Have your say in my 2020 reader survey – and maybe win a paperback!

I did a reader survey last year and it was so helpful that I’m doing it again! I’ve put together a short (9-question) survey on SurveyMonkey. It’s mainly multiple-choice, and its purpose is to learn more about my readers and people who interact with me on my author social media. I’ll take the responses and use

How do I measure success as a writer?

This is something which has been on my mind lately, probably as a sort of hangover from all those goal-setting New Year posts. What’s the best way to measure success as a writer? Or do I mean as a publisher? Ooh, now that’s a different question entirely. There are so many things you could focus

Tech Tip Tuesday: Connect to local Amazon stores with global shortlinks

Today’s blog will be a short one – appropriate, as I’m talking about creating shortlinks for books. It’s also directed towards people who have books in the Amazon store, or plan to in the future. If that isn’t you, look away now. If you already know about global shortlinks, I apologise in advance. If you

The Secret Notebook of Sherlock Holmes, one month on

A whole month has passed since The Secret Notebook of Sherlock Holmes was released into the wild. Sometimes that feels like ages, sometimes the blink of an eye. A short while ago a friend asked me how I felt about the experience of publishing an ebook. As I’m feeling a bit reflective, here’s an answer incorporating some of

I got a bad review and the world didn’t end

This week has mostly been about formatting the paperback version of the Secret Notebook. It’s the first time I’ve formatted a real book and, after wrangling with a CreateSpace template, I’m hoping I’m over the worst. I will blog about it at some point, but not until I’m convinced there are no more surprises in

I Write Like…

Oh, you must know I Write Like. It’s that website where you paste in a chunk of what you’re writing and it tells you who you write like. I’m not sure when I first discovered it, but it’s been around since 2010. According to my not-very-in-depth research (see below) it uses a naive Bayes classifier