It's time to kick it baby

Right it's the end of the year and there's nay a publisher in freakin sight. I haven't captured an agent... ok there might be one or two in my scope but no capturage as yet. So it is time to up the ante.

Gawd I can't even tell you how much I loathe the whole-everything-is-out-of-my-hands feeling. I'm sending out my submissions and waiting and waiting and biting off my electric blue/emerald green/pulsating purple/blue me away/risque red etc nail varnishes and developing a worrying nervous tick. It's time to try and wrestle back some control.

I sat down today and thought okkkaayyy, I can write, I like my books, I love creating them, people DO want to read them - I have a list of buyers, I have my teen readers e-mailing me and moaning for copies... something's got to be done. So I drank quite a bit of diet coke, ate too many celebrations and played 'Listen' by Beyonce about twenty times and then I decided on a plan of action.

When it comes right down to it an agent takes on your project because it will make them money, as of course they should. That is their job, they need to buy food for their cats and pay their book store bills just like the rest of us. Ergo an agent will take you on if you can show them that baby you can ring those tills. A publisher will publish your book because they want to sell lots of copies and make lots of money - this you see is how awful celeb autobiographies end up taking up space in our bookstores.

So it's obvious right, I need to show said agent and then said publisher that I can produce the dollars.

How to do so? Well here comes my plan of action... dem dem dem... reader-recruit.

Now I'm coining this as an official term, reader-recruit will henceforth be known as the strategy undertaken by an unpublished authour to collect such a vast amount of future readers that an agent's eyes will pop in glee and a publisher will sign her to a five book deal instantly whilst bouncing around in a state of hyperactivity. The author will show gleeful agent and bouncing publisher an excel sheet containing thousands and thousands of names (real ones) all of readers who have been recruited to the cause. These readers will all be salivating for a copy, they will be waiting and ready to buy on release date... and there you have reader-recruit.

Now I'm not going to go into my reader-recruit strategies in detail - 'cause they're techy and kinda boring but suffice to say they involve a banging website, an OH-SOMEONE-HELP-ME kinda blog, Bebo fan groups, Facebook sign up to the cause groups, Myspace bulletins and various other web-related publicity tools.

So far reader-recruit is at 476 people (web addresses harvested from my site, fans from the Immune group on Bebo and fans from the newly launched WE WANT IMMUNE PUBLISHED' Facebook group)and baby it's gonna rise - the target is 1000 by Jan.

So c'mon pledge yourself to the list - join the cause - be part of reader-recruit.

P.S. I have a rather fab GothEmBlack varnish I want to wear, my pale nails are crying out for it - only with your help may they wear varnish again!