Well, royalty payments have been calculated. Authors who have not been contacted can safely assume they didn’t sell any in the last three months. Most didn’t, it has been a very poor quarter.

One thing is notable. One author is streets ahead on sales. Nothing you could retire on, this is not a publisher that will ever rival Penguin Random House and never will be. It’s a small press starting point for new authors and it’s staying that way.

This does mean that Leg Iron Books is not way up in the marketing stakes. We cannot buy full page ads in Writer’s Digest nor can we afford to bribe Waterstone’s to put us in the window. We do what we can but with 75 to 100% of royalties going to authors (if it’s a small royalty we don’t take a cut) we have virtually no marketing budget. Authors who want to get ahead have to promote themselves too.

This author’s success lies in social media, notably Twitter. There are rules for authors on Twitter and social media in general. Most don’t follow them.

Politics, Brexit, climatology, anything that is viciously divisive, stay out of it. When you pick a side, half of your potential audience will block you. Have a second account if you want to rant but do not link the two. Even big names like Stephen King and JK Rowling have suffered with their political stances although they are currently at the stage where they need not care about lost sales. Starting-out authors are not. You need all the sales you can get.

This particular author follows a lot of other writers and posts about holidays and general amusing chat. Then, when someone asks about what they’ve published, they post a link to the book.

It works. Don’t bother with the book-ad services on Twitter, we have tried them and we have found that just like us, everyone simply scrolls past them. Not one sale was generated by that investment, not one.

Chat with people, get to know them, stay uncontroversial, don’t spam your books and only give a link when asked.

It seems to work. And it costs nothing but time.