Posts Tagged The Museum of Fractured Lives
Bag a Bargain!
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Promotion on February 2, 2015
Just a quick post to let you know that The Museum of Fractured Lives is reduced to half-price until Sun Feb 8th 2015. It’s only 99p in the UK and 99c in the US. 
This e-book is a compelling collection of four emotive long stories. Each one is perfect for filling a lunch break, coffee break or commute to work. Dip into this collection and escape into someone else’s life, experience their ups and downs, joys and sorrows.
The Amazon reviews are excellent and there’s also a growing number of reviews on Goodreads.
Here are just a few short comments:
“I just loved this book. From the prologue to the end.” Federica.
“It was a great read and I didn’t want it to end.” ShellyH
“…if I could have given this story six stars, I would have.” Sparky
After the EU e-book VAT hike on 1st Jan 2015, 99p is the cheapest price that independent authors can set on Amazon. So I hope you’ll take advantage of getting this ‘boxed set’ of all three Museum stories (plus an exclusive prologue) for the same price as a single story when bought individually.
Click here to buy on your local Amazon site.
Going Viral
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Books, Promotion, Resources, Self-publishing on September 28, 2014
This week I’m trying to go viral. The Omnibus Edition of The Museum of Fractured Lives is reduced to only 99p/99c until Saturday 4th October. 
And I need the world to know!
Have you ever loved and lost? Have you kept something to remind you of that relationship? Do you think it might be easier to move on with life if you let go of that object? That’s what The Museum of Fractured Lives is all about. It displays objects donated by people who have suffered a trauma in their lives. Each of the three stories in this book tells the emotional tale of that object and its donor. And this omnibus edition also includes a prologue telling how the museum came into being.
The individual stories (each around 9,000 words) have been well reviewed:
“I thought this was a truly excellent novella. The central character, Maxine, is vividly portrayed, and her story is touching and powerful, with some surprising twists and turns.” Mr N. Daws on Maxine’s Story
“The story drew me in very quickly as I needed to know how Karen would go about putting her plan into place … and the erotic episode between Karen and John was an added bonus!” Lesley on Karen’s Story
“Another good story in the Museum of Fractured Lives. It was good to have a story from the male perspective with a good twist at the end. Thought provoking.” Mrs J A Williams on Pete’s Story
So, how to tell the world?
I’m going to try a range of Facebook groups:
The Kindle Publishing Bible
Debbie Young’s Kindle-loving friends
Kindle Publishers
The Review
Short eBook Reviews
I’ve already contacted Indie Book Bargains who send out a daily e-newsletter. They kindly featured One Day for Me a couple of months ago but I think they select according to number of Amazon reviews and, being fairly recent, I fear the Museum Omnibus hasn’t yet generated enough.
I’m also going to investigate The EasyChair Bookshop which I heard about via Helen Laycock on the Writing Magazine Talkback Forum.
If anyone knows any other promotional places please let me know. Maybe together we can build up a list of useful sites.
(And if anyone downloads and enjoys the Museum Omnibus, I’d be over the moon if you could leave a review!)
E-Book News
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Books, Promotion, Self-publishing, Successes on May 13, 2014
A couple of bits of e-book news for you:
Just in case there’s anybody out there who hasn’t yet got A Writer on Writing – Advice to Make You a Success, I thought I’d let you know that it’s currently reduced to only 99p (99c in the US) until Sunday 18th May 2014. Grab it while you can!
Pete’s Story, the third in the Museum of Fractured Lives series is now available. Pete tells how he fell in love with Sarah almost thirty years ago when he was twenty-one. At the time he was singing in a band and living in a bedsit. Sarah was eighteen and had just left school. They planned their life together. Sarah would manage the band and it would become a worldwide success. But the couple’s future goes awry…
Finally I had some good news yesterday from Liz Smith at My Weekly – two stories accepted! So if you ask me this week how my writing’s going I’ll say, ‘Very well, thank you’.
By the way – thank you to everyone who took the time to comment on my previous post ‘How’s the Writing Going?’ It was really lovely to share all your experiences and know that none of us are alone!
I do hope that this week everyone’s writing is going tremendously – and if it’s not, remember we all often hit a dark spot. So pick yourself up and carry on! (or leave a comment on this post & I’ll commiserate with you).
Mystery Novels, NaNoWriMo and the Review Winner
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Events, Writing on November 3, 2013
Weetwood Hall Hotel (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Last weekend I went on a Relax and Write course at Weetwood Hall in Leeds.
I went to learn ‘How to Write the Mystery Novel’ with Eileen Robertson. We did character sketches of our heroes and villains, we thought about their motivations and what had brought these characters to where they were at the start of the novel. We gave brief descriptions of how our plots might develop and everyone chipped in with their own suggestions for each other’s storylines – something I found useful.
The accommodation and food for the weekend were excellent (although the bar prices were rather high!).
But it was the other course participants who made the weekend particularly enjoyable. We all got along and, as most writers seem to be, everyone was very generous sharing their experiences and advice.
Several of us are intent on doing NaNoWriMo during November (National Novel Writing Month). So you might notice this blog go rather quiet as I try to churn out 50,000 words. I did it about four years ago, so I know how tough it is. I’m hoping the challenge will kill off procrastination and give me the skeleton of a novel that might be worth spending more time on.
Finally, I am pleased to announce that Chris Sullivan is the winner of the Book Review Competition that I ran a couple of weeks ago. Chris has a book review blog at The Voyage Out – do go over and have a look at it if you enjoy reading.
Many thanks to everybody who took the time to download, read and review Karen’s Story and any of my other books. It was much appreciated and I’ve taken all your comments on board.
Morley Literature Festival Prize Giving and Public Speaking
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Authors, Books, Competitions, Events, Short Story, Successes on October 20, 2013
I mentioned a few weeks back that I won first prize in the Friends’ of Morley Literature Festival Short Story Competition 2013.
Last Sunday was the prize giving and I travelled up to Morley in West Yorkshire to receive my certificate and a cheque for £50. The certificate came nicely framed and it’s gone straight on my mantelpiece.
Gervase Phinn is the patron of the festival and he rounded off this year’s festival with an entertaining talk before making the presentation. As well as telling us about his experiences as a country school inspector (think James Herriot in a school inspector’s clothing) he was full of funny examples of mistakes we make with the English language, from his new book Mangled English – A Humorous Anthology of the Misuses of the English Language. I wish I’d written them all down now but if the book is half as enjoyable as the talk it will be a good read – and might make a good Christmas present for someone interested in words.
If you’d like to enter the Morley 2014 short story competition contact the organiser, Stuart Pereira, by emailing fmlitfest@yahoo.com for full details and an entry form. Entry is free and it’s an open theme – so what have you got to lose?
Gervase Phinn is an accomplished public speaker who knows how to hold an audience and keep them interested. I think it’s a skill that today’s writers need to master – whether it’s for promoting their work or teaching and running workshops. It’s also something that I’m useless at – so I’ve joined my local Speakers’ Club, whose strapline is ‘Speaking with Greater Confidence’.
If you’d like to find out how my first meeting went have a look at my guest post on the Sutton Coldfield Speakers’ Club Blog.
Many thanks to those of you who’ve taken the time to review Karen’s Story – The Museum of Fractured Lives. I do appreciate your honesty and I’ve learned a lot from the comments. There’s still time to enter the draw to win a Book Journal by leaving an Amazon review. Full details are here.
Finally, if you’d like some tips on plotting your novel, Nick Daw’s Three Great Techniques for Plotting Your Novel or Screenplay is going to be free on Amazon over the next few days. If you want some ‘straight to the point’ advice it’s worth a read (and, as with any free book, please consider leaving a review if you enjoy it).
Write a Review and Win a Book Journal
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Books, Competitions, Promotion, Self-publishing on October 12, 2013
Karen’s Story, the second in the Museum of Fractured Lives series is available free from all Amazon sites until Wednesday 16th October.
Karen’s Story is contemporary women’s fiction (although some men may enjoy it too). It is the tale of a single woman’s quest to find a man to father her baby. She tempts a work colleague to commit adultery. But he has a secret and their affair has devastating consequences. At approximately 8,500 words the book can be described as a long short story or a ‘flash’ novella.
To celebrate I am running a competition to win a Book Journal (pictured). It is full of pages on which to keep a record of all the books you’ve read – great if, like me, you tend to forget what you’ve read or which author you particularly enjoyed. There’s also a section to keep a list of ‘Books to Read’ – useful if an interesting book is mentioned on the radio or TV or a friend recommends a novel they like.
All you have to do to enter is:
- Download a free copy of Karen’s Story – The Museum of Fractured Lives to your Kindle, tablet or PC. If you use Amazon.com the link is here or search for ASIN: B00F3FMHSK.
- Write an HONEST review on Amazon.
- Email me at sallysjenkins@btinternet.com and let me know which review is yours.
All the emails will go into a ‘hat’ and I will draw one at random after the closing date, which is midnight Saturday 26th October 2013.
If you would like more than one entry into the draw, simply leave another review for any of my other books (you may have them sitting unread on your Kindle after previous free promotions, or you can buy them) and send me another email.
I have thought about the ethics of this competition i.e. people gaining entry to a prize draw in return for writing a review. I have decided it is acceptable (and hope you do too) because:
- there is no guaranteed prize
- winning is not dependent on the content of the review or the star rating
- the practice is well-established, for example Story Cartel offer prizes of Amazon vouchers, Kindles and books to readers leaving reviews (scroll down the page on this Story Cartel link to see the details).
I hope you enjoy Karen’s Story!
Karen’s Story – The Museum of Fractured Lives (plus 2 free e-books)
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Self-publishing on September 15, 2013
I’m pleased to tell you that the second instalment in The Museum of Fractured Lives series has been published this week.
As you may remember from Maxine’s Story, The Museum of Fractured Lives displays objects donated by people who have suffered a trauma in their lives. The objects are a symbol of that trauma.
When accepting a donation, the museum employees try to obtain the full story behind the object.
Each book in The Museum of Fractured Lives series tells the story of one donated object and the person who has given it. These books are ‘flash’ novellas of around 8,500 words.
Karen’s Story tells the tale of a single woman’s quest to find a man to father her baby. Her choice of mate has devastating consequences. Karen’s story is pure selfishness and destroys several lives.
Karen’s Story is only 77p in the UK . It is also available across all other Amazon sites by searching by the title or for ASIN: B00F3FMHSK.
To celebrate this launch, the first Museum of Fractured Lives book, Maxine’s Story, is free for today only (15th September).
Also free (until 18th September) is my collection of writing articles, A Writer on Writing – Advice to Make You a Success.
Amazon’s Kindle Cover Creator
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Computers & Technical, Resources, Self-publishing on June 25, 2013
In preparation for my next e-book release, I’ve been playing with Amazon’s Cover Creator.
This can be found within the Kindle Direct Publishing process, at the point where you would normally upload a cover that you’ve created elsewhere.
Designing with Cover Creator is far, far easier than trying to do it with GIMP or any other such design software (unless you happen to be an expert – which I am definitely not!).
There are only three steps:
- Choose Design – select an image from those available within Cover Creator or upload an image of your own.
There is a reasonable selection of images available and they are split into sections such as Animals, People, Architecture, Food and Drink etc. I found a picture which I felt was a reasonable likeness to the heroine in my tale. - Style and Edit – select the layout, colour scheme and font.
There are a limited number of each of these. The layout dictates whereabouts on the cover the title, subtitle and author name will appear. Colour scheme and font are self-explanatory. - Preview – see how your design will look in the Amazon store.
This is the only part of the process that caused me problems. When I tried to Preview I kept getting the message, ‘Cover Creator has encountered an error. We recommend you refresh your browser.’ So I contacted Amazon. They suggested that I use Firefox as my browser instead of Internet Explorer. This worked but first I had to delete everything I’d already done in Internet Explorer and start again.
At any point in the Cover Creator design process you can save the cover and come back to finish it later. And you can design in Cover Creator before your book is ready to be uploaded.
Inevitably there are some disadvantages to Cover Creator, the principle two being:
- The limited number of variables available (i.e. images, layouts, colour schemes etc.) However, I would guess that Cover Creator would become much more difficult to use were there to be an infinite choice. Just be prepared for someone to have a similar cover to yours!
- Covers created within Cover Creator cannot be used outside of Amazon. So if you intend selling on other platforms, source your cover elsewhere. Initially, my next book will be exclusive to Amazon so I’m not going to worry about this at the moment.
Here is a sneak preview of my proposed cover design. Any comments gratefully received!
To put my design in context – this book is intended to be the first in a series of stories (each around 8,000 words long), all of which will be set in The Museum of Fractured Lives. Each e-book will feature a different donor to the museum and tell the story of the object they are donating. Maxine is the heroine of the first book.
It was loosely inspired by The Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb which I told you about here. However, I should emphasise that everything in the book is totally fictional. I have never visited the museum.
Sally Jenkins 