For those of you who may have wondered why I’ve been so quiet for the last year, it’s because I decided to put the writing of my second novel on hold in order to design and build a truly unique international book promotion website for readers, authors and publishers, called Readers in the Know. The rest of this post explains why. When I published Connected back in June 2012, I knew nothing about book marketing but decided to try Amazon’s KDP Select programme and offer my brand new book free for its first 5 days. It took a couple of days to get started, but then, as luck would have it, in spite of having done nothing to promote it but email friends and colleagues, it took off. By the end of day 5, it was on 4500 Kindles (90% of which were in the UK), was No.1 in Amazon UK bestselling free titles for both Thrillers and Science Fiction and in the 3 weeks that followed, sold about 1500 copies at full price. I then tried a bunch of other marketing tactics including Facebook and Goodreads advertising, in the process blowing a good chunk of the profit I had just made, before returning to free and discount promos. Soon I discovered about a hundred websites (mostly US focused) with the sole purpose of promoting such book promos. Some were paid and some were free, although most of the apparent free ones only tended to guarantee your listing if you paid some nominal fee each time. I subsequently found that...

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