August has been a hectic and frustrating month for a number of personal reasons not worth going into, and it means I’ve not had time to compose a feature blog post here. Instead, I have a few updates perhaps worth mentioning:

Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog is now available on Gumroad.

After experimenting with Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited service for a few months, I have decided to expand the availability of my literary sci-fi novelette Wanderer to other platforms. While still available on Amazon Kindle, the ebook of Wanderer is now available in epub, mobi and pdf formats on Gumroad. It has already recorded its first sale there (a generous £6, against the £1.50 RRP, under Gumroad’s voluntary “name a fair price” principle), with more platforms to follow.

The Amazon experiment was worthwhile, but constricting: its Unlimited service requires exclusivity, but it doesn’t really do anything to elevate the visibility of its titles. The only real engagement through Amazon came when I used one of my designated promotional periods to offer the ebook for free for a limited time. Speaking of which…

The first reviews have been coming in for Wanderer.

During the afore-mentioned promotional period on Amazon, I promoted the offer on various social media platforms, including Twitter, Instagram, Goodreads and Reddit. Despite its reputation as hostile to self-promotion (which is usually well-deserved), Reddit proved to be the most productive of these. The subsequent traffic to my Wanderer story saw it spend the weekend atop a few of Amazon’s bestseller lists.

I was brought down from these heady heights by some of the usual Reddit frustrations, but I also got good feedback from a number of Redditors. It also led to some of my first Amazon reviews, which were uniformly positive and can be read here. Suddenly, with the addition of verified customer reviews and star ratings, Wanderer’s lonesome posting on Amazon began to look respectable. So too the Goodreads listing.

A special long-form review on LibraryThing.

LibraryThing is a Goodreads-style website that I’ve been using regularly to post book reviews for years, and it led to my first unsolicited review for Wanderer back in May. However, I was delighted to receive a review this month from the LibraryThing commentator known as Waldstein. Alex is perhaps the best long-form reviewer on the site and someone who has provided gracious feedback on a number of my own long-form reviews since he read my review of Lolita back in 2017. I posted excerpts from his astute review of Wanderer on my Instagram account, but the full text is beautifully composed and is worth reading in its entirety here.

Hopefully reviews will continue to come in for Wanderer – and hopefully they will continue to be positive.

Updates on Mick’s Café.

One of my other projects has been the subreddit Mick’s Café, a place I set up to find and post hidden gems in contemporary literature, music, fine art and film. I posted its mission statement on my blog here. However, after some promising initial growth and engagement, it has now stalled. I’m not sure how else to get the word out, or how to encourage engagement from its current membership (which stands at 68).

Reddit’s hostility to self-promotion even extends into mentioning your subreddit on other subs, and it’s wearying to source opportunities, and compose posts and comments (for both Wanderer and Mick’s), only to see them removed, shadowbanned or downvoted, even when I’ve followed the byzantine and often-contradictory rules many subs possess. At the moment, it seems that, with Mick’s Café, I’ve created the only corner of the internet where people don’t feel inclined to offer their opinions. I suppose that’s a feat in itself.

My own book reviews.

I continue to write reviews of everything I read, and while August might appear to be a leaner month than others (five or six books, where I might usually read a dozen), this is in no small part because I decided to tackle Anna Karenina, the huge novel by Leo Tolstoy. This has long been on my list to read, as I’m sure it has been for many others, but I didn’t want it to be just another title crossed off my list. I tried to give it the attention it deserved, and I composed my thoughts on the book here.

I’ve always written these reviews for my own edification, often not realising precisely what I’ve enjoyed or disliked about a book until I’m writing my own review of it. Nevertheless, I’m always surprised whenever someone mentions they’ve read them, whether this is another user, like Waldstein above, or another author.

I had cause to be particularly surprised this month, because a review I wrote last year, on the contemporary novella Milton in Purgatory, had come to the attention of its author, Edward Vass, and he posted excerpts from my review on his Instagram. This unexpected interaction reinforced a point I’d like to make to my own readers and prospective readers: as a writer, it’s great to see reviews of your own stuff. Not only for the sales it might encourage, but because writing (particularly self-published writing, like in my case) is often a very lonely and futile endeavour, and good reviews can often make the struggle seem worthwhile.

So anyone who is interested in Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, please check it out – and reviews are particularly encouraged!

– M.F.