Daphne before She Died

I gave notice a while back that I was going to publish a new Kindle book. Well, now it's out. The title is Daphne before She Died, and if you care to take a look at the details, you can find it, as appropriate, on either Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

If you care to compare the two book pages, on .com and .co.uk, you will find that they're different. Why? Go figure. I will shortly write to Amazon and ask, but I am not hopeful of a reply.

Obviously, you're not likely to do such a weird thing as compare two pages for ordering the same book, unless you are, like me, a person wrestling with the task of trying to make your book visible and to boost sales (or indeed, create any sales at all, in the first place). But the .com page allows the author to enter far more detail about reviews, and about the author, than does .co.uk. Perhaps the explanation is that server space on .co.uk is in shorter supply? Odd.

During the past couple of months I have been spending a considerable amount of time studying internet book-marketing techniques. My conclusion, after more reading than I've enjoyed, is that the conventional wisdom is roughly as follows:

Write a really good book; design a terrific cover, and see if you can find someone famous to give you a quote for it; issue press releases; write to a vast number of people and ask them to review your book; start a blog, and post daily; get a Facebook page for yourself and one for the book; start twittering; get yourself interviewed on other blogs; interact with all those readers who review, comment or contact you for any reason; talk to them; find out what they like and don’t like; show them drafts of your next book; assemble a database of all the people you’ve contacted, and keep in touch with them for future books; send them a regular newsletter. Make friends with your readers! It’s all about interaction!

Well, yes. Maybe. But my conclusion, after absorbing a couple of months of this kind of thing, was that, if this is what it takes to be a great success as a writer in the digital age, then I am going to have to settle for being a modest success, or even no success at all. There is simply no way, at age 73, that I am going to take on that kind of workload. I would never have time to do any writing.

Fortunately, within the last week or two, I have stumbled across a different approach. It's embodied in a new book by Michael Alvear: Make a Killing On Kindle. Alvear's subtitle (inside the book) is: Without Blogging, Facebook and Twitter.

Notice that word without. Now this really looks promising. I will let you know how I get on.

Oh, and by the way: if you'd like a free review copy of Daphne, please send me an email. Address in the Blogger profile. This offer holds good till the end of July, but by then the book should be anyway offered free (under Kindle Select procedures) for a period of about three days.