Half a life

I thought it might be time to take a look at how my novel, A Half Life of One is getting on as it drifts aimlessly around the blogosphere.

The site which hosts the novel currently gets around 8-10 visitors a day, the vast majority from Free Novels Online. Many of these visitors are from Africa, the Middle East and Asia. On average one to two visitors a month start reading the book. Pleasingly, the vast majority of those who start the book actually finish it.

If you remember when I started this blog - as a promotional vehicle for the book - I set myself a target of enticing 5 readers in total. So in a sense I have achieved everything I set out to achieve.

And yet still I'm not happy.

Obviously that original target was way too low (though still more ambitious than if the book languished unread in my desk drawer). Does it matter if anyone reads the book? Well, I'm not interested in money or fame or indeed any kind of public approbation. I simply want to give as many people as possible the opportunity to read my book because I think it has something interesting to say about the human condition. That being the case, I need to give some thought to ways to promote the book better.

I guess there are two main channels for doing this. Online and Traditional publishing. I'll look at both over the next few posts.