Books Are Magic: A Day in the Life of RW Peake

Wednesday, 13 February 2013

A Day in the Life of RW Peake

- GUEST POST BY RW PEAKE

All in all, it’s good to be me. I’m at a point where I’m selling books at a rate of three figures a day, so I can now say that I’m an author who does this full time. My normal day consists of checking my sales, then checking my email. At this point, I’m averaging 3 to 4 pieces of correspondence from fans a day, and I will continue to answer each and every one of them personally as long as I can. I have some truly great fans who have responded to my books with such an overwhelming and positive enthusiasm that I feel very strongly that it’s incumbent on me to take time to communicate with them. I’ve heard and actually debated with other indie authors who believe that this is beneath them, that there should be some sort of invisible barrier between themselves and their great, unwashed fans. For lack of a better term, I think this is utter bullshit. Long before I became an author of my genre, I was a fan, and I love nothing more than talking about Ancient Rome with fellow enthusiasts. One day this may change, or the rate of correspondence might become too much to handle, but that’s a problem I’ll deal with when it gets here, and it’s a really good problem to have in the first place.

After that, I scan the Internet looking for anything that pertains to my books that I can put on my Facebook fan page and Tweet about. For example, I’ve been the #1 best seller in the Ancient Rome genre for quite some time now, so once a week I inform the world of that fact, and how long the streak has continued. Also, I’ve been fortunate to receive a very high number of reviews, and the vast majority of them are in the 4 or 5 star range, and I’m not shy about letting the world know. I would refer back to Ted Turner’s adage.

Next, I spend a significant portion of my day adding to a blog that I’ve created called Caesar Triumphant, a suppositional history of a Caesar that survived the Ides of March and in fact goes on his campaign to Parthia as he had planned. My story actually picks up 10 years later, when he and his army invades Japan, the final land to be conquered by the greatest conqueror of all time. It’s more for fun than anything, and is based on a simple idea; if the Legions of Rome faced the samurai of Japan, who would win? Of course the eras that are the classical periods for both civilization don’t match up, and I wasn’t willing to introduce time travel, so what Caesar and his men (the central characters are from the Marching With Caesar series, just 10 years older) have to face are proto-samurai.

Finally, I am working on the final edit of my next book, Marching With Caesar-Antony and Cleopatra, which will be out on February 24th.

Oh, and I also play a lot of video games, watch enormous amounts of daytime TV, and pretty much do what I want, when I want. Yes, it’s good to be me.