A man of many words

As I mentioned a little while ago, I am concentrating some energy on making sure that Gregory sounds sufficiently different to Sam – but when I get caught up in the plot and am steaming ahead with the action, there we are again with Sam.  So I have taken a little break and have been researching suitable Norfolk and military words with which I can make Gregory sound like his own man.  I don’t want to make him a comic figure – far from it – but a few choice words of dialect and we’ll soon having him sounding a world away from that metropolitan Londoner.

It seems that the Norfolk dialect – sometimes called Broad Norfolk – is itself a blend of many influences.  Several words still in use today – such as spink, meaning finch (the bird) – are Anglo-Saxon.  Others – staithe (landing place), flag (yellow iris) and grup (shallow trench) – are Danish in origin, left over from the Viking occupation of East Anglia in the ninth century.  Still others have entered the dialect from the continent, brought in by the seventeenth century influx of Protestant refugees from Flanders and France.  A good example of this type of word is plain, which in Norfolk is used to signify a town or village square. The same word (spelt slightly differently) is found in exactly the same context in Eindhoven in the Netherlands and in Beziers in France.  More useful perhaps for Gregory’s everyday life will be blar (to cry or weep), loke (a blind alley) and – my favourite – fumble-fisted (clumsy).

Perhaps understandably, most of the period-specific military slang I have unearthed concerns insults, alcohol and army life.  The different branches of the forces had a friendly rivalry: the cavalry called the infantry foot wobblers, while the navy called soldiers being transported on their ships shifting ballast – and everyone called the Grenadiers bacon bolters (it seems to be a reference to their greed).  Drummers were sheepskin fiddlers, ensigns were rag carriers, and anything French was parleyvous.

It seems that my usual glossary at the end of each book is going to be a mixed bag, with words from the Regency period, and from Norfolk, and from the military – I shall have to devise a code to avoid confusion (of me, I mean, not of my savvy readers – and there’s another word from French).

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.