Taking the Alpine heir

Now I know we’re all rather wary of polls, elections and referenda these days, but I’d like to thank the thirty-four of you who overcame your understandable scepticism about democracy to take part in the process to select the title for “Plank 6”.  And the people have spoken and issued a clear mandate: fully 50% of the votes were cast for “Heir Apparent”.  Coming second, with nine votes, was “Dividend of Death”.  I’m delighted – I think it’s an excellent choice.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working on what’s going to go behind that title: the book itself.  And (in the spirit of full honesty about the self-published writing life, which is the purpose of this blog) I will confess that I have found this writing retreat harder than the previous ones.  Thanks to a busier working life than usual and some unexpected family illness (all fine now, thank goodness), I came away with less of the book written than I had intended.  To make sure that I head home with a complete first draft, I worked out that I needed to write about 3,000 words each day – with no days off during the seventeen days of the retreat.  And it turns out that that is really tiring.  Who knew that sitting on your bottom all day could be exhausting, but it’s more the mental effort of concentrating and being inventive for hours on end.  So far I have had to take two days off – turns out that the standard weekend pattern (five days on, two days off) is there for a reason!  It’s been a handy lesson for when I – one day – become a full-time author.  Planning to write imaginatively every day is unrealistic; I’ll make sure to create a balance of writing, promotional activities and administrative tasks, and factor in some rest time too.

That said, I am pleased with progress on the days I have been writing.  Gaps in the story are filling themselves in nicely, and today Sam and Wilson are off on a trip to Kent Surrey Suffolk (I keep changing my mind).  Barring unforeseen disasters, “Heir Apparent” will be hitting the shelves in mid October as planned.

Scorching Sam

One of the decisions I have to make for each Sam book – and, surprisingly, I make this decision near the end of the process – is when in the year to set the story.  I already know the year, of course (“Plank 6” is set in 1829) but not the season.  The plot of each book usually spreads over three or four months, and of course the time of year forms part of the background.  “Fatal Forgery” was autumnal, “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat” was summery, and “Worm in the Blossom” and “Portraits of Pretence” were both set in the spring, while “Faith, Hope and Trickery” encompassed the whole second half of 1828.  I am now mulling the season for “Plank 6” – and this decision is difficult because I am sitting here at the top of a mountain in sweltering heat.  And as with all extreme weather conditions, I cannot remember what it felt like to be at the other end of the thermometer.  So if Martha ends up ripping off her stays and jumping into a tin bath of cold water, you’ll know why.

One benefit of the heat here is that I have not been tempted to go out wandering in the countryside – and so I have hit the ground running in terms of word count.  On day one (yesterday) I managed a respectable 2,829 words, while today I bashed out a very pleasing 3,515.  Of course word count is not the ultimate aim – this is only the first draft – but I use it as a handy measure of how productive I have been.  And in those two days I have brought back two characters from earlier Sam books, created a whole new character I was not expecting, and given him a dog called Sloane.  Or maybe Hans – I can’t decide.

And don’t forget: the title poll for “Plank 6” finishes at the end of July, so there’s only a few days left to cast your vote.

Ask and ye shall receive

I’ve written before about how helpful and inclusive is the self-publishing community.  If you have any self-publishing questions or concerns or requests, there are numerous fora on which you can post (including my own first port of call, the ALLi website) and you’ll be overwhelmed by answers, suggestions and encouragement.  But I think it’s only right that I should point out that the giving freely of expertise and advice is not limited to self-published authors.

If you’ve ever read a Sam Plank book, you might remember that at the start of each of them is a quotation from a classical author – Virgil in “Fatal Forgery”, Sophocles in “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat” and so on.  The last time I studied Latin was when I was twelve (and that was when Jim Callaghan, Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev were in charge) and I’ve never attempted Greek, and so every time I have to rely on the kindness of Classics academics to check that I am using the most favoured translation.  All it takes is a few emails, and people are so happy to help.

All of the Sam books involve a great deal of research – no, don’t feel sorry for me, as I love it.  But sometimes the material is contradictory or just too technical for me to understand, and here too I turn to the experts.  I hope I won’t be giving too much away if I say that for the plot of “Plank 6” I needed some guidance on botany in the 1820s – which plants had been identified, what were their formal and common names, and whether people in England would have heard of them.  Kew Gardens was the obvious place to go with my enquiries, and the response was just wonderful: I was given exactly the answers I needed, along dedicated links to extra information (some of which gave me an excellent plot development) and a standing invitation to the Gardens to meet the experts and have a look at the plants I was asking about.  When Trump derides and rejects expertise, he is – as usual – talking out of his hat.  And experts who are willing to share their knowledge with random authors who contact them out of the blue add immeasurably to human wealth and happiness.  Thank Kew!

Changing up a gear

I know I’ve been quiet recently; my excuse is that I was on holiday cycling along the Rhine (which I can recommend for both scenery and ice-cream – the Germans are mad for both).  But I am now home again and work on “Plank 6” is at the forefront of my mind.  There are two key deadlines: on 22 July I am off to Switzerland for my writing retreat (seventeen days on my own, just for writing), and then on 18 October I am hoping to publish the book.  For the writing retreat to be of most value, I need to make sure that I have all but finished the first draft by the time I go – which is only 28 days away.  I’m nowhere near that at the moment, so it’s full steam ahead, carving out writing time whenever and wherever I can.  And the writing retreat should – must – result in a draft that I can send out to my lovely beta readers, and then I need to allow time to incorporate their suggested changes, which could be extensive.  I’m getting the vapours just thinking about it.

And of course the inside of the book is only part of it: before publication I need to decide on a title and a cover and a cover blurb, and organise a launch event.  So no pressure, then.  Over the weekend I put together a list of about fifteen possible titles – some are rather dull, others could work.  I’ll narrow that down to five and then put it to the public vote, as usual, in July.  I’ve started looking for possible cover images and documents, but thankfully can leave colour choice to the cover designer – I’ll be interested to see what they add to our current suite of blue, gold, red, green and purple.

One small update: you remember the book-signing that I did at WHSmith in April?  I’ve been trying to extract from them the vast sum I made from the day (read all about it here) and it’s taken nearly as long as writing “Plank 6”.  They’ve apparently designed a new payments system and I’ve had to submit my details to be approved as a new supplier, along with my invoice.  I’ll let you know when the money arrives and I can treat myself to an extra box of Jaffa Cakes.

Keep buggering on

Goodness, that was a hard day.  Remember how non-writers imagine that writing involves sitting down somewhere picturesque, refreshments to hand, and waiting for inspiration to strike?  I learned fairly early on in the Sam series that it doesn’t work that way – or at least, only on a few blessed days a year – and the rest of time it comes down to discipline and bloody-mindedness.  Today was a discipline day.

I have taken to blocking out days in my diary for writing, on the grounds that if I wait until a free day presents itself, it never does.  The upside is that I do get writing time.  The downside is that I have to use it for writing, otherwise it’s a terrible waste.  Today was a writing day and so I allowed myself only until 8.30 am to clear any “day job” work and then I turned off that computer, left the office and went upstairs to my “study” (i.e. back bedroom, next to the boiler) and my writing computer.  And barring twenty minutes each for elevenses and afternoon teasies and an hour for lunch, I have stuck with it.

I was writing a key chapter – I can’t tell you what, with spoilers and all that – and I did manage to plough my way through it, clocking up just over 1,500 words.  I feel sure that most of them will fall by the wayside later in the process, but I always try to remember one of the most helpful writing tips I know.  I can’t remember where I read it or who said it, but here it is: you can always edit something, but you can’t edit nothing.

And now I’m going to sit in the garden.  Tomorrow is another timetabled writing day – fingers crossed for inspiration!

While I have your attention, may I just remind you that if you sign up here for my free monthly updates on the history behind the Sam books, you will get a free glossary of Regency terms to thank you.  And if you fancy reading the first chapter of each of the Sam books for free, you can find out how on this page.

Back to basics

Ever since I entered “Faith, Hope and Trickery” for the Selfies Awards, I have been obsessed with book marketing.  The awards were to be judged on several criteria including “an effective and creative marketing and publicity strategy”, and this brought marketing to the front of my mind.  Whenever I had an hour to spare, I spent it not on writing but on marketing.  To be honest, it is the easier option: when l was struggling with a knotty plot point or a scene that wouldn’t go right, I would abandon it and do a quick marketing task instead – design a poster for my WHSmith signing event, or work on my monthly Sam update (pure research – my number one favourite displacement activity!).  Here’s the distraction poster in question:

As a result, I have fallen behind on my writing schedule for “Plank 6” – not disastrously and irretrievably behind, but uncomfortably so.  And the irony is that all this marketing seems to make no discernible difference at all to book sales.  None at all.  Some effort is doomed: I spent a few hours answering questions about how my day job has influenced my writing and about financial crime in general for a promotions person ahead of the Selfies, and of course, because I did not win, no journalist was interested in my story.  And some effort is (for me) bad for the state of mind: at the recent London Book Fair I attended a lecture on “creating your author brand”, and the amount of guilt it has engendered is huge.   (No wonder the Sam books aren’t selling – I’m not a brand!  And reading the numberless tweets generated by influencers in the publishing world is exhausting and time-consuming, let alone responding to them in a manner that will intrigue them and “drive them to you” – like Uber?).  Much marketing effort simply goes into the ether and you hope that one day it will transmogrify into a sale.  The only thing I have done recently that has had any impact on “sales” is my five-day giveaway of “Fatal Forgery” on Amazon – and I’m not sure it’s much of a marketing coup to say that hundreds of people rushed for my product when it was free!

As a result, I have been doing some authorly soul-searching.  The key fact is that I work full-time.  I have very limited time for my fiction-writing.  And although I hope one day to be a full-time author, at which point I will immerse myself in the commercial side of it too (recognising completely that successful self-publishing is not an indulgence but rather a business), at the moment I simply cannot do both writing and marketing to an acceptable or effective level.  And as it would be nonsense to concentrate on marketing if there is nothing to sell, the writing wins.  I will continue with the bits I enjoy – this blog, and the monthly Sam updates – but I will be retreating from Twitter and other more ephemeral platforms, as I just can’t keep up.

Shopping for publicity

It’s all been a bit quiet here recently, hasn’t it?  That’s mainly because just sitting and writing, with occasional forays into research, is not much of a spectator sport, but rest assured that work continues apace with “Plank 6”.  And here’s what else I’ve been doing recently:

• Booked time with my fabulous cover designer – that’s Design for Writers – to make sure that they will be available to work on that sixth cover next summer
• Done some fun, extra research on Regency jewellery in preparation for my November monthly update – if you fancy getting your mitts on that, you can subscribe by clicking on the map to the left…
• Appeared in the magazine published by our local shopping mall, the “Grafton Press” – you can see it online here.

The idea for this last one came to me a few months ago when I was walking through the Grafton Centre in Cambridge and spotted that they had their own publication, promoting the shops and businesses in the centre but also highlighting Cambridge-y things – presumably to tempt out-of-town visitors to return again and again.  And friends who work in periodical publishing tell me that freebies like this are always on the look-out for contributed content because they rarely have the budget to buy in the services of more than a couple of writers.  I contacted the editorial email address given in the magazine, suggesting a piece on local authors, and they sent back a set of about six questions – which, as you can see, basically form the piece.

So that would be my top marketing tip for this month: look around for local or trade publications that might welcome unsolicited contact, and think of a way to connect you and/or your writing to their target market.  You might remember that I managed to get into Flybe’s in-flight magazine last year, by writing a piece about London as a destination, while managing to mention Sam Plank or my writing in every paragraph…  I’m cunning like that.  If you can send them a fairly finished piece (with the Flybe one, I looked at past issues of the column and used the same questions to formulate my own submission), they might well use it pretty much unchanged, just to be able to fill a page with minimal effort.  And who knows who might be off on their hols on Flybe, or doing their Christmas shopping at the Grafton Centre – it might be that TV executive casting around for inspiration for their next Sunday evening costume drama, and there will be Sam and Martha, just waiting.

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!

Build it and they will come

I know, I know: it was but a few short days ago when I declared that I was – temporarily – abandoning all marketing efforts in order to concentrate on writing.  And to be fair to me (if I can’t be fair to myself, what hope is there?) I have indeed concentrated on the writing – or, more specifically, the plotting – of “Plank 6”.  And I can announce that I have a twisty, turny and frankly rather nasty plot in mind for you – I had no idea that I could be so unpleasant and devious.  But, in the odd manner of things, as soon as I turned my back on publicity it started seeking me out.

In example one, a review that has been pending since May, when “Faith, Hope and Trickery” was published, has just appeared.  It is on the website of Shots Crime & Thriller eZine and has been written by the lovely Pippa Macallister, whom I know from a local crime book group.  You can read it yourself, as I blush rather to repeat it, but let me just say this: “There is a wonderful warmth between [Sam and Wilson] and Sam’s wife Martha, which contrasts with the cold, hard reality of life in the areas where they live and work.”  You will also spot the typo in the title of the review: I am minded to leave this as it is, as I figure that people might notice it and – as the marvellous Oscar Wilde so astutely commented – “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

And in example two, I have been contacted by an e-book marketing company called The Fussy Librarian and asked to take part in their regular author Q&A feature.  I was recommended to them by my fellow – and kind and generous – historical fiction author Victoria Blake (if you haven’t read her novel “The Return of the Courtesan”, a real treat awaits you), and the questions the FL has sent to be answered are really interesting and quirky.  I don’t know when it will appear on the FL’s newswire (I haven’t even sent in my answers yet) but when it does, I’ll let you know.  The FL is based in Iowa in America, so it certainly can’t hurt to introduce Sam to a wider transatlantic audience.

Stiff competition

Last Wednesday I had some pretty stiff competition.  I was invited to speak at a literary event in a local village, during their annual week of festivities, and on the night I shared a platform with properly-published, best-selling author Sarah Vaughan (she’s even had her most recent book, political thriller “Anatomy of a Scandal”, promoted on London black cabs and on posters in the Tube – she’s that professional an author!).  Not only that, but Sarah and I were battling for attention against “Mock the Week” regular Hal Cruttenden (performing at a comedy event in the same village) and the entire England football team playing Croatia in Moscow.  Nonetheless, a fine band of about thirty people turned out to hear us talk about crime, writing, and crime writing.

Sarah was a lovely person, and since we met has been very generous with her time and her contacts, but I will admit that sharing a stage with her reminded me that I have a long way to go.  She happened to mention that one of her books has over twenty editions in translation, and that the Italian edition alone has sold over twenty thousand copies.  Twenty thousand!  All five of my novels, in all editions, have sold a total of just over 1,400 copies.

But am I daunted?  I am not!  Now that I have sorted out just which year I am writing about, I find that 1829 is a cracker of a year.  We’ve had the hanging of grave-robber William Burke and the first appearance of the Metropolitan Police – and it’s only the end of June.  Added to that, it was a very cold year with a wet, thundery summer and then London snow in early October – very atmospheric.  As Sam might say, we’re doing this because it’s the right thing to do, not because it makes us money.