Double delight

I know I’m meant to do it for the love of it, and honestly, most of the time I do: Sam, Martha, Wilson and I sit in my back bedroom (grandly called “the study”) and between us we put enough words on the page to release a new adventure every eighteen months or so.  And it is a pleasure and a privilege to be able to spend all those hours on something so self-indulgent and enjoyable.  But I cannot deny that it is thrilling to get recognition for the effort and the hours and the words.  And in the past couple of days, I have had double recognition!

The marvellous Jo writes a book review blog called JaffaReadsToo (Jaffa being her feline office manager) and on her regular feature Hist Fic Saturday she graciously published a blushingly lovely review of “Heir Apparent”.  Jo has been a supporter of the series since “Fatal Forgery”, when I was casting around for reviewers of historical fiction and she kindly agreed to take a punt on a complete unknown (whereas now I have reached the dizzy heights of “not quite unknown”).  I was particularly nervous about sending her “Heir Apparent”, as it has the most complicated plot so far and – with Jo’s sharp eye – I knew that any inconsistencies would be laid bare…  Thankfully she and Jaffa have given it their paw-print of approval – calling the Sam books “perhaps one of the best historical crime series I have read” – and I can breathe once more.

And then yesterday I was travelling home on a crowded train, having been separated from my phone all day by the welcome distraction of a family gathering, when I spotted that the wonderful Helen Hollick of the Discovering Diamonds book review website has named “Heir Apparent” her Book of the Month for November 2019!  She had already published a lovely review, so this is an unexpected extra plaudit – and comes with the spiffy badge that you can see on the left of the page.  Helen, it goes without saying, is a doyenne of historical fiction – as both a writer and a reader – and her opinion is one of the most valued around.  I did a mini dance of delight on the train (95% internal, so as not to alarm other passengers) and then had celebratory fish and chips for supper.  What a week!

Covered in glory

I know I said that I would shut up for a fortnight, but this is just too exciting to wait!  As regular readers will know, the one area in which I splash the cash in self-publishing is my covers.  Well, not mine: the covers of my books.  Although I know you shouldn’t judge a book, etc., I also know that a cover that screams “homemade on my daughter’s drawing program” or “bought cheap because it sort of matches my story” does you no favours at all.  Potential readers need to know that they are in safe and professional hands, and a quality cover image is their first indication of that.  Sadly I am blessed with the artistic capabilities of a cross-eyed walrus – I would no more design or draw my own book cover than I would rewire my own house.

Thankfully, back in the mists of time when I was working on what would become my very first self-published book, I was pointed in the direction of an outfit called Design for Writers.  Now that’s a name I can understand – they sound like experts to me.  That first book was nothing to do with Sam – it’s a non-fiction book about the prevention of money laundering, which is my day job – but Andrew at DfW immediately knew what I was on about and produced the first of many “piggy” covers.  (Here’s one of them.)  And when it came to my first foray into fiction with “Fatal Forgery” (try saying that in a hurry!) there was only one place to go.

Since then, Andrew and his wife Rebecca have been wonderful.  Each time a new Plank comes out, they take my rambling description (“well, it’s a bit darker than the last one, with a preacher, but not a Wesleyan preacher, and I need a sermon in the background – one from London if you can – and someone said that purple might look good, and no, I don’t have a title yet, until the vote closes next month”) and create a marvel from it.  And so this is really their success rather than mine, but the fantastic purple cover of “Faith, Hope and Trickery”, with the overwrought yet devilishly dishy young man emoting like billy-o, has been given an Honourable Mention rosette in the May 2018 “Cover of the Month” awards on the Discovering Diamonds book review blog.  And now I really will be quiet.  But only for a fortnight.

Flying(ish) off the shelves

I’ve been a bad blogger, I know, but I have an excuse: I’ve been away on holiday.  I spent a week in Galle, in southern Sri Lanka, and I can report that – lovely though it is – Sam will not be visiting it in future books.  Although Ceylon was a British “possession” in the 1820s, I can’t imagine Martha being keen on her husband sailing off for distant tropical lands – and Galle was a pretty rackety place back then, with more formal policing confined to Colombo, nearly seventy miles to the north.

Now that I am back in Blighty, I can update you on the launch of “Faith, Hope and Trickery”.  After a tense time when my original order from CreateSpace nearly failed to show up before my departure on hols, the box of books finally arrived an hour before I left and my husband was roped in as delivery boy to take the reserved copies to my two local bookshops, Heffers and David’s.  Here they are in prime position in the window of David’s – note their wonderful promotion of me as an “local (award-winning) author”, referring to my Discovered Diamonds award for “Portraits of Pretence”!

A couple of lovely reviews – both stating that they think “FHT” is the best of the Sam series – have appeared on Amazon (you can get a taster on the Reviews page).

And I have just worked out my sales figures for the Kindle edition, and in March 2018 (the month of launch) I sold eleven e-copies.  Paperback sales are harder to calculate, as the CreateSpace website is not updated instantly, but I think we’re looking at ten copies sold via Amazon in March, plus the ten delivered to Heffers and the three to David’s.

Meanwhile, the withdrawal symptoms have started already, and I am turning my mind to “Plank 6” – I’m researching the history of the Cayman Islands, and of plant-based poisons…

Plodcast

As I mentioned a few days ago, I am now an Award-Winning Author.  In a bid to make as much noise as I could about this – being a self-published author means being your own [under-funded and under-staffed] marketing department – I contacted everyone I could think of who might be willing to publicise my success.  And one of the first to reply was Leigh Chambers, who “appears” on our local radio station, Cambridge 105, and who interviewed me back in October 2015 (as a local author) on her “Bookmark” show.  She explained that all of her current “Bookmark” interview slots are taken, but invited me to come in to her daytime show instead and have a chat.  Which I did on Thursday last week, and it has now been issued as a ten-minute podcast.  So you can hear me talking about Sam, “Portraits of Pretence”, the Discovering Diamonds “Book of the Year 2017” award, and other writerly things.

A couple of things to note: the Cambridge 105 website refers to me as a lawyer, which is flattering but wrong; and I had no idea that they were going to photograph me, so I am wearing my casual squirrel dress and no make-up.  Writers on the radio do not expect to be seen…

A gong for Sam

Yesterday I was driving home from visiting family and listening to the news on the radio.  They announced who had been given a New Year Honour (for overseas readers, here’s what they are), and I had a little daydream about how marvellous it would be to be recognised (à la Lady Antonia Fraser) for services to literature.  Once home, having been offline for a couple of days, I checked my email and good heavens!  I found that I had been given something even better!  “Portraits of Pretence” – the fourth Sam Plank novel – has been chosen by influential book review website Discovering Diamonds as their Book of the Year for 2017.

Discovering Diamonds is a wonderful place.  I stumbled on it – or rather, the people behind it, before it was created – right back at the start, just as I published the first Sam Plank novel, “Fatal Forgery” and was looking for reviewers.  Everyone associated with the website – and in particular our marvellous leader Helen Hollick – has been incredibly generous with their time, expertise, guidance and encouragement.  If you’re a fan of historical fiction – of any era and in any formats, whether e-book or paperback, Victorian or Roman, self-published or traditionally produced – their reviews are unmissable.

Regular readers of this blog will remember how excited I was when “Portraits” was chosen as their Book of the Month in March.  And now to find that I have scooped the annual award – well!  Naturally Sam would dispute my role, as Helen quite rightly points out that he is the hero of it all: “The three main characters have, through the absorbing series, become good, fictional, friends.  I find them believable, plausible and very likeable.”

I know the fashion is to say that awards don’t matter, that the work itself is the reward.  And of course I do love writing the Sam Plank stories.  But they are not edging Grisham or Rowling off the bestseller lists, there is no-one from the BBC knocking at the door and begging to be allowed to make them into a Sunday night corset drama, and my marketing efforts cost much more in time than they generate in income.  And so an award like this does matter – it matters enormously.  Hopefully it will generate some publicity for Sam, but more importantly it confirms to me that I can write, that the books are worth reading, and that I am right to continue.  Thank you, Helen: to me, this award is priceless.

Sam Plank – a diamond geezer

Well, it’s Sam’s day in the wonderful “Diamond Tales” extravaganza.  As I explained a while ago, the “Discovering Diamonds” blog – which devotes itself to publicising and promoting self- and indie-published historical fiction – is marking the festive season by featuring an excerpt from a different novel each day in the run-up to Christmas, and each has to have something to do with diamonds.  Those of you who have read “Portraits of Pretence” may remember that 1827 marked Sam and Martha’s diamond wedding anniversary, and he decided to buy her something special, in that particularly blundering Sam fashion…  And this is the passage I have chosen for today.

I have so enjoyed reading the other diamonds this month – what a perfect introduction to all sorts of writers who are new to me.  It’s such a treat, having a short story in my inbox every day, written in all sorts of different styles and set in every possible historical era.  And yes, I have been tempted to order one or two – OK, four – books on the back of it.  But, as always when I am in the throes of writing, I have observed my diktat that I will not read anything “within a century of Sam” – because I am easily confused if details get too close to the 1820s.  (And for those of you who track these things, my area of research this week has been printing presses – apparently they were often manned by deaf people, who were the only ones who could stand the constant noise.)

Just write, or something like it

A dear writer friend of mine, Janis Pegrum Smith, has just started a blog sharing her experiences as a indie writer – i.e. one who writes and then self-publishes her own work, just as I do.  The blog is called – aptly – All on Your Jack Jones, and in her first post Janis passes on some excellent advice that she was given by Bernard Cornwell (a chap who knows a thing or two about writing bestselling historical fiction): just write.

In recent weeks I have found myself somewhat blocked as a writer.  In fairness to myself, I have been very busy at the day job (three overseas trips in November alone) and also fighting various minor ailments (the joy that is root canal work, and now a delightful cold caught from one of the eighty-seven people sneezing in my train carriage last week).  In other words, there has not been a lot of quality, unwoolly head-space left for producing top-notch historical fiction.  But over this weekend I have forced myself to turn on the Mac in the back bedroom (regular readers may remember that I keep an old Macbook called Flora [after Flora MacDonald…] specifically for the Sam novels, so that I can keep him entirely separate from the day work on my Windows laptop) and – to paraphrase our chum Bernard – just do something that contributes to the writing.  It’s less snappy, I’ll grant you that, but I really think it might have cleared that blockage.

So what somethings have I done?  Well, I have tweeted about Diamond Tales, the sparkling initiative with which I am involved during December.  I have done a lot of research into London printing presses in 1828 and what they looked like and what they were producing.  (You’ll see why when “Plank 5” comes out.)  And I have allowed myself to add a few more pictures to my Plankish Pinterest board, and experiment with dividing it into book-themed sections (a new Pinterest feature).  I’m not a particularly visual thinker – it’s all about the words for me – but by exploring websites that I might not usually visit I have picked up a couple of very interesting details to drop casually into my plot.  And how I love a casual plot point…

And here’s the real surprise of it all: once I had paddled around in the printing press and Pinterest and plot point shallows, I thought, well, I’ll just write that quick description while it’s fresh in my mind.  And before I knew it, I had written – actually written – nearly a thousand words.  Thanks, Janis and Bernard!

 

Fits and starts

I seem to do nothing on this blog at the moment but apologise – and here I am again.  I have been working on “Plank 5”, honestly, but my day job has been so busy recently that I haven’t had any extra capacity to write this blog as well.  Nonetheless, you might like to know what I have been up to with regard to Plank writing and promotion (other self-published authors will recognise the juggling act!):

• The audiobook “Worm in the Blossom” (the third Plank book) is currently being recorded by the wonderful Guy Hanson of Go4pro audio, who just is Sam – he’s up to chapter 21 (of 40). When he completes a chapter he sends me a link to the audio file, and I listen to it while reading along in the book, and send back any corrections that need to be made.  As you can imagine, I can’t do this on the same day as I am writing “Plank 5” – otherwise I would muddle the plots.
• I have booked time with the fabulous Design for Writers cover designers so that they can work on the “Plank 5” cover in February 2018.
• In idle moments, I have allowed myself to find some possible images for that cover, and I have also started to assemble a list of possible titles for the book…
• I have contacted another independent bookshop in a nearby town – Hart’s Books in Saffron Walden – to see whether they would like to stock Sam. I’ve had no response to my email, so I think I’ll have to call in in person – I should imagine they get hundreds of email approaches.
• I have been selected by the angelic Helen Hollick to be part of her seasonal promotion of “discovered diamonds” – independent and self-published authors of historical fiction. Her idea is to feature an excerpt from a different novel each day in December, from the 3^rd to the 23^rd, with the theme of “Diamond Tales”.  As those of you who have read “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat” may remember, Sam decides to mark his silver wedding anniversary by buying Martha a ring…  His scene will appear on the “Discovering Diamonds” blog on 16^th December, but I urge you to look at all the others – who knows what gems you will unearth!  The diamond-themed excerpts will start on 3^rd December 2017, on this blog.  (You can also click on the “Diamond Tales” logo on the left.)  A wonderful Christmas present for this author.

I think that’s it for now.  Thankfully things are slowing down with work as people – oddly enough – don’t want to be reminded about financial criminals in the run-up to Christmas, so I am hoping to get some good stretches of writing time during December.  Martha would have no truck with this procrastination, would she?

Double diamond!

A couple of weeks ago I shared the lovely news that “Portraits of Pretence” had been chosen for review as a “Discovered Diamond” – an accolade worth a great deal to me, as it is the opinion of fellow writers of historical fiction.  And then today I learn that it is even better than that: “Portraits” is their March Book of the Month.  This is decided by Helen Hollick, who launched the “Discovering Diamonds” website – and she really knows her historical fiction onions, so I am thrilled.  I am now entitled to use an even fancier logo on my website – look over to the left!

And my bookmarks should be arriving tomorrow, according to the parcel people – I’ll let you know.