Day 415

I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas. Mine was great, and Santa was especially good to me! A whole load of Estee Lauder make-up, which will probably see me into 2013 (providing the abrupt ending of the Mayan calendar doesn’t signify the end of days for us), a bottle of my favourite perfume and a Christmas jumper are to name a few of the things he brought me.  And I think I drank enough cava on Christmas day to sink a ship. Good times!

There’s no news on Slippery Souls as yet – Feed A Read don’t start operating again until 4^th January, so it’s still just a waiting game for now (which is fine by me!)

In the meantime, I couldn’t resist having a practice run with publishing on Kindle. I uploaded a short story called Indefinite Fear, and it’s currently on sale for 86p (I would have listed it cheaper, but 75p was the lowest I could go – then plus VAT it knocked it up to 86p). I have made it very clear on the listing that it’s a short story of 1700 words though, so hopefully nobody will purchase it under the impression that it’s a full length novel (or even a novella). But if you do like short, dark stories then please give it a go – and feel free to leave a review, if you have a spare minute or two – it all helps this budding writer J

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Indefinite-Fear-ebook/dp/B006P0M2IW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325111558&sr=8-1

Anyway, the whole Kindle process was very straight forward and easy to do – so I feel a lot more confident now about formatting Slippery Souls. Should maybe take me a few hours at most to do.

I haven’t really got any other news to speak of – so I think I’ll go and crack open a few bottles of Stella, graze on some nibbles and see what books I can download to my Kindle for some quality reading time. And I’ll speak to you all again in the new year!!

Day 408

Only five more sleeps till Santie! How exciting!

I hope you’ve all been good – though, I suppose if you haven’t, it’s not too late to redeem yourselves J

At last it seems like I can relax a little, with a few bottles of cava, because I’ve amended Slippery Souls and have re-submitted to Feed A Read. It’s all out of my hands now until they verify the changes, and then I’ll be able to order some books for my launch next month! Hooray! So you could say that I’ll be making the most of the Christmas/New Year shenanigan because once 2012 arrives I’m going to be seriously busy once again.

I re-designed the front cover (there were aspects of it that I wasn’t 100% happy with – mainly I wanted the turquoise background to be a little crisper). This is how it looks now:

Oh and as for the book itself, I was very happy with the quality. The cover is glossy, and the interior is a nice quality crème paper – so up to now, I’m very pleased I chose Feed A Read to self-publish with. They’ve been very quick to respond to my queries too! Thank God for Writing Magazine, otherwise I may never have stumbled upon them.

Anyway, I’ll keep this brief and take the opportunity to wish you all a very merry Christmas!

Day 402

Yippee, my author’s copy of Slippery Souls arrived this morning! It’s so surreal, but exciting, to be holding it at last! There are a few bit and pieces that I need to tweak on the cover (which was to be expected – things tend to look slightly different in the flesh to how they do on screen). And I need to spend a few days reading through the whole book (my book!!) with a pen, to highlight any other errors that haven’t been ironed out already.

I’ve ordered some marketing bits and pieces this morning also. It finally feels as though everything’s coming together at last.

Some other good news is that Easington Writers have been asked to be involved in a brass book project (running as part of the Durham Brass Festival 2012) – but that won’t start up until the new year though, so more on that later.

I don’t think I’ve got much else in the way of updates, and, to be honest, I can’t concentrate all that much anyway – I’m too excited about having an actual copy of Slippery Souls right beside me! J

So until next time, I bid you farewell.

Day 393

Right, back to weekly updates I think.

What’s been happening since the last update, apart from Christmas sneaking up…?

First and foremost, Slippery Souls has been sent to the printer to be set up. This could take anywhere between 7-21 days – but as soon as it’s set up, I’ll be able to order a copy to proof read. And until I’ve done the proof read on the actual book, I’m putting the Kindle/Smashwords formatting on hold.

Obviously it’s definitely not possible to launch the book before Christmas now, so I’ve pencilled in Saturday 28^th January instead. So I suppose, if anything, I’ll be starting 2012 with a blast.

To print the book, I decided to go with Arts Council funded company Feed A Read – and so far my dealings with them have been very efficient and easy. The book will be listed with them for £6.99, and I intend on paying to have them distribute it to all the major booksellers too (Amazon, Barnes & Noble etc) – where it will be listed as £7.99. It’s free to list books with Feed A Read, and if your book is in the top ten at certain intervals throughout the year, the first couple of chapters are reviewed by major publishing houses – which can be no bad thing! The royalties are high with Feed A Read too – for every book sold via themselves, I will make around £2.22.

Anyway, here’s the cover of Slippery Souls as it looked when I uploaded it to Feed A Read:

Onto other news…

Easington Writers launched its new anthology Footprints at the Water’s Edge on Saturday 3^rd December.

The event was held at Easington Welfare Hall, where we meet every week, and there was quite a good turnout. We sold around 70 books, and still have a few orders for people who couldn’t make the launch. If anybody else would like a copy, please contact me. The books are priced at £7.50.



Me doing a reading from the book



Easington Writers celebrating with champagne

Finally, I’ve created a new generic writing website for myself – there’ll be little bits of everything on there (short stories, poems, news), so please check it out: http://www.rachaelhdixon.webs.com/

I think that’s all of my news for now…but if I think of anything else, I’ll be back. Anyway, I’m off to prepare the house now for some Christmas decorations. If I don’t make the effort I feel like I’ll never get into the Christmas spirit and will turn into Ebenezer Scrooge, eek.