As many regular readers of this blog will know, my second novel – The Back Road – was launched just four weeks ago, and being my usual obsessive self I had a carefully considered (and very long) marketing strategy.
Based on my experience with Only the Innocent and its startling success, I had tried to analyse what made it shoot to the top of the charts and stay there for so long, and my plan was based on identifying those key points and making them work for me again.
My expectations were lower. There are not only more books out there now, but other authors are much more savvy about how to market them (I knew I shouldn’t have blogged about my methodology! 
). On top of that, until the day of launch there were still lots of 20p books in the charts, and my book stood no chance against them. Fortunately for me, the era of the 20p books ended (for now, at least) just as I was about to publish – but had left in its wake a plethora of books at 59p or 65p. The desperation to get into the charts and get noticed gave authors and publishers little choice and due to Amazon’s price matching policy and the will of other distributors to discount heavily, the days of cheap books are not quite over – and indeed, might never be.
So what did I expect?
