Barnaby has been wondering how Alexander Graham Bell sold his first telephone? It's been keeping him awake at night. Selling the second one would be comparatively easy, even though there would only have been one other person to call, and selling the third one would have been a piece of cake. But that first one, aye, there's the rub.
It feels a bit like that selling a new book. The author knows that it's a work of art, of course, but how to persuade the first reader to lay out hard cash and purchase a copy, that's the real trick. Of course it's easy if you are an established author like John Grisham, or Vikram Seth because people know you already and will be eagerly awaiting the next instalment - though Barnaby seems to remember that even Vikram Seth had problems getting his first novel published - but for a new author it's an uphill struggle getting noticed.
It's comparatively easy to publish books these days as ebooks. This gets over the first hurdle of how to make your magnum opus available to the world, but unless people read it, like it and tell their friends it's as likely to sit forever on the hard disc drive of some remote server as it ever was to end up in the remainder pile of the print book publisher. What the new author needs is good reviews.
Luckily it's very easy to download an ebook and almost as easy to leave a review once you've read it. Barnaby has decided to make it even easier and for the next few weeks both his novels 'I Keep Thinking It's Tuesday' and 'A Question of Alignment' are available for FREE download by visiting http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/barnabywilde Why not make his day and download a copy now?
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