My first book video!

Since first self-publishing a novel, I've been thinking a lot about how to further spread the word of my work. I knew a lot of authors had used videos to do so, so I decided to give it a whirl. With my company's logo sorted, I wanted to produce something that looks very professional so that I can advertise my work in the manner of a traditional publishing house.

The idea is to keep all of my self-published works under a highly visible banner, which will feature in all of them rather like a cover, so that hopefully readers will start to associate good quality books with both my name as an author and also with Fictum, my company.

The video is for "Eden", which is still selling a hundred copies a day months after it was first published. It will soon be joined by "Holo Sapiens" at the end of November.

My new company logo! :)

I've recently designed a logo for my company. As I'm self-publishing as well now, it seemed appropriate to place those publications beneath a recognisable banner. As I'm also planning to produce short videos to advertise my books it helps to create product recognition, a bit like film studios.

I had a great deal of fun creating them, and hopefully in the future they'll appear on reading devices at the start of my books  :)

For those of you wondering - the company name is Latin for fiction.

Here's the static logo:

And here's the animation:

 

 



Guest Post: Traditional versus self-publishing

I was fortunate enough recently to be offered the chance to guest post on book reviewer Jera's Jamboree blog, talking about the my experiences with both traditional and self-publishing. The link below will take you to the post.

http://jerasjamboree.com/2013/10/21/jeras-jamboree-guest-author-dean-crawford-published-vs-self-published/


In other news, Holo-Sapiens is nearing its beta-reader stage. Structural edits are almost complete and I'm now working on dialogue, character, prose and narrative, ironing out smaller errors and generally polishing the novel.

Eden remains high in Kindle's Paid rankings, despite the efforts of a "sock-puppet" reviewer in the USA ( a sock-puppet is a reviewer account operated by a rival author or somebody close to them ) who placed a negative review of Eden, false accusations and repeated links to said rival author's novels in an attempt to derail my sales and promote their own. I've reported their activity and evidence proving their link to the rival author to Amazon. In a quirk of fate and what I like to think of as justice, Eden shot up over a thousand places into the Top 700 after the review appeared, which just goes to show that crime doesn't pay.

I hadn't encountered this kind of behaviour before, and as the 'review' contained some quite offensive remarks I felt compelled to reply to it as well as report it. This led to the 'reviewer' hastily altering their comments and removing their links in an attempt to avoid any action by Amazon. If there's a next time, I'll know better.

( UPDATE: Amazon have removed the offending review as it was indeed in breach of their rules. )

HOLO SAPIENS publication date!

I've finally got a date set-in-stone for HOLO SAPIENS. It will be published direct to Kindle on Thursday November 28th, 2013. Pre-orders won't be available. I'm hard at work on my edits, and the novel is shaping up to be perhaps my favourite so far!

EDEN is still doing fabulously. It has sold close to 10,000 copies and is maintaining strong positions in the Kindle Paid charts on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm hugely excited to see what happens when HOLO SAPIENS hits the digital shelves, and how it affects EDEN's position.

I'm also guest-posting on the Fiction Addiction blog soon, writing about my experiences with digital publishing and traditional publishing and how the market place has changed so much over the past two years. I'll place links here when the post goes live..

New novel due for e-publication, November 2013: HOLO SAPIENS!

It's here! The artwork is finally done, the edits are well on their way and I can confirm that my latest novel, HOLO SAPIENS, will be published in November 2013! The exact date it will appear is to be confirmed and I'll share it here and in the usual places as soon as I can!