Be the first to read my sequel!

If you are biting your nails because you can't wait to get your hands on the sequel to No Wings Attached, here's a chance to do so very soon. Or if you haven't read the first book yet and are curious what it's all about, but didn't get around to buy it, fear not, with a bit of luck you'll be able to snuggle up with the romantic comedy this weekend.

Read2Review is hosting a book give away today. And the lucky winner will receive No Wings Attached right now, and Candlelight Sinner in January, pre release. You'll be the first to read it and it's for free. All you need to do is answer a simple question and spread the word, then the books will be yours. And who knows, maybe I'll throw in another two for two more lucky winners?

So, what are you waiting for? Tell everyone who can't run fast enough and keep your fingers crossed.

Tip of the week: How to do major rewrites

Major rewrites was something alien to me. I must admit having had the huge task before me for the first time, I had my struggles in the beginnings. I get easily confused if you give me three sheets of paper, let alone doing it on screen. Everyone has a different system and I received some advice which, frankly, didn't help me. I never edit on paper, for it doesn't have a better effect than on screen, at least not for me. I'm talking major edits: deleting huge chunks, moving/rewriting/adding scenes or characters. That's nothing you could do on paper, at least I can't.

Since I'm an editor myself, I often make my clients do the same, but they have an advantage: I tell them where or what to cut or add or even how. So they have guidance. Something I didn't have. Okay, that's not entirely true; I had a few wonderful people reading the book and giving feedback. They confirmed where I thought the book might need work. And I can officially say that, at some point, the book bored me stiff. And I couldn't even blame someone else for it, no, it was all my fault. Luckily, I followed my own advice and didn't touch the book for several months, which results in me reading with (almost) fresh eyes and that again resulted in my deleting an impressive 9k. 

Here's how I tackled the massive undertaking:
First, I copied the complete book into a new document and saved it
Then I read through it and made comments on what to add along the way (highlighted them in yellow) and deleted all the boring bit and bobs.
A few things I wanted to keep to use later, I copied into another document named miscellaneous
When I had finished reading the whole book, I started to rearrange scenes; I had one in the end that I wanted to place smack bang in the middle of the book and did exactly that.
That drastic move meant I needed to iron out the seams so it wouldn't confuse the reader later.
After that I went to find the yellow highlighted comments and added a scene, character or prose, depending on what the comment said. I wrote those in a new document to make corrections easier.

This concept seems to work for me and I will use it in future, if I ever need to do a heavy rewrite again. I'm not finished yet, but I refilled 2k of the 9k I lost. I might not make the 76k I had before, but it doesn't matter. 72k is a good size, too. As long as it's a tight and enjoyable read.

How do you go about it? The same? Completely different? What's your secret weapon?

No Christmas for me

I mean it: no Christmas for me. To those of you who have read my book Excuse me, where is the exit? know already, that I'm not the biggest fan of Christmas; far too stressfull and most families end up drunk or fighting or both. I prefer to use the time and -- for once -- peace in the house to get some work done.

How can you not like Christmas, you wonder? Well, apart from the fact that I'm not religious, I think it's fake and spiralled out of control, into a commercial day. Nothing's about love and sharing anymore, instead it's about who's got the biggest, most expensive presents. The charities run riot and fall over each other in the supermarkets to appeal to the good heart of people. I personally think people who have much more than others should share when they can, on every day of the year. If all who have more would think about those who have nothing every day of the year, the world would be a better place.

Many say: oh it's just for the children. Yes, it's nice to have the Christmas tree and have the children sitting on Father Christmas's knee, but why do they need all the masses of presents from their parents, grandparents, aunties and uncles? To me, that's training them from an early age that Christmas means a lot of presents. It trains them to become materialistic.I don't think that's the meaning of the fest.

Don't get me wrong, I do like the idea of getting together, sharing food, wine, love and laughter, but which family really has these idyllic days? In many families it's pure stress, mother spends all day in the kitchen, kids come home, eat, take their presents and leave for the party with friends.

I wonder how many people are actually out there, celebrating what they have in each other. I personally love surprising people on any time of the year, by giving them a little something as well as telling them how much they mean to me.

Sweet & Sour Lentils gone wrong

Recently, luck walked out on me, and in a hurry to get away it must have stumbled over the cable of my fridge freezer, pulling the plug. When I came home with a bag full of shopping, I found the food in my freezer defrosted and had to throw away quite a bit, the rest is going to be used in a cooking marathon over the next few days.
Today, I decided to use the bacon and duck breast; to go with it, I thought sweet & sour lentils would be a great idea. And as I'm a bit of a Blumenthal, always trying new things, I added apples to the lentils.
Here's the thing: if you ever have people coming round your house and you want it to be their last visit here's the recipe that'll make sure of it:


I used: 
soaked green lentils
half a red onion (chopped)
three slices of smoked bacon (diced)
a small apple (chopped)
a far too generous amount of vinegar (it wasn't on purpose, I swear)
an equally good amount of honey to make it look like you know what you're doing
vegetable stock

Sweat the onions and bacon in some oil, add the lentils and apples, cover with the stock, then let it simmer until the fluid is gone. Turn the heat off when you put the meat in the pan.

Score the skin of the duck breast, season with salt and pepper. Heat a pan with a bit of oil, then put the breast in the pan, skin side down. Fry for about two or three minutes, turn the heat down to medium. Turn the breast and leave it for another three minutes. Depending on the thickness and how you like it, keep turning until ready. Let it rest for a minute or two, put the lentils onto plates, slice the breast and place it on the lentils, decorate with whatever you like. Voila!

Looks brilliant, but taste vile, trust me. Not the breast, but the lentils. Just watch your visitors' faces as their eyes water from the sharp sting of the vinegar and smile.

Tip: cook the lentils the same way, but without the bacon, vinegar and honey and you're in for a treat :-)

Pass me the tissues, please.

When I logged into my e-mail account today, I found a rather complimentary letter from a guy who said he enjoyed my blog immensely. Ah, I thought, that's something nice to wake up. then, when I read on, my smile dissolved. It seems that with so many bloggers, the job directories are catching up, or better people who try to make money like the big jobsites like monster, stepstone and the like. They contact bloggers with a sob story to get them to link to their sites. For free of course. Legit companies have set aside a certain budget for advertising and won't get in touch with private bloggers. This particular company is registerd in Cyprus, so it says in the e-mail. I didn't bother to check. I've had quite a few e-mails of this kind in the past and I wonder how many people fell for it. This one was so great, I had to share it.

Excerpts of the e-mail:

"I just want to thank you for your wonderful blog."

Here is where my smile appeared.

"I read the post "Newsletter: return to sender" and then I spent another hour on your blog by reading your posts with pleasure :) Every article is interesting and easy to read."

Oh, oh, oh, you're going to offer me a freelance job as a content writer, aren't you? I thought, excited about the prospects to have some extra money doing something I love. Perhaps even at a good rate. I read on

"I really like the "I love my flat, but not the neighbours"."

Really? I'd like to know why? It's nothing more than a boring list of events and it ends in me saying that it's taking a toll on my health. You're rather weird, you know that?

"I work for Jooble company, we aggregate job adverts around the world."

Right, and what has that to do with my -- as you say -- wonderful blog? Now out with the job offer. Chop Chop!

"My job is to persuade bloggers to link to our site."

I'm confused you signed off as 'account manager'. But that aside: I'm guessing this is not a job offer but you'll try to 'persuade' me now?

"I really love my job! We have a friendly team and good management, but unfortunately I have no idea how to convince a blogger to link to us, I'm afraid I might lose my job because of it :("

Awww. You poor thing. Seems like your blogger persuasion skills are non-existent then?

"And that is why, instead of sending letters to thousands of different blogs, I am reading yours."

Are you saying, my little blog will make up for thousands of different blogs in the search engines? Wow, that's brilliant. Let's get down to business. �500 a months for an advertising link on my blog? Come on, your company can write it off next April.

"Our site is really cool, it can greatly help hundreds of people to find jobs."

Great, so why are you not trying to find a suitable job for yourself then?

My offer stands, you pay me �500 each month and I'll put a link to your company's website. Deal? Let me know when you're up for it. You have my e-mail.

Best,

Stella Deleuze

PS: Don't tell a blogger you spent over an hour reading his or her blog. I have an insight as to how long visitors stay, what they looked at and where they came from.

Please do not disturb: my iguana, my king

This was just too cute I had to share. After a relaxed doze on his top shelf he came down for a bit of a cheek rub. He loves it. But first things first: I fed him some spring greens, holding the huge leaves, so he can -- like they do in nature -- perforate and rip pieces off. He looked rather happy munching away.

Then, he decided it's time for a massage. Since he normally doesn't enjoy being touched, these rare occasions need to be savoured. As soon as I stroked his cheek, he dropped his feet and melted into the cork-bark.

 If an iguana does that when you touch it, he's definitely relaxed. ------------------------->









 See the back leg stretched, a good sign.

You can see he enjoyed it. After five minutes, though, he had enough and buggered off. :-)

Man I love this animal, with all his faults and troubles and even with all the aggressions, these are the rewarding moments.

Self-publishing: it's crucial to be realistic

I read it more and more on writers' websites that authors, being fed up with getting rejection after rejection, are eager to self-publish. Often accompanied by the words 'I've heard so much about all the success stories, I'm thinking about it, too.'

As much as I support self-publishing at some point, I can't help but wonder how they define 'success'. Would they call one book a week a success or maybe one book a day, perhaps ten books a day? And I wonder if they know how little they get from each sale. Unless they start with a novel at $2.99, which is what you need to have to receive 70% royalties, but readers are more reluctant to buy. If you price it lower, you might get more sales, in fact you have to make many more sales to have the same royalties you'd get from one sale with $2.99 (about �2, I think)

I had priced my novel at 99c to start with and sold 65 in the first month. I then put the price to $3.49/�2.50 and the sales dropped drastically. Might be the subject matter (paranormal romantic comedy), but it could easily be down to pricing.
Reviews from independent blogs didn't seem to boost sales either. Now don't understand this as a moan; I've always said, you never know if a book sells or not; despite good reviews readers didn't exactly queue to buy the book. It's just something one has to accept. I will release the sequel to No Wings Attached in Janurary and will see how it picks up and if it picks up, if it will push the first book's sales, too. If not, then there's not much I can do other than writing them off as 'good books, but nobody wants to read them'.
Unless you couldn't care less about sales, for most of us self-publishing is a full time job; the press release, the plugging, the guest appearances, interviews, blogging, give-aways, talks, signings (if you have paperbacks), blog tours, etc. Marketing isn't to be taken lightly, because it's crucial to selling, unless you have a highly commercial book in a popular genre, like Thriller, for instance. Then it might pick up without you doing anything, especially if it's of good quality.

My short stories have been rather consistent in sales, I had them on a low price from the beginning and they have been perceived well by readers, which I'm glad for. Still, I personally wouldn't call rougly over 3500 sales (kindle only) since March as successful -- others might disagree -- but to me success begins if I sell about 1000+ in a month, because that's when your book is visible in the Amazon charts.

I think the sales figures often sound much better than they actually are. I receive 30% of each sale for 86p. Again, I'm not complaining, it's not a whinge, I'm just trying to bring across the reality of self-publishing to those who are dreaming. Hocking, Locke, Leather and the likes are the exeptions of the rule. Certainly, there are a few inbetween who sold over 10k or more books, which is fantastic, but the majority of authors struggle in the lower ranks, competing against the vast amount of new authors who release their books daily.

My advice is to be realistic, don't expect anything and if success comes around the corner by surprise, you will be more able to enjoy it.

Note: I'm refering to amazon kindle and smashwords here, as I don't have experienced B&N yet. Smashwords, to me, has not been proven the right platform, which might be due to less promotion because I have my main sales through Amazon.