As I mentioned yesterday, Grey Moons last story was published on the Little Fears website this week. Along with Capricorns final page. A letter to the illustrator.
I’m afraid I lack good photos of the book. Both my copies were sent up to Scotland a year ago where I was meant to follow two to three months later. A year later… Life aye? Still, it looks like my two years bad luck run with the flat may be coming to an end. Some progress has been made on the sale. If it happens in June I’ll be homeless for a few months until I’m able to buy a new house. So darned happy today.
Capricorns horror stories were about the best thing I did early on in the Little Fears life. By establishing horror and weird fiction alongside the humour, I gave myself a huge amount of flexibility in what I can draw and write here. I love telling Little Fears groaners, but if that’s all this website was, I think it would be a bit poorer.
The horror shorts came about from a deep love of the old British horror and sci-fi radio shows along with theTwilight Zones and Outer Limits.
Capricorns horror shorts are available as an ebook and a paperback. I’d usually say something piffy about sniffing books, but in this case, I’d sniff with caution. You don’t know if she’s going to reach off the cover and drag you into one of her horrors within.
Fancy the risk? Well OK, I did warn you. She’s available on Amazon from the links below.
My good friend Joseph from WikiPoem recently asked about getting a tattoo of Capricorn. Brave man! I’ve never heard of a tattoo dragging its bearer into the pits of horror, but it sure sounds possible!
Finally, if you have a custom request for an illustration, doodle or fear you have seen here, just let me know in comments. Another good friend from WordPress, Eric of Dogtown (who I feel like I’ve known forever!), put in a request the other day. I’m quite happy to offer reprints of older illustrations.
Little Fears sales posts are like a British bus service. Nothing for ages, then two come along at once…
Well, I finished publishing two books on this site this week. My most recent humorous book, Grey Moon, was one of them.
Over the last three months, my three leading ladies, Fuen, Yuffie and Reala have made their way through 84 tales of ornithology, penguins, rum, love and splinters.
For a book I totally failed to promote on release, it’s received some great reviews over time. On Amazon and Good Reads, it sits at 4.5 out of 5 stars. For a more in-depth review, my good friend Richard has gone into detail in his review of Grey Moon this week.
It’s been an enjoyable story to tell and nice having an all-female cast. That was never intended as a social or political statement, but it’s been lovely hearing from folk who took it as a positive representation of women and LBGT in fiction.
If you’d like to grab a copy of Grey Moon, you can hit the links below. The paperback’s pretty darned sexy and smells lovely. It would make a great present for someone who enjoys sniffing new paperbacks. And reading. It’d be good for some who likes reading too.
Is that a book? Is it free for 1.5 more days? Is it awesome? Is that another cushion… Yes… Yes, it is…
Also, my book is still free, but as the title suggests, only for 1.5 more days. Head on over to Amazon and buy it for $0.00 and you can download it to any PC, tablet, iPad and Kindle ereader.
If you grab a copy and enjoy, please do leave me a review. It helps me so much! If you leave me a review, let me know in comments and I’ll give you and your own website a shout out during the week.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking holy heck does this man have a lot of soft furnishings. Well yes. Yes, I doodley do!
Also, my book is still free, but as the title suggests, only for 2.5 more days. Head on over to Amazon and buy it for $0.00 and you can download it to any PC, tablet, iPad and Kindle ereader.
If you grab a copy and enjoy, please do leave me a review. It helps me so much! If you leave me a review, let me know in comments and I’ll give you and your own website a shout out during the week.
Little Fears Presents: Seeking Hydra. The fourth book in the Little Fears Presents series. The ebook will be free this week. Head on over to Amazon and buy it for $0.00 and you can download it to any PC, tablet, iPad and Kindle ereader.
If you grab a copy and enjoy, please do leave me a review. It helps me so much! If you leave me a review, let me know in comments and I’ll give you and your own website a shout out during the week.
Fancy a synopsis?
If anything is going to save the Little Fears from awful punch lines, it is not Hydra having an existential crisis. In Seeking Hydra, Great British groaners are the order of the day as the assembled Little Fears make their way through 90 tales of lemon trees, kinky behaviour, confused doors and mystical road hogs. Boxers seek a joke; Beat finds his pop; Sprite sees a Russian president; Lucy shoots a clay pigeon; Emu’s tossed out of a club. Written and posted with scruffy illustrations daily on LittleFears.co.uk, these brief vignettes (50 to 100 words) chronicle the continuing adventures of the Little Fears. With only a sense of whimsy and a deep love of old British comedy, Seeking Hydra will make you groan, cry and laugh until a bit of wee comes out, in a truly original, unoriginal, work of art and fiction.
This weeks #Colour_Collective submission. Alice blue was the colour of the week and I love the way she turned out. She’s called Alice after the colour of course. I may use her in future tales.
Threadless Sale
A reminder once again, our Threadless store has free shipping on orders over $45. Y’all know I don’t do sales, but free shipping on $45 orders, that I can get behind. Use the promotional code CHEER7cca8e at checkout. Offer ends December 15th.
I do love how sexy my books look. Hydras story on the Little Fears is nearing an end. His search for an identity is a theme that runs throughout the new book. His last five tales will be published Monday to Friday next week. In a wonderful piece of timing, my book will be released Monday. For the whole of next week, the digital edition will be free on Amazon. Keep an eye out for it! If you fancy picking up my first three books, follow this link: http://amzn.to/2xWXILF
Free Film Promotion
I was part of a promotion this week and got a non-response on Twitter. Yeowch. I think I talk too much there so my tweets may have been lost in the tide of retweets and blether. I have 10 codes to give away for Chili Cinema. Want to nobble a £5 code to watch a movie? Reply to this tweet and a code will be yours. Linky: http://bit.ly/2A5VDNF
Patreon
Have you noticed my weekly update posts have had links to my new patrons? Well, not for the last couple weeks… Do you want a shout out at the bottom of my weekly update posts? Head on over to Patreon and pledge $10 or more a month and not only will you help with Hydra’s feed bill, but you will also get that weekly shout out with a link back to your site. Hit me up on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/littlefears
Now here’s a thing. I don’ know if this is a unique issue for me, or if it effects everyone. I have found with every single book release I have done, I have tried offering digital editions to you, my subscribers and followers, for free. Inevitably the Amazon freebie hunters always end up with copies and always, usually on Good Reads, they leave me a negative review.
Capricorn got a bad review for being weird fiction, January got a bad review for being just groaners and Spiders got a DNF review from someone moaning it was just jokes. In each case, I have been left scratching my head asking, if they could read even half the book, why couldn’t they read the synopsis? Go figure. To quote a Huffpost article:
Don’t trash the book because it wasn’t what you expected. Unless the book was misrepresented, it’s your responsibility to understand what you’re buying before you buy it. Trout Fishing in America isn’t really about trout fishing, and Fear of Flying is not for nervous travelers.
Anywhos! For the book writers out there, this time I asked you, the subscribing rabble, to leave a review every time I posted about the free book offer. I got twelve reviews on Amazon. Currently at 4.8 stars. The one negative review I got was from a freebie book hunter, complaining about it all being puns. On Good Reads, there’s more freebie hunters and fewer people who know me. If it wasn’t for Jan’s review, I would have 2.5 stars. That’s the difference you guys have made. Thank you.
For those 11 reviews, I gave away around one hundred free ebooks on Kindle over five days. I don’t recognize more than half of the people on Good Reads who currently have me listed ‘as reading’. So I don’t know how many freebie book hunters got my book and how many subscribers got my book.
Sales wise, I have had one sale either paperback or digital every day since I stopped offering it for free up from one per week before Spiders release. Water could be muddied there as I didn’t do an ounce of promotion for the prior three months dealing with my home issues. Then I suddenly did five days of heavy promotion. There’s also a mix of books being sold. It seems January and Capricorn have had a wee bump in sales from Spiders release.That makes sense and I have heard from a lot of authors, you need at least three books on sale before you get regular and consistent sales. For something as specialized and super niche as the Little Fears presents books, I believe a sale a day is good. My books are expensive. I am not yet famous. I can’t offer novel value prices of $2 a book.
There’s something else to learn from one review. Richard Yates questions whether what I do is flash fiction or a cartoon. I don’t know myself, to be honest. For those that followed my stories before I created the Little Fears, I wrote stories on their own and drew completely unrelated doodles and posted them elsewhere. There never used to be any connection between them. I know flash fiction circles hate jokes being called flash fiction. Y’all know I’m not gonna listen to that crowd’s opinion though right?
Richard did make me think. Now both January and Capricorn are released from Kindle Select I am looking for expanded distribution for them both. Maybe I should be turning my attention to the digital comic distribution platforms instead of just book platforms. Good thinkin’ Richard!
Do you take anything from this?
I don’t know if any of that is either helpful or relevant to any of you. I do know I have a lot of people hoping to self-publish who read this blog though, so I figure any data or experiences are helpful aye?
If you want to read a few reviews, there’s a couple more below.
And if you have any questions, y’all know I try to help by email or comments. Ask me anything about my book writing and publishing process and I will try to answer.
Little Fears presents: Spiders – Free for 3 more days
Hey, there rabble you still have three more days to grab a free Kindle edition copy of spiders. Links are at the bottom of this post. The rest of this post will cover the closure a book can bring.
The Little Fears books give me closure on 3-4 month blocks of stories.
I had a comment from Phil Huston the other day, “Tell me. There is joy in putting a project on the shelf? “
Yes. For me there is. I like finishing projects. My end date moves all the time for every project, but generally, I like to conclude things. Finishing a project gives me a tremendous sense of freedom and excitement for the next project. The Little Fears as they currently stand have enough tales written to keep posting one new story a day until 2024’ish. About 2,000 stories left to publish. I’d like to get to get the Little Fears to 2027. A full ten year run of Fears daily tales!
When I created the first book, January, it was about 96 stories long. Three months of stories. It felt like a good length book. At the time it also allowed me to, well, literally close the book on the first three months worth of Little Fears. Mentally that enabled me to get on with putting together Capricorn and Spiders. The next book in the series will be Hydra. Self-contained as are the previous books, but with a running theme of Hydra seeking his identity. Imagine being told you only existed as a hope or a dream. Well, that’s all Hydra is. We can explore that idea of the unknown identity, even in classic Fears style. The following book, Grey Moon, centres entirely on our three favourite women, Fuen, Yuffie and Reala. All are working in a bar on the road to the afterlife. 90’ish stories that each flow into each other.
After that, we visit a post apocalyptic landscape, where we met a new rabble of Fears. Again, 90’ish tales forming a single story throughout now told from multiple perspectives. Lots of the usual Fears humour and along with it, some, drama flash fiction. After that another set of 90 tales, this time following a pun filled Little Fears murder mystery investigated by DCI Lily and Inspector Sally.
The point being in all this is that as the Little Fears move on on this site, the direction changes a few times. Always in 90’ish story blocks which take 3-4 months each to publish online as one story per day.
Ambling back to the original quote, with January, Capricorn and Spiders, they gave me closure on a 3-month block of stories. In the future, the Little Fears books will give me closure on a complete story arc. For someone who likes finishing projects and moving on, yes, putting those books on the shelf does bring me joy.
Have you got Spiders yet?
If you haven’t grabbed your free copy of Spiders yet, you have until Sunday! Take the links below. Want a copy on your local Amazon and can’t find or buy it? Let me know in comments. If you leave me a good review, please do let me know, as I cannot place Amazon reviewer names to blogs. Would be nice to give you an acknowledgement in a post here.
Little Fears presents: Spiders – Free for 4 more days
You’re going to see another 3 of these posts. An uncharacteristic spammy thing for me, but hey, this books three months overdue and technical issues, haha! Release week of the new book and CloudFlare nadgers up. Meaning, nobody can respond to this blog post or anything on the Little Fears website, in any way through apps. Classic Little Fears luck! The issue will be resolved by the weekend. Bear with us.
So, yes, OK, the book has been released! I have reviews on this one, thank you! A good solid shout out to Jan O, who has already left me a review! Cheers Jan! Linky to her website. To Brian Thomas (I think I know who you are) and Love2Earth, if you’re out there and reading this, get me a link to your websites. I’ll give you both a shout out too. Same to anyone else who gives me a good review as it goes.
To everyone else who follows me, Spiders is free to buy on Amazon until Sunday. There aren’t many ways bloggers can give something to their readers as a thank you for being awesome. But this is something I can give you. An opportunity to get the digital edition free. Hit the links below to the digital edition, hit buy, and you can read them on any tablet through the Kindle app or Kindle device.
Well, thank feck for that! Finally, Spiders has been released! Man, this book was meant to be out back in June. The big things in life have been taken over by other big things, and honestly, I’m at least three months behind where I should be on everything. Now my house is finally decorated, I can get back on track a bit. That post I made a few months back about things I had in the pipeline for Fears, that’s getting caught up.
The first big thing this week is, of course, the release of Little Fears presents: Spiders. The third book in the Little Fears series. It’s entirely self-contained, with 94 humorous tales published on this site over the last three months. The digital edition is also free for the first five days of release.
I don’t do sales down the line. I always feel that’s a kick in the teeth to fans that have paid full crack for something, to see it then half price or free the following week. By giving the digital copy away free for the first five days of release, that’s only going to go to the Little Fears followers and subscribers. They, you, are the people who should get a free copy. Not some random Joe who spots a sale on in six months time who’s never followed anything I have ever done.
If you enjoy the book, please do leave a review on Amazon and consider buying the paperback edition for a friend who may enjoy my humour. Little Fears books, best served with lovely full-colour paper with fresh book smell.
Synopsis
If anything is going to save the Little Fears from awful punch lines, it is not Shadow eating a sandwich. In Spiders, Great British groaners are the order of the day as the assembled Little Fears make their way through 94 tales of hospitals, food, steps, night sight telescopes and revenge. Rabbit eats a password book; Spider goes to the hospital; Fish multi-tasks; Lady observes X; Sprite has a chain reaction. Written and posted with scruffy illustrations daily on LittleFears.co.uk. These brief vignettes (50 to 100 words) chronicle the continuing adventures of the Little Fears. With only a sense of whimsy and a deep love of old British comedy, Spiders will make you groan, cry and laugh until a bit of wee comes out, in a truly original, unoriginal, work of art and fiction.
Little Fears 