Heir is here!

I tried, I really did: I tried to hold off until Friday, the official publication date for “Heir Apparent”.  But I had to publish it on Amazon before I could order any author copies to send out to bookshops and reviewers, and once I had published it, it appeared on Amazon, and once I saw it on Amazon, well, can you blame me?  IT’S HERE!  “Heir Apparent” has been published and you can all buy it for everyone for Christmas – click any of the links scattered about this website.

I did consider a launch party this time but it was hard to make the numbers work.  I mentioned that I was contacting a couple of bookshops to ask about the possibilities of a launch shindig, and they both responded – which was very kind.  The Cambridge one said that I could hold a launch party but that I would have to pay for the venue (to cover staff costs, etc.) – I can’t remember the exact cost, but it was about £75.  The Saffron Walden one very kindly offered a free venue – but I am realistic enough to know that hauling my friends and contacts from Cambridge to Saffron Walden (about fifteen miles away) on an autumn school night would be tricky.  I might have a blow-out when I have completed the Sam series and hold a “celebration” rather than a “launch” – and then I can choose a better date and location.  This time, the publication is being marked by (a) chocolate cake at home, and (b) lunch out on the “proper” publication day (Friday 18 October).

In the meantime, I am doing what I assume all authors do on such days: I am stroking the cover of the book and smiling smugly.

Hart’s and minds

Is there anything an author enjoys more than talking about her books?  It’s certainly easier than getting on with writing the next one.  And yesterday evening was a great treat as I spoke to a small (I think we had eleven in total) but terrifically interested and engaged audience at Hart’s Books in Saffron Walden.  Hart’s – as a printer, stationer and bookseller – has been associated with Saffron Walden since 1836, and the current bookshop is part of the Daunt family but retains a very independent feel.  I’d had my eye on them for a while but I rarely look my best in Saffron Walden: it’s the usual destination for our Sunday tandem rides (there’s a local café that does a wonderful fried breakfast which is my reward for cycling twenty-five miles) and I’m always a sweaty, fly-dotted creature when I arrive.  Not the best image to persuade a bookshop that you are a serious writer of worthy tomes.  But one Sunday I just took a chance, and the manager Max was sufficiently impressed by my enthusiasm – or so desperate to get my pungent carcass out of his shop – that he agreed to stock Sam.  And when I suggested an author event, he kindly agreed.  And that was last night.

At such talks I am never sure which aspect is going to chime with the audience: the books themselves, or the history behind them (of policing and justice, or of London), or the writing process, or the self-publishing procedure.  And so I start with a general introduction – how I came to write the first book, why I wrote four more – and then (if the audience seems keen) open it up to questions.  Well, last night “keen” was an understatement.  I’d barely spoken two sentences before the questions started, and it didn’t let up for over an hour – fantastic!

I promised myself that I would always be completely honest in my answers, particularly when it comes to money issues – people need to know that it’s not the route to quick riches.  And in the spirit of full disclosure, I can report that last night’s event garnered me about £7.65 – that’s about 45p per book, and we sold seventeen.  (It’s not that the bookshop takes an enormous cut – their deal is to keep a perfectly reasonable 35% or 40% of the cover price.  It’s just that we self-published authors have to supply the books ourselves, so by the time I have ordered them from CreateSpace, sorry KDP – recent take-over – and paid for them to be sent from the US to me in the UK, and then given the bookseller his discount, I’m left with about 45p per book.)  As I say, not the route to riches – but just the most enormous fun and I wouldn’t stop doing it for the world.

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!

Press here for publicity

As regular readers will know, one of the hardest aspects of being a self-employed author is the marketing.  It’s not the time it takes so much as summoning the ongoing enthusiasm and imagination – particularly in such a crowded marketplace, when every author and his dog (probably literally) has a Facebook page, a Twitter feed and an Amazon profile, all screaming “Buy my books!” (or, in the case of the dog, “Take me out for a walk!”).  Marvellous though it is that anyone can publish their books these days, it does mean that you have to work so much harder to be spotted in the throng.  But it sometimes seems that the old ways are the best.

I mentioned a little while ago (or did I?) that next month I am doing a talk at the latest bookshop to stock the Sam Plank series – Hart’s Books in Saffron Walden (just the other side of the Cambridgeshire border, in northern Essex).  The shop has its own website with an events page, and I have also listed the event on Sam’s Facebook page.  But what else to do?  The manager of the shop suggested asking the local newspaper, the Saffron Walden Reporter, to publicise the talk, as – if you can believe such a thing still exists – this local weekly paper is delivered free to every address in the town.  Thankfully I have some experience of writing press releases, which I know reporters like as it saves time and fills space, and so I looked up the paper online, checked which reporter’s name was on the book-ish stories, and counted how many words were in the average piece before crafting my press release and emailing it to her.  I also suggested that it would be jolly helpful to have the story appear a fortnight before the event to give people time to get to the bookshop to buy tickets, and then of course we would need to print more tickets and hire a marquee and a warm-up act and lay on extra buses…  I may be straying here into the realms of fantasy.

But, dear reader, it all worked – and here is my press release (with a few improvements, I must admit) in today’s Saffron Walden Reporter.  The bookshop is on standby for the hordes of ticket-seekers, although my own husband has now dropped out as something better has come up.  (To be fair, he’s had a bellyful of Sam over the years.  It can’t be easy sharing your wife with a dead policeman.)

A change of focus

As regular readers will know, I try to put regular energy into marketing initiatives.  Which is a grand way of saying that I sit there with a bit of paper headed “How to sell Sam” and try to think of ideas.  Of course – as in most areas of life – the having of the idea is the easy bit.  Where I usually come to grief is actually doing it.  It’s not through laziness, but through knowing that I don’t earn nearly enough from my writing to indulge in all the marketing wheezes I would like to try.

For instance, last week I travelled down to London on the train from Cambridge – a journey of about an hour.  I looked around the carriage and nearly everyone was reading.  A-ha, thought I: wouldn’t it be good to give them all a sample chapter of one of the Sam books – just enough to fill a bit of their journey and pique their interest, so that they rush to their computer or bookshop and order the entire book.  I could hand them out on the train, or stand by the stack of Metro newspapers – after all, people who pick up a paper are self-declared readers.  But I wouldn’t want to give out scrappy photocopies – they would need to look nice.  Perhaps a book-sized leaflet, with stiff covers…  And this would, of course, cost quite a bit.  Back to the drawing board.

It’s not that I do nothing.  After all, I have my monthly Sam updates for subscribers – feel free to join us by signing up here.  We are a small band but a merry one – just today we have been enjoying an overview of the history of barbering (Sam was an apprentice barber before he was a constable).  And I have just persuaded Hart’s Books in Saffron Walden to hold an author event for me on the evening of Wednesday 10 October 2018 – so if you’re local (or even if you’re not – Saffron Walden is a delight to discover) please do come and join us.  (It’s not on the Hart’s website yet, but you can be sure that I won’t be keeping quiet about it once it is featured.)

But I will admit that marketing – unsuccessful marketing, which seems to be my specialism – can be rather depressing.  And so I have decided that for the next month I am going to stop thinking about selling the books and instead spend all those thoughts on writing the next one.  Hopefully this will remind me that I do this writing thing because I love writing.  Writing, not marketing or selling.  So let’s see how that goes.

Taking Sam to Hart’s

For some time now, I have been hoping to get Sam and Martha into a fifth – a fifth! – bookshop.  I know from hard, perhaps even bitter, experience that the big chains are a no-go for self-published, unknown authors.  I have spent a great deal of energy on trying to convince my local branches of both Waterstones and WH Smith to feature my books on their “local interest” shelves, but it seems that even these are furnished by head office stock control elves, so I have given up on that for now.  But one independent bookshop in my local area has been on my radar for some time: Hart’s Books in Saffron Walden.

Saffy – as I am afraid we call it in our house – is a delightful small town about eighteen miles from where I live.  In the summer I go there most Sundays as the stoker (back half – the one who does all the hard work) on our tandem, as it is a lovely cycle ride.  Over the years I have seen Hart’s (founded in 1836) falter, fail, close – and then reopen with great success in 2016.  On the publication of “Portraits of Pretence” and then “Faith, Hope and Trickery”, I emailed the bookshop to ask to be considered, and heard nothing.  I resolved to go in in person, to plead my case and hand over a book.  But every time I was in the town, I was sweating – sorry, glowing – profusely from my cycling exertions and far from the image of a trustworthy author of respected historical crime fiction.  And then yesterday (I know, not a Sunday, but the weather was so good that we did it anyway) we cycled into Saffy and I decided to take a chance, sweaty and un-booked though I was.

And reader, the shop’s manager could not have been nicer.  He listened to my tale as I glowed gently by the front desk, and immediately agreed to take five books – a copy of each – into stock.  A customer was waiting to pay and said that the series sounded perfect for him and that he would “haunt Hart’s” until they arrived and then buy one immediately.  Given my recent experience in David’s in Cambridge, I am beginning to see that standing by the till and catching people with their money in their hand is the way to sell books.  The upshot is that, from tomorrow (after our usual tandem ride, with the addition of a pannier containing five books and a handful of bookmarks), Sam will be stocked in his fifth bookshop and third county (Essex).

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?