Books – Carol Wyer

June 13, 2019

DI Natalie Ward is Back #TheSleepover @bookouture

Roxy had a secret.

Now she’s gone…

Today sees the cover reveal of the 4th book in the Natalie Ward series – THE SLEEPOVER. I can’t believe it, we’re onto the fourth book in that series already. It only seems a few weeks ago that Natalie Ward and her team were introduced to you, my readers.

I’ll tell you more about THE SLEEPOVER at a later date but for now, I’d like to thank my editor, Lydia Vassar-Smith, my ace cover designer, and the Bookouture team who have once again excelled themselves. The cover will mean a great deal more to you once you’ve read the book and it actually brought a lump to my throat when I saw it. (Spoiler alert – it relates to poignant passage in the book.)

Without further ado, here is the new cover and pre order links. Oh, and just so you know, I’ve already written the 5th book in the series, which will come out on December 6th!)

THE SLEEPOVER

Out September 5th but available to pre-order now CLICK HERE

February 17, 2019February 17, 2019

Crime Pays #writers-life

In January 2017, I moved from comedy to crime. It was a bold move. I’d made my name as writer of comedy and enjoyed much success, written features for and appeared in national magazines, been on numerous BBC radio stations, even interviewed on BBC Breakfast Television (twice!). I’d won the prestigious People’s Book Prize award and had a contract with Bookouture/Hachette to write 2 more romantic comedies… and… I was performing a stand-up gig around the Midlands, entitled, Smile While You Still Have Teeth to sell-out audiences.

Moving from one genre to another is a challenge. You learn skills and techniques while writing one genre that can’t be transferred to another and you have to treat the whole writing process in a completely different way. Where I had once written whatever came into my head and written larger than life, hilarious characters and scenarios, now I had to think up twists and devious red-herrings and imagine the mind of a killer. I had to plot my books carefully, research like mad and lose the humour!

Bold or not, it was the right move. LITTLE GIRL LOST shot up the charts to become the #2 best-selling on Amazon Kindle and even became a USA Top 150 Best-Seller. DI Robyn Carter was taken to my readers’ hearts and more books in the series were commissioned and written.

Earlier this month, I had the most incredible news – my crime novels had sold over 500,000 copies. I had to sit down. Half a million copies? How was that ever possible?

Having pinched myself several times, I checked the email again. It was true and I was astounded. It was beyond my wildest expectations and I felt a huge surge of gratitude to my publisher, to all of the reviewers, bloggers and friends who have helped promote my books and most of all to my readers.

I have always dreamed of selling million copies. I love entertaining people, whether that be by making them laugh, feel-good about themselves and life or by thrilling them and making their jaws drop. To know half a million people have read my books is amazing.

My sincere to all of you who have helped make this happen. THE DARE, the third book in the DI Natalie Ward detective series comes out in April. There’ll be two more after it and one further crime thriller to be written by the end of the year. I have plans for more after that and hope you will continue to read and enjoy my books. I have my fingers tightly crossed that one day in the near future I’ll be able to say I’ve attained my goal but until I hit that elusive one million sales, I am immensely satisfied with what I have achieved so far and can only say that crime definitely pays!

February 16, 2019

Day in the Life of a Writer and Her Grumpy and more #writers-life #new-release

Last week, I was interviewed by chellesandbbooks and I thought I’d share the interview with you. If you ever wondered where my inspiration comes from, or which character I’d really like to bitch slap, read on….

Please tell us a little about What Happens in France and where your ideas for the book came from?
It’s a feel-good story about Bryony Masters, a somewhat quiet and reclusive teacher, whose sister, Hannah, ran away from home when she was 16. Bryony blames herself for the incident and has over the years, tried to find Hannah, but to no avail.

When her father has a sudden stroke, she is propelled into taking more drastic action and egged on by her best friend, Melinda, applies for a televised gameshow in the desperate hope she can use it as a platform to find her sister.

The show is filmed in France and she finds herself teamed up with the gorgeous but unattainable Lewis, and a bunch of hilarious competitors, including a limelight-stealing pug – Biggie Smalls. With Lewis’s help she has to fight off the competition and take part in a series of wacky and fun challenges, not to win the prize but to get the winners’ ten minutes of air time at the end of the show each day, which she uses to find Hannah.

As for the book’s inspiration, well, it was a mishmash of things. My mother suffered very badly from St Vitus Dance as a child and relayed the horrors of her own childhood which gave me the kernel of the idea for the Hannah and Bryony plot. That led me onto how Bryony would manage to find her sister and in turn, took me down the gameshow route. Given our obsession with shows like Love Island and the like, it seemed an ideal solution, so I applied for a variety of gameshows to see what I could find out. I ended up on quite a few (all in the name of research) but they helped fuel my ideas for the ridiculous challenges and games Bryony and Lewis have to tackle.

Finally, I am an absolute Francophile and have lived and worked in France. Nowadays, I visit the country several times a year, renting small gites, so it seemed the perfect place to set the book. A few years ago, my husband, AKA Mr Grumpy, and I travelled around Brittany and the Loire-Atlantique and stayed in chateaux along the way. It was such fun we went back a few more times and saw as much of the regions as we could.

Do you have a favourite character or scene from What Happens in France?

…

Read more and my life with Grumpy by clicking this link HERE which will open another window and take you to the interview.

January 25, 2019

OMG! My jaw is dangling. #TheDare

I know… bit of a weird title but that is pretty much what happened. There’s no doubt that after months of writing and editing, one of the highlights is to see the cover for the first time and for those in the know, I am bat-shit crazy about the first two in the DI Natalie Ward series. Both were accompanied by noisy squeals and yelps of delight as I downloaded them and poor Mr Grumpy found my phone shoved up against his face – even when he was trying to fix the car – with me squeaking, ‘Look, isn’t it fab?’

When the cover for THE DARE arrived, I was balanced on my stability ball on a video call to Kim Nash, our PR extraordinaire, discussing publicity for the book’s release in April. She stopped speaking in mid-sentence then said … ‘Check your email.’

‘What? Now?’

‘Yes… go on… check it?’

I attempted to navigate from the video screen to my email account. I’m not very good with technical stuff and I lost Kim completely when suddenly the screen filled with the new cover.

My jaw dropped and stayed dangling for the longest minute. I think I said something along the lines of, ‘Holy cow… oh my… oh my.. oh… It’s phenomenal! Oh… my lord… it’s gorgeous!’ and then went slightly ballistic, bouncing up and down on my ball and performing a weird victory dance that involved a sort of heavy metal head banging ritual and pogoing.

Kim’s voice penetrated my manic activity .’You like it?’ I’d momentarily completely forgotten she was hanging on to hear my reaction.

I found the appropriate key on my keyboard to make the cover disappear and bring her back into view on my screen. ‘It’s fantastic,’ I replied, flattening my hair that had become dishevelled in the mad outburst.

‘I’m just going to email Lydia (my editor) with your reaction,’ she replied.

‘Yes… tell her I liked it.’

‘I can do better than that. I videoed the whole thing. I’m just going to send it to her…’

‘NO!’

‘…Now… Ha! Done!’

She played back the video so I could see what I looked like – a mixture of Animal from the Muppets and a crazed Tigger from ‘Winnie the Pooh’. Embarrassing. Deeply embarrassing.

It is an incredibly exciting moment when you see your cover for the first time, but next time, I’m going to make sure I’m locked away in my garret and no one can observe my reaction.

Suffice to say, the video has been deleted and Kim has gone on holiday with the payment I made. (LOL)

So… what caused such a lunacy?

This….

It’s pretty stunning, isn’t it?

You can pre-order the book now and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.

http://geni.us/B07N3WYYLDCover

January 7, 2019

How a Celebrity Pug Dog Stole My Book #pugs @canelo_co

My new release, WHAT HAPPENS IN FRANCE is out in 3 weeks. It’s a brand new romantic comedy that I can’t wait to unleash onto my readers.

I loved writing it – every single word, every character and every silly scene. I loved researching for it – getting onto gameshows (even though I felt a right idiot on some of them), travelling around France, collecting information about the country, and I even loved lying awake at night, conjuring up crazy games fit for It’s A Knockout and a gameshow that would be a delightful mixture of Big Brother meets Love Island meets I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here.

I wanted my readers to laugh uproariously at the antics in it and in the parts, shed tears and come away from the book uplifted and feeling that life is good. What I didn’t anticipate was for everyone to fall for a lesser character – a pug dog called Biggie Smalls!

Biggie has not won over every reader who received an ARC but my publishers Canelo, who were so enamoured by him, they had stickers featuring him made especially for a giveaway.

The idea of a media star pug came from an article about owners and their pugs. The feature showed the dogs dressed in various outrageous outfits and I wondered what it would be like to own a dog dressed like the notorious rapper, Biggie Smalls.

Biggie doesn’t play a huge role in What Happens in France but my goodness, he has stolen the show to a large extent. Even those who are not ‘dog people’ have been emailing me to say how much they like him.

It seems that in order to sell more books, I’m going to have to buy a real -life pug and dress him up in COOGIE jumpers and jewellery and parade him around bookstores because no matter how good the book is, and regardless of how much readers enjoy it… they’ll all remember it as the book about Biggie Smalls – the media star dog!

WHAT HAPPENS IN FRANCE OUT 28TH JANUARY

“This delightful read is done with excellent pacing, thus showcasing the marvelous talents of this prolific author.” Robin Reads

“Wow, wow and double wow….What a fantastic, fun and beautifully written book this was”

WHAT HAPPENS IN FRANCE is available to pre-order now for just £1.99 click HERE

Video made by Inky Covers.

September 16, 2018September 17, 2018

Are You a Writer? #amwriting

It’s less than two weeks before my new thriller THE BIRTHDAY the first in the DI Natalie Ward series hits the shelves. This will be my 15th book to be published and you’d think by now, I’d find this whole publication thing a breeze. Not so. Last night, I woke in a fearful panic that the new book would bomb and people would hate it. Mr Grumpy, my other half, has begun the whole eye-rolling routine that he usually performs around this time when I start whittering on publication day. He is not a writer and he doesn’t understand the see-saw of emotions that flood my body. He pulls a face when I mention chart positions and cowers behind his paper when I screech in delight at a good review. I can’t help it. This is who I am. I am a writer.

This morning, I reasoned it was normal to feel this way, after all, I am a writer and every book has a phenomenal amount of effort poured into it: I’ve laboured over every sentence; lived each character’s life to the point where they are real to me, and I have worked solidly – day and night, for months, writing, rewriting, editing, editing again, copy-editing, proofreading and reading the entire script one last time, to the point where I’ve been utterly sick of the sight of the darn thing. From inception to this moment has taken six months of gruelling effort – of ignoring my family, of ignoring my own needs, to get it to this point and so, it’s only natural I’m going be concerned. I am a writer. We are always worried about what others think of our work.

As publication day creeps ever nearer, I know it’ll get worse. There’ll be a familiar mixture of anxiety, panic and excitement and I’ll not sleep the night before the big day, and that day will be filled with euphoria and at the same time, the desire to burst into tears because I am a writer. Unless you’re a writer, you won’t really ‘get’ what I mean.

Mr Grumpy doesn’t get it – not at all. ‘It’s only a book,’ he grumbles. I look dismayed. ‘It’s more than a book! I feel like I’ve been giving birth to this book for six months.’ He ignores me. He’s heard it too many times before. I skulk away, tail between my legs and write a murderous plot in which an unfeeling husband is brutally murdered, because I am a writer.

So, what will this writer do to celebrate the release of her 15th book? Have a party? Drink champagne? Go out for a celebratory meal? Alas, none of those things. I am a writer and as such I have nobody to celebrate with. My friends are in the main, online friends because I am a writer, I spend days alone in my office, living in fictitious world populated by characters of my own imagination, reliving imaginary conversations with them. Most of this forthcoming publication day will be spent on social media, hunting out reviews and thanking people and sharing posts, and of course, I’ll be constantly refreshing my Amazon page to see if my new book baby is climbing the charts, cheering when it rises a few places and sobbing when it moves no further or tumbles. Why? Because I am a writer – a self-doubting, confidence-lacking writer who will be crossing her fingers and hoping… praying… yearning for success.

In between checking social media and panicking because my book isn’t soaring up the charts, I’ll eat bags of chocolate-covered honeycomb dips and drink endless cups of herbal tea, and all the while I’ll continue work on the 3rd in the Natalie Ward series which will be my 20th book. Yes, I am currently writing my 20th book and that can only mean one thing – I have another 5 of these publication days to get through before that one will be ready.

Why do I do it?

Because…

I am a writer.

Now, pass me the gin!

*******

THE BIRTHDAY – An absolutely gripping crime thriller (Detective Natalie Ward Book 1)

OUT 27th SEPTEMBER

Order your copy for ONLY 99p by clicking the link HERE

One hot summer’s afternoon, five-year-old Ava Sawyer went to a party. She never came home…

When five-year-old Ava Sawyer goes missing from a birthday party at a local garden centre, the police are bewildered by the lack of leads. That is until two years later, when Ava’s body is found and another little girl, Audrey Briggs, goes missing. Audrey also attended that party …

Leading the investigation is Detective Natalie Ward. A mother of two teenagers, this case chills her to the bone, and is a disturbing reminder of the last job she worked on. One that still keeps her awake at night…

Natalie soon discovers that Ava’s mother has some worrying gaps in her alibi and as she digs deeper, she’s sure Ava’s father is not telling the full story. And what did the owner of the garden centre Elsa see that day? Something that she’s not telling Natalie …

Just as Natalie is facing up to the grim possibility that Ava and Audrey were killed by someone close to home, another little girl from the party doesn’t come home from her ballet lesson. Can Natalie find a way to stop this killer before more innocent lives are taken?

Gripping, fast-paced and nail-bitingly tense, this book will keep you flying through the pages long into the night. Perfect for fans of Angela Marsons, Rachel Abbott and Karin Slaughter.

Readers are going crazy for The Birthday:

‘Absolutely stunning!… wow it blew me away. Totally my favourite book so far of 2018… I loved everything about it… A great start to a new series that I am going to love. I’m already wishing I could have the next book!… Amazing… 5 stars, although it is a shame I can’t give it more, it’s easily worth a 7. Buy it, you won’t regret it!‘ Bonnie’s Book Talk, 5 stars

‘Everything Carol Wyer touches turns to gold. She most definitely knows how to write an addictive and tense page-turner and this one is no different. Compelling from the first page, this will have you hooked in a heartbeat.’ Novel Deelights, 5 stars

‘Omg!! My heart is pounding so hard! I have just finished reading The Birthday and I am floored! This is the first in a new series from Carol Wyer, featuring DI Natalie Ward and her team. What a way to start! Speedy, sharp, heart stopping and engaging; this is a series I am definitely looking forward to!’ TishyLou, 5 stars

‘A rollocking rollercoaster ride … dark, twisty and wonderfully gripping’ Minimac Reviews

‘This could be something special… This book truly is excellent… Heart-thumpingly good… A well-paced, heart-wrenching, pulse racing, edge-of-your-seat kind of book and a crime fighting team who you can genuinely root for… look no further as this could genuinely be your next favourite read. I tore through it.’ Jen Med’s Book Reviews, 5 stars

‘What a twist! …I read this book in a day!’ Goodreads Reviewer, 5 stars

‘An exciting new series… Excellent character development… full of surprising twists and turns. This was a truly thrilling book… chilling… It certainly was no average read… I read The Birthday so fast that I was actually surprised… Excellent pacing… superb writing.’Robin Loves Reading, 5 stars

‘Wyer easily surpassed all my expectations, creating a dynamic lead character that is every bit as enthralling as the beloved DI Carter… I could barely breathe as they rushed to find and arrest the killer… Sure to be another skilfully-crafted series… intense, chilling, and the very definition of unputdownable… A must-read.’ The Geeky Bibliophile, 5 stars

**********

September 10, 2018

Do Giveaways Help Promote Books? #giveaway #writingadvice

I often see tweets “#RT for a #Giveaway” or similar, scrolling through my Twitter feed. It seems every day, authors are eagerly offering not just signed copies of their books, but other goodies to boost sales, sometimes even huge hampers of gifts, from £100 Amazon vouchers to promises of putting winner’s names into the next novel.

Most of us will have tried this. We’ve offered books, purchased out of our own pockets. We’ve signed them and posted them to far-flung places, again at our own cost, to those fortunate enough to win. Yet, how much does a giveaway influence a book’s performance?

We’d love to believe offering a signed copy of a book will garner interest in it, and those unlucky enough not to win your book will race off instead to purchase it.

Websites like Goodreads would also have you believe it is imperative to offer free books and run a giveaway campaign several weeks ahead of release. Some virtual book tour companies also advise you to offer free copies of your book to run alongside reviews, and bombard you with statistics of how many people read and respond to such posts.

Do giveaways sell more books?

After numerous giveaways held on various websites, I have had mixed results. Goodreads campaigns yielded no increase in sales, nor did I have much success offering giveaways on virtual tours or Rafflecopter prizes on blogs.

This might have been due to the timing or poor promotion on my part or simply not doing it properly, but if you are considering doing a giveaway you should remember that a lot of people you attract are simply looking for freebies. They might or might not even read or review your book. They could well tell their friends how great it is, but the reality is you will spend a lot of your hard-earned money on promoting and the financial rewards are unlikely to outweigh the cost.

Are giveaways pointless?

In brief – no. They are a terrific marketing tool and success is not always based on number of book sales. Much depends on your expectations. Gear your giveaway to create a social buzz, gain more followers on your social media platforms and increase your email or newsletter list, and all of those will eventually lead to sales. You are playing a long game and building up your author platform.

If you get your promo right, your name and book will get massive exposure, which is again great news. I learned recently, a reader needs to hear of and see a book about seven times before they click to buy. A promotion will increase those chances.

The key to a giveaway is to decide what you want out of it. If you are creating a name for yourself then they are worthwhile. If you are hoping for an immediate increase in book sales, be prepared to be disappointed. (Having said which, I know of authors who have had a spike after a big giveaway.)

The Internet is stuffed full of giveaways so target your promotion carefully. You need to be heard and stand out among other giveaways.

Results of recent giveaway.

My new thriller THE BIRTHDAY is due out on September 27th. Pre-sales have been decent but I wanted to raise interest prior to the actual release.

I offered two notebooks (see above) as prizes. I started my campaign Sunday afternoon because that seems to be a time when many people are online. I offered one notebook on Twitter for merely following me and retweeting. I offered a second book using my Facebook page for anyone sharing my post and commenting.

Given my goal was purely to raise awareness of the forthcoming release, I was pleased with the results.

My Facebook page post reached 1011 people and was shared 124 times. The Twitter post received 2,080 impressions and was shared 104 times. In total, 3091 people saw the post and are aware of my book. I’m pretty happy with that. I can’t say if any will convert into sales but for now I’m satisfied to know THE BIRTHDAY has been paraded in front of these people and the icing on the cake is that before I ran the giveaway yesterday at 2 p.m. THE BIRTHDAY was at #630 in the UK Amazon charts. By 8 p.m. it had risen 250 positions to #380.

The giveaway runs until Thursday so you have time to win one of these fabulous notebooks. If you’d like to do so, pop along to my Twitter page and retweet the link here or my Facebook author page which you can find by clicking here