Charity begins in book four

Just as an aside, the fourth book in the Saskia series, called 'Charity' has appeared on Omnilit in the US and on Kindle here in the UK. There are three more completed books in the series, with an fourth in work. There's also 'Rio', that runs alongside Saskia book seven. They'll be along in a while. Meanwhile, Charity

Ian B

The age barrier

Given myself a small problem. Well, not really a problem as such. I've been promoting the two Facebook Pages associated with the two book series, Saskia and Lisa. The original idea was to see who liked the Pages and invite them to be friends. Now comes the problem. Quite a few people like the Pages, but - most of them are young girls! This shouldn't come as a shock really given that the books are aimed at girls aged twelve to seventeen or eighteen. The difficulty comes in that I'm - rather older than that - by quite a long way. In this day and age it's not the done thing, now is it? Truly? So I'll have to content myself with watching the number of Likes increase while my list of friends remains static. Don't want anybody's parents after me with an axe after all.
Ian B

Stranger than fiction

Real life can be stranger than the fiction you write, or at least more full of surprises and coincidences. Take my book series about the two Saskias. As with any book, there are minor characters scattered here and there. Some of them don't remain minor - Rio Ashworth eventually gets her own book - but one who remains in the background, popping up now and then, is Laura, the nurse from the local hospital A&E. The Saskias and the twins meet Laura now and then as they visit the hospital and so on. Now, Laura doesn't actually exist - except she does! The 'real' Laura is a Staff Nurse at Kings Hospital in London. She's even called Laura. I have a quite well defined vision of what each character looks like and does - and that's the real Laura. Staff Nurse Laura appeared in a Channel 4 documentary series last night, and I nearly fell off my chair. Sometimes the coincidences and surprises tend to mount up a bit. Wonder what the next one will be. Oh. The book about Rio Ashworth? It's number seven in the Saskia series so it'll be along eventually.
Ian B

The great Experiment

Wow. Interesting couple of weeks. Experiment on Kindle appears to be working, but it's early days yet. The first free promotion day was last weekend and appeared to generate a fair bit of interest. As well as the Kindle thing, I've tried an advert on Facebook to try and raise the profile of the two Pages for the two book series, and that's working as well. Don't know how long I can run that, it costs money, but might be worth it finally. What I really need to do is promote the books properly, but you have to speculate to accumulate, and that's difficult at the moment.
The Kindle thing has made me think. I have a couple or three short-to-medium stories that aren't related to the two main book series but are in basically the same genre. Maybe I should tidy them up and release them into the wild. Thinking about that (did I say that already?).

As well as the Falling Buildings, which is about the two Saskias, I wrote another story about Lisa, Jody, and Holly - or more properly about Louisa, their girl-friday and general gofer. That's on Kindle too www.amazon.com/dp/B00DAILFIA That one is also on a free promotion. Here's what it looks like.
Ian B

A small experiment

I'm trying a slightly different approach to writing and publishing. Not because I'm unhappy with the current arrangement with my normal publisher, far from it. But an experiment might be in order. I had the idea of a short-ish story self published on the Amazon Kindle platform. Then I could have a go at using some of the Kindle promotional stuff - and of course I can add links to the full-length books. So - I sat down to write a story - and the story - took over. It took me rather less than two days to write 12,000 words. It almost took longer than that to edit and proof read. And then three or four hours later it was published on Kindle. And within twelve hours I'd sold one.
The rest of my 'full size' books will still be published 'properly', that will mean they'll end up on far more sites than just Kindle, but the experiment was - interesting. So much so that I'm about to do another. This is the first one.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00D7E9RTQ

Ian B

Superhero or super hero

Given myself a bit of a problem. I quite like films and so on like X Men, I can take 'em or leave 'em alone (mostly the latter usually, Mrs. B isn't up for that kind of stuff), but I've never read any of the comics or any of the books in that genre - until now. I casually followed a link on Amazon to a series of books set in a world where Superheros exist. The particular hero of this series is a young girl - and the similarity to the two Saskias in my books is uncanny - so much so that I can't put this series of books down! The books are even set in Chicago, a place the Saskias have visited - and where they're going again in 'America'. Ok, so imagine X Men, a whole set of heros with super powers of one kind or another battling other baddies with similar powers. That's what these other books are all about.

So what's the problem? I spent most of the first book thinking, 'wow, perhaps Saskia should do that', or, 'blimey, should I put that sort of thing in?' The answer that came back is - probably not. This answer was quite obvious, to me at least, when I read the latest section of 'America' I'm currently writing. The way I write is to scribble down a few thousand words (scribble? on a computer? whatever), then go back and see if what I've written makes sense. I had no problem dropping back into Saskia's world, despite having just spend a few days in quite another world generated by someone else.

So. The young girl in these other books is a Hero, like Connan the Barbarian. My characters, the Saskias and Lisa, Jody and Holly are just ordinary girls (most of them anyway) with extraordinary abilities. And that's the way they're going to stay. My girls are super heros, not Superheros - and there is a difference.
Ian B.