The Puzzle – Father Brown Is On The Case

Not really, but I will explain. Sales of The Puzzle have not been great and this was concerning. This is my first full novel since Rewind and Trouble Cross were placed on Amazon in 2012, although there has been Once Upon A Week in 2019. There has also been the split out of Trouble Cross into its 3 constituent elements – Doctor Oh No!, T is for … and Pratt, Pratt, Wally and Pratt Investigate – and The Whole in One which is all my written work (before the Puzzle) in one volume, including Trance my very first novel attempt. The Puzzle though is the first completely new novel since 2012.

Back then, as now, Rewind and Trouble Cross went on Amazon via KDP because I could not interest a literary agent. Rewind fared the better of the two and its reviews were 4 and 5 star – all except one outlier from the US which was a 1 star. Yet, without a website at the time and not able to get to grips with Twitter, Rewind made better sales in its first months than The Puzzle has with all the tweets I have made on Twitter – having been trying to engage since Sept 21 to build up an audience of 800. Only 19 sales since its launch in April. This time I even paid for a cover instead of using the KDP stock or Canva. I could not understand it.

I did have one iron in the fire though. Via Twitter I had been in contact with the actor John Burton who plays Sergeant Goodfellow in Father Brown. On an impulse, I asked him if he would read the book and he kindly agreed to. I sent a copy off to his agent and when it got to him he promised to read it on holiday after filming the next series of Father Brown. He was as good as his word and yesterday he wrote to me saying that he loved it, pointed out a couple of minor plot holes, and then tweeted to the world about a fabulous book he had read. I was, of course, over the moon, a breakthrough at last. It was already on Twitter so I just posted it on Facebook and Linked In. Surely now something would happen.

Then yesterday afternoon I should have known something would go wrong. There was an omen. The Manchester Derby Community Shield, a drab match to be true, but we threw it away again, twice. Still, I did not throw anything at the TV this time because my hopes for the book were keeping me on an even keel. The TV is living on borrowed time now though.

John’s tweet, which is about a day old now, has been seen by over 1800 people, which is far more than I could reach with a tweet. One lady contacted me from this to say she could not find the book in the US so I found the link and sent it to her, and she thanked me later for sorting out the issue. That was at least one sale.