Reading the News
Whenever I return to the UK and listen to the news on TV I am always forced to conclude that newsreaders there must go to some special school of news reading. I’ve seen the news on TV in many many countries now but the UK is unique and fairly strange. I know people living there don’t notice but it is something to do with vocal inflection. The newsreaders’ vocal inflection is simply all wrong and they always go down at the end of a sentence. It drives me nuts. It makes them sound as if they were afflicted with some strange mental disease from my perspective. It sounds condescending too if I am honest. As if, these superior news readers know something I don’t. I always notice this on every
Read More »Beyond Family and Friends
Over 1700 people entered the Goodreads.com giveaway for The Last Observer and more than 700 have added it. Wouldn’t it be nice if 10% of those actually purchased the book? The two lucky winners were sent their copies today. One in the UK and one in the USA. Is it selling? I’m not sure. Lots of people tell me they have it or they plan to get it but the Amazon site suggests they aren’t buying it there as its not very highly ranked and few copies appear to have sold there. I guess I will see more end of next month when the publisher sends a report. It should sell. The reviews are all good to great. Its not over priced. I am just not sure how to get
Read More »The Last Observer Released Early
Sod’s Law. That’s exactly what it is called. I go on vacation for 2+ weeks having been assured The Last Observer would be out on August 17th and it actually gets issued early while I am away and have no real internet access. Typical. So the book is available from a variety of online bookstores etc. in paperback form and from one or two in eBook form. I am guessing by the official release date it will be widely available in both formats. Meanwhile, it has been gathering some great reviews…. and I mean really great – my thanks to the reviewers. You can read those reviews here at the publishers site. You can buy the book at the Amazon sites amongst others – here in the USA and here
Read More »Promotion and More Promotion
As I have said before I think, the average book doesn’t sell too many copies. In 2004, 950,000 titles out of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen Bookscan sold fewer than 99 copies. Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies. Only 25,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. This is pretty old data but I couldn’t find anything more up to date in the 30 seconds that I tried…. It just shows you though. They say – they being my publisher – that you need to promote and promote and promote…. They do some of this work but I do the lion’s share. But, I am feeling guilty. For the next 2 and a bit weeks I will be on vacation and I won’t lift a finger on the book (collective
Read More »The Book That Got Me Started
Back in 2005 I published my first book. It was a labor of love too….. It is called Inner Journeys: Explorations of the Soul published by Thoth. It’s still selling and still available… It is an autobiographical account of my childhood and teens that were plagued with poltergeist and other paranormal phenomena that scared me to death. Later in life, having supressed my innate psychism, I found a real school of magic called The Servants of the Light based in the UK. The book follows my progress through the five-year first degree course of the school complete with entries from my magical diary and shows how becoming an occultist/magician finally solved a lot of personal issues. It covers topics like how to meditate, what is magic, why the occult is
Read More »The Last Observer Available for Pre-Order
I accidentally just discovered that my new novel is available for pre-order on all Amazon sites. For me this is quite exciting as, for the first time, the product of love, sweat and tears, is available albeit in August….. Check out the Amazon page on the UK website and you can actually look inside the book. You can also ‘like’ the book’s facebook page and stay up to date with developments there. You can also take a peek at the promo video I made; Or, better still, pre-order it. You won’t regret it. Its a good yarn.
Read More »A Death and the Sadness of Hatred
It was 1979. The memory of the three-day week and blackouts was still fresh in my mind as I sat in the Aston University Students Union lounge. On TV was a woman. I was listening to what she was saying because, to me, it made a whole lot of sense. Raised in Hull – a working class town if ever there was one – I rejected the bitter class warfare that passed for socialism and I found myself the butt of snide remarks for it too. Comments like “who the hell does he think he is going to college and all – he should get a bloody job like the rest of us”. Some so called school friends never spoke to me again for going to college and betraying my
Read More »Is it me?
Is it me or is the world actually falling apart? And, if it is, what does that say about me? Since I create my own reality, it must surely reflect something going on in how I observe and process the world. It doesn’t much matter whether it’s the mess with horsemeat, the story I read about the four young people that lured and murdered, by strangulation, two young guys so they could have sex on top of some dead bodies (I kid you not!), or just the general global political mess around us. Something seems wrong. The systems have failed. Kids are unemployed and mostly couldn’t care less, often expecting everything handed to them on a plate. In the US, people vote for their free phone, free healthcare, free housing,
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