Fly fingers, fly!

I'mj a big fan of Joe Konrath and he's certainly inspired me, even at my age, to write, write, write, but at the moment I'm doing more reading as Wendy bought me a Kindle.  I didn't have one before as I read stuff on my computer via Kindle for PC, the free download, but I got fed up reading sitting at a desk so I wanted to flop on the settee or the patio and read there.  Kindle ahoy!  What a clever gadget it is.  3500 books can be loaded onto it so I would think that's just about enough!  I've downloaded a dozen free ones so far, but some of them were bad choices and I've deleted them already.  She also bought me a posh leather cover and I'd recommend that to anybody thinking of getting one.  It makes it easier to hold and the two together still weigh less than a paperback.

The stories I've published so far, seven, are all I want to do for now.  I've got one more short story to finish and publish, then it's back to the partly finished novel so that I can publish it later on this summer before carrying on work on my biggy, a sci-fi romance about sailing around theThames Estuary, my local area, that I've got high hopes for.

My sales have reached twenty one, (oh, alright, eighteen to my family), so my stranger sales are a grand total of three.  That's alright though, it's early days, and that's three more than I've sold previously so WAHAY.  I reached 9500 odd in the Amazon best selling list although I've slipped back from that as others are selling more but that's out of a total of approx 125,00 authors at the last count so most are selling even less than me.  To be in the top 10,000 out of 125,000 is not bad for a beginner.  All the advice is that it takes time for people to discover you as there are so many books available, but what I like about it all is that I'm my own publisher and Kindle puts me in front of my readers - no one can reject my book as happens to all of us with the big print publishers.  As many ebooks are sold these days as print books, but most of the sales are from a few popular authors - and they are making megabucks.

What I like about it is that it costs me nothing so long as I do all the work myself.  I write the story, edit it, produce the book cover, format it for the distributor and present it in a professional manner.  It then stands or falls on how well written it is, how readable it is, and that I won't really know until a few readers give me reviews.

Until then it's keep working on new content and fly fingers, fly!

Barry Dashwood
Author of Silverback!