Advertising On AskDavid.com

Continuing my occasional and occasionally interesting look at different places fellow deluded self-publishers like myself can advertise their wares, I stumbled across askdavid.com

The chap looks decent enough in his picture, if slightly blurred and a little white at the tips of his spiky hair. But that's nit-picking.

Having decided to look for somewhere else to advertise my books other than Adwords, askdavid seemed like a good way to spend $15 that I'd only waste on essential food or some other flamboyance.

It was easy enough submitting the book, though I had to write some new blurb about it, as David is dead against using blurb that appears anywhere else. Fair enough, it's his site.

So my new review of Last Night At The Stairways is up there, and I get 10 free chances to tweet David's Twitter followers (all 21,800 of them at the time of writing). I also got a thumbnail of my head and shoulders on his homepage for a while, until more authors who'd spent $15 signing up more recently than me pushed me off the page.

Now, the all important results. I've not sold any more copies of Last Night At The Stairways than I did before signing up, though the number of sample downloads on Smashwords is up significantly. (Yes, reader, I can read between those lines).

In conclusion, David offers a professional enough service, so I'd probably recommend it, though you have to wonder how many actual readers look at his site, and how many of them are just fellow, deluded authors like me?

Why My Books Were Nearly Banned From Amazon

Naughty, naughty, slap wrist, bedroom sans supper for Lymon.

I've been warned that I'm one more warning letter away from getting my books scrubbed off Amazon for good.

And I've come to the conclusion that that'd be a bad thing.

It's all down to my recent foray back into KDP Select land with 'The Diamond Rush'. As my reader will know, Amazon demands digital exclusivity for titles registered 'Select'. So I unpublished my book from Smashwords and decommissioned it from Draft2Digital and pulled it off Kobo thinking that'd do the trick.

But Amazon's bots spotted 'The Diamond Rush' was still on sale somewhere (without my knowledge m'lud', honest). And a couple of sales via Draft2Digital proved it. Gulp. I'd accidentally broken the rules and got caught.

I was sent a stern but fair letter to which I had to hold up my hands. I thought 'The Diamond Rush' was exclusive to Amazon. Apparently not. But how difficult is it to keep track of where your titles are being sold, and how long does it take to unpublish them?

Anyway, lesson learnt. One more misdemeanour and I'm out of Amazon. So I just can't risk KDP Selecting any of my existing titles again.

REVIEW: CROSS COUNTRY James Patterson



Super short

chapters

in this one.

158 chapters in 406 pages. You do the math.

Designed for the short attention spanners.

Those with an appetite for bitesize chunks.

Look, it was a good read. A compelling story. Part of a series featuring Alex Cross, a defective detective of course. Got family problems, bit of history with some nasty people etc. This one takes him to Africa in the wake of some truly nasty family-size slaughters, in pursuit of the perpetrators. And he gets a beating along the way - if they make a film of this, his face is gonna be a mess throughout.

It's all pretty top line with some attempt to dig deeper. Didn't hate it. Didn't love it.

***