Grab Yourself a Bargain!
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Promotion, Self-publishing on June 16, 2016
The psychological thriller, Bedsit Three, is now 99p/99c on Kindle until the end of June!
Since publication last October the e-book has been priced at £2.25 and I’m experimenting to see how price sensitive demand for the book is. As the price falls to less than half-price will sales rise sufficiently to make up for the vastly reduced royalties I will receive?
Bedsit Three is not in KDP Select because it’s also on sale via other e-book channels such as Kobo (where, surprisingly, it sells better than on Kindle) so this is not a Kindle Countdown deal. I have simply dropped the price across all Amazon territories.
Selling at 99p, I will receive 29p per book royalty compared to £1.29 per book when selling at £2.25. So I need to sell at least 4.5 times more books at the lower price to make me keep it at that price point. I’m interested to see what (if anything!) happens.
Extracts from Amazon UK reviews for Bedsit Three:
“A psychological why dunnit reminiscent of Barbara Vine/ Ruth Rendell. Highly recommended!“
“I picked Bedsit Three up late on Friday evening. I had finished it by the following Sunday lunch time and I absolutely loved it. The last book that held my attention like that was Stephen King’s Misery.“
“Believable, empathetic characters and exciting tensions and resolutions in the fast-moving plot.“
Finding an Agent
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Authors, Events, Markets on June 9, 2016
Yesterday evening I braved the torrential rain that hit Birmingham and attended a Waterstones event on how to get a literary agent. The speakers were local authors Gemma Todd, Liz Tipping and Stephen Aryan.
Here are their stories (in brief):
Gemma Todd (writing as G.X. Todd)worked her way logically through the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. She noted down all the agents working in her genre and then researched them further on the internet, looking specifically for anything that she could use to personalise each agent’s covering letter. Her first novel went out to 17 agents and received some positive comments but no offer of representation. So, she put that book aside and wrote another. She repeated her submission exercise with the second novel but also going back to the agents who’d made positive comments about the first book.
After six months of submissions with her second novel, Darley Anderson agreed to represent Gemma.
Liz Tipping found her agent, Juliet Mushens at United Talent Agency, accidentally via a Twitter appeal for ‘hilarious romantic comedies’. However, at that point Liz’s novel wasn’t finished. When it was complete, she went back to Juliet plus other agents she discovered via the internet. Liz said that she chose to submit to agents who looked ‘friendly and nice’ in their photos and, to make the experience less daunting, she turned it into a challenge to amass one hundred rejections rather than one acceptance. She also put her book on the now defunct site Authonomy and received interest from Harper Collins editors. Liz signed with Juliet Mushens and is now published by Harper Collins.
Stephen Aryan wrote eight books in several different genres over fifteen years before he was signed by an agent and published. When he started his first hunt for an agent at the turn of the century things were much more difficult because the internet was in its infancy and all submissions had to be posted rather than emailed. Now he advises using social media to follow agents that interest you and using #askagent to ask questions. Stephen was also signed by Juliet Mushens and spent a year working on the book with her and then another year working on the book with the publisher.
The overall message from the evening was positive with a theme of: ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again’. And also a reminder that the wheels of the literary world turn very slowly.
Happy agent hunting!
Publishing on Smashwords
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Computers & Technical, Promotion, Self-publishing on June 2, 2016
This week I spent a few hours uploading the psychological thriller Bedsit Three to Smashwords.
Smashwords is the world’s largest distributor of independently-published e-books. It also sells directly to the public in a variety of e-book formats. I decided to use Smashwords in order to make Bedsit Three available for libraries to add to their e-book collections. Many libraries worldwide use Overdrive to source their e-books and the only way for an indie author to make a book available on Overdrive is to go through Smashwords (as I mentioned before in my post about the 2016 Self-publishing Conference).
Smashwords accepts a Word document which it then puts through its ‘meatgrinder’ to change into .epub format – so no great technical knowledge is needed on the author’s part. However, I hit a couple of snags during the uploading process.
Firstly I tried uploading a .docx document, this was rejected because Smashwords only accepts .doc documents i.e. those created by older editions of Word. So I had to use the ‘Save As’ function to save my document and change it from .docx to .doc.
Secondly, when I previewed the .epub produced via the ‘meatgrinder’ there was a blank page between every chapter. It took me a bit of fiddling and Googling to solve this one. I had to remove the page breaks between chapters (which Amazon and Kobo had seemed quite happy with) and replace with a few carriage returns. I think this is because Smashwords automatically inserts its own page break when it comes to a chapter heading.
The Overdrive catalogue is updated from Smashwords each Tuesday, so Bedsit Three should appear there by the middle of next week. If you’d like to read Bedsit Three for free please ask your library to add it to their e-book collection.
Incidentally, authors don’t receive PLR on borrowed e-books, they only get the one-off royalty for a single sale.
Click to preview
A girl has been buried in a shallow grave. Rain starts to wash away the earth covering her.
A used pregnancy test and a scrap book about a suicide are abandoned in a bedsit.
Every mother tries to do her best for her child. But sometimes that ‘best’ creates a monster.
Bedsit Three is a tale of murder, mystery and love. It won the inaugural Wordplay Publishing/Ian Govan Award and was shortlisted for both the Silverwood-Kobo-Berforts Open Day Competition and the Writing Magazine/McCrit Competition.
Available on Amazon, Kobo and Smashwords.
Travel Writing Competition
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Competitions, Non-fiction, Travel on May 26, 2016
Steve Hanson from Senior Travel Expert has been in touch to tell me about their ‘Off the Beaten Track’ travel writing competition. It’s free to enter and has a prize of £100. 
Entries should be “about a fascinating, relatively unknown place near to where you live or that you came across by chance when travelling around, or it may be a totally fictional place”. The winner should “persuade readers of the Senior Travel Expert website that the place you describe is somewhere they would very much like to visit”. The closing date is September 30th 2016.
Often when you’re on holiday the things you stumble across by chance turn out to be the most interesting. I’m just back from a holiday in Madrid and Barcelona. One evening we sat in the window of a cafe in Madrid and above me was hung a display of books (see picture on the right). The next day we spotted a grand building that turned out to be The Society of Authors building – which I think is something like ALCS but please correct me if I’m wrong.
And remember, you don’t have to travel to enter this competition – your destination can be purely fictional.
Sociedad General de Autores de Espana
Books Ireland Short Story Competition
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Competitions, Short Story on May 19, 2016
Whilst I was at the Self-Publishing Conference I picked up a complimentary copy of Books Ireland magazine. 
Inside was the launch of their 2016 short story competition and it has a pretty good first prize: 400 Euros plus a writing course at the Irish Writers Centre plus publication in Books Ireland.
The second prize is 200 Euros and third prize is 100 Euros.
There is no theme, the word limit is 2,600 and the closing date is 31st August 2016. Writers of any nationality may enter. The judge is Vanessa Fox O’Loughlin, founder of writing.ie, literary agent and author.
The interesting thing about this competition is that members of writing groups receive half-price entry. The standard entry fee is 10 Euros but members of a writing group (or subscribers to Books Ireland) pay only 5 Euros.
Full details about the competition and where to send your entry are on the competition web page.
May the luck of the Irish be with you!
2016 Self-Publishing Conference
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Events, Self-publishing on May 12, 2016
Last Saturday I went the Self-Publishing Conference at the University of Leicester.
I took two key messages away from the conference (as well as a bag of leaflets and promos!):
- Self-publishing is no longer an inferior, second best alternative to traditional publishing. Well-written self-published books that are put through similar editorial and design processes to their traditional counterparts are indistinguishable from ‘normal’ books. Readers choosing a book online, in a bookshop or in the library seldom check the publisher before deciding whether or not to have the book.
- Quality is key when self-publishing. We all know that some get-rich-quick merchants push anything out on Kindle and, unfortunately, give the rest of us a bad name. However the rules are being tightened with Amazon cracking down on books containing errors. The successful self-publisher always puts his book through quality control procedures such as copy-editing and/or proofreading.
Throughout the day I absorbed other information such as:
- How to get e-books into the digital catalogues of libraries through Overdrive (loans of self-published material are growing). There is no PLR but it is a sale which may get you known more widely.
- It’s free to generate a QR Code which can be added to bookmarks and other promotional materials. The code will take readers direct to your website via a smartphone.
- Bookshops and libraries will not readily order/stock Createspace books. If it’s important to you to have copies of your books available in this way then consider a different method of self-publishing, such as through a provider like Matador.
- How ISBNs and metadata work. This was complex and generated a lot of questions! ISBNs can now be bought singly as well as in blocks of ten.
If you’re serious about your self-publishing activities and ambitions, this is a conference well worth attending. I’ll be looking out for the announcement of next year’s date.
P.S. There was also a very good lunch plus chocolate brownies in the afternoon!
Win A Writing Mentor
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Competitions on May 5, 2016
Sophy Dale is offering a three month writing mentorship to the winner of the prize draw now running on her website, Spark for Writers.
The mentorship starts with a one to one coaching session to find out exactly what sort of support you need. This is followed by 12 weeks of email support, the submission of up to 5,000 words for editorial review, followed by a final one to one session. All of this usually costs £500 but you can be in with a chance to win it for free by simply joining Sophy’s mailing list before May 30th 2016. Please read the full details of the competition before entering.
Writing is a lonely business so a little bit of help and encouragement along the way can only be a good thing.
What are you waiting for?
What’s Your Musical Era?
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Lifestyle, Writing on April 28, 2016
What’s your musical era? When did you transition from child into young adult and have all those special first experiences: first teenage party, first visit to a pub or club, first kiss, first date etc. ?
For me it was the early 1980s. Songs by Adam and the Ants, Soft Cell, Human League and Frankie Goes to Hollywood always whisk me back to that time and I feel again the strong emotions that seemed to accompany everything I did. If I close my eyes when I hear ‘Tainted Love’, I’m at the university Union disco, dancing on a floor which is sticky with spilled beer. I feel the excitement and anticipation of a time when so many things were new and responsibilities were few.
Re-capturing this mood through music enables me to write from the heart about being young and in love. When I get in this zone it’s great – the words flow and I get lost in the story. Pete’s Story was the result of one such emotional interlude and my inspiration came (very loosely!) from a boy I went out with in my teens who was a member of a band.
What songs whisk you back to that heady time of new independence and experiences? And do they help with your writing today?
Pete’s Story is available as an individual ‘short‘ or as part of The Museum of Fractured Lives boxed set.
This blog post is part of a music themed blog event organised by Elaina James, a guest blogger on Mslexia. Her author page on Mslexia can be found at www.mslexia.co.uk/author/elainajames.
Details of participating bloggers in this event can be found on Elaina James’ blog.
National Stationery Week 2016
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Lifestyle on April 25, 2016
Want an excuse to go and indulge in a pile of luscious new notebooks, a pack of brightly coloured pens, some pretty patterned ring-binders or some delightful sticky notes? Well here it is!
25th April to May 1st is National Stationery Week and 27th April is World Stationery Day! 
The website has a suggested list of things to do during this week. I particularly like the idea of a ‘stationery crawl’ which is like a pub crawl but with stationery instead of beer (but there’s nothing to stop you downing a glass or too – choosing notebooks is thirsty work!).
There’s a quiz to find out what kind of writing implement you are. I came out as “… a stylish fountain pen! A little bit messy at times as your ink smudges, but classy and timeless. You’re writing is flicks, twists and curls and words are most definitely your thing. You only need one pen and it’ll be your best friend forever”.
So what are you waiting for? Get out there and start indulging in every writer’s guilty pleasure – the smell of fresh paper, the allure of new pens and the promise of writing success if only you can find that perfect notebook!
(And if nothing else, this post has drilled into me that stationery with an’e’ is paper and stationary with an ‘a’ is motionless!)
How Businesslike Are You?
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Lifestyle, Writing on April 15, 2016
I recently spoke to a successful copywriter on the telephone and was impressed by the businesslike way he handled both the call and his freelance working life.
We prearranged the call for a specific time and he rang me on the dot. He opened the conversation by determining how long I had available to talk. Then he briefly explained what he’d like to cover in the call (this gave us an agenda) and kept the discussion on track. It sounds rather strict but was all done in a very friendly manner.
During the course of the call he mentioned that he only checks email twice a day, once in the morning and again at the end of the afternoon. He doesn’t do social media and he doesn’t make himself available 24/7 via electronic gadgets.
I feel there’s a lesson to be learned here. Perhaps it’s something along the lines of : Successful writers act professionally and treat writing like a ‘proper’ job with proper hours. They don’t procrastinate or pretend that commenting on another writer’s cute kitten picture is a marketing activity.
Food for thought?
Sally Jenkins 