Dragon Lake Books

The home of great stories

Fallen Warriors

Fallen Warriors is now available in paperback format!

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Three boxes arrived today, delivered by a friendly UPS guy. Each containing bundles of carefully wrapped paperback copies of Fallen Warriors!

I’ve been checking online daily, sometimes several times a day, waiting for them to arrive.

It’s been a long road, first getting the ebook version released and then going through another round of formatting and proofing copies – almost four months since the ebook was published till the physical copies arrived.

I’m going to be primarily promoting the paperback edition to bookshops, but if you want to buy a copy directly from me, you can use the contact form to get in touch.

The retail price is £9.99. If you want to order from your bookshop, quote them this ISBN: 978-0-9929883-8-8

My first bookshop orders

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Ever since I’ve wanted to be a writer, I’ve wanted to see my books for sale in book shops. When I self-published The Great Scottish Land Grab I ran out of money and opted to release it as a physical book through Print On Demand (POD). The main problem with that was the price per unit was way too high to allow me to sell to book shops.

With Fallen Warriors I’ve ordered 100 paperback copies at a price that’s low enough I can make a small profit on each sale, including the book shops discount and postage. I’m not going to get rich from selling physical copies, but it allows me to reach a wider readership than I would otherwise.

I’ve offered Fallen Warriors to three bookshops now and two have so far said they’ll take copies with the other taking a proof copy to review. One of those bookshops – The Shetland Times Bookshop in Lerwick, Shetland – took one copy each of Fallen Warriors and The Great Scottish Land Grab last week when I was up in Shetland so if you want to buy the first paperback copy of Fallen Warriors on sale anywhere, or a copy of The Great Scottish Land Grab, you can do so in Lerwick! And they’ve even ordered more copies of The Great Scottish Land Grab so I now need to urgently order copies to send them. It’s all quite exciting!

Fallen Warriors – What is it all about?

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As best as I can remember, I had the idea for Fallen Warriors during a church service, where something said triggered off a series of thoughts about a story where Christians were like superheroes, using miraculous powers. Originally I thought this would make a great movie or TV series with lots of action and the miracles taking centre stage.

I started writing and the characters kind of took over. While the story certainly starts with a miracle, I found the real story lies in how the characters each react to what has happened.

The central character in the story is Emma Hunter, a young woman with her whole life ahead of her, who enjoyes clubbing and partying, whose life is cut short when she dies at the start of the book… She is brought back to life and this then started to intrigue me. What would that feel like?

The story of Lazarus being raised from the dead is familiar to many Christians, but the story gives so little detail and no insight into what it felt like for Lazarus to hear Jesus commanding him to come out of the tomb, to be wrapped in grave clothes and finding out he’d been dead for several days. I wanted to explore this through Emma’s experiences and the direction of Fallen Warriors started to take a different turn as the story became more about the consequences of miracles, especially for people who had no previous experience of them.

If you would like to try Fallen Warriors out, here’s a free sample:

The final proof!

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My final proof copy of Fallen Warriors arrived! Well actually, two copies (not sure what went wrong there…)

The blurriness on the font on the matt version has been fixed and the corrections have been made to the interior. The paperback version is ready to go! I’ve ordered 100 copies from the printer (five of which will have to be sent to the British Libraries), leaving 95 copies available for sale.

I’ve had four pre-orders already from friends and need to figure out how to take orders through this site. For now – if you would like to buy a copy, use the contact form on this website. The price will be £9.99 per copy including postage for anyone in the UK. If you live outside the UK then contact me giving your address and I’ll send you a quote.

Fallen Warriors has 35 ratings and 21 reviews on Goodreads with an average rating of 4.7.

Going Physical – Getting a book printed

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Getting your novel ready to be printed as a paperback book is a challenge – much more so than publishing an eBook. Formatting is more involved as the template has to fit to certain specifications, but several companies (including CreateSpace and Book Printing UK) offer templates you can start with. (I have to say, CreateSpace offer an excellent range of templates!)

Some in the indie-author community simply won’t bother with having a printed copy made available, but the markets I’m aiming for with both The Great Scottish Land Grab and Fallen Warriors still has a lot of readers who prefer physical books and I would lose out on a lot of sales if I don’t provide a physical version.

So, I’ve been working with Book Printing UK over the past three months to get 100 copies of Fallen Warriors into print.

It’s taken so long as I’ve been fitting the work around my full-time job, my family, and initial attempts at marketing the eBook version of Fallen Warriors.

I had two initial proof copies printed up, one with a gloss cover and the other with a matt cover to see which worked best.

The matt cover looks a lot better, but unfortunately the initial printing of the matt cover was blurry (the gloss was sharp) and also, despite having had several proof-reads, I found some additional typos inside that I decided had to be fixed. Myself and a friend re-read the whole book (I went backwards, a page at a time!) and found some more missing commas etc. so I’ll be updating the eBook version soon as well.

I was expecting the final proof yesterday, but only received a card through the door from our Postie…

Guess I’ll be getting up early tomorrow…

Day 50 – Half way through the 100 words in 100 days challenge

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I’m half way through my self-imposed challenge to write 100 words a day for 100 days.

You’d think it would be easy…

I’m beginning to get an appreciation of what the life of a daily columnist must be like. A need to come up with a set amount of words day in and day out regardless of what else is going on.

I’d lost track of how many posts I’d written, but fortunately checked yesterday and realised today is half way.

To be honest, I’m struggling.

The last couple of weeks I’ve found myself slipping in my commitment to write tomorrow’s posts today. I’ve been posting late in the day and have not been able to keep a focus on what I would be writing next.

That has allowed me to come up with some posts I wouldn’t have written otherwise, but it is not developing the discipline I want.

If you’re interested, here are the high level numbers:

Over the last 24 days I’ve published another 11,308 words. That’s 2,000 words more than in the first 25 days! My average has gone up to 471 words a day from 410! I had wanted to write less each day, but in general, am not managing it.

However, one post in particular really bumped that number up: 10 ways to fail at publishing and marketing your book was 2,172 words. If I exclude that post, my total and average are very similar.

I’m now working as a full time writer and had planned to have written 15,000 words towards my sequel to Fallen Warriors by this time. I’m only at 4,165… The planning is taking me longer than I’d hoped. I should have expected it. I’m adding characters and am trying to plot out two novels instead of just one. I will keep on persevering!

Looking at whether people are actually reading this blog is useful:

The fact is that the spikes I’ve seen in page views are all due to publishing information that’s useful for other authors (that big spike in the middle also due to the 10 ways to fail post…) I’m glad to share this, but longer term, I come back to the big question, who I am writing this blog for?

I’m feeling more and more strongly that I want to aim this blog at readers. That I want to write posts that will encourage people to want to read more of my writing. I wonder if that means posting more flash fiction, but also sharing short stories, or even teasers, the first page of a story to encourage people to buy or sign up to my mailing list to read the rest.

Of course that would mean writing more short stories and I’m not sure I’m there yet in terms of being able to do that. At least not until my next novel is complete.

I am planning to publish some book reviews over the summer and have some other posts planned, so will be working with that for now.

Onwards and upwards!