Recently, The British Fantasy Society very kindly reviewed ‘Broken Branches’.

Ben Ellis has written a dystopian story about a society that values breeding and DNA above all else. Worryingly, this could be true in some form in the future. He has taken a very touchy subject and written a thought-provoking story. What I liked about this book was the way that Ellis created his storyline, it is fluent and flows with great ease throughout, it’s not difficult to follow. There are characters to root for and some to hate.

HT Scott

Thanks to HT Scott for taking the time to read and review the book.

After missing every long-list of every sci-fi novel competition I entered ‘Broken Branches’ in to, it was a pleasant surprise to get a positive review from Ant at SFBook.com.

Broken Branches is an imaginative, interesting story that raises some genuine concerns about the future of this country. A timely, entertaining book that I sincererly hope remains fiction.

Read the full review here.

Thanks to Ant for taking the time to review the book.

I haven’t written a blog post in ages because there’s not been too much to blog about in my writing life, so how about I come back out of hibernation with this, my first ever video review by Becky.

Nervous doesn’t begin to explain the anticipation of hitting play on this!

Many thanks to Becky for taking the time to read and review ‘Broken Branches’.

Visit Becky’s youtube channel for more sci-fi goodness – youtube.com/user/InkyLeaves.

I blogged about this back in December 2014 after launching my debut novel, In A Right State, – Self-Publishing: 10 ways to get book reviews – so read that post first for 10 basic ideas, but here’s 5 new ones I’ve discovered after trying to get my second novel, Broken Branches, out there to potential reviewers.

1. Twitter.

Keep an eye out on Twitter for authors or agents retweeting a good review by a blogger or keen book review tweeter, then see if that book reviewer is interested in your genre and contact them if so.

2. Goodreads/FaceBook Groups

There are book review groups on both Goodreads and Facebook where actual, willing participants are ready and able to read and review a book! eg. Authors Needing a Review Group on Goodreads and The Book Club (TBC) on Facebook. There’s tight rules so tread carefully, but well worth doing to get reviews and hopefully getting some added to Amazon and Goodreads too.

3. Blog Side Bars

Some blogs have a sidebar with links to other book review blogs, eg. check out the left hand sidebar underneath the contact form on this blog – blueballoonbooks – loads of tasty potential contacts.

4. Blog Awards

Find some blog awards and then see if they have a book section. There are also book review blog awards such as – The 2017 Annual Bloggers Bash Awards – dig into their archives and find past winners/nominees that could still be active, just not award winning. Who cares!

5. Blog Tours

You get a lot of these featured on Twitter by publishers promoting their authors. Once you find a blog tour promoting a book in your genre then check out the review policies of all the book blogs featured, they could be ripe for the picking.

You launch a book and the next thing to do is promote it. In fact, leading up to the end of editing it and sorting out the ebook and paperback formatting, getting the cover done, in the back of your mind is the whole ball-achingly dull process of promoting your unrealised genius to the planet.

One idea I had to keep things interesting and try something new was to do a ‘Twitterthon’. I could’ve sworn that I come across this somewhere else but after some brief research, no. I’d made it up and now I know why no-one else had bothered to do it.

The rules were thus; one tweet every hour for one week. That’s 168 tweets to write.

Realising this simple rule into a reality was a lot harder than coming up with the idea. First I started by drawing up a schedule to plan the tweets which brought home the stark reality of 168 tweets.

Next was to find a Twitter scheduling tool as I was not going to stay up for 168 hours straight tweeting out gibberish, which is what would have happened…did happen. I found Twittimer which was a great tool which I highly recommend.

Now for the arduous process of filling those 168 spaces with bona fide tweets.

The goal of this exercise was not to sell books but to try and gain some followers, gain some likes/retweets and to generally increase exposure, which in turn should then contribute to some sales. So the content of these tweets should contain some promotional stuff but I couldn’t just spam my followers and hashtags with promo’s, I had to come up with a whole load of original stuff.

As you can see from the final schedule, I managed to fill most of the spaces with a combination of promo’s, links to Goodreads/Amazon/Instagram, reviews, a competition, links to my first book, links to old blog posts which detailed the writing of BROKEN BRANCHES, a tour of my BROKEN BRANCHES notebook, some Instagram videos, some adulterated meme’s, talking about the Twitterthon itself and some other miscellaneous stuff.

Using hashtags was important to help spread the word and get infront of new eyeballs and hopefully snag some as followers. I found Hashtagify and Hashtags really useful for this to gain hashtag ideas and choose the most popular ones.

IMGFlip’s meme generator and Giphy were really useful in creating BROKEN BRANCHES related memes which helped fill those 168 spaces.

So how did it go?

The title of this blog post may have given you a hint. Shit. In total I gained 2 followers. I lost a few and gained a few more new ones but the overall total went from 228 to 230. For that kind of ROI I would’ve better spent my money going to a coffee shop and asking 2 people to follow me in exchange for a free coffee and muffin of their choice.

As you can see from the schedule, I didn’t manage to complete the 168 tweets. By about Day 3 I could see things weren’t really happening so I lost all momentum and couldn’t be bothered to finish it. I did a competition to win a free paperback version of BROKEN BRANCHES which only one person entered and she was a beta reader for BROKEN BRANCHES!

What have I learnt from this?

Social media is a fucker but only doing one intense week on it isn’t going to turn it around for you. I really like Twitter but to become a big user with over 10,000 followers with no accompanying offline or online fame then you have to work hard at it and put the hours in. I’ve got better things to do, like write, so that isn’t going to be me. I never thought this was going to be a shortcut to thousands of followers but I was expecting more than 2.

One positive outcome was that I enjoyed doing the videos so I may do some more of them.

I’ve got other promotional ideas in the pipeline so don’t think I’ve shot my bolt just yet, but let’s hope they go better than this. PLEASE!

There’s a good reason why this blog hasn’t been updated for over a year and that’s because I’ve been writing a film script and also getting my second novel up to par to self-publish, and here it is.

Here’s the blurb…

Your status in society depends on the purity of your genes.

All men are sterile. Fertility drugs are given only to couples whose genetic matches are approved. Those without a family history to prove their genetic heritage are outcast from society.

Grace is a broken branch. As an orphan, she has no link to The National Family Tree, so she and her husband, Tom, are ecstatic when they’re approved to have a baby. But that was the easy part. Grace’s twin brother inadvertently gets a girl pregnant after a one-night stand, and his girlfriend isn’t happy because it should’ve been her. Both sets of parents soon become the target of a violent terrorist group that advocates genetic purity. To make matters worse, there’s something strange about the unborn children that’s attracting government attention …

So, I’m three novels in, and there’s nothing much really happening in terms of trying to snap up an agent, snare a publisher or catch the eye of anyone who’s anyone. I self-publish my first novel with sales figures that would humble a homeless, first-time, tuneless busker with a mangy dog. Now what?

Enter the glitzy world of film making, of course!

I’ve written novels, short stories, poems, song lyrics, a novella and shopping lists but the nearest thing I’ve written to something being performed is a one-act play for a creative writing evening course I took over 10 years ago when I first got into all this chicanery. I thought it was quite funny. It was set in a toilet.

Anyway. I also need a fresh challenge rather than just plodding straight into a fourth novel, so  after watching a couple of bad films, I thought I could do better and should put my money where my mouth is and try to write a screenplay. But what kind?

I like football but it appears the movies do not like football. My secondary motivation, after wanting to attempt to write a screenplay, is to make a decent football movie. Can you name one? I rack my brains and ‘Mike Basset England Manager‘ is at No.1. Don’t talk to me about bloody ‘Escape to Victory‘ – Stallone in goal? Give it a rest, son. The rest of the football canon consists of hooliganism or sanitised, corny, Hollywood shit like ‘Goal‘ which uses the old rags to riches storyline. ‘Bend It Like Beckham‘ is not bad but it still has a few sporting/football cliches in it, eg. man explaining to a woman the offside rule using condiments, protagonist on an upward trajectory, pretty poor football action, etc.

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I’m not sure what this says about the current point of my ‘writing journey’ but here’s a post about how rejections could be made easier for the rejector and more meaningful for the rejectee.

I got another rejection last week for ‘Blindsided‘, fine, but the rejection email itself was the usual bland, unhelpful, thanks-but-no-thanks. And I mean unhelpful for both parties. For example, if I were to get 3 rejections saying my first chapter is crap (‘1’ on the rejection scale) then I’ll improve it so the 4th agent to receive my submission will get an improved (hopefully) 1st chapter.

A reply is always good (any reply) as not every agent or publisher replies, but I can’t help feeling that a more meaningful response would help everyone in the long run.

The usual rejection email is something like this:

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I haven’t blogged in a shockingly long time, mainly because we (my girlfriend and I) have just had a baby who was, unthoughtfully, born 3 months premature so I’ve been otherwise engaged.

Anyway, a nice surprise was this review from Publishers Weekly which was actually initiated over at BookLife. They offer FREE book reviews so it’s worth a punt for any authors out there wanting more reviews.

As baby Harry is close to coming home, I’m hoping to write more of my football screenplay, ‘Row Z’, and also blog a bit more. I’ve never been prolific but these last few months have been shockingly unprolific.

As a debut self-published author you seem to spend most of your time begging kindly asking for reviews. 60% of these requests are ignored, 35% reply (which is amazingly scholarly and decent of you) and then 5% reply AND post a review (which is unbelievably generous of you).

So you spend a lot of time waiting.

Typically, you wait and then two come along. SFCrowsnest at the beginning of the month and now Sci-Fi Kingdom. Check it out here.

It’s a nicely structured review; a synopsis, the review, a grading (8/10 btw 🙂 ) and the best bit, ‘favourite quotes’ which was great as I’d forgotten writing these lines and even I thought they were pretty good! So that was a nice reminder.

You can get your own copy of ‘In A Right State’ here. It’s FREE at some places and about £2 at others – Amazon doesn’t make it easy to list books for free.