It’s been a long while since I’ve written a blog. I’d blame the pandemic, but I’m not sure it has to take full responsibility, although it had a surprising effect on me.
It made me insanely busy.
But first things first – the launch of The Verindon Alliance went well. I had to do it online only, as we were in the middle of a lockdown, but I held a Facebook live event, which you can see here, if you would like to, and it received a fairly good response. Sales have been encouraging, and this has been reassuring, especially since I haven’t been able to go to any of my usual haunts to sell. There has been no ComicCon and no Supanova, no bookstore signings, no school visits.
This might have driven me mad if it wasn’t for the other effect COVID had on me. As a professional editor, I expected all my editing work would dry up as soon as the lockdown started. Coupled with the possibility of losing sales because of the lockdown, I was a little worried. However, it seems that a lockdown gives people time to think about that manuscript that they’ve had sitting around for years that they haven’t done anything with. Enough of them clearly still had enough funds to pay a professional editor. At my busiest (which was, coincidentally, about when The Verindon Alliance was released) I was editing seven manuscripts simultaneously. The most I had ever done at once before that was four, and that had been for only a short period of time.
So I do have a reasonable excuse for not blogging in so long, although admittedly, the editing has been a bit slower lately. I’m still busy but it’s normal busy now.
But now I’m starting to think about that other time of year that’s coming up so quickly, as it does every year. Christmas. As I live in Brisbane, where we have pretty good control of the few small outbreaks of COVID we’ve had lately, I may even be able to do some bookstore gigs, and may have to see if I can sort that out soon. I’m also happy to do Zoom calls with any book club or anything like that if you feel like a visit, and a face-to-face if you’re local.
But it’s a real challenge to try and get back into thinking about how to market my book normally. The world is incredibly different now, so many things are still up in the air. But it may be a while before our pre-COVID lives return, if they ever do, so I encourage you to keep trying to find your new normal, as I try to do the same.
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