Are you robbing me?

                                       Free!

Free books.

Why on earth would I give away my work?

Bear in mind it took me about seven years to get the Secret of the Scroll from conception to publication. During that period I rewrote it three times and added a second and third book. A conservative estimate of my time would be at least 700 hours. At minimum wage rates that would amount to £7000.

The there's the external costs of making the book fit to read. Editing included several passes of structural, a line edit and two lots of proofreading. The people I use are professionals and have to be paid accordingly. No change out of £2000 for that.

Then there's the cover, formatting etc. Another £500.

Total around £10,000 if you include my time, which, if you ask me, is very much undervalued.

But you can have the product for nothing. How can I justify that?

It's all about visibility. If I do the maths, I need to sell about 5,000 ebooks at £2.99 in order to break even.

That's not going to happen unless readers know my book is available and that it's quite wonderful. That's where my free promotion comes in. Think of Netflix. There, all the films are free once you've paid the subscription. So giving one a try for 20mins is painless and easy. If it's unwatchable, you've lost nothing but 20 mins of your time.

So, my resistance to renting an unknown film for £2.99 is far greater than trying it on Netflix. I can still feel the stinging disappointment of the ones that turned out to be a waste of money.

If you take my book for free, you will be doing me a big favour. This is how:

1. You move me up the charts. After 1 day of my free promotion the Secret of the Scroll is No. 1 in Epic Fantasy. That means more people get to see it.

2. You give me a chance to hook you with my writing. 

3. If you read my book you might leave a rating or review. Ratings are massively important for Amazon sales. Ratings also help qualify for the book promotion services with the greatest reach. Until I get 50 reviews, I'm practically invisible.

4. Most importantly, though, you might read my book. Which is the main purpose of writing it. Forget about economics, all I really want is to be read and enjoyed.

So, you're not robbing me. There's not need to wait for the price to go up. Be my guest, take a free book now and I hope you enjoy it.

Happy Christmas

 The Secret of the Scroll

 Thanks for all your support for the first Tyrant book, The Secret of the Scroll.

There's still time to leave me a Christmas present in the form of a review.

The second book, King of the Desert, is well on its way and should be published towards the end of January provided I get my finger out and make sure the edits are all approved.

ANYONE WHO LEAVES A REVIEW FOR TYRANT 1 WILL BE ENTITLED TO A FREE COPY OF TYRANT 2!

We're working on the cover which will look something like this:

Genre

 

My new book!

I'm blogging again and this time it's because I have a new book out. Last time it was my son's brilliant thriller, Recursion, that prompted me to post.

Most of you know me through my Jenny Parker crime thrillers. My new book is completely different. It's Fantasy. Why the change?

My favourite genres are Fantasy and Science Fiction. They are what I prefer to read and what I set out to write. However, my first attempts were, unsurprisingly, extremely poor. I wrote three SFF novels before I got the message that, although I had a story to tell, my execution was too dire for any reader who hadn't been threatened with violence to persevere.

In order to improve my technique, I decided to change from third person past tense to first person present tense. This made the writing more difficult and more emotionally charged. Adding in a female protagonist pushed my boundaries to the limits.

My initial intention was only a writing exercise but the storyteller in me became engaged in the awful suffering of my protagonist, Jenny Parker. I had to find out how things resolved for her. I wrote four full length novels before I could leave her in a relatively safe situation.

Because I knuckled down, learned to write from the heart and managed to express Jenny's tribulations in a way that engaged readers the series was published and has sold far more copies than my most optimistic expectations.

The Tyrant series has been seven years in the making. I wrote all three volumes then went back and rewrote the first book from scratch having learned an immense amount about my characters during their subsequent escapades.

I'm immensely proud of it and have dedicated it to my older grandchildren. It's a story that I'm convinced they'll enjoy reading and solves the Christmas and birthday present conundrum for a couple of years at least.

Don't worry about Jenny Parker, though. She has three new adventures being prepared for publication.

Happy days.