The league table

Tomorrow is the big day – the publication of “Notes of Change”! Today, therefore, is a day of preparation and reflection. And I haven’t updated you recently on the sales of the Sam series. So here goes – the number I have sold in paperback (print-on-demand through Amazon, and through physical bookshops to which I supply stock) and in various e-formats (mostly Kindle, but occasional other formats):

	Paperback via Amazon	E-book	Paperback via physical bookshop
Fatal Forgery	290	954	145
The Man in the Canary Waistcoat	90	122	75
Worm in the Blossom	62	78	56
Portraits of Pretence	63	78	43
Faith, Hope and Trickery	49	46	26
Heir Apparent	32	36	27
Totals	586	1314	372

As you can see, it’s almost three-to-one in favour of e-books – which is good in some ways as the royalty for e-books is more generous than that for paperbacks. And “Fatal Forgery” is far and away the most popular title. Yes, it’s been out for longest, but I think what the figures really suggest is that not enough people like “Fatal Forgery” enough to stick with the series. That’s something I need to address – another task for the book marketing to do list (how to make sure that people know there is a whole series of lovely Sam books). To be fair to Amazon, they are very good at highlighting series: when you buy one book in a series, the others appear in a tempting carousel display. Perhaps I need to make the pricing more appealing – or investigate the possibility of a seven-title omnibus edition… (Apparently you can’t call e-books a box set, as that implies a physical box – you can, however, call it an omnibus. Like the number 27 to Clapham.)

Two new reviews

I’ve written before about how crucial – and uplifting – reviews are for authors.  Sadly, just as the rich get richer, the well-reviewed attract more reviews, while for those of us who are generally unknown in the writing world every single review is hard-won and treasured.  Friends and family are usually marvellous at leaving reviews when a book is first published and then it’s a matter of hoping that future readers are sufficiently moved to express their thoughts on Amazon or Goodreads.

Maybe it was lock-down boredom, or maybe people are finally getting to the piles of books they have meant to read, or maybe it’s just good luck, but I have had two new reviews in the past fortnight.  One appeared on “Fatal Forgery” whose heading made me laugh (“Nothing to add”); the review itself said “Good book with an unusual twist at the end” and awarded five stars.  Short and sweet – but five stars, and every review (even a single line) brings the book to the attention of the Amazon ranking bots.

And now a new review of “Heir Apparent” has appeared, again five stars (*smiles smugly*), calling it a “thoroughly engrossing story”: “This time Constable Sam Plank is investigating a possible case of identity theft, but as usual, that’s only the start.  I am very sad to hear that there is to be only one more book in this series.  I shall miss Sam Plank, his wife Martha, Constable Wilson, and all the other regular characters who make these books so enjoyable, and also the vivid evocations of the darker side of Regency London.”

So thank you, reviewers – you cannot over-estimate how important your comments and ratings are to us.

A Big Decision

I have some big news.  I know that back in the day (August last year) I asked your opinion on which book I should write next: the final Sam Plank book or the first Gregory Hardiman book.  Votes were fairly even, but in the end I decided to let Sam rest for a while and to embark on a new relationship with Gregory.  Since then, I have tried – I really have.  I have immersed myself in research into Cambridge and the University [everyone capitalised it in the 1820s] and the university constables.  I have worked out who Gregory is and where he comes from and how he reaches Cambridge, and what happened to him in Spain [spoiler: it’s not pretty].  But I just cannot get going with the writing; even with twelve weeks (and counting…) of lock-down, I’ve managed only about 5,000 words.  And after listening to one of Joanne Harris’s excellent Youtube tutorials, in which she talked about putting projects aside for when their time is right, I have come to a conclusion: I’m reversing my decision.  In other words, I’m going to do “Sam 7” before “Gregory 1”.  (Not instead of “Gregory 1”: I have done enough research to know that I really do want to do the Cambridge series, but just not right now.)

Before coming to this decision I had to make sure that I hadn’t hamstrung myself with “Fatal Forgery”.  You may remember that I did not plan a Sam series: it happened because once I had finished “FF” – which was intended as a standalone book – I just couldn’t bear to say goodbye to Sam.  But did I say anything in “FF” that would make it tricky to write the final Sam book, which sees the advent of the Metropolitan Police and a significant change in Sam’s working life?  With trembling hands I opened my copy and found this: “I continued working as a constable for the magistrates in Great Marlborough Street, and when the policing of London was reorganised in the summer of 1829 I was one of the first to transfer to the new Metropolitan Police Force.  I could have stayed with the magistrates, but I had a deal of respect for the two new Commissioners of Police, and London had grown so vast and so wild that I agreed with their view that the city was now sorely in need of an integrated police force.  With my years of experience, I was quickly put to work training new recruits.”  I then revisited “Heir Apparent” – the most recent Sam book – and at the end of that Wilson talks about joining the new force and encourages Sam to think about signing up to help train the new recruits.  Who would have guessed it!

I am so excited at the thought of being able to wade once more into the history of policing – Gregory is a university constable, which is not the same.  As for an actual plot, I’m quite taken with counterfeiting, coining (that’s the counterfeiting of money) and gambling.  I’m thinking of publication in October 2021.  And before you can ask, yes, there will be MORE MARTHA!

It’s alive!

Many moons ago I wrote about my efforts to be listed on the Nielsen catalogue, so that my books could be ordered through – and supplied to – any bookshop in the land.  The Nielsen people were lovely and helpful but the system was convoluted, and in the faceof its ongoing silence I have never quite had faith that it is working for me – perhaps the emails are going into a spam folder.  Every couple of months I log in to check that there isn’t a queue of dozens of orders waiting for me, unloved and unfulfilled, but of course, nothing.

And then this morning – there it was!  An email from Nielsen BookNet with the subject line “New Book Order”!  With trembling fingers I opened it.  Someone wanted a single copy of “Heir Apparent” – so not exactly a bulk order, but someone out there, somewhere in this fair nation of ours, had taken the trouble to request, nay, demand that their bookshop acquire my book for them.  And which shop is it?  In which distant county does it sit, serving customers I shall never meet and of whose lives I know nothing?  Well, it’s Heffers.  Yes, the bookshop only seven minutes’ walk from my own front door.  The bookshop that already stocks my books, and has done from the very start.  It’s a mystery, but I have clicked the button that says that I shall attend to the order forthwith, and in about an hour I shall walk briskly into town and hand over the book.  I’ll save on postage and – if feedback is encouraged from the bookshops – I should get a top rating for speediest order fulfilment ever: five hours from placing the order to receiving the book.  Amazon, eat your heart out.

And we’re off!

I promised myself that after a suitable break to admire “Heir Apparent” I would crack on with “Greg 1” – the first book in my new series, to be set in Cambridge and narrated this time by a university constable.  Sunday was the day and I began by setting up the blank templates in the research/writing package I use (Scrivener) as this is always the symbolic start to a book.  Once the templates were there, of course I couldn’t resist starting my research, and I’ve been knee-deep ever since in the history of Cambridge.  I did consider setting this series a decade earlier (I’m never really happy too far from the 1820s…) but then I remembered that the University of Cambridge Constabulary was not created until 1825, so I’m back in my favourite decade – hurrah!

And once again I am amazed at how helpful people are when you say that you’re writing historical fiction and need their help with their area of expertise.  I have already been in touch with the current head of the university constables and she has invited me in to meet her and talk about their work – past and present.

And I know that I want Gregory Hardiman to have an army background, so I read up about possible regiments in the area, and who did what in the Peninsular Wars (he’s going to be a wounded ex-soldier), and found a combination that would work.  But I am treading with extreme caution: I come from an entirely un-military family and don’t know my adjutant from my ensign.  And although all historians are (quite rightly) nit-picking, I believe that military historians are the pickiest of the lot, so I daren’t get it wrong, but military history books are complicated to the uninitiated.  What to do, what to do – and then I thought of contacting the present-day descendent regiment of the one I had chosen for Gregory.  I put together some questions, which I daresay appear extremely naïve and basic to anyone military, and sent them to the “contact us” person on their website.  Less than 24 hours later, I have had a full reply to every question from the curator of the regiment’s museum.  How very, very kind – and it’s all really interesting too.  I now know that Greg lied about his age to sign up, because there were too many mouths to feed at home and he fancied guaranteed grub every day.  If you’re writing historical fiction, never feel shy about asking for help: I have never once been turned down.

The nitties and the gritties of indie publishing

Much as I love being a self-publisher author – or what is now called an indie publisher – there is a lot to remember.  Writing the books is really only a part of it; keeping up with all the publishing of those books is administratively heavy and can overtake me at times.

Yesterday, for instance, I was looking at my listings on Amazon and noticed that my free guide to the Sam Plank series – the little publication that offers the first chapter of each Sam Plank book as a taster and a lure – was priced at 99p, rather than free.  Nowadays you are not allowed to list items as perpetually free on Amazon (special offers only), but one way to achieve the same aim is to list the item for free on a competitor site and then ask Amazon to price-match that product.  My Sam guide is available on the Barnes & Noble website for just this purpose, and Amazon has always price-matched it on their UK and US sites.  But it seems that this is not a forever done deal, because – as I noticed yesterday – Amazon had unilaterally re-priced it to 99p (and $1.29 in the US).  Thankfully the mechanism for asking them to instigate a price match is now quite simple – there’s a template email provided in the KDP help system – but it does rely on the publisher (i.e. me) spotting in the first place that the price has been unmatched.  Anyway, email sent yesterday and price re-matched today, to zero.

Also yesterday, I went into my local branch of Waterstones to check that my titles are appearing on their ordering system, after all my efforts to be accepted as an indie publisher by Gardners.  And that was when I realised that I had failed to tell Gardners about “Heir Apparent”, which is therefore absent from their catalogue – and presumably missing out on thousands of orders up and down the land…  (For the record, I have yet to receive a single order from any bookshop via this hard-won Gardners route, but I am sure my day will come.)  I really must create a check-list of things to be done once a book is actually published, and stop thinking of publication day as the end-point – it’s only the beginning for the indie publisher!

(As for the title of this post, I once heard a speaker at a professional conference who was from France; his accent was divine, darlings, and my heart was completely won when he talked of having to adjust his bank’s procedures to take account of “ze nitties and ze gritties” of some new legislation.  From that moment on, the phrase has been a very welcome part of my vocabulary.)

Sam and the cephalopods

Is there any better way to spend an evening than locked in a closed bookshop and talking to avid crime readers about the Sam books?  Short of having Daniel Auteuil and Luca Zingaretti as waiters, handing out cherries coated in dark chocolate (the cherries, not the actors – although…), I can’t think of how to improve the experience.  And so you can imagine how thrilled I was to be invited to read at the Heffers annual “Murder Under the Mistletoe” festive crime fiction event.  “Heir Apparent” was even in the window of the shop:

It wasn’t just me, of course: I was one of ten authors featured, and we each read a three-minute extract from our latest book and then gave our recommendation for a good book to read at Christmas.  I chose a passage from “Heir Apparent” that doesn’t talk about the crimes at the heart of the plot – inheritance fraud and identity theft – but rather examines the relationship between Sam and Martha, and that between Sam and John Wontner.  I think it was well-received – at least, people laughed in the right places.  Not many of the other readings had much humour, and one is still giving me nightmares.  And for my Christmas recommendation I chose “The Prayer of Owen Meany” by John Irving – he’s one of my very favourite authors, and the description of the nativity play in “Owen Meany” is one of the very funniest things I have ever read.  As Victoria Wood would have said, it made me snort chips up me nose.

In other writerly news, I am working hard on the text of “The Solo Squid” – my non-fiction handbook on how to run a happy one-person business – and am moving onto the exciting stage of thinking about the cover.  I’ve done my research into the differences between an octopus and a squid (both have eight arms, but the former has a round head while the latter has a triangular head with two fins as well as two long tentacles and a backbone) and have told the marvellous team at Design for Writers my ideas of how the cover might look (with reference to similar business-y books on Amazon whose covers I like or dislike).  From this unpromising sow’s ear, they will create their usual silk purse.  He’s no Sam, but I hope the squid will gather his own fans – perhaps I should give him a name…  Only squidding!

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!

Kind words and five stars

I can breathe again!  “Heir Apparent” now has three reviews on Amazon (the UK version – I still don’t understand why reviews on one Amazon site don’t automatically appear on all Amazon sites) and they are all five-star.  Here are a couple of lovely extracts, which warm the cockles of my authorly heart:

• “‘Heir Apparent’ is certainly the most complex case the experienced constable has had to tackle; it concerns the question of stolen identity and the law of succession in the early decades of the nineteenth century.”
• “The biggest draw is enjoying the company of [Susan’s] characters, so well-drawn, realistically flawed yet hugely likeable (for the main characters), and although the villains are suitably villainous, they too are three-dimensional, with their reasons for erring clearly drawn”
• “I love how many times pie is mentioned.”

All authors agree that Amazon reviews are important.  Sometimes we can forget that Amazon – no matter how big and no matter how global – is just a shop.  And all (most) shops care about is selling things to customers.  So Amazon tries to put its most tempting items in front of potential buyers – and the most tempting items are the ones that other buyers have bought and loved, and indeed loved enough to come back and rave about how much they loved them.  Hence the value of the review: if someone has read your book and thinks it’s terrific and tells Amazon how pleased they are, that will help your book rise up the rankings at Amazon, and it will be shown higher up the search results, so that more potential buyers can spot it.  Interestingly, you don’t have to buy a book – or anything, I suppose – at Amazon to leave a review for it on Amazon.  So if you have read any of my Sam titles, even if you’ve borrowed it from a friend or bought it somewhere else, and you liked it, please consider leaving a review for it on Amazon.  (The only restriction is that to be able to leave reviews on Amazon, you have to have spent at least £40 – US$50 on the US site – on Amazon in the past twelve months.)

And I am just putting the final touches to my free monthly research update, which will be sent out to subscribers on 1 November.  This month it’s about education in Sam’s time, so if you’re interested in the research behind the Sam books (I can’t shoehorn it all into the books – there’s far more in my files than I can ever use), why not sign up now?  I occasionally offer giveaways and competitions too – who could resist?

Ups and downs

It’s Friday, and time to take stock of the first official week of “Heir Apparent”.  It’s not an exact science (well, it probably is, but I don’t understand it) but according to Amazon/KDP/Book Report, I have now sold twenty-one copies of “Heir Apparent” (plus the previously-reported nineteen to bookshops and four direct to friends).  I’m very pleased with that, and will have a celebratory Jaffa Cake or three.  So that’s the up.

Now for the down – or maybe it’s an up, but I can’t quite tell.  Last Saturday I went to London to take part in the People’s Vote march (we’re campaigning for a vote on the Brexit deal, in case you’re wondering).  By chance, the friends I was meeting had decided to gather on Piccadilly, outside Hatchards.  Now, Hatchards is among the spiffiest of bookshops: it’s been selling books since 1797 and sitting at the heart of Piccadilly for over two centuries – and although it is now part of the giant Waterstones family, it still retains its elegant independence.  Suffice it to say that I would love to see Sam and Martha swanking about the place.  Back in my more innocent days, I breezed into Hatchards and spoke to the manager, saying that – as Sam is a local – the books definitely belonged on Hatchards’ shelves.  The manager kindly explained that he could stock them only if they were listed on the Waterstones buying system – which of course they were not.

Nothing daunted, I decided to get them on that system – how hard could it be?  Now pay attention.  In order to be listed on the Waterstones system, a book has to be available through one of the book wholesalers with which Waterstones deals, such as Gardners.  So I contacted Gardners and asked to be put on their system.  They explained that they don’t deal with authors – only publishers, and only publishers recognised by Nielsen BookNet.  So I contacted Nielsen and asked how I could be recognised as an independent publisher.  It took some time and lots of forms, but I managed it.  So now: Nielsen recognises me as an independent publisher, which means that Gardners is listed as my wholesaler, which means that the Waterstones catalogue (both internal for stores and external for customers) features my titles.  Hurrah!  And if anyone orders my book through Waterstones, the order goes from them to Nielsen, and from Nielsen to me (as an indie publisher).  I pack up the books and send them to Gardners, who deliver them to Waterstones, who get them to the customer (or put them on the shelf).  Simple.

Back to the march last Saturday.  There I am, standing outside Hatchards and gazing through their lovely window, when I spot the manager standing alone at his till.  I wander in, all casual-like, and go up to him.  “You may not remember me,” I say, “but you once said that if my books could be ordered through your system, you would give them a go”.  “Are your books marvellous?” he asked.  “They are,” I confirmed, and he went to his computer and ordered – he said – two each of “Fatal Forgery” and “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”.  I was floating on air for most of that march – Sam and Martha, in Hatchards!  And to think, she couldn’t even read much apart from bottle labels until she met Sam.

This week, I waited patiently – hah! – for that order to come in from Nielsen.  And yesterday I contacted them, and Gardners, to check that I hadn’t misunderstood the process.  But no, no trace of any order from Hatchards or Waterstones – not a one.  After pondering what to do, I’ve gone passive-aggressive: I sent an email to the manager saying “I cannot tell you how thrilled I am that my books will be on the shelves of Hatchards – I shall tell all my London friends to come in and buy them”.  So near, and yet so far…