Good morning from a sunny Lancashire,
So, here I am, back again. I have been squirrelling away on my next book, and am now well into the meat of it. It’s a completely different kind of book to the two Grace books, but I’m enjoying the reset, and telling a different kind of story. It’s set in a town that definitely isn’t an analogue for my old home town.
And there has been a bit of a development – now that NO SAFE PLACE has been out for a good while now, I decided I wanted to give it a bit of attention again, by trying something which seemed to me to be a little drastic. But I’m new at this…
On Friday morning, I set the price of the ebook of NO SAFE PLACE to zero – completely free. Months of work and there I am, giving it away for nowt! There’s method to this madness, though (I hope). The idea is that people will now take a no-risk opportunity to download the book, try a few pages, and maybe – just maybe – enjoy it enough to stick around. I certainly hope so. So, when I checked the sales data late on Saturday night, I was shocked by the numbers.
Hundreds and hundreds of downloads. I found myself checking back every ten minutes to see if the numbers would slow down, and then being amazed when they weren’t. Then I saw that NO SAFE PLACE was the number 1 free book in "English Crime" and the number 3 in "Crime Thrillers". Not to mention, number 19 in free books overall. In your face, Conan Doyle.
I have to admit I’m delighted. Hand on heart, I never dream of a truck backing up onto my drive and tipping out piles of banknotes, but what I do hope for is that people get the chance to read my books, and even better, enjoy them. I hope that after they’ve tried NO SAFE PLACE, people then take the plunge and read THE UNBURIED DEAD. It’s a real fillip for me, and is a huge encouragement to keep going, at least until the reviews come in...
So, head over to Amazon and try NO SAFE PLACE, if you haven’t already. I hope you like it.
So, Spring has sprung. The sun is out, the weather is warming up, it’s possible to start dreaming of diary dates to see people again, and all in all, things are looking good. I certainly hope that you are all seeing similar greenshoots. It’ll be nice not to have to add conditionals to every correspondence – “given these difficult times”.
Picture from yesterday's mandated exercise, where I am doing my best to stomp down the public footpath that has disappeared under the plough. Proper Norfolk sky, all the way over here in Lancashire.
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