How to Promote a Online Bookshop… filling the blank space

I came across a file in my Pool of Ideas folder, entitled How to Promote an Online Bookshop. I opened the file to find… a blank space. So now here I stand in this blank space wondering what my thinking was. Maybe I left it as a prompt for another day. Maybe it was a title that I started but saved the article under a different title… I don’t know, but now I’m here I feel like I need to shake out some words and arrange them in a useful way.

So how am I promoting my online bookshop?

I’ve been sharing my journey, the ups as well as the downs. The main down, has been the time it has taken away from the work in progress, which is the next book, a book I am very excited about, but have been trying to balance its writing, with the need to sell the books in the stock cupboard. This week I have been playing with paint, because I’ve said before, I believe strongly that we learn through play; playing with paint, playing with technology, or playing with words… the imagination is a mysterious thing, working its own magic, if only it gets the freedom play.

A fiction book I have been reading started by asking questions, which seemed an odd way to start a story, asking the reader what they would imagine. I found it quite jarring as I had sat down to read, to escape into a readymade story, a bit of escapism. I felt as if I was being asked to do some of the work, when all I wanted to do was read. But I suppose it takes all sorts, and everyone is looking for something different in a book, and actually the brain is doing all sorts of work behind the scenes when we read, as it translates the squiggles on the page into elaborate scenes and scenarios. 

I like to write the type of picture books that I would want to read, either to a child, or to myself, because the best picture books are aimed at many age groups, everyone seeing and taking from it something slightly different. The book I am currently writing is aimed at small children, but some of the humour in it will definitely resonate with the adults reading it aloud, no matter what their age. So what is the hold up? Well the characters are a bit unusual, and I haven’t found quite the right way to portray them yet, but I’m having fun working it out…



And so I seem to have found the words to populate this file, and will make sure that I save it under its original title so that I don’t come across it as an empty void again, although it has been quite a fun challenge in itself.