
Today’s highlights have been a tweet from a reader who found my novel via a tweet of this photo by Rebecca Root and a yes from one of the quirkiest independent bookshops around these parts in response to my email nudging them to stock my book. Small gains, but they matter. As Charli says, “Being a marketer is like being a watchmaker. The gears do work, but you have to get it all aligned one piece at a time.” At the moment, I don’t even know what the pieces are, but I’m doing what I can to at least give them a chance of lining up.
A few months before Sugar and Snails was published, and thinking it unlikely, other than at my own launch events, I’d be offered slots to talk about it, I put myself forward to local library staff to lead a discussion with reading groups on psychological therapists in fiction. The first of these happened earlier this week and, with a small but enthusiastic group, I really enjoyed it and sold a couple of copies of my novel. Though I am in the process of contacting other groups that might be interested, I hadn’t, until now, put anything about this on my website. But another conversation this week, with someone who had been proselytising on behalf of my novel but assumed I wouldn’t be willing to come and talk to groups about it, has persuaded me I need to declare myself as a potential speaker. In that endeavour, I’d appreciate your feedback. Obviously a webpage isn’t able to market itself but, right now, I’m more concerned with what it looks like. At this stage, I’m not even sure if author talks is the right name for what I’m offering.

Sassoon wasn’t mad, just misguided in publicly declaring his opposition to the war. Rivers agreed court-martial was no solution, but why Craiglockhart? What of his men’s morale?
Yet, after hours attending to shell-shocked soldiers, Rivers looked forward to his conversations with Sassoon. The poet was intelligent, cultured, so damn reasonable; Rivers had no power to change his mind?
His method was intuitive, fatherly: bearing witness to the horrors of the trenches to help his patients adjust. But Sassoon turned his thinking upside down. Rivers didn’t cure, he realised, but silenced protest, denied sanity, sent the soldiers back to hell.
A final declaration on the subject of marketing is that for three weeks starting tomorrow, Inspired Quill is running a Goodreads giveaway for Sugar and Snails. Tell your friends! By the time you read this it’ll probably have gone live with a widget in the sidebar. (And no, I don’t know why the linky phrases are in a colour I’ve never seen on the blog before.)