The advertising game

It’s been a weekend of two halves, with regard to my writing.  On one hand, I have made a tiny bit of progress with “Gregory 1” – the first Gregory Hardiman book, set in Cambridge.  I have learned a lot about coroner’s inquests, and I have decided on a couple of confidants for Gregory – yes, a coroner, and perhaps a surgeon as well.  I found John Conant – a magistrate – an invaluable part of the Sam series, as the two men were able to discuss their work, and I feel I need someone in a similarly educated position for Gregory.  (I have also discovered that he doesn’t like being called Greg; Samuel Plank was perfectly easy with being called Sam, but Gregory insists on the full Gregory.  I wonder why…)

And on the other hand, I have been running an experimental Facebook ad for the past five days.  I have a dedicated Facebook page for my non-fiction business book “The Solo Squid: How to Run a Happy One-Person Business”, and for weeks now they have been tempting me with a £5 “credit” to try an ad to promote the page.  And in a moment of weakness – OK, a moment when I should have been writing but convinced myself that doing something commercial to promote a book was actually just as good as writing [spoiler alert: it isn’t] – I went for it.  I signed up to spend up to £1 a day for five days promoting the squid page to potential buyers of the book, with an ad to entice them to click on a link taking them to the Amazon page for the book.  I will admit that I didn’t put a great deal of thought into the ad or its settings, simply accepting the Facebook defaults for most of it, on the basis that as this was my first ad, they would do their best for me in order to suck me in for future campaigns.  I did limit the ad a little, by asking for it to be shown to both genders in the age range 25 to 58 [I figure that the very young aren’t setting up their own businesses quite yet, and those at the end of their working lives aren’t looking for guidance], in the US and the UK [prime English-speaking nations] and with a declared interest in entrepreneurship.  This netted me a potential target audience numbering 11,000,000, which Facebook assured me was ideal.  And off we went.

Five days later, Facebook informs me that my ad run has finished.  Over the five days it was seen by 1,399 people, eleven of whom clicked the link.  That cost me £4.80 of my £5 credit – or just under 44p per click.  Looking at the Amazon sales figures, I see that in the same period (10 to 14 June 2020) I sold no copies of “The Solo Squid”.  I’ll keep an eye on the sales in the next few days in case one of the eleven clicks put the book in their basket for later purchase, but based on this small and most unscientific experiment, I can safely say that I will not be investing the Grossey fortune in Facebook ads.  Back to the writing board.

Pigeon pie and unruly curls

Way back in November, I mentioned in a post that it would make sense for me to start keeping track of details that I mention about my characters in “Fatal Forgery” and “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”, so that I can avoid blunders like making Wilson dark-haired in one book and then fair in the next.  It’s taken me a while to get around to it, but I realised that the longer I leave it – i.e. the more books I write – the more difficult it will become.  And so this weekend I speed-read (sped-read?) both novels again, looking out for descriptive details.

(I hope it doesn’t sound too conceited, but I have to say that I was really rather proud of what I had written.  I haven’t read either book since publication, so I had forgotten quite a lot, and I’m glad to say that the stories hang together well.)

As I was gathering details, I realised that I am building up a core cast of characters.  There are Sam and Martha, of course, and then Wilson.  But then there are also the magistrate Conant and the banker Freame and the prison keeper Wontner.  I like them all, and I think Sam is the sort of man who would make and retain loyal friends, so I hope that they can all appear in all of the novels – they are certainly there in “Plank 3”.

So I now have a separate folder called “Character details”, with a sub-folder for each one.  And they’re filled with handy hints like “has unruly curls” and “really likes pigeon pie and walnut loaf” and “teetotal because father was a mean drunk”.  I think the time to add to these folders – rather than simply consulting them – is after the publication of each book.  Because as I’m writing, I daren’t add details in case they change in a later edit – after all. Wilson might go undercover and hit the hair dye.

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.