The Kindle Coffee-Break Collection Vol. 1

I've got a short story out in The Kindle Coffee-Break Collection Vol. 1.

From the Amazon description:  

"Welcome to the first volume of the Saffina Desforges Presents Coffee-Break Collection. Saffina Desforges is the Kindle-UK best-selling author of Sugar & Spice and Snow White: Book 1 of the the Rose Red crime thriller series."

I'm in some good company here, so feel free to go check it out!

New Cover, New Book

So here is the final cover for my YA fantasy Edge of Dreams. Not quite ready to publish yet - it needs a last edit for typos and to murder any remaining extraneous adverbs - but I'm pleased with the way it's come out. I'll post links to it once it's uploaded but I just wanted to share it with the world now.

What do you do when you think that the bad guys might care more about you than the good ones?

Edge Of Dreams is now available in kindle format on  Amazon UK, Amazon DE and Amazon US/Other.  Also in all formats (including PDF and HTML) at Smashwords.

The Experiment Continues...

See my guest blog over at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival Website.

Sales Report!

So we're up to a huge total of 30 UK kindle sales of Hamelin's Child so far. Can't hand in my resignation yet then. But I do have 4 5-star utterly fabulous reviews on Amazon UK - and not all from my mates either! Handful of US sales and no reviews as yet, but then I have only just discovered that the UK and US sites are completely different. I've been whoring myself around the UK discussion boards and it looks like I'll have to do the same on the US ones too.

I don't find PR easy. Despite the fact that this novel was long-listed (top 20) for the Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger Award a few years back, there's still a small part of me that wonders whether everybody is secretly laughing at me. It may well be as much do with the controversial nature of the content as anything else, but I've been doing some research over the past couple of weeks and there's a lot worse stuff out there.

So I've been contributing to facebook discussions, guest blogging, grabbing every opportunity to yell "ME! ME! ME!" on other peoples' blogs and generally trying to put myself out there. Not sure I'm ready for an all out assault at work yet (there are a couple of guys selling their books in the work canteen in a couple of weeks), but we'll see how brave I'm feeling. It's kind of hard to sell an e-book anywhere other than online.

Setting the World on Fire

So OK, I haven't made the best-sellers lists yet. But this kindle thing is curiously addictive. I can't resist the temptation to keep checking the stats on Amazon. Some good reviews, but so far they're from people I know - what I want is for people I don't know to take a look. I feel like I'm coming out of the closet at work, as slowly people are starting to pick up on the fact that I write (mostly due to the amazingly talented Pete Gorrell who has designed my covers for me). It was lovely to get a response from a work colleague who'd bought and enjoyed my novel - a response from a reader, rather than a writer and somebody who is less concerned with plot and point of view and structure, and more interested in whether it was a page-turning read (apparently it was). So my confidence is slowly building, although I expect to be contemplating the motorway bridge when I get my first bad review, which will happen. Can't please everyone. 


But I'm glad I did it. So far, anyway