Category Archives: KDP Select

With A Cast of 50,000 – The Valley Of The Trolls

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I’m a troll

We’ve been together for a year now – just you and me. Well, it’s better than drinking alone I guess. One year ago I was certain I knew nothing. Today I know everything there is to know about uncertainty. I had just launched “Knockout” – my genre Romance pulsating with animal lust, lusty animals and International Locations. To some extent I have come in a complete circle. At that distant time I realised that I was saying goodbye to 35 years of serious writing. The slush piles of the Great Gatekeepers had felt the weight of my A4 gravitas. The bin-men of south London had kept pace with my output and the scorn of editors. Employers had failed to appreciate my creative day dreaming. The dog shampoo sales stats from Manchester got lost in the post modernist white thrusting buttocks of yet another dystopian philosophical tract. My writing career had arrived at the genre milestone simply because I was too poor even to starve in the attic. Perhaps – just perhaps, one could actually make some kind of income as a writer?


At first it was all about blogging and networking. That is how we met. The book went out onto all the platforms and we struggled with different formatting and “American” grammar. A few dozen kind souls looked at the blog. Now and then someone bought a book. We were priced at 99 cents. Each sale was like a birth. Now and then a kind soul would enjoy the book and give me a decent review. At that time I was able to write and live in France. I was a humble little mouse, building my literary burrow.


Firstly then the blog. I regard this as something of a success story because the readership has grown without any corporate stunts. The help and support of indie writers has boosted the readership to a total of 2,500 per month. For the first 6 months I set myself the goal of blogging every day.  Although I’m ever popular with Russian males, most of the traffic is random hits from people clicking on photographs. The fact is that the blog has sold very few books.


I arrived in the digital budget hotel with just 2 items of luggage. One was a short story “Sub Prime” and the other a genre “supermarket” book about cops and slobbers. I had decided a few years before to ditch everything of the previous period – i.e. my life. We used to live in a Capitalist system. Now life is Capitalism. Every single thing is commercial. Everything is bottom line. This is a born poor/stay poor world unless you can pull off the deal and get your hook to hold up in the sky. Dear old “Sub Prime” is the last footprint of the way I wanted to write. 


“Knockout” bumped along the bottom all through 2011. It was so far on the sea bed that only flat fish and readers fitted with sonar could detect it.  I believe we were at about number 60,000 in the Amazonian Ocean of a million digital books. This appalling figure means that 900,000 books have no significant sales at all. 

Course of the Amazon

Then came KDP Select. We knew that other writers had gained visibility by offering free books. This was our chance to get a hook up into the blue sky. We hurled it up – and it stuck behind a fast moving cloud. We topped several categories and reached the top 300 of all books. So far we have given away 50,000 books. A success story perhaps? Well – it rather depends on what happened next. 


Our first free run in January 2012 led to a sustained sales period over weeks. People were buying and enjoying the book. Reviewers on the whole were very positive and we were beginning to see some hope of some income after months and months of day and night  promo work through every conceivable media and cyber hang-out. I had also returned to the UK, grateful to get work as a bus driver.  I must also add that my actual book and story writing had stopped. Quite simply the endless jingle jangle of click this and check that has destroyed my inner calm. I tell Gilles that I am going through the Zenopause. 


Our second free run in early March was a similar success with a sustained sales afterglow. I began to notice hits by very negative reviewers as the book went back for sale. I have a policy of not commenting on reviews but surely if you are going to criticise a book – you should have read it properly or indeed, merely have read it to some extent.


Our third free run was in mid April. Clearly things had changed. Now, I’m not much of a musician – but I do have a natural sense of algorithm. Amazon have changed the deal so that you need to do ten times the traffic of free sales to get the same advancement up the sales charts. Visibility means sales. Sales means visibility. Almost the minute we came off the free deal, the negative reviews came in. Perhaps I am paranoid but can you really slam a book on the basis that in “real life” a woman would not risk her career for forbidden love? Come on guys! The book is a light sex infused escapist Romance, not a career development manual. 


So – 50,000 potential readers have the book. On the basis of the last free run we gave away about 5,000 books in order to sell about 50. It is quite clear  that in the current format KDP Select is not for me and I will not do any more free days. I know people only grab the book because it is free, but if I had sold one tenth of those books, I would not be working all day driving a bus – at least for a few months. I also think there is a great difference between the free reader and the person who looks at your book, samples it and then actually buys it. In the long term it is probably counter-productive  to put your book into the hands of people who would never like it or choose it. 


Here is the problem though. During my last free run, I was one of 15,000 free books on that day. There are now so many free books that no one is ever gonna have to buy one again. Soon there will be a plug in external memory for e-readers and all free books will be scooped as they come out. One day our unfortunate children will receive only our digital libraries of unread free books as their inheritance. Well, they won’t have jobs to keep them busy.

Emma at the Oracle

I am not an Amazon hater. They have enabled me to publish at little cost. The lending library feature provides some income, albeit small. All the same, I feel like a supplicant at the feet of the priestess of Apollo as she interprets the gas emissions at the Oracle of Delphi. No one knows what is going on. Each time the oracle pronounces, the mob charges off to the latest Klondike. Each time a Romance novelist writes a blog, the historical imagery becomes more tangled. Soon there will be Amazon soothsayers and experts. Amazon lobbyists will offer special insights. And they will all be right – until the oracle emits gas again.


Oooh – I do go on. Thank you all my lovely readers who have sustained me during the last year. How was it for you? Please dear friends – let me know how you are getting on with KDP Select?  My own future is gonna be a lot more proactive. I want to get to the readers who want to read me and will pay a few cents to do so.


In the teeming millions of creatures being swept down the Amazon to the sea, I will no longer be  a speck in the universe washed onto the shifting sands of broken metaphors. Who said I was a purple crap writer? I really do love you guys out there.


Emma thinx: Don’t big yourself up. Big yourself within.
















I’m Fifty not Thrifty – Still Giving it all Away

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First of all it was Woolworths. This wonderful shop from which I had purchased my first 45 rpm record (T Rex singing “Ride a white Swan“) closed a few years ago. Oooh – I was only 8years old but Marc Bolan was the prettiest bloke I had ever seen. I had been given a record token (who remembers them?) for my birthday. It was a few months later that I heard him singing and my love affair with men wearing tight pink clothing began. Ever since I’ve been addicted to the Giro d’Italia cycle race.


And now, 42 years later, as the Giro rolls across Italy, I am approaching the big Five Oh No. To coincide with this event “Clintons Cards” announces the closure of about half its outlets. Seemingly they are a victim of the e-card, rather in the way that dead tree books are becoming a victim of the e-book. I am not sure how I feel about any of this. In order to celebrate my birthday I’m giving away digital copies of “Knockout” on Amazon Worldwide ( USA UK FRANCE GERMANY ITALY & SPAIN) during Thursday 17th and Friday 18th May in the hope of reaching the big 50 in the charts as well as in my bones, teeth and soft components. As a special salute to “Clintons Cards” and the dead tree book industry, I am also giving away signed copies of my paperback on Goodreads – all entries to be in by Sunday 20th May.

Now, another year slips by and all that. I do just wanna say that I’ve had more fun and frolics since I turned forty than I had ever had before. Wow – let’s ratchet it up for the next decade. Maybe a little extra chilli and garlic, maybe a slightly deeper red wine over a longer lunch. Slower breaths and longer kisses have been the wisdom of my ageing.  Really truly, this is a deeply serious comment. The English summer is cold and wet so far. The Euro creaks. The money beast bellows. From Greece come stories of mounting suicides and new born babies being held as security in hospitals when mothers cannot pay. Let us not forget love, comradeship and pleasure. It is allowed.

Emma thinx: Comrade humans – if not us, then what is humanity?

Beg Steal or Burrow

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It’s that first insecure Wednesday. Things should be OK this month because I woke up shortly after midnight yesterday morning and before I said anything else I uttered the magic word “RABBITS”. I know that some folk say white rabbits but I believe that this weakens the spell. Of course some of you will have no idea of what I talking about. I hesitate to use the word superstition because that makes it all seem kinda – well – nuts. An old English custom of saying “rabbits” on the first day of the month was drilled into me by my mother. If at some point during the next four weeks I dropped some china or failed an exam (regular events) she would sigh and shake her head resignedly saying “It’s you own fault – you didn’t say your rabbits.” All I could do then was to cling on – expecting to fall at each hurdle until the next 1st of the month. As the broken china, failed exams, missed buses, lost boyfriends and publishers rejection slips piled up in  the hallways of my life, I guess I often forgot to say “rabbits”. 


When I had my own little bunnies I decided that I would never impose this type of insecurity on them. That was until my ex husband bought the first pair of baby shoes and put them on the table. I had to divorce him to clear the curse although for years he clung on by saying “Good morning Sir” to the magpies just to please me. Believe it or not when we split up, the removal men dropped my mirror but I told them to pack it with his stuff so that he would take the bad luck with him. 


So, having said the magic word I clicked on my Amazon KDP account to see if the new month brown bar of doom had disappeared. As you will recognise comrades, my sense of personal worth is linked to my sales figures. As the new month arrives the counters return to zero and there is just this brown nihilistic line. (Ooooh – I’ve been trying to get that intellectual word into something for years!) 1st of May – 0004 hours, a sale was made. I slept secure. By morning two books had been returned. The brown line had gone – but I am less than nothing. As I drove my bus around the town there was not a single magpie to greet to lift my gloom. A seagull dumped his entire bowel contents onto my windscreen and I shouted at it to F*** off. When I got home I had made some sales. Yes – that old mystic seagull oath never fails.


It’s all a load of tosh isn’t it. My wonderful partner works and works to help me and he has never thrown salt or said rhymes to spiders. He tells me that more effort means more success. He’s a kinda business type. I know he’s right. That’s why I’ve doubled up on my lottery tickets.

Emma thinx: You can make your own luck, but the ready meals taste the same.



Roll Play Exercise

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Spot the difference



There’s a song by Janis Ian which contains the line “Let’s drink a toast to those who best survived the life they led”. Well – here’s to all those who’ve survived the drink and the toast – and the butter, the foie gras and the chocolate. Life catches up with us doesn’t it. The bus driving blogger novelist carboholic lifestyle has done its worst. It is not that the situation has got out of hand. It has got out of both hands. Soon I’ll have enough spare tyres for every wheel on the bus. It had to stop. I have joined a gym. When I finish my morning shift I go straight to a modern cathedral of techno-flab where there are merciless machines that have ways of making you squawk.

 Even worse the place is half full of skinny pert anorexics who do not need to be there and spend their self righteous time watching the sagging wobblers gasping for survival. If that were not bad enough I encounter neighbours and acquaintances to whom I would never present myself in rippling Spandex. I have seen a few films of an erotic and anatomical/educational nature where the participants wear masks so as not to be recognised (I assume) by friends, work colleagues or members of the book club. A small comfort like this would double membership. Luckily a little ray of sunshine fell upon me today. I staggered back through the door after a treadmill session watching a TV show about liposuction and heart transplants. There on the mat was a lovely sample selection from “Hotel Chocolat”. Damn – I must have forgotten to cancel my subscription. And before I move on to literary matters here is a video clip I found whilst researching Vladimir rootin tootin Putin. I think it’s about dieting. Keep watching until you see the ballet dancers! Wow – Oscar likes this video, but only the classical paintings. Seriously though – this world has so many cultures! Rejoice.


Tomorrow (Saturday 3rd March) is a free KDP day for “Knockout”. The tweetbots and all the engines of cyber triberr will be whirring. I apologise for all the self promo. If you’ve not got your copy roll up roll up. Here are the links:
Amazon USA
Amazon UK
Amazon France
Amazon Germany
Amazon Italy
Amazon Spain



Emma thinx: Beauty is only deep skin.

Snow way!

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Defiance

As the last snow melted I sat in my garden this morning with a cup of coffee feeling the sting of the sun on my face. The furniture is re-assembled and dry. Beneath the snow a hyacinth proclaimed its defiance. New buds were green on the fig tree We are such little things – with all our vanities and petty brief lives. Whatever becomes of us, Nature will win and all our defeats and victories will be nothing.  It is a comfort is it not?

Madame! Of course it never freezes here

I’ve been having a KDP free day. I shifted about 1700 copies of the “serious” short story “Sub Prime” and 800 of the Romance “Knockout”. All in all now I have shifted some 10,000 copies of this book – the majority for free. I am not a marketeer or any kind of business person. To be frank, I am happy even if the book gives pleasure to just a few readers. I have never wanted to charge any money for “Sub Prime” because it is an unashamedly socialist story about exploited powerless people. The fact is I guess that in my old bed-sit “sincere” writer days, if I had sold 10,000 books I would have been able to work for a year – yes if I had sold them! The fact is that a Mills and Boon “title” used to sell about 7,000 copies before it is pulled off the shelves and pulped. I guess those days are gone. My own mistake is to have pushed out a single book without a series or stable of similar books already off the production line. If you just have the one book, so much effort and promo to get it noticed will create nothing but a brand vacuum. My advisors and I do clash a little over this. My view is that free days are great if it leads on to sales…..if. 


Amongst the many regrets of my life is that I have always scrapped all the manuscripts that came back as rejected. I have always figured that the next one would be worthwhile and someone would like it. The danger was  I may have been tempted to waste more time on the rejects rather than trying to improve. You think that posh educated experts must be right about you. You learn these lessons too late. I hope these rather dour words may get to you if you are a younger struggler out there. Do not throw it away just because a few publishers and agents sneer at it with remarks about inconsistent genre targeting etc. Soon enough you will have run out of time, your energy will be failing and younger better writers will be nearer those golden control buttons. My heart felt advice to all writer/marketeers out there is  – get a bus or truck licence.


I hope I don’t sound too miserable – I am not. I would like other writers to tell me their take. I really would like some feedback on where you guys as writers think we are going and what are realistic ambitions? 


Emma thinx: If the snowball gets too big you can’t see the glacier.



Oxymorons Run Amok in Free Sales Orgy

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You know that insecure feeling when you come downstairs after the party, slithering on a wine soaked crushed samosa that obviously missed the eloquent mouth of some unknown drunk, who at the time, was the wittiest and most flattering intellectual in the world? For a moment you gaze around wondering how cobwebs could possibly suspend so many popper streamers until you remember that the spiders have had several months of freedom to weave silk ropes that could catch an anchor chain. And all because the lady is a novelist and does not do dusting. She also does not do ironing or checking of sell by dates on mundane produce. How can a pickled onion be out of date? Who did not know that 2007 was a vintage premier cru champagne year for bloody pickles? 


This is a long way to explain that I had a bit of a party and that I know my life is being sucked into a femaelstrom of microwaved Swedish meatballs. Apparently Edgar Allan Poe first introduced the masculine form of the word into literature. I must start to get a grip. I get up in the morning in my furry dressing gown and check my sales, my blog comments, my facebook likes, my triberr karma rating, my Amazon chart position, my twitter re-tweets and my Goodreads reviews. I am become  Electro-Fem, a Joan of Story Arc, a Romantic Grovelist at the keyboard shrine. Then I put on my woolly pully and go out driving my bus. Good job all the other motorists don’t know that the huge vehicle in their rear view is being driven by a neurotic self doubting ego maniac on a cobweb and pickled onion literary guilt trip. This life would not have happened to Jane Austen.


Oooh – I’m glad I got that lot off my chest. The party was on account of having some 3,000 folk reading my book Knockout! by Saturday. By the end of the weekend I had shifted 8,000 books. Of course, they were all free on Amazon’s grand KDP Select Adventure. My serious “mined from the sorrow of life” prize winning etc. short story Sub-Prime had shifted 328 copies. You know, I always bear in mind that I sell the Romance for 77 pence in the UK which is less than a candy bar. When it became free, there was an exponential increase in interest. And I bet you that someone who got it for nothing reviews it and says it is a soppy formula written load of sex, cops, robbers and slobbers. (Oooh, I love it!) I do hate it when people miss the point. As I hover on the publish button, Amazon have just started tweeting me as a “mover and shaker” and I’m still high in the rankings with sales increasing if anything. Does this make me feel secure? Of course not. See my thinx today. My future sense of security rests on the continued real sales.  I think there might be a few bad hair-trigger days.


 Somewhere in the fog of the party, an intellectual goatee beard type is reading the sell by date on my pickle jar and asking me what year it is. “Look”, I exclaim, “I’m an artist – how the hell should I know?”


Emma thinx: From the ground you see the mountain. From the peak you see the drop. 

Kreatures of Kreation

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Firstly let me thank Jo VonBargen for nominating me for the Kreativ Blogger Award. At my primary school I was appointed deputy blackboard monitor. Since then few accolades have come my way and I have searched in the desert of broken dreams ever since for that high. Oh – OK – I’ve been scribbling romance and I’m in double purple 3 glasses of wine on empty stomach mode.  The regulations require that I list 10 things about me that one would not suspect. Oh dear, does this mean that I must submit to a warm bath of ego while my readers sponge my back. Ooooh – here goes then:


1) I play the trombone. Probably this is why I can be a little brassy. It certainly explains my love of Wagner.
2) I am not quite absolutely totally a fully pigmentally challenged natural blonde. 
3) My favourite undergarment is my salmon pink and black lace basque.
4) I have a RYA coastal skippers ticket.
5) I have a Class 1 Heavy Goods (semi-trailer rig) licence in addition to my class 1 bus licence.
6) My ex husband called to say he was marrying a pole-dancer. Turns out she is my age, lives in Poland and loves to tango.
7) I am allergic to cats.
8) In France people think I’m Belgian on account of my accent and love of chocolate.
9) When sensitive English friends visit us in France I have been known to serve rabbit and tell them it is chicken.
10)  My favourite position with my sexy French lover is… on the back of our tandem going downhill.


Gilles bought me my basque by mail order from a lively national company who provide lingerie and all manner of toys. They boast that their products are delivered in plain wrappers by their own couriers. I was at home when the doorbell rang and a large tattooed man handed me  a package. With a wink he explained in a gruff confidential stage whisper – “Ere y’are Sweet heart – here’s them naughty knickers.” – I was quite shocked.


What a week-end. I’ve been free on Amazon KDP Select  and Rosina keeps phoning me with updates. In the end I gave up and made leek and potato soup. To me it seemed a bit bland so I added some anchovy paste…..Ummm – well, we ate it.


The weekend stats have all sorts of astonishing aspects. If you are thinking of going for this KDP deal you might be interested. Breakdown of figures by Tuesday I hope.


The second regulation for this award is that I choose a further six Kreativ souls. Here is my list:

1) Claude Nougat – La giornalista piu intelligente in Italia.
2) Jack Durish – historian who is improving my general knowledge
3) Magda Olchawksa – for her informative and varied posts about the Creative Industry.
4) Yvonne Lewis for being the only other person on Earth to admit to loving Carousel and Oklahoma
5) Craig McGinty for This French Life – the best ever resource for news and info for expats in France
6) Julie Kemp for Empty Nest Insider – Intelligent writing about a variety of interesting topics.




Emma thinx: Elation and deflation have poetic relation.









Writing the Sex in the Text

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Shall we talk about sex? Oh OK – if you really want me to. I write Romance. Well – love and sex actually. In “Knockout” there is a story but it is a story about a sexy woman going headlong into a passionate sexathon with a beautiful guy. They do it in her bed. She does it all on her own. They do it in his bed, in Paris, several other places and they do it on a boat. They kiss and caress the burning totality of each other’s lips. They adore each other’s skin and musk. She craves the untiring hard knot of his controlling, urgent muscles. He longs for her abandon, surrender and softness They eat highly flavoured food and breathe the garlic of shared ecstasy. They drink champagne and lie naked in the warm open air almost as a sacrifice on the altar of lust. Oooh….if I don’t stop tweaking the knobs I’ll have to jump in a cold bath. And just think – it was me, a middle aged working woman who wrote it.

self portrait

 The basic reason why I write this kinda stuff is that I love it in life and I love it in fantasy. I know it may be a brazen to say that, but it’s true and if I’m honest then in my writing about sex I’m not short changing my readers. When I write a sex scene I am there and willing it on. Actually, it’s writing itself.


There are technical problems in writing about sex. The big one (Oooh steady on) is the line between artistic, pornographic, anatomical, purple and naff. Different generations and cultures have different levels of frankness and taste. In the supermarket today I noted that I could present myself for chlamydia venereal disease testing while I was waiting for a new batch of granary wholemeal bread to reach the shelves. All those intimate swabs quite put me off the idea of a nice buttered crust.  I was reading some supermarket Romance where the young lady presented her sexual arousal by way of her “dampened swath”. That brought me out in a fit of the giggles. I figured if things didn’t gel with the guy at least she could wipe down the kitchen worktops. In another similar epic, the young lady exposed her “creamy crevice” – so far this is the worst image I have ever encountered. Well, at least there is some classy alliteration. Finding the words, the euphemisms and the poetic passion of human juice is not always easy. Just this morning I encountered a curly triangle of love. Well, I suppose if your car broke down you could prop it up in the road to warn other drivers of an obstruction. It’s all about context is it not?

knobs and shafts

When it comes to the male side of the park, obviously a female can only guess and ask a lot of questions. My lover man is never shy. His only complaint is that males only get to ride one wave while  females can stay in surfing all day. – (Hmmm – depends on the quality of the water). Males provide more vocabulary problems. I have a few dislikes – such as swollen manhoods. It always makes me think of those old naval war films where they wear 10 layers of clothing under a duffle coat.. Luckily, my readers are mostly female and factors such as size of hands, width of shoulders and tone of voice can excite more response than shafts, lengths and pulsating needs. For fun I googled “knobs and shafts”. Not quite what I had in mind. With males it’s just so easy to get lost in engineering. 


But here is the core of the issue. People like sex. Even people who do not want actual full contact sex are interested in it. Sex is us. We are born what we are and half the world has the opposite set of bits. 

And then, of course there is love. Oh Love, oh love, love, love. This purest thing, rejoicing in the pollution of its own sense, losing focus so as to see nothing but the other. It is where the ego both asserts its power to give and shrivels in a humility of powerless longing. Our love finds expression and escape in physical sex. Cold sex is what my friend the poet Oscar Sparrow describes as the “gaping gash of loveless love”. Getting this blend right is the work of the humble hack Romance writer. 

“Knockout!” my romance novel on Kindle is FREE on Saturday 28th and Sunday 29th January if you want to check out how I deal with these tender literary parts.

Amazon USA
Amazon UK


Emma thinx: Love me – love my love.