It’s all a grand lark, but with a serious purpose. If the books, these forays into the world of Biome NE47, are any good, they have to find a market. But the market doesn’t just suddenly materialise.
No, that’s where both the free taster, and the widely circulated, often free first book come in. The taster, Fragments of a Song, went out live on the 1st of May. Local publicity in the facebook noticeboards elicited a surprising amount of interest. It seems that very few novelistic forays into the intriguing community of the Allen Valleys have been attempted heretofore. Anyway, the taster is available on the Amazon/Kindle platform now for pre-order, and will be live to purchase from the 22nd of the month.
On the 15th of May, the complete and unexpurgated first novel of the Biome NE47 series, Prequel: A novel of the foreseeable future, launches. It’s available now to pre-order on the Amazon/Kindle platform, and will go live there on the 1st of June. But from mid-May, copies will be made widely available with a view to eliciting comments and reviews. Perhaps, perhaps with some good feedback, Prequel will elicit a few sales, build up a small readership. That would be lovely.
While these promotional activities are proceeding, the main event, Biome NE47: A novel, is waiting in the wings as the second installment of the series. And on in the distant future, perhaps September, perhaps earlier, writing will start on volume 3, with a current working title Sequel: The new world on the cusp of history. It’s not very imaginative, but it’s what it is.
Indeed, as an author, I’m rather more interested in the writing than in the marketing and promotions, to be honest. But that doesn’t mean I won’t give the process an honest whirl, the very best effort I can. It’s a natural thing, I think, to be diffident and coy about one’s work in the writing sphere. But to develop the promotions properly, it seems that the author part must displace themself out of the promotions part, take a back seat to the marketing.
This process is both exciting, and incredibly daunting. It’s kind of a thrill to see the books beginning to stack up on Amazon, in the author’s bookshelf. But the very process means sticking one’s neck out, at last, after the lonely sojourn of writing.
Will the characters live, breathe and propel their narrative along for the reader? That’s the question which will haunt us for some time yet to come. No doubt the process will inform the writing of Sequel on into the autumn, but at the same time that story will have to live its own life, a life far apart from the marketing realm, too.
Biome NE47 