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The Tomorrow Child - Easter Offer

Download the Kindle edition of THE TOMORROW CHILD for free between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.


Wishing you a Happy Easter and a Good Read!

Six Words

So, Hemingway's in this bar, or maybe it's a restaurant, or a cafe - you've all heard the story - and he bets his writer friends ten pounds each that he can write a story in six words that will reduce them to tears. They all take the bet. He scribbles a few lines on a napkin and tosses it into the middle of the table for them to read. It goes like this:

For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.

His friends duly paid up. Did they cry? We'll never know. But Hemingway considered this his best work. It has beginning, middle and end. It's tragic. Every word is truth. No speculation, no introspection (at least on the part of the author), no fat.

Of course, the provenance of this story is open to challenge. Was Hemingway the first to write it? Had he seen an advertisement like it in the back of a newspaper? I imagine there are thousands of unintentional short stories crammed into the back pages of papers on a daily basis. Tragic, romantic, amusing, dark. Every snatch of prose tells a story.

Here's my own take on a six-word novel, in the footsteps of Hemingway.

For sale: Ring. One careless owner.

And a play in six words, too.

'Hello.'     

'I do.'        

'Push!'      

'Don't cry-







A Review of The Tomorrow Child

Head over to Gallifreyan Buccaneer to read the first review of THE TOMORROW CHILD.


Review

The New Cover

I'm thrilled to reveal the new cover for THE TOMORROW CHILD.

More on the competition to follow . . .

Design a Cover Competition Update

Less than two days to go!

Marketing Update

I believe it was Gary Strang in an episode of Men Behaving Badly who said, If you throw enough balls at enough coconuts, eventually you win a fish.


Albeit an analogy for getting Dorothy pregnant, it could also apply to my approach to marketing and promoting The Tomorrow Child.


Am I casting my net too wide? Do I need to narrow my focus? Probably. I currently have adverts running on Facebook and Amazon. I'm generating thousands of placements, and getting around 1% converted to clicks. What I'm not seeing is those clicks converted to sales.


I'm also enrolled in amazon KDP Select, which means The Tomorrow Child is part of the Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Owners' Lending Library scheme. I've just started to see some data from this in terms of pages read, so it could be that the adverts are driving sales through this channel.


I hope so.


Then there's the Writer's Online Subscriber's Showcase. The Tomorrow Child will feature on the website, free, for up to two months. It's good exposure as the site has thousands of visitors daily.

Subscribe to Blog of Whispers

You can now subscribe to Blog of Whispers to keep up to date with the latest blogs, comments and activity. I've also added a search function.

The Tomorrow Child on Writers Online

The Tomorrow Child is currently featured on the Writer's Online Subscriber Showcase. Click the link below to view.


Subscriber Showcase

Design a Cover Competition Update

7 days to go, and no entries received as of yet. Maybe this is your opportunity!

Evolution of a Story

The Tomorrow Child grew out of another story that I started writing in 2002. Back then, I had just read the first couple of Harry Potter books, and convinced myself that I could easily write something as good as that.


'Hello, Mr Bloomsbury, I'll take my six figure advance now, if it's all the same with you.'


I started writing a story called Jason Price and the Guardians of Time (so original!) that had an enigmatic supply teacher who would enter the teacher's smoking room (yes, this was back in the day when you could still smoke inside) and disappear to a dimension that existed 0.168 seconds in the future (don't ask why, I can't remember).


It was terrible. Well, let's say it had plenty of good ideas, but they were underdeveloped and never really held together as a story. There was no narrative drive, just lots of exciting events that sounded great in isolation, but didn't add up to anything. And the dialogue, well, damn!


I sent this to a small publisher, full of hope and dripping with naivety. It was a first draft. I don't think I even proof read it. I had some expectation, that anxious what if buzz. What if somehow all the mistakes were overlooked and the potential of the story shone through?


Not a chance. It came back with some brief notes, a pat on the back for imagination, and that was it. No publishing contract, no advance, simple rejection.


I came back to it in 2012, after some success - a short story published in a Doctor Who anthology, another in Writing Magazine, and another which was sold to an anthology that never made it to print - and started to redraft. The teacher went, along with the first hundred pages of kids creeping around a school to find out what he was up to. The future dimension changed to a world of dark matter where memories are collected and archived.


I spent a couple of years drafting and redrafting before finally stumbling on the heart of the story, the thing that would drive the narrative forward (hopefully). It came to me one evening when I was out jogging. What if the main character was actually . . .


So, if your stuck in a rut with your writing, go out for a jog, or a walk, or maybe even a bike ride or a swim.


I can't tell you if The Tomorrow Child is any good, but it's evolved into something a million times better than it's predecessor. And while self-publishing might not be the fulfilment of the dream that I set out to achieve as a writer, it perhaps marks an evolution in my attitude towards writing and selling a novel. It gives me a marketplace to test my book and my marketing skills, and it doesn't stop me from seeking the traditional publishing route with my next novel.

Competition Countdown!

16 days to go until the Design a Cover competition closes. Make sure you get your entries in by 23:59 on the 20th Feb.


Don't miss out on a great opportunity to have your work showcased!


What have you got to lose?


Surely you can do better than this . . .

Competition - Design a cover for The Tomorrow Child

Every book deserves a great cover, so I’m offering the chance to design a cover for The Tomorrow Child. Can you capture the essence of a story in a single image?

The competition is open to all. The only stipulation is that you have read the book, so I have dropped the e-book price to 99p. Click here to purchase.

The winning design will be applied to the e-book and the paperback edition, and the winning entrant will receive a free copy of the paperback edition of the Tomorrow Child, as well as a credit on the title page of the book, and first refusal on providing cover designs for future books.

Five runners-up will also receive a free copy of the paperback edition, and be named on the blog of whispers and The Tomorrow Child Facebook page.

An album of all entries will feature on the blog of whispers and The Tomorrow Child Facebook page.

The competition is for a front cover design, which must include your design, the book title – THE TOMORROW CHILD, and my name, E T Olgeirsson. Do not include any straplines or additional text.


Closing date for entries is 20^th February 2018. Entries received after this date will not be considered.

Please send your entry as a pdf to: tomorrowchildcomp@gmail.com

Include your name, contact e-mail address and a brief covering letter telling me a bit about you. This will be used as biog to run alongside the winning entry.

Terms and conditions:

1. All entries must be the original and unpublished work of the entrant.
2. All entries must be in PDF format
3. Judge’s decision is final with no correspondence being entered into.
4. Winner and runners-up will be notified within one month of the closing date of 20^th February 2018
5. The winning entry may not be published, promoted or reproduced anywhere without the prior permission of E T Olgeirsson.

 

Good luck, have fun!

Marketing Strategy

It's all about traffic and driving audience to your website / blog / Amazon page. It's a wonder how indie authors mange to get any writing done! Marketing a book is a full time job in itself.


My Amazon ad is running until early February, and thus far it has generated a few impressions, but no link clicks (the all important bit), but that means it hasn't cost me anything yet. On the other hand, my Facebook ad has been seen by almost 3,000 people and has generated over 30 link clicks.


Clearly this will shape my strategy going forward. Perhaps I will switch to a Product Display ad on Amazon, and increase my Facebook daily budget to maximise the number of link clicks.


Then comes the hard part - turning those link clicks into sales. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. However, you can have a jolly good go at trying to convince it. To that end, I have changed my blurb to give it a strong hook. Let's see how it goes!


Elsewhere, I've started a page for The Tomorrow Child on Facebook. You can visit it here - www.facebook.com/etolgeirsson


Fell free to give it a 'like.'


Oh, and somehow I've managed to find a little bit of time to write. One brick at a time!

Five-Star Review

Well, the first review for The Tomorrow Child is in, and it's 5 Stars. A massive thank you to the reviewer for starting me off on such a positive note.


As I said in an earlier post, it will be interesting to see if and how a review affects sales.


In the meantime, I have decided to set a small advertising budget and use Amazon Marketing Services to run a thirty day advertising campaign. This will be a Sponsored product ad, which will in theory increase search visibility by using keywords to target customers.


Not sure what the success rate will be, given my budget, but it will be an interesting exercise, and AMS provide a detailed breakdown of the number of clicks my ad receives during its run, alongside estimated total sales as a result of customers clicking the ad, and also an advertising cost of sales.


The chances are I won't see any real benefit from this and will have to consider increasing my budget, but who knows. Anyway, here goes . . .