Lots of work has been expended in the Hope world recently on expanding my social media connections. I have blogged before about how much I hate it, and that is still true. Mainly because I don’t like imposing on people, I don’t like jumping up and down to get people to look at me. I have found this makes selling books really difficult, so I have buckled down and got with the program. Hence my now almost obsessive interest in Instagram and the effort that has gone into improving my offering on there. I have been amazed by what gains very large followings, Kardashians aside. Book bloggers who just post pretty pictures of stacks of books are wildly popular. I guess that at least some of them are sort of visual comfort food. I have taken a slightly different approach and tried to put out ‘mood boards’ – combinations of images that I have found helpful or relevant in trying to build that atmosphere of my writing. I have also included a few of my writing off cuts, bits of poetry(?) etc that I liked but couldn’t use.
Mixed results. As a percentage, the number of likes is very high for most of my posts (good – getting something right) but the number of people who see them is distressingly low (bad – c’mon people it is a thing of beauty). Needs must, as an advertising medium, that I accumulate a lot more followers by the time my next novel is released. As a writer friend of mine told me, your second book sells the first, the third the first two and so on… I hope he is correct on that one!
Thus the changes I have made to this blog – it is now part of a very simple website, a bit of spiel about the books and selected blog posts giving the back story detail that I could only imply in the books. Hopefully I have got the theme and feeling from the books into the decor and you feel wildly neo-medieval, with a fondness for ale, pies and murky murdering… Personally I go easy on the latter, except in print where maybe the body count gets a little high…
Jeremiah Hope 