In a quaint British custom – The New Year’s Honours List – Her Majesty has made Ringo a knight of the realm for services to drumming.

Lord Ringo would have been better. It sounds like a character in a fantasy film. ‘The dragons are at the gates, Lord Ringo!’

‘For services to’ is a euphemism for doing your job and getting rich and famous. Generous donors to the Tory party (or New Labour; or Old Labour for that matter) get honoured for ‘services to business’. Since the Beatles got the MBE there’s been a crowd-pleasing tendency to give meaningless titles to entertainers as well for ‘services to dance’ and so forth.

Workers at Tesco are not made Dames for doing their job – or ‘services to checkouts.’ I am still waiting to be made Lord Murphy for services to call handling.

If Santa brought you an e-reader for Christmas then you might like to try it out with free books. These multi-author giveaways are currently running on Instafreebie but only until the 31st December.

Gothic Horror: Madness and the Macabre.

Best of British Science-Fiction

Horror and Thriller

 

FREE BOOKS! CLICK HERE for Instafreebie Group Giveaway of horror stories.

The free books are not just mine but those of other writers too.

Although I take most marketing claims with a large pinch of salt there was no harm in trying Instafreebie as it’s free on the basic plan; but you don’t collect readers email addresses. I put a book up and had about 20 downloads over a couple of months on the basic plan.

Instafreebie e-mailed me and told me that if I had been on the $20 per month plan I would have collected 20 email addresses for my mailing list. The free plan doesn’t collect email addresses. However, you can try the $20 a month plan free for a month.

That’s what I’m doing now and it’s looking good. I joined Five Little Horrors onto a group giveaway and on day one – today – 37 people have claimed it. How many have read it is a different issue but it’s something. There’s no money in it, of course, but the idea is to get your name known to readers, get them on your mailing list and let them know about your latest release so they can bound enthusiastically to their computers and buy it at once.

I rather think  most people who download free books like free books and won’t buy any but it’s worth a go. Moreover, like any writer I want my stuff to be read. Bought and paid for is nice but read will do.

All my books are on giveaway individually (except The Brigstowe Dragons which I didn’t publish) but the group giveaways seem to be the way to go. There’s safety in numbers. All fifty writers in the group will be promoting it and we all help boost each other, which is also nice.

Now all I have to do is spend a week figuring out how Mailchimp works so I can send a newsletter to my new fans. Oh, and write a book for them to buy.