A little over a year ago, I wrote a long-ish short story for a competition. I didn’t win, but I ended up with a rather nice story that was too long to send out to magazines and too short to send to my publisher. At around the same time, I’d started wondering if I could try this self publishing lark. I’ve always wanted to be a traditionally published author, but… well, increasingly, you’ve got to do a lot of the book promotion yourself. It used to just be stuff like chatting to book bloggers (I like doing that) and messing about on Twitter and Facebook (I quite like that too). But now, Facebook and Twitter algorithms have changed and I end up talking to only a tiny number of people – which is fine most of the time, but if I want to try promoting anything… the message doesn’t go very far. Which means that promotion now requires paying for adverts. Chatting to my online friends, thankfully, still remains free.

All this is a long-winded way of saying that I’ve self published Pat’s Pantry so that I can try new things. If I pay for an ad and sell a few books, then I’ll at least get part of my money back. Besides, it’s cool to be a hybrid author nowadays, apparently.

What was my point? Oh yes. I eventually self published the short novella as Pat’s Pantry. It’s FREE this weekend. Please do download it, if you’re passing through Amazon. It’s a very gentle story about Sue, who gets a second chance at romance when she’d pretty much given up hope. The story is set in a tiny village in West Yorkshire. It’s only about 25 pages long, so you should be able to read it in under an hour!

So yes, Pat’s Pantry. Totally free until Sunday. If you do read it and like it (or even if you don’t), please leave a review. Amazon uses the number of reviews as part of its algorithm. If a book has more than 50 reviews, apparently some Good Thing happens. I’m not sure what that is – I’m hoping showers of sparkles or cakes delivered by drone… but it’s more likely to be Amazon ranking the book a bit higher.

I know some of you read review copies and have left lovely reviews already. Thank you, thank you, thank  you! Incidentally, I love the village in this story so much, that I’m planning on writing more novellas featuring other characters from there. [If you want to be in with the cool kids and get review copies and things, sign up for my newsletter].

Have a great weekend. Hope you get all your Christmas shopping done.