If you have occasionally glanced at my blog posts over the past nearly two years, you will have noted one consistent fact: there have been none! The last post was back in the early part of 2015, after which my focus shifted more my writing and less to my site. Something of an omission, on reflection, and I’ve decided that this post, in the final hours (in UK) of 2016, will be the first of more frequent offerings. (more…)
There’s nothing quite like the challenge of standing up in front of an audience and talking about what you do and how you do it to clarify your thought processes about being an ‘author’ or ‘writer’ or ‘novelist’. (more…)
Has it really been six months since I last posted on this site? Time flies when you’re bashing out the third novel. (more…)
The cover of a book should never be underestimated, despite the famous adage. It’s the flagship for every book, the first thing that is seen on a bookshelf, whether that bookshelf is real or virtual. I think it’s even more important now in the world of ebooks since we are bombarded with book cover images every day. (more…)
Book readings are a great way to spread the word about a new release. As reported in an earlier post, about a year ago, a couple of months after Rare Traits was published, I gave a talk about it and a reading of three short passages at the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club in Hong Kong. The evening went well, several books were sold and feedback was good.
Being in Hong Kong again recently, I thought I’d repeat the event for book number two (more…)
It’s too easy to become complacent about your hard drives. Crazy really when you consider they are the guardians of your data, the keepers of everything you value that a few years ago you would have kept locked away in your filing cabinet or in photo albums. And yet you take them for granted. Why? (more…)
Since writing the first two parts of this series of three, my recently published second novel, Delusional Traits, has been through various editorial mills and I hope emerged a better beast for it. I am still awaiting feedback from eagle-eyed readers, but I remain confident that it is fairly clean. Certainly it went through plenty of scrutiny. It’s now out there – click on the panel to buy your copy. (more…)
Since posting the first article in this series, I’ve been looking more closely at the problem of locating missing speech marks. It’s not an easy problem (more…)
You know the feeling – you’ve got to the stage with your new best seller where it’s been through several drafts. You’ve read it, hated it, changed it and polished it. All that remains is the proofreading and editing… (more…)
Things have been fairly subdued on the sales front over the past couple of months, so it’s very encouraging when another five star review pops up out of the blue.
On 29 June on Amazon US, a lady called Robyn Carter posted the following review, the first for a while:
Best book I have read in long time. A rip roaring read. Can’t wait for book two. If you like art combined with science then this is for you
Many thanks, Robyn, I’m very grateful to you for your comments and the five stars
And what is happening to book two? Well, if you follow my FB page, you’ll know that having finished the first draft sometime ago now, I decided that firstly the ending, and then the beginning needed work – particularly the ending. So that’s where it’s at. The start of the book is now ready, apart from further proof reading and all that stuff, and I’m well on the way with the ending. Just a couple of chapter rewrites to go. After that, of course more proof reading and editing, so it will be a while, but let’s look for now at September as a target.
I’ll keep you posted.
Our recent trip up to Hong Kong for three weeks from our winter hideaway in Phuket had a number of goals. First and foremost, we were there to see the Hong Kong branch of the family: stepdaughter Zoe and granddaughters Lily and Phoebe – do you recognise the names from Rare Traits? (more…)
Ebooks are brilliant, but printed books are far from dead. If you are an indie author, you really should be maximising your options by going for both. Read on… (more…)
Many indie authors are choosing to stick exclusively to the ebook route rather than suffer the depressing frustration of the myriad slammings-of-door-in-face that inevitably accompany trying to get a book accepted by a publisher or jumping through the hoops required to get their book into the correct shape for print-on-demand. 
(more…)
If you are an indie author or otherwise enlightened, you of course know the answer and you can stop reading here.
Still with me? Then the snippet of information in this post could be useful to you and may even result in you reading my book!
Since publishing and promoting my novel, Rare Traits, as an ebook on Amazon, I have been surprised by the number of people who thought that it was necessary to own a Kindle in order to read an ebook bought from Amazon.
“I don’t have a Kindle,” they text/email/post in frustration. “When will it be available for the iPad?”
As all indie authors will know, it is!
How?
While this post isn’t a plug for Amazon – they do a pretty good job for themselves – I am impressed by how readily available they have made their Kindle Reading App.
If you have an Amazon account, then almost by definition you have a computer/tablet/smart phone. Whichever you own, Amazon are likely to have a version of their Kindle Reader App for download to it. And it’s free! All you need to do is go to your Amazon page, click on the Free Kindle Reading Apps panel, or if you can’t spot it, type ‘free kindle reading apps’ into search, and the Kindle Apps page will appear. Your preferred device and OS should be listed.
Download your App and Bingo! you have all the versatility of the Kindle, but in colour, just like on the Kindle Fire. I personally prefer to read on my iPad than on my Kindle, which is an older, keyboard model. On the iPad I get a choice of paper colours, the book title is at the top of every page and in the library, all my purchases are displayed with the covers in glorious colour.
So there you are; it’s as simple as that! Follow the instructions and you will no longer have an excuse for delaying reading Rare Traits!
In an attempt to kickstart some sort of sales for my newly released first novel, Rare Traits, I took advantage of Amazon’s KDP deal and put the book on free promotion for two days last week. My daughter sent notifications round her impressive network of business contacts and I contacted just about everyone I know via email, my new Facebook author page, a rising presence on twitter, and word of mouth, as did my wife, family and several friends. (more…)
One of an author’s nightmares must be that after one/two/three/many years of writing a ground-breaking novel full of new ideas and original insights, either someone else pips them to the post and publishes an almost identical story, or something else in the world changes in relation to something in the plot. (more…)
I may be a cynic but I believe that convincing anyone of anything is 90% presentation. For a book, especially for an unknown author, that has to be the cover. I know, I know, you can’t judge a book, etc. But people do, especially with the plethora of books popping up on Amazon daily.
Having a slight artistic flair, I thought (more…)
My daughter, Lea, has been a quiet but steady force behind the marketing of Rare Traits. She wants to see the old man published and she knows he is struggling with the brave new world of social media and with strutting your stuff online. (more…)
The ideas for Rare Traits developed slowly. I had been thinking, the way you do, about identity, ID cards, passports and the like and musing on how difficult it is becoming to alter these documents.
No, I’m not in the business of faking IDs, but from my forensic background I do have some insight into counterfeiting (more…)
I have always enjoyed writing, but most of what I have written has been non-fiction – Hong Kong Under the Microscope, blog posts, the countless reports, manuals, funding requests etc that are part of being a forensic scientist and head of a small government department. Come to think of it, the funding requests were fairly fictional. (more…)
