Highland Fling

Summer sale – Highland Fling

Need some light-hearted, fun reading for your holidays? Highland Fling is now on offer at £1.99/$1.99 in a e-book shop near you… Or it will be once they put my price changes in place. I’ll be running the price promotion until the end of July.

Here’s a little excerpt:

“That’s Christina the Dating Guru. Haven’t you heard of her?” Katya says.

Well, no. But then I haven’t needed dating advice for a long time. Ryan and I got together while we were still at school and we were together ten years so I’m bound not to be familiar with a dating guru. And what does that even mean?

“Have you used her advice, then?” I ask, “and if so, does it work?”

“Nope. I’ve just heard of her. An influencer and all that, and you’re not going to believe the weird co-inci… Oh, never mind. Her website address is datemate dot com. Look it up.”

And with that she hangs up. I tap out the name on my keyboard. Wow. This woman is all over the internet. She’s got a blog, podcasts, YouTube tutorials and everything. Curiosity piqued, I read through some of them. They include guides to using dating apps, what to do the first time you go out with someone so that they ring you back (guaranteed), the best profile pics to use and what make-up you should wear for a first date.

I’m half-way through an article about what will make you a sparkling conversationalist capable of capturing his attention and keeping it when someone clears their throat behind me.

“Ahem. Not interrupting anything am I?”

I whirl around on my chair so quickly, I fall off and land in an undignified heap at his feet. I had no time to minimise the screen either, and the site’s header—a riot of hearts and stars complete with the tag line, How to Go from Dating Loser to Loved Up, flashes there. I’m about to get up when another thought strikes me—he’s got the Dating Guru’s portrait upstairs, and he’s caught me looking at her website! I’ve just signalled loud and clear that I sneaked upstairs and had a good nosey. I might stay here, face down on the floor and praying the ground will swallow me until he goes away.

“Do you want a hand up?”

“No, no!” I straighten up slowly, keeping my eyes on that calming moss-green carpet until the last minute. Heavens, I’d forgotten just how… divine Jack is. Last week, his hair was army buzz cut, and now it’s grown in a little. Still short enough to show off those eyes and cheekbones but the extra millimetre of length emphasises its bright copper colour. The eyes regard me with amusement. Or perhaps it’s irritation. I’d better check with him that it’s okay for me to use his office.

“Er… I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow. Doctor McLatchie said I could use your house as the broadband connection is much better here,” I say, dismayed when he rolls his eyes and says, “She would”. Oh heck, didn’t the blasted woman warn him? And what right does she have to offer strangers the use of someone else’s home? I should have asked her to find me somewhere else to work.

He heads for the kitchen, asking me if I want another coffee.

“Yes please,” I follow him through. “Though I can make them, least I can do…” I trail off. He hasn’t actually confirmed I can use his house as my office.

In the kitchen, sunlight makes a brave attempt at cutting through the grey clouds to bounce off the redness of his hair. He leans against the kitchen counter, one foot up and his arms folded—one of those guys whose face gives nothing away. Does he ever crack a smile? I remember that photo Katya and I saw of him online when he’d worn this wide grin, the upturned mouth creating a dimple on one cheek, and how lush the smile made him seem.

Now though, those dark eyes remind me of the stand-offs I have with Little Ms Mena when she and I argue over how much smoked salmon she’s going to eat. Who will blink first? My wretched imagination peels clothes off him. He lifts his arms above his head and the tee shirt disappears. Before I know it he’s in front of me wearing only that white towel, neatly knotted over a perfect six-pack torso. I blink twice to dislodge the image.

The face in front of me cracks, a tiny upturn to the corners of the mouth signalling amusement. The change in expression is welcome but (ye gods) did he just read my mind?

Flippin’ heck, I hope not…

You buy Highland Fling on Amazon here.

I need a new bum and other mysteries

Click bait title, hmm? I’m running an ad campaign for Highland Fling, attempting to educate myself in the mysterious world of keywords.

I plugged my romcom book’s details in the Google Adwords keyword planner and one of the suggestions it threw back was ‘I need a new bum’. Low competition for that one apparently, but between 1k to 10k searches a month and a bid range of between 14-17 pence.

I get it—sort of. The Algorithm Gods who now rule our lives have waded their way through the tonnes of data we willingly hand over and decided a fair proportion of people who buy romantic comedies also worry about the gluteus maximus bit of themselves. Therefore, as they type the words (or ask Alexa) ‘I need a new bum’, a link to a romantic comedy book appears and they decide to buy that instead.

At least I hope they do. I’d much rather the women of the world were distracted from their gluteal quest and decided to buy a book instead* of chasing snake oil or dangerous surgery. Last year, an article in a newspaper highlighted one woman’s horrific experiences when she underwent a filler operation designed to give her a curvier backside. And another story told of a doctor who went on the run after one of his patients died following filler injections.

Body dissatisfaction

Tempting as it is to snigger at those stories, it is part of an overall trend towards body dissatisfaction fuelled by social media. As a teenager I only had magazines, TV and film to worry about and that was bad enough. Imagine living with a constant stream of too perfect images you hold in your hand…

Talking of which… Instagram announced this week that it might phase out visible ‘likes’ for posts on the platform—i.e. the likes for posts will be private so there is less competition between people to get reactions. This doesn’t bother me. As someone who has a following of less than 80 people, I never get that many likes anyway. So if only one or two people like my self-congratulatory posts about my books and there is no display of it, who cares?

Instagram, like other social media platforms before it, gave rise to influencers—i.e. people with huge followings who were then courted by companies to promote their products. The most famous example are the Kardashians whose social media accounts are reckoned to bring them in millions of dollars.

Kylie Jenner

Kylie Jenner’s make-up company leveraged that popularity, helping to turn her into a ‘self-made’ billionaire by the age of 21. (Like many other people, I dispute the Forbes’ classification of Kylie Jenner as ‘self-made’.)

If the likes for a picture of a fashion influencer wearing a pair of trainers or new duds courtesy of Top Shop or the likes do not show up, how do those influencers ‘prove’ their worth? Will they still get the freebies and the bungs if others cannot see how popular a post was?

Anyway, back to keywords. Will ‘I need a new bum’ get me sales and am I cynical enough to try it? Here’s hoping and yes.

*Not least because it puts money in my pocket…

Top 10 Procrastination Tips for Writers

HIGHLAND FLING – NOW ON AMAZON

So there I am, firing up the laptop and full of enthusiasm. I’ve a chapter to update or a blog post on the joys of cleaning (I write a lot of these). Whoop, whoop. Can’t wait to begin…

But first there are endless procrastination activities I can employ to delay the writing bit.

Here are some of my favourites:

Looking at the cover of Highland Heart (the book I’m writing at the moment) and phwoar-ing at the vector Dexter (dark hair and sunglasses) on the front cover. Tragically, I do this a lot.
Checking my sales of Highland Fling on the Kindle Direct Publishing dashboard twice a day. And that’s me exerting gigantic amounts of willpower; otherwise I’d look every few hours.
Watching cat videos on YouTube. No need to explain that one, eh? Here’s a fab one. No, no, no need to thank me.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjRs_WT8VzM
Checking my viewing figures for my stories on Wattpad. See number two for other examples of pathetic cravings for external validation.
Wandering the house looking for the cat so I can interrupt his busy sleeping schedule and tell him he is the loveliest diddly-dumpkins in the whole wide world.
For the love of all things holy let me SLEEP
Doing housework. No, really. If you are under the illusion that I’m a clean freak (see the reference to cleaning blogs above), I’m not but if housework delays that moment of putting pen to paper, I embrace it.
Updating my writer chums with long, detailed emails about my progress on the Work In Progress and exchanging moans about book sales.
Researching stuff. Does anyone else get this—where a random question strikes you and you think to yourself, ‘Aha! That’s the first thing I’ll do when I go online. Find out the history of the Medicis.’* And then you vanish down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia, emerging hours later with more knowledge than you’ll ever need about Renaissance Florence.
Checking your social media accounts. “I need to do this,” you tell yourself, “for professional reasons and not because I’ll get sucked into whatever is trending on Twitter and get caught up in conversation threads for hours on end.”
Pacing the floor because steps. If I stay in front of my laptop for too long, my entire body will seize up and I’ll be rushed to A&E where the doctors will need to perform emergency surgery to unbend my limbs. Better walk about a LOT then.

*Triggered because I’m watching Medici: Masters of Florence on Netflix at the moment.

Highland Fling – out now #amwriting romcoms

You get a cup of tea with your cake too!

If I knew you were coming, I’d have baked a cake…

Hello and welcome to the launch party—yes, Highland Fling is out there in the Amazon world. I had put it on Kobo, Apple Books etc., way back in April/May and much as I’d love to make the bulk of my sales off the Amazon platform, only an idiot author doesn’t use mighty book behemoth. .

You can find the book at: https://books2read.com/Highland-Fling

Here’s the short ad I ran for the book:

Love Jill Mansell & Katie Fforde? Gaby flees to Scotland to escape a failed relationship. When fate puts the red-headed Jack in her way, sparks fly…

I had to make the book sound exciting in 150 characters (including spaces) which is not a lot at all. And hence the ampersand above. I’d also originally put Jill Mansell and Sophie Kinsella, but Katie Fforde’s name was shorter. As she has also written a book called Highland Fling, maybe she’s the better choice.

Anyway, here’s the cake I baked to launch the book. Sorry you can’t eat it in person. Perhaps that’s okay with you if you’re avoiding sugary stuff as this cake is loaded with it. I decorated it with fudge icing made from 500g icing sugar. Dental decay in one mouthful.

Why a chocolate cake? In Highland Fling, I featured a chocolate cake—one created for a special occasion. Mine is nowhere near as fancy as the one I’d described. The people in my books are much better cooks than I am. They also have the patience for sugar work so can create cakes that not only taste nice but look fabulous too. As you can see from picture two, I am a hopeless food stylist.

The Highland Fling cake had pink frosting and silver stars, and more tiers. Four women shared a slice of it and the taste silenced them—quite an achievement as one of the characters is the world’s nosiest woman who doesn’t usually let a full mouth stop her questions. Here’s what I wrote:

Ashley places two plates of the Chocolate Decadence dessert in front of us, cutting Mhari off. Pink icing, the exact colour of the Blissful Beauty branding, holds together five layers of dark sponge, the lot covered in a ganache that sparkles with edible silver glitter. The chef has studded the top of the cake with stars made from white chocolate and piped a perfect BB in whipped cream on the top. We pick up the cake forks in unison, waiting for someone to fire the starter pistol.

And that leads me to a question for you:

If you would like to make the cake (and I am sure your efforts will be prettier than mine), it’s a Mary Berry recipe and you can find it here.

And finally, I’ve posted rather more blogs than I like to do this last week or so (three in one week; an all-time record) so I’m sorry if I have tried your patience. I’m going to take a blog break for two weeks. See you later this month and thanks for sticking around.

The happy day when your print book arrives…

As most authors would agree, a print copy of our book has far more emotional pull on my heart than the electronic version. Even if all you ever do is order one copy for yourself, do it anyway. It cements that feeling that yes, you ARE a proper author—you’ve got the paperback to prove it.

Nowadays, you can even create hardbacks through IngramSparks. At some point, my ego might run rampant and demand such but for the meantime, the paperback suffices.

And, oh it’s a thing of beauty. Enni at yummybookcovers designed my cover for it. (My terrible photography ‘skills’ do not do the cover justice.) She really knows what she is doing when it comes to chick lit book cover design. I’ve written a chick lit book and if you hadn’t already guessed from the title, it’s set in Scotland…

Attracting rom-com fans

My tagline adds that the book’s a rom-com and the design, the font and the positioning convey the genre clearly. As an author, you want the people who typically love your genre to see your book and know at once it’s what they enjoy reading.

Note that you can’t see my heroine’s face? Enni can explain that—romance readers like to project onto a main character and it’s easier to do the less you know what they look like. She’s also used vectors, another common practice in this genre’s book cover design practice.

Because the title of my book isn’t unusual, there are plenty of other Highland Flings—my cover makes mine look like the traditionally published versions (Katie Fforde’s one, for example) rather than screaming “self-published”. While traditional publishing doesn’t guarantee quality, readability and enjoyment there’s enough of a sense that a trad-pubbed book offers some of those things to make a book look like a better bet.

KDP printing

I set up print on demand copies of my book through Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). How did I find the experience? KDP replaced CreateSpace, the print book service Amazon bought some years ago. Some authors have reported issues with KDP, but I’ve used it three times and haven’t experienced any problems.

You supply KDP with an interior file and a cover file. This differs from the front cover you supply for an e-book because it has a spine and back, although KDP can create the spine and back from your e-book cover. I’d rather not. My design skills are negligible and if you’re going to go to the effort of creating a print book, why not it properly?

Five days to deliver

I uploaded the files, filled in the details bit and ordered a review copy on the Thursday night. The book arrived on Tuesday morning, ahead of the date Amazon told me. This is a common Amazon practice—managing the expectation of buyers so you are pleasantly surprised but I wouldn’t recommend relying on them to deliver early.

It did look beautiful. This time, I’d opted for a smaller size. The last book I ordered was 5½ by 8½, and I think the 5×8 version feels more ‘standard’. For the last book, I used IngramSparks for books bought outwith Amazon—I sold very few of them. In theory, I agree with IngramSparks. You will get much wider distribution of your books if you offer them via IngramSparks, but there is a set-up cost (refundable if you order 50 books) and it also requires the cover to be set up in a different way.

On the other hand, I did one version of that book through KDP too, and without a doubt the colours and design were much sharper. It’s worth noting KDP dominates the US and UK markets and therefore the service works best in these territories. I suspect it takes longer outside of the US, UK and certain European countries.

I will do the books via IngramSparks at one point, but only when I can afford it. This book needs to work harder for its money…

I’m incredibly pleased with my book cover and cannot recommend Enni’s services highly enough.

First in series promotion

I’m currently running a ‘first in series’ promotion on Kobo for Highland Fling, ahead of the Amazon launch next week…

You can buy the book on Kobo here.

Highland Fling – what’s in a name?

Book titles aren’t copyrighted (except in Germany), which means if you choose a generic title such as Highland Fling for a Scottish romance, chances are other authors will have gotten there before you.

I thought I’d explore the others and see what authors have done with the concept. Call me biased, but I think the Highland Fling cover Enni Tuomisalo of yummybookcovers.com created for me is far and away the best one.

Katie Fforde

Katie Fforde’s Highland Fling is the one that comes up first in most searches. She’s a well established chick lit author so that is to be expected.

Here’s the blurb:

When virtual assistant Jenny Porter’s boyfriend accuses her of being impulsive, soft-hearted and un-businesslike, dashing off to Scotland to sort out a failing mill for one of her clients may not be the best way of proving him wrong.

And promising to help run a mobile burger bar before she’s even found her feet doesn’t help matters. When she finds herself determined to save the mill—whatever her client’s wishes—it seems that Henry’s accusations may have contained more than a grain of truth.

So when Jenny’s awkward encounters with the abrasive but disconcertingly attractive Ross Grant develop into something more complicated—just as Henry arrives in Scotland to reclaim her—it’s time for Jenny to make some decisions. Should she do the sensible thing and follow Henry back to London? Or is her Highland adventure more than just a fling…?

Emma Kareno

I had to feature this one, as it’s also by an ‘Emma’ (though I’ve not seen an author neglect to put their name on a cover before…)

Jo thought she had her career all mapped out, after finishing her degree in archaeology she was going to work in Italy. Then she met Miles, a wealthy London businessman, and everything changed.

When Miles’s betrayal shatters her heart, in one wild and tear-stained moment of despair Jo throws her belongings into a suitcase and takes refuge with her cousin Heather in Edinburgh.

In the Scottish capital the annual festival is in full swing and the whole city is a vast playground of theatre, music and art. Without Jo realizing it, her sudden arrival soon stirs up trouble. As Jo slowly drags herself out of the doldrums of broken-hearted misery amidst the whirlwind of the world-famous festival, emotions reach boiling point around her.

There is Jerry, the fun-loving friend who cannot help pursuing Jo. There is Duncan, Heather’s boyfriend, a Scotsman whose rugged charm and impressive physique Jo just cannot ignore.

And then there is Duncan’s best friend, the drop-dead gorgeous Craig, as beautiful as a Greek statue and definitely beyond Jo’s reach. It is enough for him to walk into the room to set women’s hearts on fire with desire. Of course Jo falls head over heels in love. It is just like Jo to long for the impossible.

Jane Justine

The second one that comes up in the searches is an erotica book… (the backbone of the ebook industry?!) by Jane Justine.

Writer Charlotte Harvey is researching the mysterious legend of the Highland Ruby pendant for an antiques magazine.

Her quest leads her to a remote Scottish island where the pendant’s owner—the dark and charismatic Andrew Alexander—is keen to test its powers on his guest.

Alexander has a reputation for wild, and some say perverse behaviour. In this rugged environment Charlotte discovers the truth—the hard way!

Derek Adams

Finally, my favourite one is this book by Derek Adams…

Frank cancels a trip to the beach to help his buddy Randy check out the Scottish castle he has unexpectedly inherited. The castle is a wreck, Randy is a mess and Frank is furious—until he encounters the real Laird of the Manor and indulges in a ghostly highland fling.

(I’m definitely buying that one.)

My own Highland Fling, a romcom, is now available on Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play et al, and is available for pre-order on Amazon here.

Emma baird – author