Rollercoaster of emotions

 

Anyone else go through a series of emotions for no reason?

Today, when I woke up, I was done.

Didn't want to lift a finger. Could easily have spent the day in bed napping and scrolling TikTok. It felt like I'd forgotten to take my anti-depressants, but that wasn't the case, I've taken them every day since Tuesday.

Since my book launched earlier this week, I've been pushing hard on the promotion.  I've sent out about forty packages to targeted individuals with presents in telling them about the book, I've been doing lots on social media, and I've contacted four hundred libraries to suggest that they buy the book.

As of yesterday, I was on six sales.

Now, there's so much against me. A new author, selling a book in an unclear genre (not a nice definable one like thriller or romance), a collection of short stories instead of a novel, self-published, without  proper marketing, an agent, or big social media presence, has a likelihood of major success of under 1%.  Selling a hundred copies has a maximum likelihood of 10%.

And I didn't write the book to be a massive success - although that would be nice, of course, who doesn't want to earn millions from a book they've published and have a mansion with several staff? (especially a gardener.... not a fan of the outdoors lol).  I wrote it because I've always wanted to publish a book, and the stories in it I like.  Even though I wrote them, they make me laugh.

But still.  When I woke up - depression was significant.

That feeling faded when I received a nice email from one of the libraries I'd contacted, saying that it wasn't a fit for their library (being medical in nature), but they was going to suggest it to another library on campus.  I chilled on Minecraft for a couple of hours, and felt pretty good after that.  And I checked my stats and found I was up to eight sales!

So then this afternoon I went out, and came back, listless and apathetic despite it being spring and there being some actual sunshine around.

And now I'm feeling good - I've had a decent dinner, I've made some more promotional videos, I'm now feeling like I've actually had quite a good day. And I'm on leave tomorrow, so I'm looking forward to that.

Sometimes, with having mental health stuff going on, I forget that it's actually an issue.  Some days I'm powering through all sorts of challenges and tasks, and feeling perfectly fine, and I think it's not a thing any more.

And then some days, like today, you have a spell where you feel like everything is wrong, and there's no rhyme or reason behind it.

But now I'm feeling better :) and I'm very lucky to have this platform to vent on (and those who know me well, I am so very happy to have you in my life - I wouldn't be here without numerous people who have helped me and continue to help me)

Finally - If you haven't already.... buy my book! https://amzn.to/3XBVH1z

What character are you?

 You can now take a quick quiz to see which of the characters in my new book "Norman the Insurance Salesman and Other Stories" you are - I'm Sam the Carrot.... which isn't a good sign 😟

Take the quiz now:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/mikeraven/which-norman-the-insurance-salesman-character-ar-5gb7lk9evg

If you've not bought my book yet, why not pop over to https://amzn.to/3Y8BIrk and take a look?

Book statistics

 

I've been delighted to see that my book sales have increased - yesterday I sold 2 books, while today I sold 3, representing a 50% increase in sales.

Assuming this increase continues at the current rate, by the 3rd of June everyone on Earth will have a copy.

I'm getting a speedboat!

Joking aside, go and have a look :)  https://amzn.to/3FSmErC  

IT IS LIVE

 It's live.

At last.

All formats of my book are available at https://amzn.to/4iG0sj3 and despite mucking up the promotion, I feel good now.

It's been a long road, and I'd definitely do some things differently if I did it again (and maybe I will!), but I'm just so pleased to have the thing out there in the wild.

Obviously if you're reading this, I'd love you, kind reader, to go and buy a copy - and maybe even leave a review on the Amazon website (or post about the book wherever you'd like) - it's very much a labour of love.

If you want to find out more about the book, there's shedloads of info over at thog.uk too :)

Really annoyed

 I'm really annoyed at myself.

I had a plan for publishing and promoting my book ("Norman the Insurance Salesman and Other Stories" - catchy, I know!), which was to make it live at the start of May, and before that I'd send advance readers copy to my targeted list of awesome people, and hopefully that would result in some reviews and some promotion to try to kickstart sales.

All that changed when the other day I clicked Publish on the eBook instead of scheduling it first.

The issue with this is that Kindle don't (understandably) allow you to distribute your eBooks outside of the Kindle Store and Amazon if you're signed up to their Kindle Select programme - which I am.  So while I can still tell people about the book, and give them copies of the sample pages Amazon put on their website, I can't send anyone the full book in electronic format.

I could buy physical copies and post them, but that's an outlay I can't afford right now.  So the reality is that I'm not going to be getting the reviews and the buzz that I was hoping for.

It's bittersweet - I'm really annoyed at myself, because it's my mistake, but also I'm really excited to have my book out live - except it isn't fully live, because of me trying to fix my mistake, the eBook is now back in review status and not actually purchasable, while the paperback and hardback copies are (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0F2884VMF) so I'm now waiting until the eBook is back fully live too and then I can do my promotion. Effectively I'm doing a "soft launch", which in my experience is when someone logical tries to do marketing - and it doesn't work. But I'm hoping that I'm wrong!

It's still fun. Writing a book is something I've always wanted to do, and it feels great to have done it. It's just not how I was hoping it would go! But that's life for you I guess :)

Anyway - expect to continue to hear from me more book-related stuff!

New Website and Book Progress

First and foremost, I've got a new website, it's thog.uk - go and take a look at it if you haven't already.

Next....

See this??

This is a wonderful, wonderful thing.  I appreciate that it isn't that easy to read, but basically Kindle Self Publishing has accepted my manuscript.

I knew that writing and publishing a book would be a lot of work, but I didn't realise the amount of tinkering needed at this stage. There's so much little tweaking to be done, both fixing errors in the upload process but also correcting words and format errors.  It's going to be an iterative process, particularly as I get feedback from beta readers, but I can't deny that I'm impatient and getting tempted just to press the Publish button!

The other cool thing is I've got my cover artwork produced by the awesome Nazia Hameed (https://www.fiverr.com/designby_nazia) which I'm really grateful for.

Nazia came up with 5 different concepts this was great as I really had no idea what I wanted (which is definitely not helpful!)

So, I'm hoping to publish in a couple of months, stay tuned :)

Album Cover

I feel like this photo is an accidental album cover for a northern England indie pop band that sings songs about getting their dole money on time.

Whetting your appetite

 To continue to build up the excitement for my upcoming book (Norman the Insurance Salesman and Other Stories), I asked AI to generate some front covers based on my story titles..... this is what I got from ChatGPT:

I personally quite like the third one...

Gemini meanwhile made this, which I really like the style of!

Meanwhile Nightcafe refused to generate an image for "child safety reasons"?!?

And finally Copilot came up with this:

I really like the style of Gemini but the third ChatGPT image feels like the best one overall - but of course I know the names of the characters! Thoughts welcomed :)

Writing a book

 So, I've been writing a book.

To be honest, I'm hoping it's kind of there.  I've printed out a couple of copies of first drafts for people to give their feedback on, and I'm sure there will be a bit of refinement but I hope it's somewhere near ready for me to work on.

Now, obviously, I have a vision, and that's me on a stage at a book festival (probably at Hay-on-Wye) being interviewed by someone, lots of people sat listening, while we take part in an interesting and funny discussion.  I love making people laugh.

I have tried over the years to write a book.  And I understand the formula for writing a successful book.

The successful book is a novel, with a twist, a good plot, relatable characters, all that good stuff, fascinating detail, maybe some excitement.  I understand that.

But I can't write that.

I lose my train of thought far too quickly, at most I write a chapter and then it peters out.  My Google Drive is full of abandoned stories.

Short stories don't sell.  Any website that advises people trying to make it as an author tells you that.  Especially not "flash fiction" which I thought was stories that were fifty words or so, but apparently stories as long as 750 words can be flash fiction, and that's what I tend to write, most of my stories are short.  They're a few pages.  To be honest, they're the right length for when you're on the toilet.

Also, my book isn't long enough.  Books should be over 60,000 words.  I'm not there. I'm around 17,500 words.

So, I know my book isn't going to sell.  Furthermore, it's in fairly bad taste.  A lot of the stories have a lot of death and/or sex in it, they're silly, and sensibilities are offended by them.

But I like them.

I have one qualification for the story to make it into the book - and that is that it should make me laugh.  If I'm not smiling when I read it back, it's not going in (and there's a stack of stories I wrote that haven't made it into the book because of that).

I've also been careful with some of the stories to try to ensure that there isn't gender bias or shit like that.  People can be great, nice, lovely, alright, annoying, and outright dicks.  And they can vary between these (I know I do).  Your race, gender, religion, whatever other qualities, don't matter.  They don't affect your behaviour. Your behaviour affects your behaviour.

Beyond that, there's few limits.  There's a story about a being from Norse mythology.  There's a story about Alan the Demon.  And there's a story about Norman the Insurance Salesman.

So anyway, the book is coming.  I expect that it will sell very few copies, mostly to my closest friends and family who feel like they ought to buy a copy. I'm sure that it won't get anywhere and that I won't be interviewed on a stage or win any prizes, but it's coming.