Shallow Waters Gets A New Look

Yes, you read that correctly, after nearly 18 months, Shallow Waters is getting a brand new look.

Why? you might ask.

Well, it’s all to do with the upcoming release of Made to be Broken. I was struggling with the cover for it and decided to revamp Shallow Waters as well as getting a new design for Made to be Broken so that they both gelled together as one style.

And it’s working.

I’m loving the new cover for Shallow Waters. It encompasses the book well and I love the colouring. I really hope you like it as much as I do.

So, without further ado, here is the cover that will now be showing on all formats of Shallow Waters.

To celebrate the new cover release and the fact that I have some paperback copies of Shallow Waters with the old cover on at home, one person who replies to this post (a simple ‘pick me’ will suffice) by Tuesday 3rd May, will receive a signed copy (with the old cover).

 

 

Next week I’ll be doing the cover reveal for Made to be Broken!

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Shallow Waters

When catching a killer isn’t enough…

The naked, battered body of an unidentified teenager is found dumped in an alleyway and post-mortem finds evidence of a harrowing series of events.

Another teenage death with the same MO pushes DI Hannah Robbins and her team in the Nottingham City division Major Crimes Unit, to their limits, and across county borders. In a race against the clock, they attempt to unpick a thick web of lies and deceit to uncover the truth behind the deaths.

But it doesn’t stop there.

Just how far are the team willing to push themselves to save the next girl?

I have a 3 book deal with Audible!

I wrote the body of this blog post before I wrote the title and when I came to write the title and realised I was going to be so blunt about things, I had to come back down to the basics of the post itself and do some rewrites as I have said it all in eight little words.

So, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! You read that correctly. I have a three book deal with Audible.

For anyone who has been wondering where the new Hannah Robbins book is and for anyone who likes listening to their books audibly this is what’s been happening.

I’m really thrilled and excited to be able to say that a short time ago I signed a three book deal with Audible, the largest provider of audio books to the listening market. I was absolutely stunned when they approached me and even more stunned when they offered the three book deal based on reading Shallow Waters. Audible think the books will work well in audio format and I am delighted that Hannah Robbins is going to be made available in a format that will make her within reach to people who may otherwise not have read her. The short of sight, or disabled who find holding books or ereaders difficult. People who find reading difficult. Audio books are a whole new world of books, another format of reading that should be embraced and as you can tell, I am overjoyed to be a part of the Audible family.

Audible are currently in the process of creating Shallow Waters and will release it on completion.

In relation to book 2, we are working towards a simultaneous release, which means the ebook and paperback will be delayed because it takes 3 months for an audio book to be created after a manuscript is finished in its entirety. So, for that, I apologise, but it does mean that you will have the option to get the audio version at the same time if you wanted to and it would sync with the ebook version, or just the audio version if you preferred.

So, I am now officially a hybrid author. A foot in both camps of the self and traditional publishing worlds. It feels good. Things are going smoothly. Book 2 will be with you next year as it’s close to completion but not quite (you’d rather wait for a better book than a rushed book I hope.)

And to celebrate this momentous news, I am putting Shallow Waters on a FREE price promotion so that anyone who hasn’t read it can pick it up and see what they think of Hannah Robbins and her team in Nottingham. It’s FREE in all countries across the Amazon board, so whichever one you shop in, you will be able to pick it up without paying out a single piece of currency for the next three days. Today through to Thursday. Here are the quick links to Amazon UK and Amazon US.

 

Are you an audio book listener?

#IndieReCon The Place For Writers To Be!

A short time ago I joined the Alliance of Independent Authors having self-published Shallow Waters at the end of December last year. In that short time, I have found the community of people within the group to be friendly, open and incredibly helpful. Generous and giving of their time. No question too small or silly. (There’s a very active Facebook page.)

As well as having that place for its members to get together and talk about problems with uploading to platforms or whatever else they want to ask or say, ALLi, as they are known, work hard to make the independent author as regular a part of the publishing world as any other author.

One of the things they are doing this year is running IndieReCon. It is “three packed days of advice and education about self-publishing and reaching readers. PLUS this year: a live-streamed Indie Author Fringe Festival, from the London Book Fair (Book & Screen Week).

The best news? IndieReCon is run by authors for authors, so it’s all free!”

So, not going to London Book Fair? Listening in to all the excitement on social media about it and wishing you were there? Well, this is something you can be a part of.

And from where I see it, is with the line-up they have, you don’t need to be an indie author to get something out of this, if you are a writer, there will be something you can glean. Just look at this line-up HERE and remember it’s easily available online and it’s free! I can’t copy and paste the whole line-up, it’s huge, but that link covers it all.

It does include;

• Content Marketing 101: How Authors Can Be Smart and Strategic With Their Most Important Asset : JANE FRIEDMAN
• 10 Million Sold and Counting: A No Holds Barred Q&A with BARBARA FREETHY and BELLA ANDRE
• How to Make a Living with your Writing: JOANNA PENN
• Literary Values in the Digital Age: REBECCA SWIFT
• The Age of the Serial : SAMANTHA WARREN
• Pinterest for Authors: Build your Brand with Pins & Boards : JAY ARTALE

Now I’ve only picked a few events to give you a flavour of the range of topics covered from the huge online line-up that can be found HERE with the times of events given in US and UK time-zones. There is something for everyone, no matter how you write and who you publish with or for. If you can’t make it to the London Book Fair, then why not join in with this and register HERE. It will be great! The hashtag is #IndieReCon if you’re on a Twitter event.

I’ll hopefully see you there! I’m really looking forward to the next three days!

 

(And if you’re on Twitter and this really isn’t your thing, you might want to mute that hashtag….)

 

If We Were Having Coffee – A Week Of Highs For Being An Author

The #weekendcoffeeshare is the brainchild of PartTimeMonster. We sit down every weekend and share our week in a more informal, personal way than maybe the rest of our blog posts are written. Feel free to join in.

If we were having coffee I’d say it’s been a few weeks since we sat down together and did this. The past couple of weekends has been a bit off, health-wise and I just couldn’t get a post together. I’d ask you how you are and what you’ve been up to over these missed weeks?

If were having coffee, I’d be drinking tea as usual and I’d tell you it’s been a mixed bag of news over these past couple of weeks, some of which I’ll leave for other posts, but this week, well this week, it’s all ended on quite the positive note and it’s all about being an author.

As a self-publishing author, I was absolutely thrilled at my mention in the publishing industries trade magazine The Bookseller, in the Independent Author Preview: March 2015. Shallow Waters was listed under Crime and Thrillers Here. I had no previous indication it was going to be listed. It’s not a review, just a listing. I have no idea how indie books are picked up on their radar for this feature, but I’m thrilled nonetheless.

I was then contacted by the Nottingham Post we set up a telephone interview. It was quite funny because I didn’t know what to expect and didn’t prepare in any way and in turn felt I rambled a bit too much, but the finished article is now in the Saturday paper and online HERE. The article’s author, Lynette Pinchess asked for a photograph to put with it. One where I was holding Shallow Waters. I didn’t have one. Start photographic session with 11-year-old son! Not a bad job to say he was itching to go back out to play and I hated posing.

On a last note, due to a lovely sunny week here in the UK, I’ve dropped the price of Shallow Waters in a Spring sale. It’s 99p in the UK Amazon store and $1.47 in the US one. And as I’ve just looked, it has also now managed to hit one of the charts in the US Amazon store which I haven’t seen before. It’s number 69 in Murder! What a great end to my week.

 

 

So, another drink? Tell me more about your week….

Shallow Waters – Goodreads Giveaway!

I finally got around to sorting out the Goodreads giveaway of Shallow Waters last week (it had to wait for verification by staff for it to become live). It wasn’t as easy as I thought it was going to be because the copy of the book I had listed on there is an e-book version and I’d forgotten that specific versions are listed, even though I’m a regular user and see that some versions have different covers! So, what I had to do was list the paperback onto Goodreads system so that it could be put into the Giveaway. Finally, all is done and 2 copies of Shallow Waters are now listed for giveaway on Goodreads.

I will sign both copies before sending them out. This is open to person in the UK, US and Canada. So if you live in any of those countries, just click HERE to be taken to the giveaway. It’s running until 29th April so you have plenty of time to enter.

 

On a side note while we’re talking about Shallow Waters, I did mention this on Twitter at the time, but if you missed it, Shallow Waters is now available in a couple of libraries in Australia! I am beyond excited. A lovely Twitter reader requested her library stock it and they did! And as you can see from the below image, it is also being borrowed! So that was last week’s good news 🙂

 

What good news do you have to share from last week?

Shallow Waters – Free!

A couple of days ago I joined Wattpad. Wattpad is a writing community where anyone can write stories and share them for free. They are mostly in chapter format, building into something larger as the weeks go along and with it, building a following. The biggest thing on there is teen fiction and fan fiction.

 

I’ve decided that I’m going to share Shallow Waters on a weekly basis, chapter by chapter as I write and compete Hannah Robbins two, but without ever completing it to the end. It does have 96 chapters! If you are on Wattpad and haven’t yet read Shallow Waters and want to check it out, my profile is; http://www.wattpad.com/user/RebeccaBradley0 but for anyone not on there, every Sunday, I will share a chapter here on the blog – but not to the end, so you have been warned!

Amazon UK.  Amazon US.   Kobo.  Nook.   Google Play.

Shallow Waters

1

The noise unnerved her as she tried to shift her body in an attempt to ease the pain. Instead, the slight movement caused every bone and fibre of her body to howl out in objection. She could no longer tell where the pain was coming from, but the receptors in her brain kept up their constant transmissions. The shrieking of her nerve endings blended into one mindless assault on her senses. The stench of her own urine was sharp in her nose as it burnt her bruised and bleeding body.
As she shifted, it creaked and rattled again. She froze, the sound reawakening her terror, returning her to the reality of her surroundings. Her eyelids felt heavy and hot, drawn down and protective, but she forced them open. Just to check.
Her body throbbed. Blood crusting on dry and broken skin added to the acrid smell assaulting her nostrils. It tasted bitter and vile in her mouth. The room was unlit, a faint light sneaking under the door at the far side of the room casting shadows, playing with her mind. She could make out shapes in the gloom, furniture she knew was there in the daylight, shape-shifting in the dark. It was quiet. She strained for any sound of someone else in there with her.
She tried to turn her head to check he wasn’t there, watching from the corner. Pain seared through her skull like hot metal rods. She was alone. Slowly, she lowered it back down onto the damp, sticky plastic base and let her eyelids close. The dog cage surrounding her was left behind for the blackness that now enveloped her.

If We Were Having Coffee – We’d Ask Is CreateSpace Environmentally Friendly?

The #weekendcoffeeshare is the brainchild of PartTimeMonster. We sit down every weekend and share our week in a more informal, personal way than maybe the rest of our blog posts are written. Feel free to join in.

If we were having a lovely soothing cup of tea (you can have coffee if you really have to – but I have a lovely Rose tea from Betty’s in my cupboard) I’d tell you it’s been a bit of a weird none week for me this week as it was half term for my youngest. The weather was rubbish and my health was blah, so we didn’t do anything.

But on Monday I did the whole of the weeks course work for a Future Learn course I’m doing which is on Branding, so I felt particularly good about myself that day. The first course I started with them I didn’t complete but the timing was bad, the end of the course coincided with me preparing for the release of Shallow Waters. Future Learn is a great facility for short courses to give you a taste of longer courses the university may offer. They are full of great content and get your mind working. With this Branding course, I wondered if I would be able to glean any information on Brands and how they work and if I could apply it to an author brand. So far on week two I’ve learned that the product needs to be good first and foremost and then it’s about customer experience rather than what the brand wants. Social media have changed the way a lot of information is exchanged and any brand, of any description that doesn’t move and adapt as quickly as its target audience is going to struggle.

Also, there is an issue of social awareness with brands. Is the brand socially aware? What are they doing to help people or the planet because society is finding this a more and more important issue. So for me, I looked at my Createspace printed book for Shallow Waters and couldn’t see the FSC sign (Forest Stewardship Council) on it, so I don’t think it is printed on environmentally friendly paper.

What do I do about this? If you pick up any of the books you read, you will more than likely find the FSC sign on the book because publishers have signed up to be environmentally aware, yet Createspace don’t have it. This makes me unhappy. Shallow Waters mostly sells eBooks, but it does sell a few paper copies and I have made them available. As an author brand, what is my social awareness if I provide books that I don’t know the origin of the paper? I think this week I might email Createspace and see what response I get and update you next week.

What are your thoughts on how we read and our impact on the planet in our pastime? Or how do you view brands? Is how they manage outside social factors important or do you not care?

Why The Cheap E-Book Is Not Devaluing Authors Work

Last Monday I wrote a blog post about the pricing of e-books. More specifically, lowering the price of mine – Shallow Waters from £1.99 to 99p and equally halving it in all other countries.

Stuart Miles: freedigitalphotos.net

The reduction in price was meant to be a weekend promotion, to see if I could get Shallow Waters to move at all and if it did move, to see if it would move enough in sales or visibility to make it worth the drop from 70% commission on my price to 35% commission.

The price promotion proved to be a positive move on both fronts.

Then one of my commenters said, and this only a partial quote of a full sentence, but it’s one that triggered this post, that ’99p is cheap for a book’. So I started to think about that whole circle writers go in about the price of e-books and 99p being cheap and less than the price of a cup of coffee and surely all the work an author has put into that work, the novel is worth much more than 99 pence?

Well, here’s a different view and it could be contentious!

My novel isn’t worth 99 pence and I’m never going to say it is. The thing is, I’m not just earning 99p for all the hard work I put into that novel. I’m earning a bit more than 99p. 99p is just a part of the payment I’m receiving for my hard work. There is a cumulative payment that I actually receive and every author receives for their work. Do we expect each individual person to pay what we think that novel is really worth? No. But they can contribute to its whole. And by lowering the price to 99p I am actually getting a better price for my work than I was by keeping it at a higher price. I’m not devaluing my work. The person buying has no responsibility to me. And I don’t buy that by pricing my work so low I am devaluing the work of other authors. This is my work and I am getting a better price for it as a whole, so why would anyone argue against that? Everyone has the ability and choice to price their books as they choose. I may put the price back up because it is cheap right now. I’m not saying the price isn’t cheap for a full novel. But what I am saying is; the person making that one payment of 99 pence is not making a payment of what the novel is worth, they are making a part of a whole, bigger picture and people need to see that the single book is not the value, the total sales is what the book was worth.

What do you think of e-book pricing?

Fight The Fear And Ask Anyway

Yesterday I went to my local library to pick up a couple of books, because I obviously don’t have enough on my bookcase or Kindle or on NetGalley waiting for me, I’m ordering them from my library as well! Anyway I pottered in with the simple intention of collecting what was waiting. I had the book club book, The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas and a non-fiction book about murders in Nottinghamshire, waiting.

Anyway, while I was picking up my books, I had a brainwave. Mmmm, I’m not sure I’d actually call it a brainwave. An idea came to me and I approached the library assistant and asked if she stocked self-published books. She looked bemused and shouted across the library to her colleague to obtain the answer. It seemed they thought I was looking for a specific book.

No. I clarified that I was asking because I wanted to know if they would stock a self-published book as I had written and published one myself and was interested in having it stocked. – What had come over me?!

This was a different matter, they seemed interested and helpful. Though they still didn’t know the answer or how it would be done, they told me to come back on Thursday when the manager would be in and we could sort it out then…..

*Terrified face*

I posted this information on my social networks and it seems from other indie author’s experience, libraries do indeed stock self-published books and my county does stock self-published books.

So the moral of today’s Insecure Writers Support Group post is that you have to step out there, beyond your comfort zone. Even when you’re not expecting it. Just do it. You never know what might happen.. Stretch yourself. In any capacity. See if something surprises you.

 

Though Shallow Waters is not yet available in your library, it is currently available on Amazon UK, Amazon US and Kobo.

How Are You Thinking Of Pricing Your E-Book?

I want to let you know about e-book pricing, what I’ve found has happened and has worked for me over this past few days and you can take away any thoughts, nuggets of wisdom, or not, for yourself, should you find any.

This weekend I put Shallow Waters, my police procedural crime novel on a price promotion discount over all the countries it was selling on and the platforms, Amazon and Kobo. It equated to about half price. In the UK, it was discounted to from £1.99 to 99p and in the US it was discounted from $2.99 to $1.49.

The reason for this was to see if it would help move sales along any. I’d released it just over a month ago. I had good daily sales and was making some money on the 70% option of Amazon’s pricing plan. But it was steady and I’m a little impatient. I wanted to experiment. To see if a promotion would help or hinder; 1. My income with the drop to the 35% income bracket and 2. The sales ranking of the book itself.

I decided it was a weekend only offer as I didn’t expect to sell enough books to make what the 70% was making me, but the great thing about being an indie author is you can experiment to your heart’s content.

So, the weekend is over and what have I found?

I have found that the drop in price has increased my sales and increased them enough to be making me per day, what I was making at the original price where I was earning 70% of the sales. The increased sales have also moved the novel up the sales chart, thereby increasing visibility of the book and hopefully garnering it more sales.

So with that evidence collated from the weekend, I shall be continuing the promotion for an unknown period of time.

I had thought the day of the 99p e-book was over and authors were pricing their work higher. The Amazon top 10 chart is filled with books at higher prices and yet I have found sales have gone up. I can’t promise it will stay on promotion because these recently sold books may not be read, and then may not be reviewed. Sales may drop off and putting it back up may be the sensible thing to do. It’s the thoughtful decisions that come with publishing your own book as I’ve found.

Pricing your e-book is not a decision to rush into. You need to think about it and consider the reasons behind the decision. But also realise you can change your mind at any given time.

For me, Shallow Waters is staying on promotion, on Amazon UK, Amazon US (all others) and Kobo.