Promote Your Indie Book – Yourself. a) Time. Be prepared to devote, say twenty minutes, every day, to self-promotion. Keeping things going every day is the way to get your book noticed and that is the only aim you have in life for that twenty minutes. b) Do not follow the crowd as if you are a sheep. Yes, you want a wide audience and that is good, but things trend and everyone jumps onto that latest bandwagon and they can be guilty of disregarding the social platforms that they seem to abandon. Here is a for-instance;- At the time of writing, Twitter (X) is in turmoil. Personally, I see no difference but writers elsewhere say it has become toxic and I see absolutely no signs of that toxicity. Many have abandoned Twitter because of a dislike of Elon Musk and that to me seems weird. Anyway, donkey’s years ago I was into buying and selling shares in a very small way and learned that you shouldn’t always follow trends. If you bought when the market was selling, and sold when the market was

The title of my latest novel does not become clear until towards the end. Currently going through its fourth edit, the working title may change but may now be settled on. Billed as a cosy, clean, strangers to lovers novel, chapter one is given here for anyone wishing for a preview. Ashley. Friday of Week One. I twisted uncomfortably on the club’s bar stool and allowed a bony and bare, left elbow to rest on the bar, obviously after checking that the bar tender had made the surface dry and it wasn’t sticky, and then I blew out in abject boredom and looked around the dark but almost silent room wondering why in God’s name I was sat in the dump of a place. Maybe later on, I thought, this grotty club might look okay because it would be too dark to see anything, but now, now it looked desperately in need of a freshen up, or at the very least a replacement of the beer-stained carpet areas that held the smell of alcohol long after any liquid had dried out of them and were also frayed at the br

A holiday read for the beach that isn’t going to be ready for the summer – probably. After self-publishing thirty books, those being novels mostly but two books of poetry included, I decided to write for the first time a cosy, clean, romance with absolutely no vampires, witches, succubus, or similar characters. I’ve reached the end, started a first edit, and a question popped into my head that I hadn’t thought of for a while. Are you a cutter or a filler when editing? Me, I’m a filler. The finished novel is thirty chapters and an epilogue, around sixty thousand words, and I know that as I edit, more and more detail will be added (smells, sounds, touch) and the word count will slowly move towards eighty thousand or so. Some may say that it isn’t an edit and it's just filling in where needed before an edit proper but I see it as a first edit, an addition of words and those additions can be edited on the second edit. After that second edit the novel will be put to bed for a couple of week

During my working days, my life felt one-dimensional, with work taking up most of my time and relaxation being a counter measure. Since retirement (I am 71 as I write) time management has been split between a number of areas. I have always written novels and used to be a member of the 5am writing club, getting words down before showering and getting to work. These days writing can come as ideas flow and that, as you can imagine, is far more fruitful. More on this in the "Novel Writing" category. Time driving around the country in a work capacity has been swapped for a three-times-a-week round trip to Llandarcy where my granddaughter trains in rhythmic gymnastics at international level as a mamber of Llanelli Rhythmic Gymnastics Association. Meanwhile, my grandson, at aged fourteen, is making his own stop-motion videos and wants to make it his career. I support this with the purchase of models that are used in the videos, by pushing things on social media and by sitting with him during