Readership!

          Marketing, you'd think, would increase your readership. That means the number of people who buy your books. The only marketing I've done for my ten books on Kindle has been to recommend them to folk on the discussion threads on Amazon. But I assumed this wasn't having any effect at all.

          However, I've been checking my account and I've sold about fourteen or fifteen books in the last nine days (since the start of December) and almost all of them were sold in Britain. One book has sold in France, The Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf, so vive la belle France! I wondered why only a few have been sold in America, but I've just noticed that it was Amazon UK where I was leaving the messages. If you stick Amazon.com into the browser, you get a completely different page. And the one for the book I've mentioned has a Buddhist forum.

          This has changed my idea of what I was going to write in this post. I was going to say that I'm really out of this writing game at present, and I'm going to concentrate my energies on my meditations, the Great Vajrayana, and if I'd wanted a readership, I'd have started writing books about a one eyed, one legged detective with a slight heroin problem, and a dog called Spot. This is not that I didn't want to be a "success", but I was never poor enough, or had enough time to devote to writing detective books.

          I wanted to write all kinds of different books and  I have written genre fiction. Remote Control is a political thriller. Ursula Mackenzie was my agent at the time and she suggested that I write a political thriller and I managed to finish it only thirty years later! But it is in a genre.

         I have also written two books for children of between ten (actually, whenever you can read!) and fourteen, In The Land of the Demon Masters and Bugtown. And I know these are excellent books for children and young folk because I road tested them on a lot of kids when I was still a school librarian. Stand on me. Twelve year old kids love these books!

         But the books I would really like people to read before any others are The Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf and TheBlissBook. Like Are You Boys Cyclists?, nobody but me could have written these books. The style is, I think, mine. But the reason why I'd like folk to read them is because amongst the travelling (the first one is about being in Nepal and India) and education, and writing, and the jokey bits, these books promote meditation. If more folk meditated, more folk would be happier than they would have been. I've been meditating for over twenty five years and that's something I do know.

         These days I've taken a break from writing so I can practise Vajrayana Buddhist meditations, and this takes all your time.

         I was going to write that I'm very grateful to Allan Guthrie for telling me all about marketing, but I really can't be bothered. I'm  not really wanting to become an indie publisher or a professional writer anymore (though I've been writing for over thirty years!) since I don't need the money, and I'm not going to stop telling folk that half my books have been rejected by almost everyone because they have, including by him in his agent capacity, but now that I realise that I got the sales by promoting myself on these discussion threads - for how else could anyone have found them? - I think I might spend a wee while every day harassing folk to buy my Buddhisty books in the America Amazon site. A Buddhist forum! Eat your heart out, you Dharma bums! Here I come!
9:42  p.m.
        This is later! So I goes to the Buddhisty forums on Amazon.com and it is wonderful! There are threads from folk who want to know about meditating, and how to start meditating, and I think I can advertise my give-away-for-bugger-all books to them, and I spend a half an hour writing this huge post about the Buddhisty books and all, and then I try to post it, and ... zippo! It says that you have to buy something first. I assume buying the one book I bought before doesn't count with these folk since I bought it through the UK site, and, anyway, it was a waste of time and effort. I would have had to spend ages and ages buying my own book off the Amazon.com site, as opposed to the Amazon.uk site, and then some other obstacle might occur.
        I think God is telling me that this is intermittent reinforcement, and don't do this. It's clinging and craving, leading to becoming and then ... grief, sorrow, lamentations ... delusions, disappointments and despair, suffering in this life.
       What we need is a young person. I've already signed away 25% to the boy who helped me set up this blog, who claims he has my signature on a napkin, and fifteen percent to the consiglieri, but if someone would like ten percent of what's left .... Dearie me! I have no problem with the quality of the wonderful writings I used to do. But that's it! It's much better to go and meditate in my hut. Realising voidness is all that matters!