Now I know I should really be out and about promoting my poetry collection, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to stand up in public and read from The Next Big Thing But One at this month’s excellent Novel Nights event. I did make a slight faux pas with the first extract I submitted, as for some unfathomable reason (probably something to do with testing my own comfort zones), I sent in a section with a lot of Very Bad Words. Fortunately, I was given a second chance and this time my piece was accepted, and I duly put on my pink performing shoes and stepped out, alongside the excellent Clare Snook and Mark Lewis.
For those of you who are interested, here’s a recording of my bit:
The main feature was a chap called Dan Jeffries, who gave a fascinating talk about crowdfunding and marketing, containing much food for thought. This inspired me to make a bit more effort about how I present myself online, as I’ve got a bit lax since the bold days of blogging and promoting Mrs Darcy. The first step is to combine the various Facebook pages for my first three books into a single author page, although this is not quite as straightforward as it might first seem. If you want to merge two pages, they need to have very similar names, and if you change the name of them in order to facilitate this, they seem to get locked for a while before you can actually go ahead with the merge. We’ll see what happens. I have at least changed the Mrs Darcy page to a more generic one, with a nice new banner featuring all four books. If you haven’t already liked it, please do give it some love.
Meanwhile, the reviews for Love and Loss and Other Important Stuff have started to trickle in, and everything is looking very positive. If you are a poetry blogger and you’d like to take a look, do get in touch and I might be able to spare you a copy.