#PitMad – June 8th

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#PitMad

I thought I’d remind authors regarding another #PitMad tweet contest tomorrow.  It’s where authors can submit three tweets during the day using the correct hashtags (please see Brenda Drake’s blog here: http://www.brenda-drake.com/pitmad/) about their unpublished, completed manuscript, and hopefully gain the attention of a literary agent.  You can pitch more than one project, but can only send a maximum of three tweets during the day.

If an agent likes/favourites your tweet, then you will be able to send them your manuscript according to their submission preferences (you will need to put PitMad Request:  TITLE) in the subject of the email.  Therefore it’s important not to ‘like’ friends’ tweets showing the #PitMad hashtag, as agents will be requesting manuscripts by ‘liking’ tweets.

The first hashtag that must be attached to your tweet is of course #PitMad.  After that will come two more hashtags according to the genre of your book, information on these hashtags is on Brenda Drake’s blog.

Good luck everyone.  I’ll be pitching my manuscript, so will spend today working out all my tweets!

 

A Question …

At the moment one of my books ‘A House Without Windows’ has been reduced in price by Amazon for a promotion on Amazon.CA for the entire month of June.  It’s currently on page 13 of the ‘Featured Deals’ section, which you can check out if you like by clicking on this shortened link:  goo.gl/yhgV3A

The question I’m putting to all you writers out there, is how do I promote a book that is only discounted on Amazon.CA?  All the promotional sites I usually feature my discounted books on want details of the Amazon.COM site only.

I’ve sold one book in Canada so far this month, which has pushed the book up the ‘Featured Deals’ section from page 17 to page 13, but if I can find the right site to promote it on perhaps I’ll have more sales which might get it to page 1 (she says hopefully)!

Anybody have an answer for me please?  All comments gratefully received!

 

It’s Good to Connect

Once in a while as you blog away in cyberspace you connect with a like-minded soul or two.  This weekend I was pleased to be able to meet up with Ellen Best (you can check out her blog here https://ellenbest24.wordpress.com/ ) at the Red Rooster music festival, which is held at Euston, Suffolk, near where we both live (Ellen has recently moved to Suffolk and now lives just a few miles away from me).

Ellen told me to look out for a short person with plaits.  I told her to watch for someone with curly hair and mirrored sunglasses.  We found each other by the fountain!

For a laugh I gave Ellen’s plaits a tug to make sure they were real (they were!) and we were off chatting straight away, with none of that awkwardness you sometimes have when meeting new people.  We now look forward to being ‘ladies who lunch’ in our local town of Bury St. Edmunds.

It’s the first time I’ve been to the Red Rooster festival.  It’s smaller than the ones we’re used to, and has a lovely family atmosphere. We took our little grandson, who loved the children’s area, and the children’s tickets were free!  When we sat down on the grass for our picnic, an impromptu jamming session took place behind us by musicians who were good enough to be playing on one of the stages.

We’ll definitely go to this festival again.  Also it was great to meet you Ellen!

Who Ate All the Pies?

After losing almost a stone in weight during my radiotherapy treatment, and also having to be slightly over-medicated on thyroxine to hopefully keep my thyroid cancer at bay (being over-medicated can cause weight loss), I am now in the enviable position of needing to put on a bit of weight.  However, it’s not as easy as it seems.

The dietitians at Addenbrooke’s Hospital helpfully suggested hot milky drinks, savoury milky drinks, yoghurt drinks, ice cream sodas and chocolate mallow drinks before they realised I am dairy intolerant! I also cannot bear the taste of anything sweet at the moment, because to my massacred taste buds sweet foods taste like radiation (yes, you can taste it).   Instead the dietitians gave me a neutral -flavoured lactose-free build-you-up drink called Calogen Extra, which has the consistency of wallpaper paste and leaves a disgusting after-taste.  There are many Calogen Extras sitting idly in my fridge.

This week I’ve tried eating two lunches; one around 10.30am and one around 2.30pm.  I’ve been stuffing sausage rolls, meat pies, or doorstep slices of toast with beans or spaghetti down the little red lane, with more pasta at dinner time.

No luck.

It’s really strange – I’m hungry a lot of the time now, and I’m enjoying all the foods that I never used to eat.  Salty foods are the only ones which taste like they are supposed to, and I’ve been eating crisps and also bacon, which previously I would not touch because normally I hate anything salty.  Apparently the sweet taste takes a few months to return, which is a shame because it’s the sweet things that make us put on weight.  However, anything sweet tastes really bad at the moment.  I’m trying though, but Sam ends up eating it.  He’s putting on weight and has had to re-join the gym!

What with eating all this pastry and bags of crisps (I call it ‘yellow food’), it’ll be just my luck that in a couple of years I’ll be queueing up at Addenbrooke’s Cardiac Unit as well.

 

 

 

Happy Campers?

An incident occurred while we were away on the Isle of  Wight recently that brought home to me the British stoicism in the face of adversity.

One night at the weekend we had the mother of all storms raging for a good few hours. The rain was torrential, and the wind screamed and whistled and brought down a blanket of leaves and twigs onto the decking.  We heard on the news the following morning that there had been over 500 flashes of lightning during the night.  Our holiday home was thankfully spared though, as it seems quite sturdily built with an added bonus of double glazing and central heating.

A little way away down towards the beach was a field of colourful tents containing perhaps about 200 campers.  The field had been full when we had walked through it the previous day, and Sam and I both wondered how they had all fared during the storm.  The next day when we took our usual morning walk down to the beach, the field was a tad waterlogged, but children were running about, barbeques were smoking, and families were sitting under blankets chatting and laughing, no doubt sharing events of the previous night.  There did not appear to be any spaces where a family had perhaps given up and gone back home.

I must admit that if I had been in a tent I would have sought out a hotel room.  Sam and I have camped with our boys at the Download music festival in similar bad weather, and remember the mud with its consistency of gravy, the bone-aching cold, and the inability to find any dry clothing.  Plus a nasty effect from the lack of a memory foam mattress on ageing hips, and the noise of other people shouting “Oggy oggy oggy, oi oi oi!”  well into the small hours. Never again!

Perhaps it’s because we’re older now and the families were all younger than us.  I think nearly 60 year olds perhaps need a little bit of comfort!  Would you have gone home or braved the weather and stayed in your tent?  I know what I would have done…

Tasty?

The new Stevie seems to be nearly a stone lighter.  I’m feeling a lot better since my radiotherapy treatment finished 2 weeks ago, but the weight is still staying off.  Anything sweet tastes like radiation (yes, you can taste it, believe me) and I find I’m repulsed by the sight of cakes, biscuits, or anything full of sugar.  Even fruit I haven’t been able to eat, as it also tastes strange, and burns my mouth and the inside of my throat.

I suppose it’s not a bad thing, but I did enjoy a nice piece of fruit cake before the treatment began.  I still buy it, but Sam ends up eating it.  He’s putting on weight, and has had to start visiting the gym again.  All my trousers are a little too baggy now, and I’ve had to invest in a belt.  I’m wolfing down snacks of hummus and crackers, sausage rolls or toast in-between meals, as my appetite has returned with a vengeance.  However, my taste buds have not.

I can’t get used to my flat stomach!  I’ve lost 3 inches off my waist and keep waiting for the old Stevie shape to re-appear, but the scales stay fixed at 9 stones.  My knees have never felt better though, and are thanking me for losing ten pounds of flab.  What a way to lose it though.

I’m a bit sad to have lost my taste for fruit cake and the lovely summer fruits that are in the supermarkets now.  I only hope that with time my taste buds come alive again and allow me to partake of just a little bit of lemon drizzle cake or sultana loaf.  Is life worth living without a slice of genoa cake?  I suppose it is, but I’ll just have to get used to ‘The new normal’ (usually abbreviated to ‘The new norm’), a favourite phrase of the clinical nurse specialists in the department where I used to work.  Now I understand what they were going on about.

Due to a sinus problem my late aunt had not been able to taste a thing for years.  She would always cook a roast dinner on Sundays, eat every scrap, and exclaim – ‘That was a lovely dinner!’.  Poor old June.  At least I’ve got some sort of sense of taste, albeit a severely mutilated one.

Any Authors Had Success With This Promotion?

Hi all,

Today I received an email from Amazon to say that they are considering including ‘A House Without Windows’ in an upcoming promotion in the Kindle Store on Amazon.ca for the whole month of June at a discount that they would determine.  The original price and the discount would be listed on the book’s page.  The discount could be up to 85% off, and royalties would be paid according to the discounted price.  As an aside, they state that they cannot guarantee my book will be featured.

I just wondered how many other authors have taken part in this Kindle promotion?  If you have, did you find it successful?  Also, why only Canada and not a general discount?

This is the first time I’ve been contacted in this way.  A House Without Windows is my best-selling book, but reading through the rules I see that books must be priced between 2.99 – 9.99 CAD before they are able to be discounted.  This leads me to another question:  Would it be best if all e-books were priced at $2.99 to start with?  Would they all then have an equal chance at this promotion?  Currently all my other books apart from this one are at a lower price.

I’ve told them to go ahead.  I’ve no idea whether I’ll sell hundreds of books or none at all.

 

A Little Boost

I had a good day yesterday, not too many after effects.  After a lovely carvery lunch at the Strand Palace hotel I went with Sam to the Festival Hall to listen to the Glenn Miller band; not the original one of course, but a new one under the musical direction of Ray McVay.  Excellent band, although in my opinion there should have been more clarinets.

I was brought up on Glenn Miller’s music as Dot was a great fan, and to me it’s timeless.  There were a few people in the audience there who by their great age must have been around to see Mr Miller himself in his heyday, but also lots of younger people enjoying the music too.

Here’s a view below taken from the fifth floor of the Festival Hall.  The recent event on Westminster Bridge hadn’t seemed to put the tourists off, although when we walked over Waterloo Bridge Sam made sure we were walking on the side of the pavement facing on-coming traffic!  I was looking at the view along the Thames, but Sam was looking at the cars.  Happily there were no problems yesterday.

Moonlight Serenade always brings tears to my eyes, and yesterday was no exception.  I think Dot must have been there in spirit too, as she would never have missed something like this!  My favourite Glenn Miller songs are Indian Summer, Pennsylvania 65000 and of course Moonlight Serenade.  Such wonderful tunes and such a talented man.  May he rest in peace, wherever he may be.

Time to Submit?

Do any Indie authors have a completed manuscript and are looking for a publisher?  I’d like to recommend Miika Hanila and his team at Creativia, who have published three of my books.  Above are a couple of covers they have made for mine.   There is also a Facebook group to join, and a Facebook ‘Street Team’ to help with the promotion side of things.  Below is a link to my Creativia landing page they have set up for me if you would like to check it out:

http://www.creativia.org/country-living-and-award-winning-fiction-writing-stevie-turner.html

Creativia, a community-driven publisher, has so far 110 authors from the USA, Canada, UK, Australia & New Zealand, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Taiwan, and Venezuela.  They have published over 40 bestselling novels and receive many submissions, taking on about 10% of them.  If you want to find out more, please email info@creativia.org and mention my name.  Thanks!

The Year of the Waist

No, that’s not me in the featured image, but instead here I am in my front garden after 24 rounds of radiotherapy, and …guess what?  I have a WAIST!  I haven’t had a waist since about 1965, and so I’m thrilled to see that it’s decided to appear again after such a prolonged absence.

I can thoroughly vouch for radiotherapy as an effective weight-loss tool.  You will be nauseated quite often and have a constant sensation of hot salt in your mouth, but hey, if you can cope with that, you’ll see the results of your efforts in only 6 short weeks.  You’ll also totally lose any liking for sugary foods that you had before.

To add to this miracle, my left knee, which was showing signs of wear and tear before the treatment, is now as agile as a 16 year old’s as it now doesn’t have to carry the equivalent of 5 x 2lb bags of  sugar.

After this evening’s zapping there’ll be another 5 more to go. Sam has started singing ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’