The Hard Graft Starts Here

After the first few months of selling copies of the book to family, friends and a particularly warm bowel cancer contingent on twitter, sales of the book have slowed down considerably in recent weeks. Of course there are only so many family and friends to sell the book too, and likewise on twitter the amazingly supportive bowel cancer crowd has only so many followers you can target. In fact I am amazed that I haven't come in for a bit of grief with all my repetitive tweets on twitter!

And so as Easter approaches and the book having been on sale for 5 months the hard graft begins. I still stand by aiming for my original target of 1000 copies, which would in theory raise £1000 for the Beating Bowel Cancer charity. With sales standing at 166 after 5 months the odds are probably not in my favour of achieving this. What I need to do is find a way to target and connect with a new audience who can identify with both the cause and the book. Over the last 5 months my faith in human nature has been completely restored as the kindness and genuine support for the book has been fantastic, and it certainly makes the effort of doing it all worthwhile. On the weekend just gone at a reunion dinner a guy came up to me and handed over £20 to go into the justgiving pot. I find it interesting that the justgiving page has raised the same amount of money for the charity as the book has, and they seem to go well together...

And yet with all the endless tweeting, blogging and shameless book plugging the main focus for me remains my mum. Following on from surgery last September to remove the cancerous section from her bowel, she then had surgery to remove a nodule from her left lung in January. The bad news at that time was scans then showed up more nodules on her right lung meaning an additional operation in March. This has meant she has undergone 3 major operations in 6 months which is pretty intense for anyone let alone a senior citizen! Yet she doesn't complain, has taken everything that has been thrown at her with dignity and a steely determination to do everything she can to beat the disease. She is totally inspiring! All she wants two do is to pick up her life again and get back to some normality. Hopefully fingers crossed she is not too far away from that point now. The results from the first operation showed one nodule to be cancerous, which we had expected as it had been there all along, and all the rest were non-cancerous. We haven't had the results on the right lung yet, but just hoped the nodules they removed all turn out to be non-cancerous.

I will continue to put in the hard work into this fundraising book for as long as it takes, and for anyone who has already bought the book I really am ever so grateful. To all others please do whatever you can to support the book as the book's fortunes can change with just one sale.