what impact it has on sales.


In the meantime, if anybody has any advice that they'd like to share in the comments section, please do.


Merry Christmas
Einar

The Tomorrow Child - Paperback Edition

The Tomorrow Child is now available in paperback format from the Kindle store.


The Tomorrow Child (UK)  £7.80


The Tomorrow Child (US)  $10.40




And between now and Friday 22nd December, the e-book version is available for FREE!

Sorry, it's been ages . . .

I'm going to start with some statistics:


No. of submissions made: 18
No. of rejections: 18


I've got a little black book (www.moleskine.com) and the first three pages are filled with names of Agencies, dates of submission and the word 'rejected' next to each one. I have eighteen emails telling me not to give up, that this wasn't quite what they were looking for, that they no longer represent Young Adult fiction (do your research!); all very kind, all very encouraging, all very disappointing.


So, there's reality. What do you do? You carry on!


I've not been idle since making that first submission. I've written and edited a second Young Adult novel, not a follow-on from The Tomorrow Child (though there is going to be one), but a brand new story that is now ready to send out to Agents. What will I do differently this time?

1. Be more targeted. I think last time around I felt I had to get my manuscript in front of everybody and anybody in the hope that someone would pick it up and say yes. A bit like closing your eyes and throwing a dart in the hope that you hit the bull's eye.
2. Really nail the synopsis. I found this difficult - what to put in, what to leave out. Do you give away the twists? Do you name check every character? I also found that each Agency I submitted to would have slightly different expectations of a synopsis, especially in terms of length.
3. Read more of the Agent's blogs. These give a good insight into what an Agent is really looking for, what they are promoting, who they represent and how that author is performing. This, I hope, will help with point 1.

As you will have seen from my previous blog, I have self-published The Tomorrow Child through Kindle Direct Publishing. I'll be blogging about the experience as I have a crack at marketing the book, and I'll also be looking into the option of publishing it as a print-on-demand paperback.


The Tomorrow Child went live yesterday, and it has already sold several copies. If that was you, thank you!

The Tomorrow Child, my Young Adult Fantasy novel, is now available for Kindle, Mobile and Tablet from Amazon. Please follow the links below.

The Tomorrow Child (UK)   £2.22

The Tomorrow Child (US)   $2.99

There is a place beyond our knowledge, a place no Human can exist.

Until now.

Thirteen-year-old Jason tumbles into Chronos with no memory of how he got there.

It is a world obsessed with time; a world of peculiar heartbeats; a world under siege from a dark enemy called Extractors.

The safest place for Jason is the Academy, where the children of Chronos are sent to be moulded into soldiers.

But why are the Extractors so determined to kill him? What is a Flotsam reader? And who can he really trust?

These are not the only questions Jason will face as he tries to piece together his memories and find a way home.

The Tomorrow Child is a tale of dark matter, of family, and of finding an identity in a foreign land, where nothing is quite as it seems, and memory is the ultimate truth.

You can take a sneak peek at the first three chapters by following the links above. Should you purchase the full book, I'd really appreciate a review.