About Me

Tollesbury, Essex, United Kingdom
I was born in the Summer of 1969 in Dagenham, just on the border of East London. School was largely unproductive but enjoyable, setting me up for something of a wayward but interesting life! On leaving school I had various jobs including putting up stalls at Romford Market, working in a record shop, putting up ceilings, gardening and road sweeping. After resigning from an insurance company to play in a band, I found myself unemployed for two years. Then finally I got back on my feet and I've been a psychiatric nurse since 1997. I wrote A Cleansing of Souls when I was 22 years old and followed it up with Tollesbury Time Forever almost twenty years later. I started writing The Bird That Nobody Sees in September 2011 and it was released in July 2012. In terms of writing, my heroes are Jack Kerouac and John Steinbeck. I would also include Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan and Tom Waits as literary influences. So that's me I guess - scruffy, happy and in love with literary fiction, music and life...

Wednesday 1 February 2012

January has been and gone...

So, Tollesbury Time Forever came out on 3rd January 2012. I had few hopes for it other than a handful of people buying it, four fingers of which may read it, two fingers like it and maybe the thumb would put a nice review on Amazon for all to see. But here are the results for the January jury....

Amazon.co.uk     -  268 sales
Amazon.com       -   31 sales (including 5 Smashwords)
Amazon.de          -     1 sale
Amazon.fe           -     1 sale

Total for January -  301 sales

Reviews              -  37 (33 five stars, 3 four stars and 1 three stars)

Tollesbury Time Forever was also voted as the UK Kindle User Forum Book to Read for February with, apparently, an unprecedented winning margin.

I am obviously lost for words, considering my initial expectations, but I will try and make some sort of sense of all this madness, draw some conclusion of a sort.

  • Kindles and ebooks are more popular than I thought
  • Tollesbury Time Forever is more accessible than I thought
  • People are more wonderful than I thought
So where from here?

Well I fully expect sales to tail off - there are only so many people who will come to hear of the book and perhaps they have all been reached. But it's been a fine start. Maybe one or two more reviews will come in as people get through their backlog of Kindle books - and that will be nice. The Tollesbury Parish Magazine will be running an article in their March edition and I've been told that NHS Trust for whom I work may be running something in one of their magazines in February. And I am still waiting to hear from Sarah at Saint FM - now that's a sentence I never thought I'd write...

I am halfway through revising A Cleansing of Souls and am very much liking the way it is turning out. Just to remind you I wrote it twenty years ago and it has needed a little honing - but much less than I thought. I will be bringing it out in March as an ebook. Rebecca has already painted the cover and it is beautiful.

And I am right back into my next novel - The Bird That Nobody Sees. I love it and can't wait to get it done. I go through phases of writing and phases of surviving. I have just begun, in the last couple of hours, to enter the next writing phase so hello insomnia, hello Miss Red Wine and hello lost days!!!

So again, thanks to you fine people. Darren, David, Liam, Rosie, Cheryl, Lily, Nick and all you other wondabulous beings in this writing, reading life of ours. Keep on Keeping on! And keep on being great!!!!!!

Come on the people!!!

5 comments:

David Barber said...

You're on a roll, matey. Long may it continue!!!

Groovydaz40 said...

One day I will be able to say I read it almost but not quite first....

Am I making sense?

Good show anyway buddy.

Stu Ayris said...

Cheers David and Daz. I tell you what lads - we seriously need to meet up one day for a beer!

Sean Patrick Reardon said...

Congrats on all counts, Stu. I think there will be plenty of sales and readers of TTF in the future. Good luck with the new one and I can't wait to read ACoS when it is available.

Stu Ayris said...

Thank you Sean. Yours is still the first review that everyone sees - and I can't thank you enough for that mate - I really can't.

Peace my friend!!!

And FRUGALITY of course!!