Judgement Day

The briefest of blogs this evening as I have to face an interesting challenge tomorrow… 

First things first though; if you have been following my posts - Hello friends in Russia!  Hello friends in Germany! - you will know that I recently took part in Amazon's offer of promoting my book, The Last Changeling, by making it free for a day.

Things I did wrong: 

1) I didn't promote it on any free book websites - this I should have done as it can generate future sales when readers trawl those sites and find mention of the title.  

2) I didn’t spend any money promoting it.

Things I did right:  

1)I tweeted, Facebooked and blogged about it like crazy.   

2)I didn’t spend any money promoting it, (I guess that can be put under both headings!)

I know a fellow unknown-British-writer who had 100+ copies of his book downloaded on his free day, so I was hoping for something like that number.  The figure finally came up at just short of 450 downloads!  I'm sure that's small fry to some people, but it's wonderful from where I'm standing.  Some downloads went to India - I had no idea there was such an interest in British supernatural tales there.

So my little book has fluttered very far indeed, and even now someone I will never meet may well be settling down to read it.  That's both heart warming and completely amazing.

Now, onto the interesting challenge for tomorrow:

For the entire month of May, Liverpool will host the 'Writing on The Wall Literary Festival.'  Some heavyweight names will be coming to the city, like Melvyn Bragg, Janet Street-Porter and Howard Marks, but tomorrow night sees the start of the 'Pulp Idol' heats. 

Just like the TV show Pop Idol, it's a competition for writers in which novelists aim to impress a panel of judges by reading from their self-penned works.  

Tomorrow night it will be my turn to get up and introduce The Last Changeling to them.

Please wish me luck.

Thank you.