How hard is it to learn English?

My daughter is learning to read, using the phonics system, which is imperfect, but seems to be working.

Helping her learn has made me realise how tricky the English language is.

Take these three words for example:

Lose
Dose
Hose

Three similar looking words, but each with a different pronunciation that would crash any Phonics driven computer.

So good luck to everyone out there learning English. Sorry it's all a bit complicated, but don't blame me, I didn't make up the rules!

On Which Day Of The Week Do Ebooks Sell Best?

Wouldn’t it be good to know the time of the week when Mr and/or Mrs Book Buying Public was most likely to acquire your action/adventure story, shell out for your saga or hand over the cash for your horror novel?

Such information would enable us authors to time tweets, adapt ads and line-up launches to capitalise on our audience’s propensity to buy.

This is not an advertisement by the way. I’m not about to offer to sell you data that proves that 3pm on a Tuesday is a more profitable day for sales than Friday at 9pm (when everyone who isn’t writing their next novel is out having fun, surely?)

But having shifted a few copies of my books in the US and Europe, I’m noticing patterns emerging. Briefly and chiefly, these are:

Tuesday and Wednesday are the slowest sales days. 

Friday and Sunday are the strongest sales days, followed by Saturday, Thursday and Monday, in that order.

It would be interesting to discover if these figures tally with the sales of your books, or if your experiences are vastly different.

Top Ten Tweets Of All Time #1

It's been 5 years since I first Tweeted. To mark the occasion, I'm counting down my ten most popular/successful tweets for no reason whatsoever really. 

THIS IS THE

1. 

The Secretary General lacked the skills to be either a secretary or a general. #amwriting THE DIAMOND RUSH

Most Tweeted. Most Favourited. Most Retweeted. One of my favourite quotes, from my first novel. This tweet capitalised on the popularity of #amwriting and #novelquotes

I never link it directly to the sales page for the novel. I just use this Tweet to raise awareness of the book. If people like it enough, finding and buying the book is easy.

Top Ten Tweets Of All Time #2

It's been 5 years since I first Tweeted. To mark the occasion, I'm counting down my ten most popular/successful tweets for no reason whatsoever really. 

2. 

Looking for a new author? Try these #thrillers. They’re as fresh as a freshman’s air freshener. http://goo.gl/BrFU5g 

Can't deny that this one is salesy, but I tried to inject a bit of wit, and give readers an idea of my kind of writing style, while selling my range of novels. And, although it's hard to track precisely how many sales this tweet was responsible for, there were always spikes in downloads when it ran.

Top Ten Tweets Of All Time #3

I had to mark my 5th Twitterversary somehow. So here's a countdown of my top ten tweets I've twittered on about since 2010.

3. 

Wow. 100,000*#downloads of my novels on #Kindle and#Smashwords. 

*Figure rounded up to nearest hundred thousand.

Self-deprecation was an early tactic of mine. It worked to attract new followers, but didn't boost sales. But this is one of my favourites purely because of the number of followers and retweets it was responsible for. The first line made me look a hugely popular novelist back when I wasn't. The pay off delivered the Earth-shattering truth familiar to many a self-published author (I suspect).

Top Ten Tweets Of All Time #4

It's been 5 years since I first Tweeted. To mark the occasion, I'm counting down my ten most popular/successful tweets for no reason whatsoever really. 

4. 

"Who, except dicks and desperadoes, goes clubbing on a Monday night?" 

Last Night At The Stairways. http://bit.ly/UHmWj0

Time was when not a Monday went by without me tweeting this. Pulling a quote from my 2nd novel, this tweet seemed to resonate with plenty of people, garnering a fair few likes and helping make my nightclub horror my best seller. This isn't overly salesy, it doesn't desperately scream 'buy my book', it just gives an insight into what the reader can expect.

Top Ten Tweets Of All Time #5

It's been 5 years since I first Tweeted. To mark the occasion, I'm counting down my ten most popular/successful tweets for no reason whatsoever really. 

5. 

The #apocalypse is pretty annoying. Here’s 80 other things that’ll give you reason to #whinge and whine. http://tinyurl.com/9foz9cu

A very time specific tweet, and one that made good use of a trending hashtag. This was posted just before the world was about to end (according to Nostradamus or some such other clairvoyant.) Anyway, I thought it would be a good time to promote my sole non-fiction book Gets Up Your Nose And Curls Your Toes (The Anthology of Annoyance). It worked well while that hashtag was trending...