Getting my priorities straight

I find myself in limbo.  I have a full-time job (although I do work for myself and therefore have more flexibility in my working pattern than do traditional employees) and my main hobby during my free time is writing historical fiction.  But writing is no longer the solitary and focussed activity it once was.  The advent of self-publishing (which is gradually renaming itself “independent publishing” – I suppose to remove the suggestion of vanity and self-indulgence) means that those of us who fail to find an agent and traditional publisher can still publish our books, but this leads inevitably to a vary crowded marketplace.  Even taking as a tiny and unscientific sample the “indie authors” whom I “know” through my own membership of the Society of Authors and the Alliance of Independent Authors, hundreds of books a day are being published.  It’s marvellous, in that there is going to be the perfect book for every reader, but as an author, how do we elbow our way to the front and shout, “Here it is, your perfect book – it’s the one I’ve written!”?

And this is really the nub of my post today: how can the hobbyist author – as opposed to the full-time professional – find time to do what is necessary to stay afloat and visible in the publishing world?  Before you get out your notepad, I should confess that I don’t have the answer – or at least, nothing more revolutionary than “you just have to find the time – as with most human endeavour, effort in will lead to results out”.  For myself, I concentrate on my monthly Sam Plank update distributed via Mailchimp to my mailing list of (I’ve just checked) 43 subscribers.  It works for me because (a) I’m doing the research anyway and it’s fun to distil some of it into an update, and (b) all the received wisdom about book marketing says that a mailing list of loyal readers is more important than anything.  But I know I’m dabbling in an amateur fashion, and when I see what full-time authors can do – probably ably supported by publicists and publishers – I am green with envy and mournful with inadequacy.

In my darker, more envious moments I remind myself of two things.  One: when I retire from full-time work (hah!) I will be able to do all this publishing and promotion properly.  And two: if I have an hour or two to devote to the author side of my life, I should spend it on writing and not on worrying about publicity and marketing.  After all, I could have the slickest sales campaign in the world, glitzy enough to make John Grisham weep into his inkwell, and it would be worth nothing without having the words between the covers, ready to sell.  So that’s my moan for today, and I’m off to write a scene where poor Wilson has to tell a mother that her son has died.  Cheery.

My flexible festival

It’s raining cats and dogs and we’re still under lock-down (at least here in the UK), which gives me the perfect excuse to stay indoors all day and “attend” not one but two virtual book festivals.  I wasn’t sure to begin with but now I’m a real convert: I don’t have to pay for travel or accommodation, and I can still see everyone even if I can’t meet them in person (plus I get to nose around their backgrounds and bookshelves).  Moreover, with Zoom and the like, we audience members can ask questions via the chat facility, which is actually a fairer system: you don’t have to wave your arm madly to catch the moderator’s eye – we’re all equally visible to the chat bar.

So far today I have heard talks by Elizabeth Buchan, Debbie Young, A A Abbott, Orna Ross, Joanna Penn, Jo Ullah and Kate Mosse, and I still have four more sessions to look forward to – what bounty!  I have been scribbling notes like a demon, recording a mixture of inspiration (Elizabeth Buchan: be patient – allow the batteries to recharge and the ideas to percolate), writing skills (Kate Mosse: create a strong historical scaffolding for your characters and let them loose within it to choose their own story) and practicalities (Orna Ross: every author needs a premium product – it is very hard to make a living just from books and Joanna Penn: look at your books’ reviews to find the right language to use in your promotional material and ads).  I’m fizzing, I tell you.  And the one concrete thing I have done between sessions is to create anew the @ConstablePlank twitter handle that I had abandoned.  It’s not quite the right handle, now that Gregory Hardiman is making himself known, but it will do for now – and at least I can follow other inspirational people and get these posts promoted a little more widely.

And to complete the festival experience, I grabbed a quick pizza for lunch between sessions and pretended there was a queue for the loo.

Close reading and cover design

After the frenzied writing and word-counting of my writing retreat, it probably seems as though I have gone a bit quiet now – but that is the nature of the editing beast.  I have so far read the whole of “Heir Apparent” three times myself (including once when my printer went moody and missed out two whole chapters and I couldn’t work out why the plot made less sense than usual…) and now it is being read for typos, spelling, etc. by my husband.  He is a very precise person – engineer by training, bike mechanic by passion – and therefore good at looking closely at things.  Plus it gives him such pleasure to be able to point out spelling mistakes to me, an English graduate – the things we do for love.

While all of that is going on, an author’s mind turns to thoughts of publication.  And to that end I have been:

• Writing the “front matter” for the book – which (for me) means:
  • gathering extracts from reviews of the other books in the series – these go on the very first pages of the book
  • deciding on a classical quotation to start the book – I can’t remember why I first did this in “Fatal Forgery”, but it’s part of the process now, and quite good fun for someone who had no classical education
  • writing the dedication
• Co-operating with the cover designer – by which I mean I give him some rambling drivel about how I think the cover could look, and he creates something amazing out of it (we’re nearly there now – I’ll show it to you soon)
• Planning the launch – I’ve emailed one bookshop which (perhaps in a moment of madness after a reading) offered to hold my “next” launch party (they didn’t know I’ve never had one before).

After “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat” (book two), I did write myself a list of pre-publication tasks, which had been invaluable: when you’re preparing a paperback and several e-versions, there’s a lot to remember.  And at the end of the list, I have written: Don’t worry about a specific publication date – Amazon will publish when it wants to.  Good advice.

On a related note, you know that I have my free guide to the Sam Plank series?  When I published it, I managed – through publishing on another site and putting that price to zero and then asking Amazon to price-match that zero price – to get the guide listed for free on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.  I assumed – fool! – that this meant that it would be free on all Amazons, but apparently not: a friend in Belgium emailed to say that Amazon.fr was trying to charge her 99¢ for it.  What to do, I wondered?  Thankfully, my friends at the Alliance of Independent Authors came up trumps; I put a query out to them and they suggested contacting Amazon directly and asking to have the publication price-matched across all Amazons – and it worked.  Live and learn, live and learn.

Ask and ye shall receive

I’ve written before about how helpful and inclusive is the self-publishing community.  If you have any self-publishing questions or concerns or requests, there are numerous fora on which you can post (including my own first port of call, the ALLi website) and you’ll be overwhelmed by answers, suggestions and encouragement.  But I think it’s only right that I should point out that the giving freely of expertise and advice is not limited to self-published authors.

If you’ve ever read a Sam Plank book, you might remember that at the start of each of them is a quotation from a classical author – Virgil in “Fatal Forgery”, Sophocles in “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat” and so on.  The last time I studied Latin was when I was twelve (and that was when Jim Callaghan, Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev were in charge) and I’ve never attempted Greek, and so every time I have to rely on the kindness of Classics academics to check that I am using the most favoured translation.  All it takes is a few emails, and people are so happy to help.

All of the Sam books involve a great deal of research – no, don’t feel sorry for me, as I love it.  But sometimes the material is contradictory or just too technical for me to understand, and here too I turn to the experts.  I hope I won’t be giving too much away if I say that for the plot of “Plank 6” I needed some guidance on botany in the 1820s – which plants had been identified, what were their formal and common names, and whether people in England would have heard of them.  Kew Gardens was the obvious place to go with my enquiries, and the response was just wonderful: I was given exactly the answers I needed, along dedicated links to extra information (some of which gave me an excellent plot development) and a standing invitation to the Gardens to meet the experts and have a look at the plants I was asking about.  When Trump derides and rejects expertise, he is – as usual – talking out of his hat.  And experts who are willing to share their knowledge with random authors who contact them out of the blue add immeasurably to human wealth and happiness.  Thank Kew!

Boxing clever

As many of you will know, the “indie” (independent) publishing world is very co-operative, very inclusive and very helpful.  I belong to a marvellous organisation called ALLi (sounds like “ally” and it’s the Alliance of Independent Authors) and their members’ forum on Facebook is the place to go with all manner of writerly and self-publisher-ly queries.  The joy is being able to follow in successful footsteps of those who have gone before, and it is in that spirit that I have created my first box set of Sam books.

Before you get too excited, I should clarify that it is an e-box set of e-books – nothing physical here.  The idea is that readers of series really like series, and box sets appeal to them.  If you set the price right it can represent a saving on buying individual titles – and readers do love a bargain.  And if your series is longer than the box set, you are encouraging people to persevere further into the series.

As for how much work is involved, it’s not too onerous.  Obviously you have to create a single file out of the separate book files – for me, this was a fairly simple cut and paste exercise, with a bit of jigging to create one glossary out of two.  You then have to put an overall title at the beginning; in my case, I went for the rather predictable “The Sam Plank Mysteries Box Set One: Books 1-3”, with the three separate titles listed below.  (I said “Box Set One” in case I decide to do another one with later titles.)  And then I put bookmarks and hyperlinks into this title so that people can jump straight to the book they want – although I imagine that most people will read straight through, and the Kindle keeps your place.

Then there’s the cover.  I did contact my cover designer to ask about cost but decided that I could do something myself that is just good enough.  After all, the individual covers are eye-catching and beautiful, so I simply created a single image out of the three covers.  I have no talent at all for design, so I went to the ALLi forum and put up two different options for the cover – and people very kindly suggested various improvements (including having the faces looking at each other instead of turned away, although I do worry that the yellow fellow is now staring rather too appreciatively at the red girl).  And here it is:

With combined interior file ready and cover assembled, all I had to do was upload them to KDP – and decide on the price.  The total price of buying the first three Sam books in Kindle version is £9.97 so I priced the box set at £5.99 – in effect, people get the third book free.  I uploaded it yesterday, and so far I have sold one.  As ever, I’ll keep you posted.

Chaos behind the scenes

I can imagine that you’re all thinking how lazy I am – no Sam updates, no new plot developments, not a bean.  But you would be wrong, as I am knee-deep in behind-the-scenes Sam work.  As you know, it is a dream of mine to get the Planks into every bookshop in the land.  I have tried to find out how to achieve this on numerous occasions but the picture is so confused and murky that I have always failed – until now.  (You may remember my short-lived excitement at getting myself registered as a publisher with Nielsen here in the UK – an achievement that has resulted so far in precisely zero sales.)  But then – thanks in no small measure to the advice and encouragement I have received from ALLi (the Alliance of Independent Authors, which I cannot recommend too highly) – the lightbulb has been lit.  To be order-able from UK bookshops I need to be listed with wholesaler Gardners, and to get into their catalogue I need to print my books via Ingram Spark (part of the Lightning Source family) as well as via KDP (CreateSpace-as-was).

Simple, you might think.  But there are a couple of snags – one I have solved, and one I continue to battle.  The solved one is to do with ISBNs.  When I first published the Sam books with CreateSpace (now absorbed by Amazon and part of their KDP platform) I chose to use the free ISBNs handed out by CS, rather than buying my own.  But IS will not print and distribute a book that uses a CS ISBN – and so I need to withdraw the original books and their ISBNs from sale and replace them with new books using new ISBNs that I have bought myself.  Buying ISBNs is easy but not cheap; I bought ten of them for £159.  And changing the ISBNs on the KDP books is simple: you just withdraw the old books and then upload the same files again but quote the new ISBN and the cover will be adjusted automatically.

Which brings me to my unsolved snag: the cover.  The cover files I have were designed for use with CS books and were created using a CS template, which was manufactured to the right specifications given my cover size and the number of pages.  People warned me that IS uses thinner paper than CS, which means that the IS books are slimmer than their CS cousins – which in turn means that the spine dimensions on the IS cover file will be wrong.  I enquired with my cover designer about adjusting the files to meet IS dimensions – and was quoted £75 per cover, for five books….  Not an inconsiderable sum (which would require a significant – and probably unrealistic – boost in sales to justify the outlay).  Could I get away with the original cover files, I wondered?  So I just tried it: I registered with IS and created a new title and uploaded the interior and cover files that I use for CS/KDP.  There was a bit of a hiccup when the IS system said that the interior PDF did not have embedded fonts, but an hour’s work sorted that out.  And IS seemed happy enough with the cover file – all looked fine with the online proof.  I went ahead and ordered a paper proof, and it arrived today.  Two things are obvious: the cover file is not quite right, and the colour is very different:

The colour difference looks worse because they are side by side (that’s the brighter CS one on the left and the duller IS one on the right) but it is disappointing.  And the spine will just not work (that’s the original CS copy on the top, with the slimmer IS one below):

My engineer husband has suggested simply adding some blank pages to the IS interior file, to bulk it up to fit the spine, and has offered to get out his micrometer to measure the page thickness and work out exactly how many cushioning pages I will need.  As they say, back to the drawing board.

Ups and downs

I’ve snaffled myself a writing afternoon in the middle of the working week – don’t tell my clients – and have enjoyed the crazy research threads that you follow when starting out on a new plot.  Among my search terms today: apothecary, infarction, st martin’s lane, acne and butler’s pantry.  Allowing for trips down numerous research rabbit-holes, I am reasonably pleased with just under 890 words written in (what is currently) chapter three of “Plank 6”.

And as if to reward me, an interview I did with the Alliance of Independent Authors – which I joined last month – has appeared on their blog.  I can’t imagine there’s anything you don’t already know about why I love financial crime, but just in case – here’s where you can read it all again.

In other news, I hear from Hart’s Books in Saffron Walden that five tickets have been sold so far for my talk there next Wednesday.  It sounds like it’s going to be an intimate little session but they are often the most fun.  And once you’ve done a talk to three people in a tiny local library, five in a bookshop sounds like riches indeed!

Surveying the reader-scape

One of the great pleasures of being an indie author (indie being independent – so self-published, published through a small publishing house, etc.) is the community you join of other indie authors.  I have recently signed up with ALLi – the Alliance of Independent Authors – and am very much enjoying reading their guidance, advice, discussions and debates.  I am also hoping that my own profile will appear on their website one day, so I will keep you posted.

One very well-respected indie author whose work I follow closely is MK Tod.  Her introduction to historical fiction – like mine – was a teenage obsession with Jean Plaidy and Georgette Heyer, and she now writes books with a WWI setting.  However, she has also made a study of people’s reading habits – albeit mainly people with a love of historical fiction, as they are the ones who find her blog and therefore her “reader surveys”.  She has just published the results of her fourth such survey, containing the thoughts of 2,418 respondents from around the world, and it is well worth reading.

From my perspective – as a keen writer and rather unsuccessful seller of historical fiction – there were a couple of questions whose responses I was most eagerly awaiting.  The first was “In historical fiction, which time periods do you enjoy?”.  And I am relieved to see that mine (nineteenth century) is the second most popular (after twentieth century).  Nineteenth century settings are particularly popular with women, and with those aged over thirty – which perhaps explains the requests I have received for “more Martha” in the Sam books!  And the second was “Reflecting on your fiction reading, how relatively important are the following factors?” – including plot, characters, authenticity and so on.  As Ms Tod herself deduces from the responses, “feeling immersed in the novel’s world” is the most critical factor for readers, followed by “authenticity” and “superb writing” – and as readers age, “superb writing” becomes increasingly important.  This is a great relief to me, as I spend so much time – granted, I love doing it, but still, it takes effort – on making my setting, language and characters as authentic as possible, and encouraging readers to follow Sam into the heart of London in the 1820s.

As someone hoping one day to make a living from writing, I was also interested to read about people’s book-buying habits and preferences.  And this survey – which, again, has an historical fiction bent – tells me this about my target audience:

• They get their books mainly through Internet purchase or borrowed from a library
• 75% of them “frequently or exclusively” use print books
• Their most trusted source of recommendations is friends, followed by well-known book review sites or blogs
• They enjoy reading articles about an author’s work, and following authors on Facebook and Twitter
• They don’t use social media as much as I had thought, and the feature they most value on social media (when they do engage) is book reviews.

Traditionally published authors have entire marketing departments at their disposal, to track and react to this sort of information.  For those of us working alone – the indies – MK Tod has provided an invaluable service, and my own thanks go out to her.  This will certainly inform my future marketing plans.