P.J. Murphy's Writer Site

As is becoming customary, I’d like to start this post with an apology. This is going to be a pretty boring, workmanlike post – mainly because there has been so much going on that if I get into too much detail about any of it, this post will become a novella. I want to honour my pledge when I started this blog of sharing the self-publishing journey, warts and all, so a workmanlike post is in order.

My second apology is that this post does STILL not include an update on the cover of Dead Letters. I’ve had a bit of trouble finding cover designers that don’t flee in panic when I mention my far-out idea. Hopefully I’ve hooked one now, though. We’ll see…

With that out of the way, on with the update. Here’s what I’ve been up to these past few weeks:

Troubleshot cover – In my last post, I asked for opinions about updating the simple design I currently have for that book. The majority opinion was a resounding silence, but what I did hear is that the more polished cover doesn’t really match with the village I describe in the book. I guess it’s a common risk that covers don’t match the images in people’s head, but still it convinced me to leave as is. For now.

Selling my soul – Yes, I went to bed with Facebook and did some advertising of Troubleshot through the platform. I figured that I had already sold my soul to Amazon, so I might as well complete the set of multi-national companies that draw people’s ire (incidentally, I’m writing this from an Apple while driving a Tesla). Say what you want about multi-billion dollar evil corporations, but they get the job done. I think I should do a whole blog post about my success with Facebook ads, so for now I’ll move on..

P.S. I have to say that none of the companies I just mentioned are evil. Mainly because my shock collar goes off if I say that. Ow – quit it!

Finalising text for Dead Letters – I received back the copy edits for Dead Letters last week, along with a few editorial notes. Fortunately, there were no really fundamental issues, so I was able to blitz through them in a day and finalise the text. This puts me in a good place to finalise the page numbers and thus the spine size and cover design. Which leads me to…

Proofing – I shared a similar image to the one below last year, before publishing Troubleshot. Amazon allows you to order up to five proof copies at a time, so you can check things like page and text layout. For Dead Letters, this was essential. The novel contains a story within a story in a different font, all sorts of quotes and italicised text i.e. plenty of opportunity for things to go wrong. And go wrong they did, as you can see from the number of post-its.

Preparing marketing – Troubleshot was a huge learning experience in terms of how to market a book. There are lots of things I’ll do differently for Dead Letters, and one of them is lining up some reviews to go out with the book launch. Thanks to everyone that’s volunteered for this and now has an advance copy of Dead Letters in their hands. Let’s just hope they’re good reviews, or this could backfire.

Competitions – Springtime is competition season, so that books can be judged for the awards season in autumn. I’ve entered quite a few. Time to dust off that party dress…

I think that’s it for now. Update over. Phew! Normal service to be resumed next time.

Byyyyeeeee!!!!