I’m never anything other than honest, no doubt to my own detriment, and the launch of Hope Is A Six Letter Word was a mixture of (excuse the pun) hope, excitement, and crushing disappointment. Authors play the long game, and I’m happy that with time, Hope will find its audience eventually. I agree with a number of reviewers that it’s probably the strongest novel I’ve written so far, and feedback has been uniformly positive and enthusiastic. I also thought I’d learned my lesson, carefully planned teaser campaign, promotion, contacted local media and bookshops, and launched over the Easter weekend, when people have a lot of time (over the whole long weekend) to peruse and purchase.
The downside, barely anyone has bought the ruddy thing so far, and it’s my weakest launch yet. It does make you wonder, as an author, what exactly you need to do in order to prompt sales. I had far more social media reaction and retweets than ever before, but these seem to have led to zero sales or reads. Those I’ve had seem to have some from other channels, word of mouth, blackmail, recommendations, but social media would, I’d hoped, prove a helpful marketing tool. The sales via wholesalers/bookshops don’t show up on my dashboard yet of course, so there’s always the hope that my push for paperbacks worked and I just don’t know it yet.
So, definitely a lull and a bit of the blues, but that just means I can throw myself into something new. The first draft of the non-fiction is complete, I’m re-reading the three-querters written next novel to get myself back in the headspace, and have completed something called Joshua’s Story, which was a chapter I excised from Hope as it just didn’t work in terms of balance in the story. I’m just finishing an edit and polish and, as it stands alone equally well, will be posting it for free on the pages here in the coming weeks. Once Hope has a respectable number of reads. So why not encourage me, and made me want to post it sooner, by joining those that have read and enjoyed Hope. It’s good, I promise.
Stay safe,
Kit