My Instagram Adventures

This began back in January, when my fabulous daughter-in-law, Sophia, gave me a whirlwind introduction to the platform, transforming my unused account with a couple of posts and reels, and showing me a handful of tricks. In a little over two weeks, I had 8 posts, a couple of reels and a couple of dozen followers – pretty much all of whom I knew. Then the fun stuff started. My first scammer pretended to be some kind of spiritual guru, but turned out to be a teenage boy who basically just wanted money. For goodness sake. If he'd just approached me honestly and offered the sort of promotional services he reckoned he could provide, I'd have snapped his hand off. But nothing angers me more than scammers, because as a self published author, I've been targeted by these low-lives my entire writing career, over a decade.

On Sophia’s advice, I trawled through dozens of authors websites looking at the type of content they provided, and picked up a few tips along the way. Most of February was spent creating book trailers for each of the six books in my latest series, a genre mash up of time travel and dungeons and Dragons, set in a UK version of The Big Bang theory, with several nerdy 30 somethings.
The first Time Doctors book, Time and Time Again, takes us on a journey back to the early 2020s reminding of some of the miseries in surviving a global plague. Lest we forget.

Because this is yet another brand new genre for me, I'm right back to scratch in terms of marketing, despite selling thousands in each of my mediaeval, magical and military series. And several hundreds more in my young adult and coming of age series. I'm not even going to talk about my very own 50 Shades series because basically I never promoted that one too much because it didn't sit so well with the type of books I like to read.

Hence the foray into an entirely new type of marketing with all the frustrations and heartache of a (massively) steep learning curve. One of the more eye-catching tools for hooking in potential readers is the book trope graphic, so this was my next project. Apparently, they really work, because all of a sudden I’m getting half a dozen messages every day from “influencers.”

The first one I engaged with happily took my money (all $74 of it) to post a review which suddenly had 12.7k likes in a matter of hours, then not a single one since. She even had the brass neck to ask for a tip!
All's well that end's well - with Paypal's help, I got a full refund.

Time Doctors #6 - D & D Scenario

Lizzie's turn at DM results in five different scenes, each based on a previous scenario. However, she has scant idea of running a DND session.

Time Doctors #5 - D & D Scenario

Norseland

Ben dreaded his turn at DM, having seen how well the others did. But his passion for all things Marvel and particularly the Norse mythology aspects meant he didn't do a half-bad job of creating a scenario where his housemates could let loose with their inner heroes.

Time Doctors #4 - D & D Scenario

Dragon Quest

Georgie's turn in the hot seat, and she
relishes the opportunity to eviscerate
a few of her real-life dragons in fiction.
And it turns out, one or two of her
housemates also have issues with
monsters in their past.