An Evening with Walter? Or not?

The drums were rolling until that decisive moment when the Writers' & Artists' Short Story Competition 2014 Shortlist was announced. I'd sent my entry for the Competition in July 2013 and had been waiting patiently for months. But on Saturday I found out I hadn't made the shortlist of 10. Oh well, you can't win them all!

According to Writers & Artists, the competition judges had to go through nearly 3,000 entries of "an extremely high standard". They were overwhelmed by the positive response and enjoyed reading the work of so many keen writers. Tough decisions had to be made to narrow down the entries. The winner and two runners-up of the competition will be announced on Friday 28th March.

I'm curious to find out what they thought about my entry, 'An Evening with Walter'. But, now that I know my story will not be published by Bloomsbury, I might get round to including it on the blog.

Meanwhile, I'm not sure what to think about life after book publication.

I'm trying to keep up-to-date with the distribution process. 'Out of Bounds' has been available on Createspace and Amazon websites for a little more than a week now. Same for the ebook on Smashwords. Last week I noticed Barnes & Noble started retailing the ebook too. I'm monitoring this the best I can.

Naturally I'm also monitoring response and sales. Those are hard to measure and I already know that it will take time for the word to spread. However, a few figures have already come back to me indicating that some copies have been sold via Amazon and via Smashwords. Lovely jubbly!

I'm also satisfied with my initial marketing response and with the glorifying comments from my friends on the social media. I guess it's time to seriously consider step 2 in my marketing initiatives and see what else I can do to hammer home the message that 'Out of Bounds' is out there and worth the investment.

I also resumed writing novel n°2 on Sunday. More about that some other time.