A nest-full of tweets

One of the hardest things about being a self-employed, self-published, self-starting author is the marketing of your books.  Guess who has to do that?  Yes: yourself.  And although I have run my own (non-writing) business for many years, and of course that has involved marketing to a certain extent, it turns out that authors and marketers need radically different skills.  In short, authors have to like their own company and be able to shut off from the world around them, while marketers have to be people people, friends with everyone and full of sociable beans.  Tricky.  So once a quarter – I know it should be more often, but that’s all I can face – I dedicate one of my Sam days to marketing rather than to writing, and today was one of those days.

For some time now, it has been bothering me that my Twitter profile serves both my work persona (anti-money laundering consultant) and my author persona.  And although there is some overlap – financial crime – they do tend to clutter each other, and I think it would be both more professional and more authorly to split them.  And it turns out that you can have as many Twitter-beings as you like, as long as each has its own email address.  So today I have set up a new Twitter account in the name “ConstablePlank”, and I intend to drive all Sam interest in that direction – so please do come along and follow him (well, me – and no doubt Martha will get involved too).  Alongside Twitter I also have blogs (one for work, one for Sam) and Facebook pages (one personal, one used very rarely for work, and one for Sam), as well as an Amazon Author Central profile and a GoodReads one, and so I have had to write a long list to make sure that they are all pointing at the right versions of each other.  Makes you long for the days when people simply wrote rather elegant letters to each other – or indeed to fictional detectives.

A new hook for the Worm

Just a quick post today, to remind all of you self-published authors out there of the importance of shameless self-promotion.  I have written before about how I try to exploit every “hook” to get some publicity for Sam and his stories.  And one thing I take advantage of is the fact that I spend a fair proportion of my working life in Guernsey.

Guernsey is one of the Channel Islands, and it has a very active financial sector.  Couple this with my unusual name, which means that many people living in Guernsey and working in finance have vaguely heard of me, and there you have a potential hook.  So I sent a press release to a Guernsey news website, and today I see that they have shared it – here it is.  Who knows whether it will lead to any more “Worm” sales, but I know for certain that it won’t lead to any fewer.

(I’ve also just come back from recording a radio interview for a book programme on a local radio station, but I’ll tell you more about that once it’s broadcast.)

Tiny taster from “Plank 3”

It occurs to me that with all my grand talk of word counts and marketing brainstorms, you might think that it’s all an elaborate distraction and suspect that I am not actually writing anything for “Plank 3”.  Oh, but I am, and to prove it, here’s a tiny nibble:

I thought it was a cat at first.  Just as you turn into Norton Street there is a yard on the corner, used by a local blacksmith during the day.  At night he pulls an old wooden door across the entrance to keep out the curious, and as I walked past it I heard a high-pitched whimper.  Martha’s never that keen when I bring home stray animals, as she says – with some justification – that as soon as you get fond of them, they find their feet and leave you, but I had a look anyway, expecting to see a mother cat and some kittens.  Instead, as I inched the door to one side and peered into the yard, two very human eyes looked back at me from the shadows.

“Now then, who are you?” I asked.  “Come on, lad – you shouldn’t be in here.”

“I’m not a lad,” replied the girl with some difficulty, drawing in a breathe between each word.  “And I want my ma!”  With the last word came that whimper again.  Her hand shot out and grabbed hold of mine and squeezed with unexpected ferocity.  “Please, mister – get my ma!”

“Does she live near here?”  I asked.

The girl screwed her eyes shut and shook her head.  Again, that awful whimper, and I made up my mind.

“Well, I do,” I said, “and my wife’s at home and will know what to do.”  I bent down to the girl.  “Here: put your arm around my neck, and I’ll pick you up.”  She looked at me with uncertainty.  “I’m a constable – I look after people.”  Another whimper, and I scooped her up before she could object.  She was heavier than I expected, and by the time I reached home and kicked the door to call Martha, I was sweating.

So what do you think?  Does it make you want to read on?

Worth every sausage roll

I mentioned last week that I was inviting a couple of friends around for a “Plank marketing brainstorming”, and I promised to report back.  Well, it was a terrific success, and I can highly recommend the concept.  Not much to organise: I bought some nice sausage rolls and crisps from M&S (rule one: never poison guests with own mediocre cooking), selected some wine and juice, propped our old cork bathmat up against the wall in the lounge, and wrote down each called-out idea on a sticky and stuck it on the bathmat.  The key rules of brainstorming are that all ideas – no matter how impractical or batty – are recorded, and that no idea is assessed or judged at this stage.  What you want is free-wheeling free association of ideas.

And that’s what we got.  I introduced the books and the concept of the series very briefly and then, in just over an hour, we generated 58 separate marketing ideas.  I have now transcribed them all into a document, just listed without ranking or sorting.  I will mull them for a couple of days, and then start planning.  Some will naturally group together – for instance, “contact online book clubs” and “contact overseas book clubs” will require similar research and approaches.  Others have a date-specific element to them, such as “take stall at Cambridge Folk Festival”.  Ideally I would like to take one idea (or group of ideas) a week and see what I can do with it.  Some will prove impractical (is it likely that Amazon would share any information it has on the profile of the buyers of my books?) and others might turn out to be batty – but if I get even a fifth to lead somewhere, well, that’s  dozen more exciting marketing ideas than I had this time last week.

Bribes for brains

A writer friend has posted an excellent reminder on her Facebook page today: apparently Confucius said, “It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop”.  Writing Plank over the past fortnight has been rather akin to wading through treacle, with my cold-fugged brain, but I am trying to keep moving at some level.

Coincidentally, this evening is my Plank brainstorming session.  A few weeks ago I decided to exploit my friends and ask them to help me think of ways to promote Plank, and this evening a little group is coming to my house to be bribed with nibbles and drinks to share their ideas.  I have found an old cork bathmat onto which I can pin sticky-notes with their ideas (I think Martha would have approved of my thriftiness) and bought some M&S sausage rolls and crisps (inflicting my cooking on them would not help matters), and hopefully a bit of free-wheeling brainstorming will give me some new ideas.  I’m looking for anything I can do to promote the two books I have already written and to drum up anticipation for the five yet to come – all (legal) ideas, no matter how wacky, will be considered.  I’ll let you know.

Cold stops play

I have just come back from a three-day mini-break in Berlin and brought home with me: (a) four chocolate-covered marzipan sticks (like fingers of Fudge for the serious chocoholic); (b) some pasta shaped like the Brandenburg Gate; (c) an increased fear of the Stasi; and (d) a filthy cold.  Thanks to the last of these, my 2,000 Sam words are just not going to happen today – my brain feels like it’s sharing my skull with a large sneeze-generating cloud.  But rather than waste the time, I have rugged myself up on the sofa with a large glass of Ribena to hand (for non-UK readers, that’s a blackcurrant cordial much beloved of my generation, apparently full of vitamin C) and my laptop on a cushion, and I am starting the research for the cover of “Plank 3”.

The cover of “Fatal Forgery” (aka “Plank 1”) was entirely the brainchild of my marvellous cover designer at Design for Writers.  I gave him the outline of the story and – this was great fun – examples of book covers I liked and disliked, and he came up with that (well, almost that – in the first version Sam had a moustache, but we changed it to side-whiskers).  I loved it the instant I saw it.  When I wrote “FF” I didn’t know I was going to do a series, but then I fell in love with my characters and couldn’t let them go.  So along came “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”, and by the greatest stroke of luck we found that the original “FF” cover could be adapted to give a series feel.  Each book needs an outline figure and a background document relevant to the story – two elements for me to research – and then the title.  And to foster the series identity, on the cover of “Canary” we have the strapline “A Sam Plank Mystery”.

My plan for today, therefore, is to look for appropriate images.  Given that prostitution will be figuring significantly in “Plank 3”, I shall have to be careful with my search terms…  I shall then send them to the cover man, and he can look into copyright, licensing, etc. and let me know what we can actually use.  He will also suggest a colour in an appropriate “antique-y” shade – I’ve had great compliments on the “FF” teal and the “Canary” old gold, so there’s plenty to live up to.  Perhaps I should take inspiration from my red nose and the purple Ribena and go for a pleasant shade of Regency puce.

Writing what you know – and what you don’t

One of the most popular pieces of advice given to writers is to write what you know.  I can see the wisdom in this; after all, these days I find myself writing almost exclusively about financial crime, whether it is modern money laundering or historical fraud.  (I should clarify that this doesn’t mean that I know about these things because I do them – I know about them because I think a lot about how to prevent them.)  But surely the joy of escapism that comes with fiction is for the author as well as the reader.

Take my Plank novels, for instance.  They are about magistrates and police officers and lawyers, of whom I have known – and continue to know – many.  They are set in London, which I know reasonably well.  And the first one – “Fatal Forgery” – centred on a bank, which is a species of financial institution with which I am very familiar.  But beyond that, well, I’m off into the unknown (or at least, the initially unknown – days of research usually put paid to my innocent status pretty sharpish).  Beyond reading all of Jane Austen and some of Georgette Heyer, I didn’t know much about the Regency period – but being a contrary sort of person, I felt that the Georgians, Victorians and above all the Tudors (saints preserve us from yet more tomes about the Tudors) had been done to death, and the 1820s are just so perfect for financial crime and nascent detectives.  I didn’t know much about the prison system back then – particularly the frankly bizarre treatment of debtors (basically, lock them up until they pay off their debt, but because they’re locked up they can’t earn any money – see “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”, and weep).  And on a personal note, I didn’t know much about spending a marriage longing for children who don’t arrive; I never wanted the little blighters myself, but I have a couple of friends in this situation and was able to talk to them about it.

To be honest, a book based purely on my own experiences would actually be quite interesting, as I have had a (let’s be charitable) varied upbringing and (ditto) colourful family life.  But it would be interesting only for the reader – not for me, the writer, because I’ve been through it all once already.  So I’m sorry but we’re going to have to compromise on this, and stick with stories that allow me to comfort you with some genuine knowledge while entertaining myself with some exploration and discovery.

Hip hip hotel

This afternoon I spent an hour in this hippest of ultra-hip hotels, the London EDITION.  No, I have not won the pools, but I have been racking my brains to think of innovative marketing ideas for my books, and the address of the bank at the centre of the plot of “Fatal Forgery” was 6 Berners Street, and the banker himself lived next door at 7 Berners Street, and this hotel is now on the same site…  So you follow my thinking: would the hotel manager be interested in the book?

Well, I can’t say yes or no yet, but he agreed to meet me this afternoon and seemed intrigued by the idea.  I told him all about Sam and about magistrates’ constables and about what his part of town looked like in 1824 (for a while, his hotel’s block was the very edge of town – beyond it was countryside) and about Henry Fauntleroy.  I probably talked the poor man’s ear off, to be honest.  And then I suggested that he might like to have “Fatal Forgery” in his hotel’s library or gentlemen’s bar or snug, or perhaps in some of the swankier suites.  And he said that it might be a nice gift for regular guests.  And his secretary said that they sometimes hold after-dinner talks on topics relevant to the hotel.  And I said that many of London’s visitors come to the city precisely because of its historical richness, and might like to know about a real crime that took place on the very site of their hotel.  I then gave him a copy of the book, and he promised to read it.  It was all very thrilling to talk about Sam and his adventures, and I’ll let you know if anything comes of it.

(And just to balance the books, if you will, I also contacted the hotel that now inhabits the building that was Great Marlborough Street magistrates’ court – Sam’s office.  And despite three emails and one voicemail, the manager there was obviously not interested at all.  But you have to try everything, as you never know which approaches will work and which will not.  At least that’s how I got my husband.  Only kidding.)

Bite-sized Plank – splinters?

I go back to work on Monday, and I was determined that one of the things I wanted to achieve during this festive break was discovering a workable way to write (and enjoy writing) “Plank 3” while working full-time.  I don’t want it to become a chore, as it is supposed to be a pleasurable hobby – but yesterday I found myself panicking.  Here I am already in 2015, I thought – the very year of publication for “Plank 3” – and I’ve only written a thousand words and the plot is still a bit holey and I can’t find out how much a hackney coach licence cost in 1826 and Martha is going to lose patience with me.  I will confess that I lost some sleep over it last night, but then this morning, sanity returned.

It sounds terribly unartistic and unromantic, but I decided that the way to cope with the overwhelming-ness of “Plank 3” is to cut him down to size.  And I worked out that if I write 2,000 words a week, by the end of June I will have nearly the whole book written.  2,000 words a week is surely manageable; after all, I wrote half that the day before yesterday and barely broke a sweat.  Of course some weeks it will be harder: I regularly go away on work trips from Monday to Friday, and am very tired on those evenings.  But with just 500 words an evening, it will be done.  And then some weeks I will have more time and can “write ahead” on my target.

I am not kidding myself that this will result in 2,000 perfect, publishable words each week – but it will give me something to improve.  So onwards and upwards: only 1,000 words to go this week, and I have all of Sunday to do them.  I’ll let you know how the new word-counting regime goes.

Accidents of history

One of the things I like best about writing historical fiction (which I define as “fiction set in any past era other than one you lived through yourself”) is that history itself gives you a framework.  And researching that framework is rather like a lucky dip – you never know what you are going to get.

Of course, when I chose to concentrate on a magistrate’s constable in the 1820s, I chose my period for good reasons.  It’s sort of in-betweeny – not quite Georgian any more and not yet Victorian – which means that not so many people have set their books there.  And from a policing and crime and justice perspective, it was a time of great change and development: first police force finally set up in 1829, spirited debates about the death penalty, and repeated financial crises.  But each time I start a book, I allow myself a couple of days to swim around in the relevant year, doing free-form reading and research, to uncover anything that might enliven and inform my writing.

So “Plank 3” is set in 1826 (the discipline of setting each Plank book in a specific year suits my tidy mind: “Fatal Forgery” was 1824, “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat” 1825, and on we go with the series, as explained here).  For the past two days I have been Googling like a demon, using search terms such as “1826 london crime” and “1826 weather event”, to uncover anything that might amuse or explain.  It would be disastrous, after all, to set a book in London in 1912 and not mention, at least in passing, the sinking of the Titanic, as everyone would have been talking about it.  And the 1826 stories that might have diverted Sam include the founding of London University (renamed a decade later University College London), and the gin palace craze.  Yes: thanks to the halving of the duty on spirits and the cost of a spirit licence, grotty old pubs around London were bought up, titivated and turned into glamorous gin palaces – a bit like the craze in the 1990s for wine bars.  One consequence was that public drunkenness was everywhere, and Sam, walking to work, would have had to step over inebriates in the street.  I can hear him tutting now.