After you deliver a soft launch for your book, you will want to start shouting about your book from the rooftops. A physical launch event is a great way to do this but hiring a room and buying lots of wine can be expensive.

Never fear! Another great way to raise interest for your book is to host a virtual launch event on Facebook and it won't cost you a penny. A virtual launch is essentially a group of guests meeting in the same online location at the same time to 'hang out'. A Facebook event is the perfect forum for this because people can post on the wall in chronological order so the 'party' can progress throughout the night.

The best and most fun virtual launch party that I have seen was for Pigeonwings in September 2013 hosted by its writers Heide Goody and Iain Grant. These are the five top tips that I learnt from their event...

1. Set the Date - use the Facebook event to promote the time and date of the virtual launch in advance. Invite your friends and fellow writers. Treat invitations for the virtual launch every bit as seriously as if it were an actual party.

2. Set the Tone - this is a virtual party so set the tone as the host. Have some fun with it! Welcome people upon arrival, offer to take their coats, post pictures of drinks and nibbles, see how many people will join your conga line by posting underneath your status, tell people to wear fancy dress by changing their profile picture to an image of them in a silly outfit and so on. It is all  so use your imagination!

3. Music! - post links to YouTube videos so everyone can hear the music being played at the party. The Pigeonwings launch asked for song requests with a Heaven and Hell theme (also the theme of the book), which was a fun way for the guests to get involved.

4. Party Games! - post pictures of silly images that share themes with your novel and set a caption competition. Offer a prize to the funniest caption. This prize could be a free copy of your book or similar merchandise like a fridge magnet or badge. You could also give a prize to the silliest profile picture, the best song requests and anyone who posts a review to Amazon during the party.

5. Sell Books - after having some fun, you can begin to promote your book. Post links to the book on Amazon and kindly ask people to download a copy. It helps if you make the book free during the virtual launch as a reward for your party guests. Plus, if lots of people download the book in a short space of time then the book will spike in the Amazon charts! To help sell books, you may also want to do a question-and-answer session using the comments under a Facebook status. You could also do a guest interview with your illustrator.

Virtual launches are fun, free and you don't even have to leave your house. Get your party started!

Once you have published your novel on Amazon, it is time to start selling the novel. 

A huge book launch is quite tempting at this point: you could host a launch event, flood your social media channels with messages, ask book reviewers to post reviews on their blogs simultaneously and so on.

But wait! Slow down. Before you do an all-singing, all-dancing hard launch, it is best to first promote the book with a soft launch to friends, family, acquaintances and trusted fellow writers. Facebook is the best platform for this approach. This soft launch period may even last for a month or two. 

Here are five reasons why you should soft launch your novel...

1. Time to Build Reviews - your first sales will go to your close friends and family. Ask them to write reviews on Amazon. Ask your test readers to do the same. The Amazon algorithms will start kicking in once you have gathered a few star ratings and your book will creep up the charts. This means that when you get round to hard launching your novel, your potential readers will see a book with a collection of good star ratings and an impressive chart position.

2. Time to Build Sales - sales also help your book rise through the Amazon charts. A good amount of early sales through the soft launch will make you look more impressive when you get round to the hard launch.

3. Time to Check Spelling, Grammar and Formatting - despite rounds and rounds of test reading, there were still five grammatical errors in The Sheriff by the time I published on Amazon. The buyers of the first few copies spotted this when they were reading the e-book and let me know. They have now been stamped out. Future readers will no longer encounter these errors which is good. After all, they will certainly express their dissatisfaction if they have spent money on something which isn't industry standard.

4. Time to Build Your Author Platform - I would strongly suggest building your author platform months before you publish your book. However, there are some author pages that you cannot complete until your book is published, such as the Amazon Author Central page and the Goodreads Author page. The soft launch window will give you time to do this.

5. Time to Experiment - use your friends and acquaintances as a test group. Experiment with different prices to see if they have any effect on your sales. This means you can value your product effectively before the hard launch.

As a wise man once said, 'Softly, softly, catchy monkey.'

Everyone judges a book by its cover so you need to invest in professional, inventive artwork.

I am very proud of the front cover for The Sheriff and I feel it lives up to the story. After spending months writing and editing the book, it would have been a shame to drop the ball at the final stage with a sub-standard cover image. Thankfully, my illustrator Matt Miles did a brilliant job and now The Sheriff is particularly eye-catching when scrolling through the Amazon shelves.

I feel I have learnt a lot on this subject over the past three months so here are my top five tips for illustrating your novel.

1.  Artists Thrive at University - arty degree courses are full of talented, undiscovered artists looking for a chance to prove themselves. Rather than paying a vast sum of money to a 'professional', I strongly recommend visiting a local university which offers arts degrees and putting up a poster requesting an illustrator. The departments may even email the students on your behalf. You will be spoilt for choice. Some universities, such as Coventry University, have a public degree show in the Spring and you can view each students' work before taking home their business cards for your favourites.

2. Browse Before You Buy - illustrators have very different styles so view a selection of their work before making contact. Many illustrators have an online portfolio on sites such as Tumblr. This is the portfolio for Matt Miles.

3. Get The Ball Rolling - once you have found an illustrator, you will need to get the ball rolling yourself. You cannot expect an illustrator to read your book and come back to you with a range of different covers unless you want to pay a fortune and are happy to wait a few months. You need to have a cover in mind: images, colours, layout. Give your illustrator examples of what you had in mind. For The Sheriff, I provided Matt with a print-out of my favourite book covers and images similar to those in my head. These images included the Mufasa cloud from The Lion King and a character from Final Fantasy X! It may sound daft but it really helped provide Matt with a starting point.

4. Do The Legwork - help your illustrator as much as possible. Make their life easy. So, if you require special formatting for Amazon and Smashwords and Createspace then you should be researching this yourself and sending the information to your illustrator. You should no expect your illustrator to do all of that for you. Their job is to design. Your job is to provide direction.

5. Pay Them! - do not think that fresh-faced students are going to work for free. The opportunity to illustrate your novel is not the honour that you might think and if you want them to dedicate time to your art then you need to reward them. Agree costs in advance. Whatever they charge will be a bargain. After all, they might find fame and fortune before you so make the most of their talents now!

They say a rolling stone gathers no moss. Well, the Ethan Stone franchise certainly honours this old proverb because Tom Aston's sequel is leaner and meaner than its predecessor.

Aston understands the formula for a good thriller: a deliciously-complex plot, plenty of action, a quick pace, a host of ambiguous characters and twist upon twist.

What's more, unlike many thriller writers, Aston has a superb grasp of language. The dialogue is crisp and the sense of place is vivid. He describes characters and settings in short, sharp bursts of poetic language, for instance: "The showers of freezing rain drifted down under the street lights of the old suspension bridge like thin grey curtains gusting in and out of a broken window." This provides powerful imagery but doesn't overstay its welcome. The novel is a thriller, after all.

As a sequel, the expectation is for an increase in scope and Aston delivers on this front. The plot, arguably the defining tool of any thriller, is extremely intricate with numerous sub-plots occurring all over the world. This global element signifies another increase in scale. Whilst its predecessor, The Machine, was set predominantly in China, the sequel zips along at a dizzying pace between France, Canada, Switzerland, Afghanistan and New York. And the sequel delves a little deeper into Stone's back-story, touching upon his military exploits in Macedonia. Hopefully there will be more back-story in the next instalment.

Aston, like fellow thriller writer Jo Nesbo, is full of fresh ideas. Notable highlights include the explosive opening in which a suicide bomber charges through Strasbourg Christmas Market, a brutal wrestle between two women in a hotel room and an eye-watering interrogation scene involving a scalpel.

Finally, Aston should be commended on his research. His knowledge is vast, ranging from countries and weapons to languages and historical conflict. It is an impressive feature of his work and ensures his stories feel grounded in the real world.

Based on The Noble Lie, it is reasonably to expect Ethan Stone to have a literary career as long as Jack Reacher. And that's the truth.

The Noble Lie is available for Kindle for just £2.56.

I launched my online author platform on 12 January 2014. After just two months, I have amassed 501 Twitter followers and received 2731 unique visitors on my website.

I attribute this success to my activity on Twitter. These are my five tips for building a solid Twitter following.

1. Following the Right People - if you are a writer, then the people who you will want to follow you will be other writers, readers, publishers, editors and agents. If you follow people with a similar interest then they are likely to follow you back. There are various hashtags all writers should know and you will find fellow writers by searching for these hashtags.

2. Thanking Your Followers - remember to thank your followers for following you, as this helps with retention of followers. A short direct message to every new follower saying 'Hello [insert name]' and something like 'nice to tweet you' is quick and courteous. Automatic direct messages look impersonal which is why it is important to insert the name to show you wrote the message yourself. Better yet, comment on something in their bio and you may get into an interesting conversation.

3. Tweet Good Content - this also helps with retention. Keep your followers interested in you by linking to book reviews or blogs about writing. If these book reviews and blogs are hosted on your website then this is a good way to increase your website traffic too. Also, stay true to your bio. If you describe yourself as an author then you should be tweeting about writing, books, editing and other writers. If you stray off topic then your followers will get bored of you. Hard-selling your own book is also quite boring and should be avoided.

4. Give Back - I firmly believe all writers should help their fellow writers and Twitter is an easy way to do this. Tweeting good content is part of this but you can also help writers get exposure by retweeting, favouriting and replying to their tweets. You could visit their websites (often listed in the bio) and interact with these sites. Best of all, you could buy one of your followers' books, read it and review it. 

5. Go Pro - be professional in your Twitter activity. Use a sensible photo of yourself as your Twitter profile picture, rather than an image of something silly or abstract. You are a person, not an organisation, and Twitter users will feel better able to relate to you if they can see you are a real person. Be professional in your tweets too. Don't overload your tweets with hard-selling messages or twenty hashtags or spelling errors or shouty CAPITAL LETTERS AND EXCLAMATION MARKS!!! It will make your tweets look like spam and nobody wants clutter on their feed.

And remember, Twitter is a lot of fun so enjoy yourself.

It is important for writers to network with fellow writers. This is why all writers should join a writing group. However, thanks to Twitter, you can do much of your networking online.

The best way to meet fellow writers on Twitter is to use the hashtags that your fellow writers will be using. By searching for these hashtags, you will be presented with a long list of tweets by fellow writers also using the hashtag and then you can add them, retweet them or simply start conversations.

So, here are five types of hashtags all writers should know.

1. Writing Hashtags - these should be added to tweets during the process of writing: #writing, #amwriting, #wordcount. If you are writing as part of NaNoWriMo then you can also include #NaNoWriMo and #NaNo. Similarly, if you are editing then you can use #editing or #amediting.

2. Advice Hashtags - if you are sharing writing advice with your fellow writers then you should add these to your tweets: #writingadvice, #writingtips, #writetips. Offering writing advice in the form of a blog post is a great way to direct people to your website.

3. Publishing Hashtags - if you have published your book on Amazon or Smashwords then you should use these hashtags: #selfpub, #epub, #indiepub. You may also wish to add #kindle, #kobo, #nook or #smashwords depending on where your book is available.

4. Book Review Hashtags - writing book reviews are one of many great ways to help your fellow writers. They are also a great way to direct people to your website. For tweets containing links to book reviews, you should add #bookreview, #AvidReaders, #goodread, #mustread, #bookworm.

5. Genre Hashtags - it is important to reach your target audience when promoting your book. As such, use these genre hashtags in your tweets so fans of your genre can find you: #FanFic, #fantasy, #horror, #romance, #SciFi, #KidLitChat and so on. You could also try a hashtag for the title of your novel, such as #TheSheriff. This would be especially useful during a book launch event if you decide to host one.

Give hashtagging a try. It helped me gain 500 Twitter followers in just two months.

Pigeonwings is the hugely funny and readable sequel to Clovenhoof.

It does everything a sequel should do. It retains everything successful about its predecessor (lovable characters, outrageous comic set-pieces, clever religious references) whilst expanding the established universe with new characters, settings and set-ups. These new elements include Nerys' dysfunctional family, a dog that has all the answers, a paint-balling trip, a flaming sword and a road trip to Wales.

Pigeonwings is a lot more story-focussed than its predecessor. Clovenhoof was very sketch-based and episodic, with a subtle story arc that only came to the foreground in the final two chapters. However, Pigeonwings has two story arcs established from the beginning. The first concerns Ben's blossoming romance with Nerys' sister and the second focuses on an island of misfit monks. Both give the story drive and will keep you turning those pages until the inevitable moment when both plots collide.

Authors Heide Goody and Iain Grant are building a comic franchise with the potential of Discworld-style longevity. The first step towards that goal was side-lining their former protagonist, Clovenhoof, and allowing a new character, Archangel Michael, to take centre stage. This reverses the original formula - now we have an angel exiled to Earth instead of a demon - but, most importantly, it provides another character who can carry the franchise in case readers ever get bored of Clovenhoof.

(Although, fans will be delighted to know that Clovenhoof is far from absent. He cuts in and out of the story whenever it needs an injection of chaos, much like the shark in Jaws. His trip to a Women's Association meeting is particularly hilarious.)

The next novel in this franchise is rumoured to be titled Monks and will focus on the monks introduced in this novel. This is an even bolder move because Clovenhoof, Michael, Ben and Nerys are unlikely to feature at all. However, let's not forget that Pratchett ditched Rincewind for his third Discworld novel and it was still a huge success, establishing the witches who are now greatly-adored by fans.

And based on the comic talents of Goody and Grant, it appears that the Clovenhoof franchise will be just as strong without Clovenhoof. Bring on the monks.

Pigeonwings is available for Kindle for £2.99.

White Oaks is the debut novel from author Lyn McCulloch. It is a light, enjoyable read about a middle-aged woman called Judy who finds herself running her newly-purchased B&B single-handed when her husband Gordon is called back to sea.

Judy is a lovable and grounded heroine, brilliantly drawn and full of British can-do spirit. She must contend with all manner of obstacles throughout the novel: a kitchen fire, a missing dog, several rooms in need of decorating, a visit from the police, a smitten neighbour, the dreaded hotel inspector, scuba divers and even an gang of morris dancers. These challenges keep the story moving at a nifty pace and will keep the reader turning the pages.

White Oaks was originally published as a serial and this is evident from the episodic nature of the chapters. Readers could digest the chapters as a series of short stories which makes them perfect for reading during a commute.

The cast is vast but McCulloch ensures each character is recognisable and fully-realised. We are introduced to Judy's family, friends and staff, which makes for a rich ensemble and provides plenty of opportunity for bickering, banter and bust-ups. Particular highlights include Mavis, the chambermaid with a tough exterior but a heart of gold, and Judy's son Tom, who is part-layabout and part-genius. It takes all of the characters to get White Oaks up and running and their camaraderie provides a feel-good factor that will leave the reader smiling.

In some respects, White Oaks is reminiscent of the television show Gavin & Stacey: a dysfunctional family, adapting to a new region, plenty of humour, the aforementioned feel-good factor and there is even a wedding to bring everyone together.

Lastly, it is worth mentioning the semi-autobiographical nature of White Oaks. McCulloch runs her own B&B and this has clearly informed her writing. White Oaks therefore offers a behind-the-scenes look at B&B management which is often quite fascinating.

White Oaks is a delight and will certainly invite you to dream of your summer holidays, especially at this time of year. As such, there is no better time to purchase White Oaks and it is a true bargain at £1.99 for Kindle.