About time too …

… I know a lot of you are thinking. My faithful 4 readers. I wish I could say I’ve been busy, but that’s not strictly true either.

Latest news on the latest book: There is no news. I’ve sent it to 9 agents. I’ve had three replies so far. One to say that the agent had died last year so they weren’t taking new submissions. One to say they weren’t taking new submissions anyway – and they didn’t even have the excuse of someone dying on them. And finally someone from one of the largest agents in the world, Curtis Brown, to say that she really had to believe heart and soul in a book before she could take it on, and in all fairness she didn’t believe that much in mine. Well duh, it’s only a book.

So that leaves 6 agents to go. They’ve only had it, oh, about a month now … so it’s early days.

In the meantime I’ve been exploring new avenues, just out of interest. I had a look at Twitter but didn’t think I could maintain the flow of exciting events. It’s not like I’m Stephen Fry or Ashton Kutcher (1m ‘followers’ and rising). I don’t think tweeting:

Sat and stared at computer, then wrote a bit.
Sat and stared at computer, then wrote a bit.
Sat and stared at computer, then wrote a bit.

… will generate a lot of enthusiasm, even amongst my zealous followers.

But I have come across something called AQA2U. This weird-sounding acronym has grown out of a text-based question-answering service. You text your question to an address and they text back the answer. It can be a question about anything. They say they have hundreds of people working for them who will get an answer back to you, 24/7, for 98p. Their new service is a bit like Twitter – you set yourself up as a ‘publisher’ of text information and then people can register to receive texts from you. It costs 98p to register and then 25p when you receive a text. Of that 25p, the publisher gets a small cut. AQA say that if you have 25 subscribers each getting just 3 texts per month, the publisher can earn about £275. If you have 250 subscribers, you can earn £3000.

So I signed up.

I guess the thing is that you have to be ‘publishing’ something that people will be interested to read. So there are publishers providing racing tips, ‘Word of the Day’, sporting headlines and so forth. I wanted to make mine writing-related – and the grammar and ‘word of the day’ variations had already been taken – so I’ve called it ‘Crime Writing News’. The idea is that I send out up to 3 messages a month that are interesting factoids or news or gossip, mostly about US crime writers and their work. I have no idea how much of a market there is out there but it might be fun to see where, or if, it might lead. With my track history in marketing, I’ve set an ambitious target of earning 20p in my first year.

So, if you want to look at the site for your own reasons, not just to sign up to CRIMEWR2U, then head here:

AQA2U

Once there you can Search on Crime and my advert comes up. Or just text CRIMEWR2U to 63336 to sign on. It’ll cost you 98p to register, then 25p per text. Cleverly, they’ve set a limit so that you’ll never pay more than £3.50 in any given month for texts received – I assume that’s texts received from any publisher, not just the one. But I may be wrong.

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