Diary of a Provincial Lesbian by VG Lee Free for Kindle and the Free Kindle Reading App

For 5 days over Valentine's weekend we've been giving away VG Lee's novel Diary of a Provincial Lesbian on Kindle. If you don't have a Kindle you can download the free Kindle reading app from Amazon.

You need to download it from the Amazon site for your country and it's available on all Amazon sites around the world, including:

UK http://www.amazon.co.uk/Diary-Provincial-Lesbian-ebook/dp/B00BFGFKSA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1360799431&sr=8-1

US http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=B00BFGFKSA

Free Kindle reading apps are available here http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/feature.html/ref=dig_arl_box?ie=UTF8&docId=1000425503

Diary of a Provincial Lesbian is a book that can be enjoyed by women and men, by anybody who has ever asked themselves the question: ‘What is love?’ The heroine, Margaret, thinks she has found love, until her partner Georgie gives her the classic book Diary of a Provincial Lady, and an empty diary where she can record her own life.

The following year will bring changes she doesn’t expect, to her life and to herself. In this novel, filled with the comedy and sadness so typical of all our lives, VG Lee shows what love really is, if it’s expected to last beyond the first thrill of meeting.

She also shows the importance of other types of love – the love of pets and of friends, and the importance of accepting those close to us with all their faults. As always, VG Lee makes the reader laugh out loud and also cry, and by the end of the novel the main character and the readers are no longer the same.

VG Lee’s novels have been endorsed by Sarah Waters, Stella Duffy and Time Out, and she was shortlisted in the Stonewall Awards for Writer of the Year at the end of 2012. She is also a stand-up comedian and regular comedy feature writer for The Lady magazine.

Support the Homeless in International Poetry Competition to Win Book Publication

The cold weather is with us so do help support the three Cold Weather Shelters assisted by the Lumen and Camden poetry project. You could also win publication of your own short collection in our annual competition. There’s less than a month to go until the closing date of February 14^th, but the sooner you enter, the sooner we can pass all money raised to the organisers of the Cold Weather Shelters.

This year’s judge is the acclaimed American poet Anne Stevenson, who has been a chair of judges for the T S Eliot prize. Andrew Motion is patron of this poetry project, which is essential to keep the Cold Weather Shelters going.

Previous winners are Bob Cooper (2012) and  Caroline Squire (2011), and their short collections An Apple Tree Spouts Philosophy  and The Ideal Overcoat are on sale, with all £3 of the cover price going to the same charity. Nobody involved in organising this competition takes any income from it.

The winner is chosen on the strength of just one poem, and as part of the prize they will be helped by a professional editor to complete a short paperback collection with 20 pages of poetry. They will also get an invitation to read in one of the popular Lumen and Camden venues, will receive 50 copies of their collection, and will be well promoted.

The entry fee has been kept deliberately low at £2.50 per poem (up to 40 lines) or £10 for six poems, so that everybody can enter. In its first two years the competition attracted around 1,000 entries each time, raising between £1,500 and £2,000 for the charity. There are also regular open mics and poetry performances in the Lumen and Camden venues where the homeless sleep during the cold weather, and where more money is raised.

These poetry events raise thousands of pounds each year, and every year we try to increase our support. The Cold Weather Shelter organisers say they couldn’t survive without the contribution made by poetry. The events and the competition are the brainchild of the poet Ruth O’Callaghan, who has been running the Lumen and Camden Poetry series of open mics and performances for six years.

The open mic events are held in the two venues where the homeless sleep in the Cold Weather Shelters. They are at 1 Buck Street, Camden, and 88 Tavistock Place, Kings Cross. A listing of events and information about the Lumen and Camden Poetry project is on http://www.camdenlumen.wordpress.com

Details (Please share these if you can):

INTERNATIONAL LUMEN/CAMDEN POETRY COMPETITION

Judge: Anne Stevenson

Prize: Publication of short collection for one winner, 50 free copies, launch event and promotion.

Closing date February 14th 2013.

Poems up to 40 lines. Proceeds go to three London Homeless Cold Weather Shelters.

Entry fee: £2.50 per poem, 6 for £10.

Details on www.wardwoodpublishing.co.uk competition page.

Going Viral on Amazon. How We Did It

I promised an update to what happens after a giveaway, and the answer is that we learnt from the experience with one book and are now on our second giveaway. It has gone viral on Amazon in the UK. By this I mean there are now downloads every second even if we do nothing to promote it. The book is Joe Stein’s crime novel Another Man’s World.

I should make it clear, in answer to some queries, that I don't count this as 'viral' because we have given away a lot of books. It has gone viral in that we don't need to do anything and the downloads are continuous. As professional publishers we can't nag individuals to take a free book to support us - people who may then let the freebie languish on their ereader or computer. We need a meaningful giveaway where we promote as we would any other book launch and people decide for themselves whether or not they want the book.

Even if you aren't thinking of a giveaway, many of these tips can be used to get a 'paid for' book high in the Amazon rankings, and getting high in the rankings is the key to going viral as potential readers and buyers find your book easily when browsing their favourite genres. I'll cover the subject of 'paid for' books' in another post and you need a much lower number of daily downloads to succeed (which is still hard to sustain).

To help authors and publishers do the same thing I’m going to explain the methods used. But first I’m going to answer a question I’ve been asked by other publishers during the giveaways. They want to know if giveaways devalue books if people start to expect books to be free.

The answer we have found is that the opposite is true. During and after the giveaways we sell more ebooks and more print books. This lasted through December after I acted as a guinea pig and we experimented with a giveaway of my novel.

December is a slow month for small publishers as buyers tend to get the books major publishers are putting huge promotional budgets into for the Christmas market, and bookshops actually return a lot of books to publishers to clear the shelves for these bestselling books. They won't accept any new books until January.

Instead we had one of our best months so far for both print books and ebooks and I’m sure the giveaway helped with this. So my conclusion is that a giveaway doesn’t devalue print books and actually leads to more sales.

The book given away also helps get the author’s name very widely known and can reach an international market if the promotion is done well, and this leads to more of their other books being sold. After the giveaway the book that was given away also continues to sell, as reviews start to make their way onto the internet later.

We have also decided that it works to keep ebook prices lower, as this not only leads to more ebook sales, but also leads to more print book sales.The royalty on an ebook at a low price is quite close to the royalty of a paperback (where the royalty is 10% of cover price due to our higher production costs) so this works out well for authors. Even at our lower price of about £1.50 the author gets a royalty of about 50p as Amazon and other costs take a third, and the rest is divided 50/50 between the author and publisher under the terms of our contract.

So, what are the techniques for getting an ebook to go viral on Amazon? First of all it has to be an excellent book as people won’t support a giveaway otherwise. I believe people know they can trust Ward Wood to be publishing good books, and they also trust Joe Stein as his crime books have good endorsements from reviewers including Crimespree Magazine. The paperback of this book sold well and has a high ranking.

So the first tip is not to give away poor quality books in order to promote your other books. This book is excellent and people downloading it are now also buying the next in the series. They are also buying more ebooks from across our list as they like this one. Don’t give away anything less than your best writing. It’s your showcase to the world. This book has been out in paperback, and it’s worth doing a giveaway once a book has had time to prove itself.

We learnt from the first giveaway that it’s vital to set a low price for the ebook, so that after the giveaway it will revert to this price and this will help keep it high in the paid Kindle rankings, as people who have just missed the giveaway will still be tempted if the price isn’t too high. The Amazon servers update slowly, so a book manages to stay high in the free Kindle rankings for about a day even if it has a price.

We also learnt the importance of being in the right categories. Amazon allows two categories for a Kindle book so we put Joe’s in Crime and Thrillers. In fact we have now learnt that you can put a book in a subcategory and it’s also in all the higher categories, so you can put a thriller in a subcategory of crime and it will also be in all the categories above that. Which means we could also put the book in a completely different category - Action and Adventure for example - but I have a feeling that might devalue how good the author is.

There are thrillers in Action and Adventure and it's easier to get a ranking in the Adventure subcategories, so if you have this kind of book you might want to consider it as a step into the rankings. The same is true of other genres and categories - research into books like yours can show how the successful authors and publishers are getting high rankings. Which categories are they in?

You can change the categories during a giveaway and it’s worth doing this if you need to as you really must get into the top 20 ranking for a category. My novel got high in Literary Fiction, while Joe’s has got high in Thrillers. Some categories are easier to get high in, and it’s worth choosing an easy-to-get-into category to help increase the downloads by making the book highly visible to people searching for books in their favourite genre. 

Thrillers is a difficult category to succeed in – it took 400 downloads a day in the UK alone to get Joe into the top 10. But you can aim for a subcategory of Thrillers and move up. For example, under Crime and Thrillers you could click on Thrillers, then another subcategory, and you would get a ranking more easily while still being in the harder categories of Crime and Thrillers. 50 downloads a day could get you a top 10 ranking in the lower subcategories. (20 downloads a day can maintain a ranking once the book reverts to 'paid' status).

Sorry if this sounds complicated but it makes sense when you are setting up your Kindle book. When choosing a category you are given a list of possibilities and when you choose fiction, nonfiction etc you are given all the subcategories. Click on them to find the subcategories of subcategories. When potential buyers look for books on Amazon they do the same thing, searching for fiction/nonfiction and then being offered subcategories. Amazon actually has one of the best methods of helping buyers search for books in their favourite genres.

The next step we took was to have a Facebook event for the launch of the giveaway (and we will also have a Facebook event for the final day), with links to the book on Amazon sites and a reminder that people don’t need a Kindle. They can download the free Kindle reading app from Amazon. It’s also important to let people know they have to use the Amazon site for their own country, or many get confused that they can’t see the offer if they click on a link to the wrong site. You do need to build a large Facebook group for an event to help get a giveaway started, and you do need to be patient as many people do want their hands to be held. The clearer your messages the better the pick-up rate of the giveaway will be and the fewer requests for help you will get.

We then sent a message to all 461 members of the Written Word social network, which is part of a voluntary project for writers I've been running for 6 years. I'm also involved in writing groups in the virtual world of Second Life and can send notices to more than 2,000 writers and booklovers there. People on Second Life are very supportive and the two bloggers who helped by writing about the giveaway are both people I have met through this virtual world.

The other steps are mainly the same ones described in my previous blog posts. One addition is that I have realised how useful Goodreads is. I am in a number of groups on Goodreads and each group has one forum to allow author/publisher promotions, so I put news of the giveaway in those. It definitely made a difference on the second day, when downloads were starting to slow down. At that point Joe was nearly in the top 100 ranking for all books on Kindle but not quite.

You can also Google websites that let you list free Kindle books and you can find quite a few of the good ones listed here. Other sites not on this list are bargainebooks, Ereader News Today, Free Kindle Books and Tips and The Cheap.

I should also have stated the obvious in my previous posts, which is that you can list your giveaway in a daily thread on the Kindle forums for your country's Amazon website. They like people to put all the giveaways in the same thread for each day, and this does also help keep the thread being bumped into first place in the forum as new posts are added.

By putting the notices on Goodreads and also getting some support from two bloggers, Colin Bell and Selby Evans, we managed to get Joe into the top 100 ranking for all Kindle books on Amazon UK. Once the book was in this top 100 the downloads started to roll in every second, at which point I think we can say it has gone viral.

Another addition to the techniques used in our last giveaway is that the book was listed on the Hot UK Deals site. We didn’t list this ourselves: somebody found the deal and listed it here and I was told about it. It’s important not to use this site to self-promote in any way as that isn't permitted, and the site lets members list good deals they find and others can rate the deal as hot or cold. The site is full of wonderful freebies and discounts so it’s very popular, and Joe’s book took off as a ‘hot’ deal due to member voting. I’m sure this has helped as his offer has stayed on the ‘Hot’ page. It has had thousands of views. Although we didn't list it, I did link to the offer in every way I could (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc).

When you post news of your own books on Goodreads and other forums, it's worth keeping an eye on how many views your posts get. Some groups on Goodreads are larger and more active than others. The main response we get is from a different and extremely popular website - Kindle Boards - but if you use them, do be sure only to use their Book Bazaar forum, as self-promotion isn't allowed anywhere else. The Mobile Reads forum is also good, but again it's vital only to post where author self-promotions are allowed as the admins of these sites are very quick to remove people otherwise.

You do need to be prepared to put time and effort into the initial promotion so that a book can go viral, and I find it's best to have a 5-day giveaway, the maximum Amazon allows in a season. This gives enough time to move up in the rankings, and as some books are on shorter giveaways they will vanish from above you. Of course you do need to keep a high number of downloads per day to maintain your position. Groups on Linkedin provide an extra place where you can be taking part in discussions about ebooks and talking about your giveaway or promotion.

The more of these approaches you can use in the first day, the more chance you have of getting a high ranking and going viral so the book starts to do the work itself. It's a lot to do on your own, so careful planning and others allocated to do various tasks would help. But for most of us it really is a go-it-alone process, or an author and publisher process.

Joe isn’t a self-promotional author, but he is an excellent crime author, and his book going viral does show that it can be done even by an author who shies away from the limelight. Joe did send the news to his email list, and it’s important for authors and publishers to build an email circular. We also sent the news to our Ward Wood email following.

Your email list is incredibly important, especially if you are an author, as you can encourage friends and family to support you. Just sharing the giveaway on their Facebook wall, tweeting about it, or mentioning it on a blog, will make an important contribution. Joe is an ex-boxer, like his main character Garron, and still trains teenagers who got excited about joining in with their Facebook walls once the book went viral. In fact seeing the book getting higher did get people excited about helping, and sometimes being given a book encourages people to enjoy the fun of this challenge and the thrill as a book moves up in the top 100.

One final tip I would give is that authors do need to ask people to help out with a blog or a share on Facebook and Twitter and so on, and I do the same on their behalf. We do have to be careful not to nag and spam people so I don’t push anybody. But it seems support isn’t given unless you ask. People need to be invited to take books, or to buy books, or to help with a blog. Even if you ask, you’re unlikely to get more than a few shares and retweets, and just a couple of blogs. But they can make that difference and push you up into a ranking that helps you go viral.

Going Viral on Amazon. Some Hope.

You can read the 'some hope' in the title ironically or literally. It will be a while before I can see the lasting effects of the giveaway of my novel. It's now the 5th and final day, and downloads have averaged 100 per day. I'm now on about 500 and will see the grand total in the morning. The difficult task will then be seeing if the novel can stay high in the rankings when it's no longer free, and the only way this can happen for a book is if it goes viral in certain ways and takes off on its own.

When I thought about having a giveaway I was concerned about possible negative effects, but I hadn't realised what some of the good effects could be. Along with the pleasure of being able to give a book to so many people, the giveaway has also continued to lead to sales of printed books from various retailers and from me directly. These sales aren't huge, but all small publishers and most poets and literary fiction writers will know every sale is a cause for celebration.

This time last year we invested money in hiring a PR company for Ward Wood books in general and I can say this giveaway has achieved far more than the PR company did and without the £2,000 or more a PR company costs. I've compared notes with another author, and between us we have tried out two of the better known PR companies for publishing. PR agencies usually charge a fee that only covers one press release circulated and follow up phone calls, and this can lead to very little in terms of press and media coverage. I said I would give figures openly in these blogs, so this is what you can expect to pay and what you can expect to receive for your money. Sometimes they also circulate review copies for you, which is an easy task.

It worries me that the responsibility for PR could fall more and more to authors as the trend increases for self-publishing. As an author/publisher I can understand this as I'm a traditional publisher for our authors, but need to hire external editing and promotion for my own books if I choose to keep them with our company. For this reason I was thinking of going with another publisher for my next book, specifically because self promotion just isn't as effective as somebody else doing it for you, but the giveaway has made me reconsider.

The amount of work I put in as a publisher to promote books by our authors just couldn't be paid for if authors had to pay the £50 per hour charged by PR companies. It takes continual press releases tailored for each news item that could get coverage for an author and more than the 6-8 weeks that consitute a promotional campaign led by an agency. The work never ends, as bookselling is incredibly hard.

I really didn't expect the giveaway to lead to better results than the PR agency, but it wasn't hard perhaps.... In just 5 days the book has got to 14th position in the literary fiction ranking on Amazon UK, and has been in the top 10 on Amazon US, moving about between that position and the top 40. I've realised part of the reason the downloads are higher for Amazon US is that Ireland and India are also included on that site.

When I look at reports from PR agencies authors have used, they tend to lead to one or two reviews and maybe a broadcast. In just 5 days I've been asked to provide a reading to be broadcast on the popular Homegrown Podcast run by Nic Treadwell after he downloaded the book, and he has also asked to broadcast another Ward Wood author VG Lee.

There has been increased traffic to the Ward Wood site, leading to sales of books by our other authors, and small publishers particularly need people to buy direct from them. For some reason people always seem to buy from Amazon, so it's quite ironic that a giveaway on Amazon could help us achieve the sales direct from publisher we really need. I think the interesting discussion about publishing that has grown up around the giveaway has led to increased awareness and sales direct from the publisher.

Feedback from others during the giveaway made me realise the importance of encouraging people to click the Like button by books and to post reviews as this moves a book up in the Amazon rankings. I haven't been too successful at this as I don't like to harass, but was very encouraged by a review that turned up out of the blue from James Lawless, an Irish author, who I didn't know at all (which makes it even better) and who really 'got' what I was doing with the dystopian themes in the novel. You can see the review here and it will also go on my page on the publisher website.

If the book manages to stay high in the rankings it will have a chance of maintaining the high level of visibility needed to take off on its own. There's a limit to how much help a book can be given to keep people aware of it, especially when you have full-time work to do. Constant promotion by the publishers and authors could also put people off.

Anybody with a Kindle or other ebook could consider going onto forums, like Kindle Boards and Mobile Reads Forum. On these sites it's important to take a genuine interest in the discussions, but they do also give links to your books (especially Kindle Boards where they will help you put the covers of your books on all your posts with links to Amazon). They also have places to promote your book, and it's important to keep any self promotion strictly to the boards where this is allowed. I tested out the effectiveness of both of these sites on Tuesday night by posting after a long absence. Downloads of my novel went up by 21 in a matter of minutes, meaning that people were clicking on the links to my books from the messages even if I wasn't self promoting.

The period after a giveaway shows if people who have downloaded the book have enjoyed it enough to Like it on Amazon and to post reviews, or one sentence comments. If enough do, the book will stay visible in the top 20 or top 100. They might write about it in other places and ask the author to be interviewed or broadcast. Whether or not this happens for my book, it has become clear to me that it certainly can happen and the giveaway is well worth considering for authors and publishers.

Getting High in Amazon Rankings

It's Day 4 of the giveaway of my novel and I promised to blog openly about the experience with exact statistics. I've also been learning valuable facts along the way so I'm glad I did this. Sometimes it's only by experimenting that you find out how the publishing market works, and although I felt I knew about ebooks, the past few days have demystified Amazon and Kindle even more.

I woke up to find my novel in the Top 20 in the ranking for literary fiction on Amazon UK. It was also doing well on Amazon US but it's a bit harder to work out the ranking system there. I'll keep trying! You'll want to know how many downloads took the book to that position. Overall there were 307 downloads, with 113 in the UK.

The book continues to do much better in the US, despite me being a London author, with 187 downloads in the US by this morning. The remaining downloads were in Spain, France and Germany, where I have author friends on various social networks. I'm not sure whether the higher number of downloads in the US is due to more enthusiasm for ebooks and social network promotions there, or if it's due to the higher number of Americans in my social networks - probably a bit of both. I thought it was Brit Lit but it does seem to strike a chord with American readers, which I've been very pleased about.

Getting high in the rankings is important as a book needs to become visible to potential buyers if it's to take off on its own and go viral. For this to happen it does also have to be a good book, and I'll leave readers to judge that about my own novel. However, seeing the novel in the top 20 made me realise that the free ebook giveaway idea does let authors gain visibility for their books in a way that would normally be impossible without the high promotional budget of a major publisher.

It's not as easy to give a novel away as people may think, as I said in my previous post. But if a novel can get to such a high position in the rankings with just a few hundred downloads it's certainly possible to gain visibility. A book can slip down the rankings just as quickly, of course, and after the techniques described in my last post to invite friends and social network contacts to get the book an author can run out of fresh ideas.

One of the things I have found out is that it's important to encourage people to press the Like button by your book on Amazon and to add a review, even if it's only a sentence. This moves books up in the rankings, as I could see when I looked at the top literary fiction books on Amazon US, listed in price order from lowest to highest. Books that cost more could still appear higher than a free book if they had a number of Likes and reviews.

I have to be careful about contacting too many people asking them to press Like or to post a review, even if they give me feedback saying they enjoyed the book. As a publisher I'm more wary of annoying others and doing anything to damage the reputation of the company or the authors on our list at Ward Wood Publishing. But I think it's important for authors in general to invite readers to support them in this way. People just don't seem to do it if you don't ask. And people don't usually mind - I know I don't. Some may get annoyed with you but you just have to steel yourself for that, be polite back, and maybe go away and have a little cry!

The other way to make sure your book has a chance of appearing high in the rankings is to check you have it in the right categories in your Kindle settings. Unfortunately Amazon only allow two categories to be set so I chose Literary Fiction and Fiction/Humour. It's much harder to get high in the rankings for all fiction books, but it's possible to gain this visibility in your genres. Being in the right category also helps readers find you - readers who are looking for your type of book.

I realised the importance of this during the giveaway, as my book was in General Fiction and Women's Fiction (I hadn't chosen these settings). It isn't Women's Fiction, and General Fiction isn't specific enough to help people find it in the rankings. In fact Women's Fiction doesn't come up easily when searching genres either. So these two categories were useless during a giveaway and I realised they are useless in general in terms of helping potential readers find your book. When choosing categories for your book, it's worth taking a look at Kindle Books on Amazon and seeing which genres are easy to find.

We had to waste 12 hours of the giveaway period changing to the right categories but it was important. I didn't exactly choose to waste this time, but if you take a look at your Kindle settings by editing them, Amazon will take your book offline until you Save and Publish again. Once a book is offline you have to choose Save and Publish to get it Live and Amazon check it for hours first then slowly update each server for each country. So don't take a look at your Kindle settings during a giveaway - it's important to sort them out beforehand.

I have managed to keep the downloads going at about 100 per day without nagging people individually to download it or to support it in other ways. This is partly because there are people who will mutually support even without being asked too persuasively. These tend to be people who have a particular interest in ebooks or in the other technologies involved in ebooks, such as social networking.

The wonderful Selby Evans, a patron of the arts in the virtual world of Second Life, blogged about the giveaway on his site Virtual Outworlding. I noticed the results in terms of immediate downloads of the book to his large and mainly American following. Downloads in the UK were given a bit of a boost by Anne Welsh's blog, and as she's a librarian with a following of booklovers, that really helped.

Even these quick blog posts support ebooks and authors, and in fact if bloggers use their Amazon Associates link to the giveaway they could earn commission on any other books the buyers get while there so it's worth their while identifying good giveaways and writing about them. I continue to be surprised by the way the giveaway has increased sales of my printed books, especially my poetry collection, but also the novel, so links to the giveaway could also have earned bloggers commission on these sales.

Contacts who share the link on Facebook and Twitter also help keep interest going in a giveaway, and again I haven't asked for this too much but would encourage authors in general to do so. It's human nature to need to be invited to do a thing and to be reminded. The amount of support authors could get is much higher than I've achieved but I need to be careful about possibly annoying others due to the other sides of my work.

With one day to go I still have some new ideas to draw attention to the giveaway and will report tomorrow on the final statistics, the additional tips and techniques used on the last day, and the way forward with a book that's high in the rankings once it has to start being sold again. And of course all of this has to be fitted in with a busy work schedule or perhaps all authors could achieve more with a giveaway.

If you have tips of your own about free Kindle promotions, please leave feedback. I'd like to gather as much advice together as possible.

Ebooks. You Can't Give 'Em Away. Or Can You?

This week I'm experimenting with the free ebook giveaway idea until Wednesday. So that this experiment will be useful to other authors and publishers I'm going to be completely open about the number of people who take the book, the techniques used, and the pros and cons of this idea. Some of this is hard to find unless somebody tells you, especially the number of books you need to give away in order to get to a good point in the Amazon rankings so that you're visible to readers beyond your own contact list.

I'll start with the figure you all want to know. In the first two days 220 people have downloaded the book. More than 100 were in the US, 85 in the UK, 1 in Spain and 2 in Germany. The higher figure in the US, despite the fact I'm a British author based in London, helps to show the importance of an engagement with social networks in order to reach out to international readers.

It also shows that ebooks are vital as it's almost impossible for many publishers to get their printed books stocked and sold in other countries due to the cost of sending them combined with the demands of bookshop managers for big discounts that would put publishers into a loss. In the US, Ireland and UK bookshops tend to want to buy only from their wholesalers, so unless you can get stocked by their wholesalers it's almost impossible to sell to some countries.

Although bookdepository.com is excellent for supplying UK books to the US, Amazon only supplies books stocked by its wholesalers. We're stocked by the major wholesalers, but many aren't so it's a huge problem. So ebooks are the most effective way for authors and publishers to become internationally known and read. One problem is that potential readers don't realise they can only use the Amazon site for their country to download ebooks, which no doubt loses a lot of takers as it's complicated giving links to all regional websites. There are also some strange factors (such as ebook sales to Ireland going through the US Amazon website only).

Giving ebooks away isn't as easy as you might think, even though I'm a publisher with a track record as a published author. With so many people contacting me every day asking me to download their free ebook, my main fear was that nobody (or very few people) would take it. People are inundated with requests from their friends to accept and read a free book. This could be worrying for people selling printed books and ebooks, but one of the main surprises is that the giveaway has led to a flurry of interest in the printed books, and sales have increased. A printed book costs less than a visit to a coffee shop for a drink and a cake, so maybe this isn't so surprising. Paying or getting a book free isn't perhaps as important a factor in reader choice as we imagine.

But a free gift of an ebook people already quite fancy is going to tempt them to make that step and actually get it. The second question that will be on your mind is how many people I had to promote to in order to get about 200 takers. The maths for this seems quite simple. I have two main social networks I can promote to, both with contacts involved in books and writing, and the total number of contacts is just over 2,000. So, in the first two days I seem to have about 10% take-up of the offer. I'll keep you updated on the figures as I move into the second half of the promotional period.

To some of you 200 will seem like an excellent figure. '200 new people discovering your book' another author said to me. But in fact they aren't 200 new people. They are people who have been on my Facebook list because they have a particular interest in writing and publishing, and in the virtual world of Second Life, where I have been organising a large voluntary project for writers for 6 years. When you look at it this way, 200 might seem quite low and shows just how many 'friends' truly interested in our projects we really have on social networks. However, some only log on occasionally so it was probably a good idea to run the giveaway for the full 5 days Amazon allow in any season all in one go.

An unexpected bonus was the feeling it gives to see so many contacts downloading the book, reading it at the same time as each other, and giving feedback to me. It's a time when many people are short of money, and those who love books tend to buy too many and try to cut down, so it's rare to have this sudden burst of 'book sales' and simultaneous reading by many. It's usually an experience that only bestselling authors can enjoy.

With 200 downloads the book got to 835th position in the Amazon sales ranking for free books in the UK, and just over 2,000th in the US. People in each country can only download from one Amazon site and the rankings are based on the total for each location. I'm starting to see the downloads starting to grow in Germany, Spain and France.

What are the best ways to promote a giveaway without making your friends and contacts feel 'spammed'. I sent out a notice to the publishing company group, inviting members to an 'event' during the giveaway. I also invited friends and contacts from my personal Facebook friends list to an 'event' with a link to the Amazon sites as the location. Apart from the problem of people clicking on the wrong Amazon site for their country, this did work well. The downside to this is that some people don't realise they should turn off group notifications if group discussions become active and start arriving in their email. During a giveaway a group wall will get active so brace yourself for people getting irritated and it's important to remind people how to turn off notifications. Luckily I only had one complaint, but he made it very public on my wall - in fact you may find that you get trolls.

I then also sent group notices to the writing groups I have on Second Life. I have to say, I found the Second Life bookloving community very supportive and this will be part of the reason the downloads are higher in the US than the UK. They also account for the downloads to France and Spain. People on Second Life tend to be technology lovers as well as booklovers, and many of them are enthusiastic about ebooks. It's a mutually supportive environment for writers on Second Life, and I was touched by the number of people who shared the news on their Facebook wall and also on blogs without being asked to help.

At this point I have done as much as I can with my social networks without driving people crazy with reminders to take the book if they would like it. I have to be very careful as a traditionally published author and a publisher as I mustn't do anything to damage my own reputation or that of the authors with Ward Wood Publishing. I didn't send reminders to the group, or to friends individually, after the first invitation.

A self-published author probably should go for it with even more gusto, contacting friends to remind them to download the book, and letting them know how and why it can help. This might be the only way many authors can head up the Amazon rankings during their giveaway period, and the book could then go viral if it gets into the top 100 or top 10.

It will also help if the book is in the right Categories in your Kindle settings. I hadn't selected these myself and you do need to check that your publisher has put you in the main categories you feel are right. Amazon only allow two categories and my book had mistakenly been put in Women's Fiction (which it isn't) and General Fiction. This lost me about 12 hours of the giveaway period as I had to have it changed to Literary Fiction and Humour. Being in the wrong category (and I really don't consider my book Women's Fiction) not only makes it hard for readers to find what they want, but the correct niches give a book a better chance of getting high in its particular category.

So this is the point I'm at. I need to use some additional methods for the final half of the giveaway and will explain them in another post and how effective they are. Any feedback on your own giveaways, and also ebook sales, with tips, pros and cons, will be very welcome. And thanks to all who have dowloaded the book! I would love to see links to any reviews and feedback, good and bad, and also any places you have shared news of the giveaway.

The Next Big Thing

If you haven’t heard about The Next Big Thing then where have you been? Each Wednesday, authors who have been selected answer ten set questions on their blog about their next book. They then tag five authors, give a brief bio about each, and it will be their turn the following Wednesday. The idea is to make some sense of the blogosphere by drawing attention to good author blogs. I’ve tried to choose a varied set of authors who will take The Next Big Thing out in new directions, and I’m sure all of you will find at least one author you haven’t encountered before – and maybe get some new ideas about the ways blogs can be used. You’ll find them all at the end of this post.

With thanks to Colin Tucker who tagged me. Colin’s blog is at https://colinptucker.wordpress.com

1) What is the working title of your next book?

Help required on this. So far it has had the working titles Charing Cross Station and then Everyone Can Sing. I’m also considering A Time to Sing. Any feedback on these ideas would be very welcome.

2) Where did the idea come from for the book?

The idea for one of the main stories in the book came from a relationship I had with a character who seemed exceptionally kind and caring. A person of integrity. But it turned out he was extremely deceptive and hiding something important. I don’t like novels about couple relationships so I was waiting for something else I could add to the book. Then I discovered that a holiday cottage I had fallen in love with had been the scene of something horrific just before I stayed there. This gave me the extra inspiration I needed to build a story about how we make assumptions and how our perceptions about people and places can totally change when a single fact about them is revealed. I also wanted to write about feminism and love comedy, so meeting the stand-up comedian VG Lee inspired me to add a character based on her who has written a spoof book of extreme feminist ideas as a comedy but it becomes a bestselling cult manifesto.

3) What genre does your book fall under?

This is always hard to answer for me. It’s contemporary fiction, which says nothing about it except that the voice is very contemporary. It’s perhaps literary fiction, but I hate to say that as it sounds elitist and I think literary fiction can be an enjoyable read for most people. It’s definitely comedy but also has thought-provoking themes I hope. Like my last novel Everything is Free it’s probably a ‘state of England’ novel (as one reviewer said) as I like to write about our society, and it combines dark humour and light humour. It doesn’t get as nasty as Everything is Free, which I will be giving away for five days from Saturday on Kindle as a dark, alternative Christmas gift of a novel.

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

The deceptively over-nice character Robert looks a bit like Alan Titchmarsh, but I’m not sure if he would like to act. Somebody like that with a ‘butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth’ look who isn’t too handsome. VG Lee could play the comedian who gives feminism a kick up the pants with her comedy manifesto. Judith and her 18-year-old daughter Lydia look like a younger and a middle-aged version of Carole King, and there’s a very androgynous character called Viv who may be male or female. I’d need a very feisty actor for Viv. A young Tilda Swinton maybe. Then there’s Joe who is like a middle-aged Bob Dylan. And a mystery woman who Glenn Close could do well.

5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

The people who seem closest to us can be strangers guarding secrets and the revelation of one fact can make us realise we’ve been living a lie for years: everything we hold most important can be taken from us in that instant.

6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I will approach agents with this novel. With my last novel I turned down offers from a major publisher and a good small publisher, thinking it would be good to support Ward Wood Publishing with it. But it’s not a good idea to be an author/publisher these days despite a long and important tradition of this in the UK. It’s much more effective for me to publish and promote the work of others. Unfortunately nowadays, with so many people self-publishing and setting up small companies to publish their own work, it has become harder to be an author/publisher in a professional way.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

It isn’t completely finished but I’d say two years.

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I can’t really think of any. I seem to have developed a bit of an unusual style, and even if I start off not writing in it, it soon takes over again. My contemporary writing voice has been compared to Catherine O’Flynne but she writes about urban disaffection whereas I love the city and even some of the most dreadful characters.

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?

A person I met who seemed like one of the best people I had ever known, but who turned out to be the person who has treated me worst in my life. To him I send my gratitude, as it’s the most deceptive people who inspire some of the most interesting characters for me as a writer. The more successfully deceptive a person is, the more they surprise the reader, and the more the reader believes the other characters would have believed in them. An obviously deceptive person would be transparent to the reader and the people deceived would be demeaned as they would look too stupid and gullible. We all have to be conned by them, and in my life I’ve been inspired by two people who were excellent at the art of deception.

10) What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

I had to learn to sing as research for this novel and it has become a passion. I wanted learning to sing to be a way Judith gets rid of her inhibitions and as an echo of how Erica Jong used aerophobia in Fear of Flying. Feminism is one of the themes of the novel, with the teenagers researching the history of feminism and discussing the iconic books and novels, so I wanted to have a similar positive note and title. Sorry about the pun.

The Next Next Big Things

Here are the five authors I’ve tagged. I enjoy their writing and their blogs and it’s a delight to be able to share them with you.

Matthew Paul

Matthew has had poems published in a variety of places, including Fire, Poetry Ireland and Poems from Art (Tate Modern) and some are forthcoming at nth position. His first collection of haiku - The Regulars - was published by Snapshot Press in 2006 and the second, The Lammas Lands, will be published in 2013. He is associate editor for Presence haiku magazine and was joint writer/editor (with John Barlow) of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (Snapshot Press, 2008). He is the UK contributing editor for the annual Red Moon Anthology of Haiku (USA). His haiku have been anthologised in - amongst others - the Iron Book of British Haiku, The New Haiku (Snapshot Press), and, more recently, The Humours of Haiku (Iron Press) and he has run haiku workshops for the Essex Poetry Festival and for Poetry South. His blog is at http://matthewpaulpoems.blogspot.co.uk

Colin Bell

After a career making Arts Programmes as a producer/director and executive producer for British, American, Japanese and European broadcasters, Colin Bell (aka wolfiewolfgang), gave up television to concentrate on writing. His novel, Stephen Dearsley's Summer of Love, will be published in 2013 (Ward Wood Publishing). He has also published three children’s stories (Novello’s), film reviews (Mansized, the biggest men’s health online website), and poetry in the UK and the USA in The Blotter, Every Day Poets, Shot Glass Journal, Bittersweet, Prism and the Fib Review. His short stories have been published by Ether Books and performed by White Rabbit Theatre in London and he is a Writers’ Village Best Writers’ Award winner. He lives in Lewes, East Sussex, England and also writes a daily blog and other reviews as wolfiewolfgang on his website http://www.wolfiewolfgang.com

Abegail Morley

Abegail Morley is guest poetry editor for The New Writer. Her collection How to Pour Madness into a Teacup (Cinnamon 2009) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection (2010); the title poem was previously nominated for the Best Single Poem. Her second collection Snow Child is published by Pindrop Press.

She was nominated for the London Best New Poet Award 2010 and won the Cinnamon Press Poetry Collection Award (2009), The Didsbury Arts Festival Open Poetry Competition (2011) and an Orbis Readers’ Award. She has won prizes in Agenda Competition; Nottingham Open Poetry Competition; The Frogmore Prize; Leaf Books; Kent and Sussex Folio; Aesthetica Creative Writing Competition; Canterbury Festival and Swale Life Poetry Competitions. Her work appears in a wide range of journals including Anon; Assent; Envoi; Financial Times; The Frogmore Papers; Ink, Sweat and Tears; The Interpreter’s House; Iota; New Walk Magazine; Other Poetry; Poetry Review; Poetry Salzburg; The SHOp; Snakeskin; The Same and The Spectator and is reviewed in the TLS; Other Poetry; Peony Moon; Ink and Sweat and Tears and Eyewear.

She is also in the following anthologies: Not Only the Dark (2011); The Forward Book of Poetry (2011); Balancing Act and Other Poems (2011); Did I Tell You? 131 Poems for Children in Need (2010); The Sandhopper Lover and Other Stories (2009). Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual (2012). Abegail’s blog is at http://abegailmorley.wordpress.com

Mike Horwood

Mike Horwood was born in London in 1955 and grew up in Berkshire. He has lived in Finland, where he teaches English, since 1985. Mike has an M.A. in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University and is currently working towards a PhD at Bangor. He has a poetry collection, Midas Touch, and a novel, The Finn´s Tale, both published by Ward Wood Publishing. His blog is at http://www.mikehorwood.blogspot.com

Sharon Zink

Sharon says: I became a writer at five when my German-Brazilian-American grandfather gave me an Amazonian plant which he said could sense good and evil, thus dooming me to a life ruled by a vivid imagination. Having survived a sticky teenage hell by turning to verse, I became Shell Young Poet of the Year, my first collection, Rain in the Upper Floor Café, being published when I was seventeen.

After spending several years pretending to be a model, art dealer and bookseller in post-Velvet Revolution Prague, amongst other places, I studied English at Queen Mary, University of London and then read for an M.Phil. in Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Jesus College, Cambridge, before returning to London where I gained my Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Lisa Jardine.

I taught at various universities before abandoning academia to work freelance and focus on fiction. Since then, I have received the title of Writers Inc. Writer of the Year and have also been short-listed for the Raymond Carver and New Writer story awards on four occasions, being named in the latter as the Editor's Choice.

Having been published in anthologies, newspapers and journals in the U.K., U.S. and in translation in Mexico, my work has also been the subject of editorial features in The Telegraph and The Guardian and various TV slots. In addition, I have read at venues such as the Barbican and the Royal Festival Hall, a selection of my stories also having been produced at the 2008 Edinburgh Festival, winning an award from The Scotsman. keen traveller, I have wandered widely in Mexico, India, Thailand and Europe. I have also spent an extensive amount of time in America - the former home of my grandfather - most recently undertaking astronaut training at N.A.S.A. whilst researching Emptiness, my new novel about female astronauts – ‘The Log Flume’, a chapter from this work, was recently published in The New Writer. I currently live on the Sussex Coast with my cat, Muse.

My first novel, Sharonville, is currently under submission.

Sharon’s blog is at http://www.sharonzink.blogspot.co.uk