One last effort

 If anything can tear me away from my pc, it is good weather. 

It seems we are in for some good sunny days so I guess I'll be out there with everyone else enjoying it.

I have never enjoyed weeding in my own garden as much as I do now with the sun on my back. Usually the weeding I've done has been in France, where stay too long in the sun and you go inside looking  rather pink and suddenly discover it hurts to touch your skin.

I am putting one last effort into a) writing a new Regency and b) using Amazon ads for my back list. I dropped the ball entirely in January and didn't do anything at all to promote my titles. Naturally ,my earnings totalled something like £5 for the month, so I'm at the point where I give it up for good or I get back into action. So far, I'm working on keywords....for regency, and vikings. I paid lip service to the idea of researching 100 plus keywords in the past but now I'm putting the effort in. We'll see how it goes.

KENP

 A little while ago I bemoaned the fact that I had made one of my books free and it got no read figures via KENP. 

Well, today, scratting around on among KDP notices I found one that told me Amazon no longer give KENP stats for free reads. If you don't pay for it, they don't track any reads for you. So I guess there's not a lot of point in making my books free any more.  I wonder when they changed that?

People say it pulls in new readers because they try you for free, decide they like you and go buy some of your other stuff. I'll believe it when I see it.

The pic on the right was taken in Hong Kong some years ago.  It still looks astonishingly modern and very stylish. A far cry from other parts of  the city - I don't know how those poor trees survive!

Hard slog

 Some chapters absolutely beg to be written -

while others can be hard slog.

I have made two starts on a new book and ground to a halt on each of them because writing the next chapter was unappealing. Now I have begun a third story, and same thing is happening; loss of interest, or should I say other things in life are more appealing? Whatever the reason, the end result is the same. Even with a chapter outline 1-35, I still lose interest. Maybe  its a natural process, maybe it's because sales are dropping (and everyone wants encouragement to carry on) maybe my urge to write is waning. Whatever the cause, it is happening.

For a long time I've always wondered how Gabaldon managed to write her chapters piecemeal and then stick them in some sort of chronological order. She writes in chunks and then looks for something else and gradually ends up with larger and larger chunks... it sounds like it is something that would stop me getting bored. So far I've never tried her method, but it sounds more and more appealing. I'll keep you posted.

Library Genesis

 https://www.theatlantic.com/.../search-libgen.../682094/...

Every author should check this link to search for their books.  The Atlantic  (an American Journal?) has a searchable database listing over 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers.

 The database is called Library Genesis or LibGen. Four of mine are there. So are many others, including those of Dorothy Dunnett. It is anyone's guess how much or how little of it has been used to "teach" Meta's AI systems to write books. 

You should read Jessica Redland's thoughts on the matter: https://www.jessicaredlandauthor.com

"The billionaires, the pirates , and the great book heist."

Stuffing your Kindle

Rainstorm over Ullapool

 As an experiment I put my most recent book on Free for three days at the beginning of the month. I haven't done this for some time and I wondered if it still worked as a method of get ting a book into the hands of readers. Well, it seemed it did. Quite a few went out in those three days on Amazon Kindle.

But guess what?

Here we are three weeks later and not one page has been read. How disappointing is that?

I can only hope that in the next few weeks I may see some KENP reports creeping in.

Luckily I have diaries

 I have been adding one photograph per day to Facebook, utilising the old paper pics I have in my collection.  Most are fine though all I've done is take a photo in good light of the old pic with my mobile phone, then uploaded it to my pc.

It is surprising how hard it is to remember where the places are.

Some have a scrawled name - Domme - but many are blank.

Luckily I have diaries (week to view) going back to 2002 and they tell me we took the ferry on 29th July and stayed in the Abbaye Royale de Fontevraud, from where we visited Chinon and Azay-le-Rideau, then Angers, Saumer and then on to Tulle,  Figeac amd Maurs where we stayed at La Chatelleraie before we drove on to Cahors. Back to Perigeaux, west to Saintes, then north to Nantes across the pont de Chevire and to Saint Malo and Portsmouth. 

Quite a journey to try and fit all those photographs into! But at least it is a guide. And the memories are so good.

Podcasts

Call me slow if you like but I have just discovered the world of podcasts.

The only trouble with them is I tend to fall asleep - which is great if its late at night and sleeping is what I really should be doing, but not so good if it is midday and I am supposed to be working.

I hear them all day long as my other half listens to political/news podcasts,. I hear them but I don't listen. Well, sometimes I do when it's Rory and Alistair. But it gave me the idea that it would help save my eyesight if I listened to things instead of reading them all. So I began looking for podcasts in my area and found  loads of creative writers do them.

Many are American. We are usually a decade behind American trends, though maybe the delay is not so long now as it used to be thanks to social media and television. I've begun with Urban Fantasy author Lindsay Buroker since I enjoyed her Death Before Dragons series. She is a six figure author so she must be doing something the readers like. 

Will I do a podcast? I think the world is safe as haven't a clue how to do it technically.