A plea for PLR

Twice a year, my Twitter feed is inundated with cheery messages from other authors, along the lines of “Just received my PLR cheque – £129 for my loans this year!” and “I love PLR – cheers for my cheque!”.  For the uninitiated, PLR stands for Public Lending Right, and it is a small payment made to authors (and illustrators, editors, translators and audiobook narrators) whenever a book is borrowed from a UK library.  At the moment, if their book is borrowed the author is given 11.26p.  The money is handy, of course (an annual cap of £6,600 is set so that the most popular authors don’t run off with millions) but what is really exciting is seeing your books being borrowed.  Or I imagine it is really exciting.  For I have yet to benefit.  Let me explain.

Despite the availability these days of extremely accurate borrowing data, PLR is still calculated on a old-fashioned method, using loans data from a sample of thirty regional library authorities (there are 151 in total) which is then multiplied to provide a national estimate.  I have donated the Sam books liberally to my various local libraries – but they are all in the Cambridgeshire library authority.  Which was last part of the PLR sample in 2010.  This means that the PLR scheme, by not looking at Cambridgeshire, knows nothing about my books and so does not include them in its calculations.  Sadly, the sample proposed for the year ending June 2022 does not include Cambridgeshire, and nor does the one ending June 2023.  I have written to the PLR people a few times, asking why – given that all libraries these days keep digital records of loans – they can’t simply use complete data rather than a sample, but they’re not keen.  I’ve blogged about this before, way back in 2015, but nothing has changed since then.

So here is my plea.  If you are a library user, please ask your library to stock books by your favourite authors – which may even include me.  The more widely our books are stocked, the more likely we are to be lucky enough to get into that PLR sample and therefore become eligible for a share of the pot.  You can check here to see whether your local library authority is part of next year’s sample group – yes, that’s you, Suffolk, Camden, Oxfordshire and Cornwall, for instance.  And it’s not just about the money: I dream of the day when I receive a PLR statement showing that people are borrowing my books because I know how much I love libraries, and what a thrill it can be to find a favourite author’s back catalogue just waiting for you to borrow, or to discover a previously-unknown author whom you grow to love.

Like a pig in press

I am having just the most fun.  For some unknown reason (I guess I once showed an interest in the website) I have had an email from a newspaper archive service offering me a free three-day weekend pass to their records.  Three days of snooping around in old newspapers, especially given that I am library-starved during lockdown – yes please!  In short, you can put in any search term and time frame and the service rootles through its “20,200+ newspapers from the 1700s–2000s”.  It’s not comprehensive – sadly, there’s no sign of the “Cambridge Chronicle” that was published on Fridays in the 1820s and would have been useful for my new Cambridge-set series – but there’s certainly enough to keep me going.

I have written a long list of search terms, trying to think of anything that might be useful for “Plank 7” or the Cambridge series, while hoping that I don’t stumble across anything that contradicts something I have written in an earlier Sam book.  I have been clipping and saving like a demon, and have devised a new file-naming convention so that I can see at a glance which topic it covers (Crockford’s gambling club, Met Police, counterfeiting, university constables, etc.).  This has made me realise that the articles I had sourced before, in the good old days when I could go into a real-life archive, are named rather chaotically, so I need to go back through those and rename and reorganise them.  Don’t feel sorry for me for one single second: I’m in seventh heaven when I’m researching and organising.

I have also taken the opportunity to search for my own surname in the press; it’s unusual enough to accumulate only 393 matches between 1802 and today (and some of those are mis-readings of the words “grassy” and “grocery”).  I was hoping for something glamorous or scandalous or wealthy, but sadly the high point of the family’s achievements seems to be a W E Grossey triumphing after “close and spirited competition” to win the Church of Ireland Young Men’s Society Elocution Competition in 1891.

Excuses, excuses!

Goodness, how long has it been – nearly two months since my last post!
 Along with almost everyone else, I have found it hard to concentrate in
these worrying times – and that’s unusual for me, as I normally have
phenomenally selfish powers of concentration and the ability to shut out all
external distraction. Awash with well-meaning advice about “being kind to
yourself” and “seeing each small step as an achievement”, I have been spending my recent writing time not on the writing itself, but on writing-related issues, such as research and marketing.  And neither of those has gone particularly well either, so you can see why I have been rather quiet with these updates!

People will tell you that going to the library in person is outmoded and
unnecessary, but they are wrong.  Granted, many library “resources” have
now been digitised – it’s a godsend, for instance, to be able to search online
newspaper archives.  But digitisation projects focus – quite rightly – on
items for which there is more demand, and despite my personal obsession, I have to admit that beat records from London’s early police stations (a current interest of mine) are not a high priority for many people.  And although digitisation conveys the content of a piece very well, it cannot carry with it the other aspects: the weight of a book, or its smell, or the quality of the paper that was chosen.  When I go into the Munby Rare Books Room in the university library here in Cambridge to examine a book that might have been in Conant’s personal library, for instance, I want to know whether he would have struggled to lift it down from the shelf or lay it flat on his table – none of this is apparent from a screenshot.  But most important of all, I miss the librarians – those experts who know their stock and how to find it and what bits might be useful but not immediately apparent from the catalogue.

As for marketing, I have been doing a lot of theory: I’ve been taking online
courses (David Gaughran’s “Starting From Zero” is lengthy and detailed but
completely free and seems packed with useful stuff) and reading books and
articles and blogs.  But I have decided that I need to take this marketing
malarkey more seriously, with a more professional approach, and so I am not going to do what I have done in the past and just try a bit of this and a
smidge of that and hope for the best.  Rather, I am going to put together
a proper plan of attack and be much more logical and cold-blooded about my marketing – but not this year.  That’s a big project for next summer, when I will be approaching the publication of “Plank 7” – and one thing David has taught me is that the most potent marketing tool you can have is the launch of a new book.

The other key message from David is that the mailing list is the lynchpin of
everything – and mine is pretty rubbish.  I have tried to get more
subscribers: this month I am running a competition to win a magnifying bookmark – and even with badgering all my friends on Facebook and Twitter to encourage their pals to sign up, I have managed to increase the list by… one person.  But I am nothing daunted: David has written a whole book on how to get mailing list sign-ups and it’s the next one I’m going to read.

But to end on a positive note, you will be glad to hear that during our
three-week holiday in Switzerland (for which I am now paying the price: 14
days’ self-isolation after travelling home through France…) I did manage to
thrash out the plot of “Plank 7”.  It’s a bit tricky, this one, as I have
to ensure that it completes the circle, linking up with the end of “Fatal
Forgery”, as well as requiring some significant research into the advent of the Metropolitan Police.  (For those of you despairing about how slowly
government moves these days: the law approving the creation of the Met was passed on 19 July 1829, and the first men went out on their beats on the
evening of 30 September 1829 – that’s two months and eleven days later!)
 And for those of you who have asked for (demanded…) it, yes, there is
more Martha.

Juggling constables

I rather fear that my blog posts at the moment are a bit dull – there’s not much to say when you’re knee-deep in research.  But I am finding it a mental challenge to live with two constables at the same time.  There are six Sam Plank novels out there and I want to take every opportunity I can to promote them and acquire new readers.  In this endeavour I have help from all sorts of lovely people, including – today – Helen Hollick, who has featured a conversation with Martha Plank on her historical fiction blog Let Us Talk of Many Things.  In an imaginative departure for her blog, Helen periodically features conversations not with authors but with their characters, and today it is Martha’s turn.

At the same time, I am ramping up the research for my new series – the Gregory books – which will be set in Cambridge (but still in my beloved 1820s).  This involves long hours in the library (don’t feel sorry for me – it’s my version of paradise) and even the outlay of £20 on a comprehensive and chunky history of the university (I figure that I’m planning five Gregory books, so it’s a bearable investment of £4 per book).

But what should I do about my monthly updates?  These go out to subscribers on the first of each month (do sign up – I’m currently writing for a very select and loyal audience of thirty-one!) and so far have concentrated on the research that underpins the Sam books.  Indeed, all nineteen updates have been called “Sam Plank update”.  Shall I re-brand them?  Or keep that title and just explain each time that the research – although still late Regency and therefore equally of interest to Sam fans – is being done to furnish Gregory with his life and backstory?  It doesn’t matter one jot at the moment, I suppose, but when the Sam books are picked up for a blockbuster Sunday night telly drama and I’m having to beat journalists off with a stick, I want to have my author profile and presence all neat and tidy.  In the meantime, turn away now if you’re squeamish: I’m off to research facial and eye injuries caused by muskets in the Peninsular Wars.

Best writing day ever?

Many writing days are rather uneventful: enjoyable, certainly, but uneventful.  So when a writing day comes along that is exciting, I like to tell you about it.  And yesterday was a doozie.

For a start, I spent a good part of the morning with the Cambridge University Marshal and the Pro-Proctor for Ceremonial.  The what, I hear you cry – but if I tell you that these two are part of the office that employs the university constables, you will understand my excitement.  Quite apart from being lovely people, they were both an absolute fount of knowledge and so generous with that knowledge.  I now have a much clearer idea of the character for the narrator for my Cambridge series – for instance, I was going to give him a limp, but they said that constables (in the 1820s) needed to be fleet of foot to catch naughty undergraduates and so perhaps a eye injury (very common in war veterans of the period) would be more suitable.  I have pages and pages of notes and leads and ideas – just fizzing.

In the afternoon an email pinged in with the heading “The Solo Squid”.  This book was published on Sunday (paperback and Kindle version) and I have been a bit nervous about it: it’s a business book but not in the usual way, in that it doesn’t give guidance on setting up a business or dealing with the taxman or turning your company into a world-beating brand.  It simply encourages people to enjoy working alone and to take steps to make life as a one-person business professionally and personally fulfilling.  And I did wonder whether people would read it and say, what a load of self-indulgent piffle.  So I opened the email through squinted eyes, prepared for the worst – someone outraged and demanding a full refund.  But what did I see?  “The Solo Squid arrived from Amazon this morning and I have to say I read it all in one sitting – as such I felt compelled to contact you and to say thank you so much for writing this… Thank you once again for a superb read – something that I will endeavour to recommend to a number of business associates who have also risked it all to go it alone.”  I literally danced around the office – and the lovely fellow has already posted his thoughts as an Amazon review.

And in the evening I gave a talk at our local library on life as an indie-published author.  It was a packed room, as you can see:

I had notes to guide my talk and to make sure I didn’t miss out anything crucial, but there were so many questions and such a lot of interest – and I even sold a handful of books.  I love encouraging others to give indie publishing a go, and it is a great boost to know that my experience will help other authors and budding writers to take the plunge.  What a day!

I have a dream

At the weekend, for reasons too complicated to explain, I spent a couple of hours thinking about my dreams – not the sort where your teeth are falling out while you’re being chased by your O-level maths teacher for your overdue homework, but the sort where you imagine and plan for the future (as in “hopes and dreams”).  The brief was to dream big – to write down anything, regardless of likelihood or practicality.  Of course several of my dreams related to the Sam books and I thought I would share those with you:

• To publish two more Sam Plank books, taking the series to seven
• To hear one of the Sam books read aloud on Radio 4 as their “Book of the Week”
• To win “The Selfies” in April 2019
• To see “Fatal Forgery” on sale in Tesco and Waitrose [one for the numbers, the other for the snobbery…]
• To open a national newspaper and see one of the Sam books unexpectedly and favourably reviewed
• To have the Sam series recommended by Mariella Frostrup
• To see the Sam series turned into a Sunday evening costume drama on the BBC, with Claudie Blakley playing Martha – Sam is still to be cast.

Here’s Claudie in “Lark Rise to Candleford” – and maybe moody Brendan Coyle would work as Sam…

What surprised me when I went back over my Sam dreams was that none of them mentions money.  Sure, winning an award or getting a review heard/read by thousands would increase sales, but what seems to matter to me is a wide readership rather than earning a fortune.  I do appreciate that I am in the lucky position of having a day job quite apart from my Sam writing, which means that I do not have to rely – thank goodness! – on Sam income, but still, it’s shown me that I am motivated by getting people to read Sam rather than by getting them to buy books.  I’ve blogged before about my unhappy experience with libraries and the PLR system, but despite this I would be just as happy to see more people borrowing the Sam books as I would to see sales increasing.  (I just love checking our local library catalogue and seeing all the Sam books out on loan.)  So that’s the dreaming done – now on with the reality of writing.

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!

Starving in a garret

I am a – very proud – member of the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society, which was set up in 1977 to collect and distribute to authors the money they are due from “secondary uses” of their work (such as when schools photocopy books, or libraries lend books).  Apart from this sterling work, the ALCS also works as a campaigning organisation to promote the right of authors to be treated – and paid – as professionals.  And they have recently published the findings of their survey “Authors’ Earnings 2018: A survey of UK writers”.  Although I am only a part-time writer I submitted my information – and awaited the results with trepidation (as, of course, I hope one day to become a full-time author).  This may be an unrealistic dream…

Some highlights – or rather, lowlights:

• the median annual income of a professional writer in the UK is now less than £10,500 [in 2017, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation declared that the income level considered to be a socially acceptable standard of living for a single person, was £17,900]
• based on a standard 35-hour week, this works out at £5.73 per hour [the current UK minimum wage for those over 25 is £7.83]
• if you take into account all writers – part-time and occasional as well as professional – the median annual income is a measly £3,000
• in 2005, 40% of professional writers earned their income solely from writing – in 2017, it was just 13.7% [as earnings from writing fall, professional writers need to supplement their income with other activities such as teaching, editing, etc.]
• but the creative industries in the UK are now valued at £92 billion and are growing at twice the rate of the UK economy as a whole – which suggests that the contribution of writers is being significantly undervalued.

Rather depressing, isn’t it?  I’m very lucky in that I can afford to do my writing as a rather expensive and time-consuming hobby, but can you imagine a society where no-one can afford to be a writer?  So come on: buy those books, go to those readings, write those reviews – and hug an author!

The book-buyer’s marketplace

Whenever I give talks about writing – and I’ve spoken in libraries and bookshops, and to book groups, WI meetings and the Rotary Club – people are always fascinated to know about the economics of self-publishing.  Telling them how much it costs to self-publish – nothing! – always surprises them.  (Of course writing a book costs a great deal in time, and you might well choose to spend money on professional editing services, or a cover designer, or a pretty template for the layout of the interior, but you can actually upload a book to a self-publishing service for no payment at all.)  But what really surprises them is how little of the purchase price eventually makes its way back to the author.

If I sell a paperback via Amazon – cover prices are £7.99 and £8.99 for the Sam books – I eventually get about £1.30 of that sale.  If I supply bookshops directly – which entails me ordering the books myself and then selling them on to the bookshop – I get about 50p per book in the end (and, in one case, I am actually subsidising a bookshop because I think it’s the right thing to do, and I lose about 20p per copy that they take…).  And if I sell an e-book – Amazon lists them for about £3.10 – I eventually get about £1.10.  I’m not eyeing up that retirement villa just yet!

And a very interesting article on this subject – where to buy your books in order to best benefit the author – has appeared on the website of the Society of Authors.  It’s a very illuminating read and, as you might imagine, flies the flag for independent bookshops and local libraries.  If you have any choice at all in how you consume your reading material, it’s well worth having a read – some of the observations will surprise you.  (Although much of it is concerned with traditionally published books – they talk of buying in bulk from distributors, which is obviously only a pipe dream for the self-published – it is still useful to have the marketplace dissected in this way.)  Click here for the article.

Sex on the brain

I imagine you think I’ve stopped writing.  Certainly my decision to take eighteen months to write “Plank 5” – as opposed to a year each for the first four books – has taken away some of the urgency I used to feel about word counts and deadlines, but rest assured that Sam and I rarely go more than four days without spending some time together.  (For new readers of this blog, I am not the world’s laziest novelist: I actually have a full-time job, and the novels are my – somewhat overwhelming – hobby.)

Anyway, I know you like to hear about the mechanics of writing historical fiction, and recently I have been thinking and reading a lot about sex.  Well, to be more specific, about contraception, pregnancy and fertility.  I don’t want risk any spoilers, but if you have read earlier Sam books you will know that Sam and Martha are childless – and not by choice.  In “Plank 5” I look into this a bit more deeply, and this has proved quite tricky.  For instance, did Sam and Martha know what caused babies?  Of course they knew that sex had something to do with it, but did they know about sperm and eggs?  What did they think was going wrong for them?  Did they blame themselves, each other, God, fate – or did they not see it in terms of blame, but rather simple destiny?  Even today people are reluctant to discuss these very personal matters, so you can imagine that diary entries, newspaper articles and learned discussions about them from two centuries ago are, to say the least, thin on the ground.  I’m reading some pretty peculiar stuff – hope no-one’s analysing my borrowings from the rare books collection at the library…

And you know my fixation with etymology – in essence, making sure that the vocabulary I give to Sam is not too modern.  Surprisingly, it is tricky to find the words that nice people would have used to refer to pregnancy and childbirth.  As ever, there is plenty of rather coarse language, but that’s not what Sam would have recorded in his books.  “Pregnant” was in use, but (and this nearly caught me out) both “expecting” and “in the family way” are much too recent, dating only from the 1950s.  French was back in favour, so “enceinte” could be used in more refined households.  And when no-one could miss it, you were “great with child”.  But the one I had never heard – and I’m still in two minds about using – is “lumpy”.  I mean, not terribly flattering, is it?