Hello, and how was your week? Mine has been frustratingly slow – some weeks just go like that don’t they. I have however, made a little progress on the book promoting front.

Firstly, I have, I think, managed to add paragraphs to my description on Amazon. On Facebook, I belong to a couple of writer’s groups. One is the Association of Christian Writers (which I had to pay to join) and one is the SciFi Roundtable (which was free). Now, the Scifi one is brilliant. They are a group of authors who all try to help each other, promote each other’s books, offer feedback on writing, etc. They are also very funny, so I enjoy the general banter and jokes, even if I don’t always join in (I think most of them are rather more intelligent than me!) Anyway, I asked them about the whole paragraph on Amazon thing, and they told me to add <p> at the start of a paragraph, and <p/> at the end. It worked. At least, it did for Hidden Faces. I now need to try it for the JOANNA description.

Second bit of news is I finally have a trading agreement set up between Gardners and Waterstones. This has taken a very long time! I now need to submit a copy of JOANNA to Waterstones, and hope they like it enough to stock it in their shops (it is already available on their website). Of course, they do not actually tell you where to send a copy, you have to send a form asking for the address. Which all takes time. Luckily, books don’t have a ‘sell-by’ date.

I was also interviewed by a local journalist. This was less scary than last time (everything is less scary than last time). We met in a cafe, full of men who either looked like builders having a late breakfast, or retired gentlemen on their own having coffee. I was the only female in the cafe. We talked about JOANNA, and I launched into all the amazingly interesting facts I have discovered about psychopaths. Now, my family have begun to be less than enthusiastic about psychopaths, but that cafe full of blokes were captivated! I became aware that all the other tables were silent and listening to our conversation. Then they started to join in – leaning across to ask if I thought President Trump was a psychopath! It was very funny. Hopefully, it might also sell a few books when it appears in shops in April.

The journalist took a photo (always embarrassing) and said he would write an article to coincide with the book launch on 29th March. I do hope the article is about JOANNA, and not about me – I’m quite a private person really. He has since emailed me. He is sometimes invited to speak on Meridian FM and BBC Radio Surrey, and has suggested to them that I could go and talk about psychopaths. This would be both brilliant and extremely scary. Good for the book promo though, so I hope something happens. I will let you know.

xxx

Since writing this, another journalist contacted me, asking for an interview. This one wanted a photograph of me “at my desk”. Now, when you have a family, “your desk” tends to be any available space that’s not too noisy. At present, it is my dressing table, in my bedroom. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to take a stranger into my bedroom (especially as I wasn’t sure when they emailed if they were male or female – a bloke might’ve got the wrong idea when I started to lead him upstairs!) So, I decided to ‘create’ a desk downstairs, in the corner of the kitchen. I do sometimes work there, but usually surrounded by lost socks and piles of laundry and odd items the dog has brought me. So I did bit of a tidy up. I also realised just how many dead plants I own. Seriously, every window sill in the house had a dead plant on it! They had to go. As did the muddy paw prints on the floor and the pillow worth of dog hairs. By the time she arrived, I had done a major Spring Clean and was exhausted. Next time, I shall do what J K Rowling did, and pretend I wrote my books sitting in cafes.

I am hoping the interview part went well. She seemed very interested, anyway – and told me about a few people she knows, asking if I thought they were psychopaths.

I have also booked a table at the Easter Market in town. This will be a good place to sell signed copies of JOANNA in April. It is all beginning to fall into place.

To preorder JOANNA, please follow the link:

https://anneethompson.com/published-books/joanna/

xxx