KARMA IS A BITCH

Or “The Sad Story of William’s Book”.

How many of us can honestly say we have never ever used pirated software or downloaded a movie or a book or both or all three?

I recently tried to sell a book I had written. I advertised it on Facebook and thought that the result would be a whole raft of sales. I had written the book in question when I was going through a bad patch and still think it is a good read today. The most recent time I revisited it, I thought that I could have written a slightly better-worded summing up as it comes across as far more pretentious than I really was at the time I wrote it. I was a little concerned, not by the true meaning of what I had written but how it could be perceived.

Still, as I said before, my opinion that it is a good read, full of interesting anecdotes which are true but would be hard for some people to believe, remains unchanged. I awaited the results of the campaign, especially the sales figures, with anticipation.

To my disappointment, I made very few sales, not even enough in royalties to cover the cost of advertising and I was a little taken aback. Surely there should have been more interest in my book than that?!!

A few days ago, I did a search for my book online in order to check whether it had had any more reviews on Amazon. As I write this, there are but two.

It was then I came across a chat room conversation in which people were asking where they could get hold of “True Stories of My Dabbling in the Occult and Other Weird Stuff” by William Mobberley.

Hey! That’s me! That’s MY book!

In my naivete, I thought that perhaps there was a fault with Amazon’s search engine and I was about to point them in the right direction when I realised that what they meant was where they could get it free of charge. One kind soul had provided them with a link and to my amusement, the page even had a couple of reviews, one giving my book a mere one star out of five and another giving it five stars. It would appear that my book polarises opinion.

I got quite a shock when I looked at the downloads which numbered approximately 730.

Of course I cannot approve but neither am I a hypocrite. He who lives by the sword will die by the sword and he who reads a pirated copy of a book will have his book pirated. That is Karma – but 730 times???!!!

Ah, the lost sales. How much I could have done with those royalties! I do not delude myself that the losses are real. If these people could not have obtained it free of charge, they most likely would not have bought nor read it at all. I do not condone what they did (obviously) but I did get a little frisson when it dawned on me that my advertising DID have an effect after all. There had been nothing wrong with the advertising, nor the book. The problem was that those people who saw the ad probably thought: “That looks interesting. I wonder where I can get it without having to pay for it.”

Ah, such is life. I suspect that authors have never been that enamoured by public libraries either.

What I will say is this: If you have at some point read my book (having obtained a copy by whatever means) and you have read it and enjoyed it, could you please at least rate it accordingly and leave a nice review on Amazon? If it got a couple of hundred, good ratings, it would go up the Amazon chart and there would be a good chance that I might actually get some sales after all.

And that is the least you could do, you rascals! 😉

(Click on the image of the book or here to see it on Amazon. Hey, you could even buy a copy. That would make a change.)

Here is the description.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
– Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio

This is the true story of a life lived with one foot in the unseen world. Told with sometimes stark honesty, these tales of demonic possession by evil spirits, encounters with UFOs, sexual abuse, visions of saints and of training in mediumship by a real clairvoyant are fascinating and disturbing, yet told with an infectious life-affirming exuberance which is at once irreverent and provocative.

Telling it like it was, the author spills the beans on his occult activities, from ouija board sessions, to haunted houses, tarot cards, telepathic animals and a particularly chilling encounter with real evil.

Venturing into areas most wouldn’t dare go anywhere near, very few people have led a life like this. Incredible, astounding, courageous in the telling of it, let alone the living of it and it’s all true.

376 pages (paperback.)