Belfast Books Book Blog

Russell Brunson’s Dream 100 gives authors a practical way to stop promoting randomly and start identifying the people, platforms, communities, podcasts, newsletters, reviewers, bookshops, and media outlets that already have the attention of their ideal readers.

A professional cover can help the right book look credible, but it cannot create demand, fix weak positioning, or make the wrong audience care. Before authors spend money on design, they need to check whether the book itself has a realistic commercial foundation.

A book funnel gives authors and booksellers a clearer route from reader interest to purchase. Instead of relying only on Amazon, a ClickFunnels book funnel can help you sell directly, capture reader details, build your list, and create a proper book sales system.

Most self-published books do not fail because the author lacks talent. They fail because the book is published into a crowded market before anyone has properly tested the audience, positioning, demand, competition, and route to discovery.

Friends and family are often kind, supportive, and completely unreliable as beta readers. If you want honest feedback on whether your book has real market potential, you need to hear from the right kind of reader.

Belfast Books looks beyond the crash itself to the Fort George gathering, the passenger list, the alleged “jolly”, and the records still needed to understand the human story.

"The Troubles by N.R. Marchand, a review.

The Troubles novel is a treacherous thing. For many authors – especially those unfamiliar with Northern Ireland’s complex social, political, and historical terrain – it is difficult to navigate, and chances are that nobody will thank you for doing it. Regrettably, this is the case with N.R. Marchand’s The Troubles (Olympia Publishers, 2018).

Throughout much of the Troubles, Irish and Northern Irish authors simply avoided the topic altogether. For both local writers and readers, suffering and loss were often too near. It was left mostly to British and American thriller writers to explore the conflict. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these thrillers are often laughable for the Northern Irish reader. Sometimes referred to as Troubles trash, some academics even suggest that the deluge of inaccurate representations may be, in part, responsible for the closemindedness that maintains sectarian division,[1] and hinders the peace process. Whatever their repercussions, these thrillers spoke about the trauma of violence too glibly and didactically for Northern Irish readers. There were no simple, believable solutions and, in any case, what more could they learn about a conflict that coloured their everyday lives for thirty years? A market flooded with these crass and reductive representations deterred authors from adding their own opinions to the literary “freakshow” that was the Troubles novel.[2] There are, of course, notable exceptions to this[3] and, since the conflict’s end (although it seems a little optimistic to say “resolution”), a vibrant and talented cohort of authors has stepped up to address Northern Ireland’s chequered history and problematic present.[4]