Lonely Nights Productions

We’re exactly one week since my third crime novel, featuring Detective Constable Dominic Strider of Chester CID, was released.

Strider Begins: Road to Nowhere is an origin story for the indomitable sleuth and takes place in the week running-up to Easter. Thus, its release last week was very serendipitous indeed!

Rather than solely bombarding the world and his wife on launch day, I’ve decided to spread the launch publicity out over the coming weeks, slowly but consistently beating the drum for my book each and every week for the forseeable.

Last week was a social media blitz. This very blog gets shared over WordPress of course, and also on my Twitter, Linked In and business page on Facebook. I then replicated the post on my personal Facebook page and Instagram (annoyingly, you can’t add links to IG posts so I updated my bio on there instead to link to WordPress). I’ve pinned the article at the top of both Twitter and Facebook for maximum exposure.

Since the book was launched on Amazon by my publisher, I linked that page to my own Amazon author’s page, which lists my previous two DC Strider novels too.

Strider Begins: Road to Nowhere is an origin story for the indomitable sleuth and takes place in the week running-up to Easter. Thus, its release last week was very serendipitous indeed!

I’ve updated my Patreon page, offering followers exclusive access to other writing work from my novels, short stories and (unpublished) film scripts and invites to book signings and other events – all for the princely sum of £1 a month. A bargain I say.

Being a former local newspaper journalist, I then wrote a story about myself, publicising the book, with pics of me and the front and back covers (as shown here). These were sent to my local news websites (including Next Door), my local paper, where I used to work and live (Chester) and in my home town (Tamworth in Staffordshire).

Finally I sent the same story, with a few tweaks, to my work’s intranet team for it to be published on the staff intranet. This led to me being invited to speak about my novel at our department-wide staff meeting with the CEO! I had lots of complimentary comments and some orders from colleagues, so all worked well.

So what’s next? Well, I have an old Kickstarter video which advertised the novel back when I was trying to raise funding for it, about three years ago. So I plan to re-edit the video and put it on my old YouTube channel which, frankly, is almost redundant these days (barring some old audition tapes). So I plan to shoot more videos in the near future and revitalise the YT page – check it out later.

I have book signings to try and organise in local bookshops, and I’m going to enter as many crime novel/writing awards that I can. It just means that I aim to keep the book in the public’s eye for weeks and months to come.

So please feel free to read my blog, visit my Amazon author’s page to find out more about me, and (once uploaded) watch the video, all of which will be pointing you towards the novel itself – a fun, twisting, dramatic, comedic, mysterious and cracking read.

Till next time, happy reading!