Well the big promo has been and gone. I think on the whole it was very successful. As a complete unknown I had nearly 4000 copies of my books downloaded. OK I don't get any money from that but it does mean there are 4000 copies of my work floating around, presumably most being read or will be read. I have to wait and see how many sales this generates - so far only a very small trickle in the US. However it's all a learning curve. I gather I shouldn't have used up my free days all at once and shouldn't have done my books at the same time. But I'm not really sorry - as I said I am a newcomer to all this. And I don't think I'd have had even the same number proportionately if I had run the promos on one book at a time. But I'm learning. I have scheduled a 2 day free promo on Pieces of a Puzzle for this weekend, the 1st and 2nd of December. And I am trying to get notices put on various websites announcing this. Funnily enough I have sold more copies of Puzzle than any of the others - presumably people thought if the others were free they would just buy that one. So let's see if it works the other way around. I still need some reviews of course. There are websites you can use but I'd far rather have genuine unsolicited ones.
I am also working away trying to get my books ready as paperbacks on Amazon. I thought that would be a good idea especially with Christmas coming. I am doing it the slow laborious way. Perhaps by the time I get to my 10th book I'll know how to do it and it will take me less than half a day to format one book, even using Create Space's preformatted template. One thing I have done is put in the author's bio of each book that my fifth book Rock-a-bye Baby will be out by the end of the year. So now that I have set myself a deadline I'd better get cracking and finish it! I should have lots of time over the next couple of weeks (three weeks and one day till we go to Singapore). My volunteering at the school finishes this week and my bridge partner has gone to Sydney for a barmitzvah and only gets back as we leave. So no excuses.
Colin has gone to our council offices for the eighth time. We are trying to put in a very small splash pool in the corner of our very small garden and need planning permission. Each time we take them all the forms they come up with a new requirement, which they hadn't mentioned before. Our pool man is getting throughly fed up - although Cape Town is one city there are several different municipal offices each of which has different requirements. He says if he had to do all this running around he's have to charge twice as much for the pool. We had hoped to have it before Christmas but it is looking less like it by the second. As I write Colin has just got in - having successfully handed in the plans! There were 6 different people to see at 6 different desks with 6 different queues - over two hours. No wonder Jan, the pool man won't do it!
Our lagoon has a flock of flamingos on it! First time ever that we have seen flamingoes here, although they are at several lakes and lagoons a few miles away. There were lots of pelicans a few months back but there was a reason for that - something to do with an algae bloom which was killing the fish so that wasn't really desirable. The only large birds there normally are the Egyptian geese and the Hadeda ibises (so called because that's the noise they make). In our little garden we have a sunbird feeder so attract beautiful sunbirds in wintertime - but not at this time of year as there are too many nectar bearing flowers out.
Time for Phoebe's walk. Till next time :)
H
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