Five star review for The Wretched!
Portsmouth By Heather Jennings on 25 May 2017
Five star review for The Wretched!
Portsmouth By Heather Jennings on 25 May 2017
Several people have asked me why I write and where I get my ideas from. After answering this question on Stage 32, a resource for writers of all disciplines, I put down the following.
Get www.davidegates.com blog updates directly to your email! Don’t miss any news regarding my current books, short-stories and upcoming projects ever again!
In the bottom right-hand corner of my blog pages, you’ll see the following button:
Click on this and enter your email into the box and every time there’s a new blog-post, it’ll be delivered directly to your mailbox!
We promise we won’t share your email with ANYONE and you’ll only get blog updates which are posted no more than once a week.
My book, The Wretched, has been entered in the 2017 AuthorsDB.com Cover Contest.
It literally takes just a couple of clicks to vote and your vote will help get it noticed to progress to the next stage of this esteemed prize. I’ve previously won Gold and Silver for the covers of The Roots of Evil and Access Denied.
Click here to vote or cut and paste the following link into your browser.
https://authorsdb.com/2017-cover-contest-results/23914-cover-contest-2017-the-wretched
Available at all good online bookstores in paperback and eBook formats.
Amazon recently changed their search engine parameters and the results are pretty dreadful.
Whilst not perfect, before a couple of months ago, when entering “David E. Gates” as a search string, it would invariably return most of my publications on the first page.
At best, I now only see my author page as the second result and my latest publication ninth on the list. However, the results now are very inconsistent and frequently return NONE of my books on their first page. Other results include anyone with “David” in their name or “Gate” in the title which overrides what one would expect from entering the full string of “David E. Gates”. One result which is always featured is:
Hamish and the GravityBurp (Hamish 3) by Danny Wallace and Jamie Littler
Plus, it USED to work! YOU CHANGED SOMETHING recently and it suddenly – literally ONE DAY TO THE NEXT – STOPPED working!
Really not happy about this and if not sorted will remove ALL references to Amazon from my publicity and links. What’s the point of my directing people to your pages if a search on my exact name doesn’t even produce ANY results????
VERY disappointed and would ask that you refer/escalate this appropriately.”
I also told them to compare Apple’s search results I get on Apple’s iTunes store – a search for my name there reveals ALL of my books!
– Page 1 = The Wretched
– Page 4 = The Roots of Evil
– Page 8 = The Ghost of Clothes
– Page 5 = Access Denied
– Page 19 = First Words
– Page 29 = Omonolidee (I’m on Holiday): Black & White Version
A search query on Amazon.co.uk functions much like an internet search engine, producing results for each of the words separately and in relation to one another.
The order of items that appear when searching for your title is determined automatically by our system from information such as past sales history, current availability, and the length of time it has been listed on our site. These factors change and the search results are continually being updated to reflect those changes.
I am sorry that I don’t have better news for you.”
After reading the first couple of chapters of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, in school, I took the book home and finished it that evening. Since then, I’ve always written.
Whether it be short-stories, poems, film-reviews, interviews with the famous or full novels, I’ve always loved the putting together of words to describe something in a specific way.
I was fortunate enough to meet and interview Clive Barker, Terry Pratchett, James Herbert and many other writers and their responses when I asked them what advice they’d give to an aspiring writer was consistent. “Don’t give up. Keep writing. You will get better and better” they all said.
Clive Barker, and his horror work in particular, was inspiring to me and so I wrote. I was published in film magazines such as Samhain and Starburst along with articles and stories for various fanzines, but it wasn’t until I put into words the telling of a personal tragedy that things really kicked off for me.
Access Denied, the true story of an emotional trauma and the subsequent battle I had with corrupt and despicable organisations, was self-published as my first book. It met with immediate success – to date, it has 100% positive reviews! People who read it told me I had a real talent for writing with many of them telling me that once they started reading it that they couldn’t stop. “I couldn’t put it down.” several have said. I was humbled but ecstatic.
The self-publishing boom enabled me to look at some things I’d been working on, revise and complete them and publish them. I write fiction primarily, loving the short-story form and poems, and the responses to my horror books (The Roots of Evil and The Wretched) has been phenomenal.
It’s a hard slog though. The writing bit is easy. But getting people to buy your books and marketing them is a massive struggle in a world that’s saturated with talent (and non-talent). It’s very difficult to get people to try something new. There seems to be no end of competitions which appear to be nothing but exercises in making someone else money, so I tend to only enter those that are free or cheap.
I have already won several awards but real success (to the point – as Arthur C. Clarke did – where his book sales earned more than his day job so he could give up the day job) eludes me presently.
I clearly have something of worth on those pages. What I write is not to everyone’s taste, but a lot out there really like it. If only they’d leave reviews and tell all their friends, I might make a few more pennies. Despite all this, I soldier on, hoping for that big break, to get my stories in front of the right people, living in anticipation that the word-of-mouth explosion will occur. As Clive, James and Terry suggested, I’ve never given up. I’ve come close but my love of creating stories and visions for people is something I’m passionate about and I’m always drawn back to those ideas, some of which come in dreams. Expanding upon them to create a world and characters which people love and enjoy taking the journey with is very rewarding, even if it’s not financially enriching.
Getting that finished book in my hands, all those months or years of effort coming to fruition, is a feeling like no other. And, one day, I’m sure I’ll be on a train or in a park somewhere and see someone reading one of my books. When that happens, I know I’ll be humbled but ecstatic once more. Something to look forward to.
You can follow my blog at www.davidegates.com or my author page on Facebook @davidegatesauthor where you can find details of all of my books and free short-stories to download or buy.
Thank you.