Excited to be out there!
Well it took a while but I now have Piscium out in both kindle and paperback formats and its great to be getting feedback on the book ,which has been extremely positive. At a personal level it’s been great to have people who have read the book talk to me and feed back there thoughts. Interesting too Readers have expressed concern about various issues that appeared unresolved. For example, what happened to the Land rover that crashed into the lake? That’s an interesting one, because in an earlier version of the story Mark and Jez went back for it the following day, by which time the lake had receded and it was parked on the muddy bank. It started straight away and they drove off in it. The reason this did not appear in the published version was that I was determined to bring the novel down to comfortably under 100,000 words and I had to do some ruthless editing. I didn’t think recovering the land rover was essential to the plot, but in retrospect I can see that it was a loose end that needed snagging. As well as the face to face conversations there have also been reviews posted on the amazon bookstore, which again have been very positive, with one exception. All of the seven published reviews to date have, alongside the written commentary, given 5 stars. One review has no written commentary and has given one star, which is a shame because it brings down the average, However it has intrigued me. Did someone give me one star because a) they pressed the star button by mistake not meaning to leave a review. b) they know me and really don’t like me, or c)They thought the book was terrible. If that was the case, fair enough, but it would have been good if they could explain why.
Writing and publishing Piscium was never about making money and from that point of view selling lots of copies is not important. But like all writers, creating a novel was not a solipsistic enterprise. By publishing a work one wants other people to read it. So now we move on to the next phase of the publishing journey, book marketing. Clearly I don’t have a huge publishing house marketing team behind me, and for the time being at least no physical presence in book stores. Piscium is only available on Amazon, but then, Amazon represents a massive marketplace. So its about getting visibility. And that’s what I am currently working at. Personal contacts, social media, influencers and press relations. When I feel I’ve done what I can in these area’s I’ll move on to advertising.
The really exciting bit though is the self belief that I am an author. It’s taken a long time to get there, but it’s changed the way I feel about my writing and encouraging me to keep at it. I currently have a spy novel under way, originally started a few years back and now taking form. Not sure yet if this will be the next one for publication, but it’s good to get the metaphorical writing muscles exercised. In the same way you need to run regularly to produce good performances, good writing comes at least in part through regular stints at the keyboard. Which brings me to the other question people have been asking. Will there be a sequel to Piscium? The answer is maybe, but thats the subject for another blog