Where has Hastings Battleaxe been? Oh Gawd, don’t ask. Getting ‘Death, Deceit and Cake’ ready for publication. It is done. It is now available for pre-order on Kindle prior to release on Tuesday 1 July. The Amazon paperback will be released on 15 July. Battleaxe the author (aka Stephanie Gaunt) would love it if you are willing to cough up 99p, get the Kindle eBook, and leave a nice review. That’s the only way a new author can get a new novel started on the long, long struggle through the Amazon forest. The other big thing that has happened was Philosopher’s Big Birthday. But as I said last time, he wasn’t keen on big celebrations, and such celebrations he did want were low-key so I won’t report them on here. So, this post will concentrate on the novel.
That Amazon forest is a vast, uncharted wilderness. Prior to release, my novel ranks at 497, 717 in the Kindle store, and 11,025 in Cosy Crime. If I did nothing to market it, it wouldn’t move, the forest would close over it and it would die. Look, at this stage I don’t really care if cosy crime is not your thing, or even if you enjoy it. Enjoyment, of course, would be a bonus… so:
Click on this link to Kindle! Thanks!
Phew. Hopefully, I’ll be OK because the novel features the fictional Compton Perceval WI. Potentially, there is a large readership among WI members. Hastings Battleaxe also has a substantial wider social media presence, and a large personal network.
Why did I opt for self-publishing via Amazon? Readers may remember that a few months ago I had a horrible experience at the hands of a supposedly professional agent who I met via a ‘Meet the Agent’ slot at a local book festival. See this link to the sad post. It was so discouraging and demotivating it quite put me off, so I decided to go it alone.
After all this work I do now begin to realise why agents are so reluctant to take on new authors. Too much work for potentially too little reward. After writing the the thing, you are then thrown into a technical minefield of editing, formatting and cover design, and then you have to market the finished result. I decided to employ a professional cover designer, and am glad I did. I found Patrick Knowles via the Reedsy site, and would totally recommend him. He has given me lots of other useful advice apart from designing my cover. They say people judge a book by its cover…
I was also advised to get the text checked out by NFWI, to ensure it would not offend WI readers, did not infringe copyrights, and would not negatively impact their reputation. That worried me massively – I won’t refer to it here, but Hastings Battleaxe has Form when it comes to writing about the WI… Fortunately though, the novel was picked up by no less than the Chief Executive of the NFWI, and she pronounced it acceptable… mega-thanks to her.
The formatting for Amazon was a nightmare… I had to produce 2 versions, the Kindle eBook, which is simpler because Kindle does it all for you, and the finalised text for a print-on-demand paperback, which nearly drove me mad. It shouldn’t have done, because a while ago I formatted my poetry collection, ‘Lines and Wrinkles’, and you’d think poetry was harder, but the Amazon processes are very fussy. You have to start the page numbering after the first few pages of introduction, do a proper table of contents, and worst of all, get the layout of the pages right. It kept on telling me my ‘gutter’ was too small, and the end result paperback now has the text too far away from the inner margin. Then, talking of editing – I’m pretty good at that myself – I thought – and Philosopher is even better, but it wasn’t until I got the proof of the paperback that I counted 41 mistakes! Not all mine though, the conversion process to Print on Demand is not 100%. But it is now just about OK. It’ll retail on Amazon for £8.99, as from 15 July.
Here’s the eBook cover – you just get the front appearing on the Kindle search.
I do get royalities from both the eBook and the paperback, but I don’t expect to make money from this business – believe me, after a bit you even stop caring if anyone is ever going to read the stuff. I just want to get it done and out there. And it’s not done yet! ‘Death Deceit and Cake’ is the first in a series of three ‘Caroline and Olga Mysteries’. I am now about 60% through the second one, ‘Death is a Desirable Property’. Caroline is now an estate agent, but still a WI member, of course. That Compton Perceval WI is going to have no members left…
OK, enough of that.
Ohh, go on then, quickly, here is a photo from one of Philosopher’s birthday meals, with our old and dear Brummie friends, Sue and Alex and Sue and Graham. We went to a restaurant in London I recommended on here in May this year – Ognisko, a Polish place in Exhibition Road. It was truly excellent – a boiling hot day.
Then we just had Bannatynes in Hastings with Anna and Gareth and a few others… the birthday fest is over now, I think….
