Askival Re-Launch
Sorry for the shameless click bait! I guess Shocking Thing Number 1 is that I will resort to cheap, low-down tactics to get your attention. (But maybe you already knew that…) The reason is that I am appealing for your help. After my publisher’s collapse last year, I got the rights back for A House Called Askival, but just haven’t had the time or the will to tackle the torturous process of formatting and re-uploading it as an ebook. Until now. I realised that the 71st Anniversary of Independence and Partition this August was a ‘now or never’ moment, so took a deep breath and dived in. I nearly drowned in the techno-babble, but have surfaced, I think, with a readable ebook. It is available for pre-order now at a bargain price on all Amazon sites around the world and will be released at midnight on the 14th/15th August in commemoration of Independence.
So how can you help?
1. Pre-Order If you don’t already have the digital version and would like it, please order now from here or your own Amazon site. (Or buy again, for an updated version with glossary of the Hindi words!)
2. Share the News and this link http://bit.ly/AskivalUK as widely and as quickly as you feel appropriate.
3. Review If you haven’t already, please consider putting a rating and short review here http://bit.ly/AskivalUS or your local Amazon site. It makes a huge difference and only needs a few words.
Why the unseemly haste? The key thing with Amazon is to get a spike in sales in a very short space of time. This bumps a book up the charts and means it will be promoted and featured, generating more sales, and so on. Getting as many pre-orders as possible means that all the sales actually happen at the same moment when the book is released, thus creating the all-important-spike. I’ve set the book price quite low at the moment as another incentive - $2.99 US, £3.99 UK – so hopefully that will prod a few people out of the long grass of procrastination.
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On Amazon Japan, where Google Translate thinks it's a 'paper bag'
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Time for Trees
On the foliage theme, but in other news, my workshop on contemplating trees at Solas Festival went well and I really enjoyed meeting the lovely people who turned up. I will be leading three day-long reflective retreats called The Day of Trees in September (Church of Scotland venues) and October (The Bield at Blackruthven), so do consider coming along or sharing the news with others. All the details are here:
Church of Scotland Day of Trees
Bield Day of Trees
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Solas participants
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Festive Spirit
It’s soon time for my annual pilgrimage to Auld Reekie for festival season. I go this Saturday 11th to help on a Society of Authors stall in the Edinburgh International Book Festival bookshop on George Street, where we’ll be chatting with folks about what the Society does, as well as curating some short readings. That night is the EIBF opening party, which is something of a who’s who of the lit scene, and then I’m back again on the 19th as the chair for two kids’ book events. Then I’ll stay through till the 21st for our Society of Authors in Scotland AGM, plus fitting in a bunch of fun stuff in-between. The final foray is on the 24th, when I take our group from Kingussie High School to a book fest talk and a fringe show. We’ve got 22 kids signed up this year, which is almost double when we started four years ago, so really exciting. I’ll update you on everything when I’m back and recovered!
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Never know who you'll meet at The Fringe
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2nd Shocking Thing You Never Knew About Merryn
She has never watched a single episode of Blue Peter. This won’t mean anything to people in India, Australia, the US, or indeed most of the world, but – I have discovered - is deeply shocking to people in the UK, who wonder how I survived such an impoverished childhood. I can only hope my chairing of kids’ events at EIBF will not suffer for it.
All for now and thank you in advance for any help you can offer promoting the Askival re-launch. Hugely appreciated.
Namaste!
Merryn
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