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.)

At long last – and a longlist!

The day has finally come: I am a full-time author.  Well, that’s over-stating it, but on 31 December 2021 I retired from my “day job”, and now I can spend more time learning about self-publishing, marketing my books, exchanging ideas and encouragement with other indie authors – oh, and doing some writing as well.  I found my last three months of work so busy and all-encompassing, what with planning my exit and providing “just one last training session” for so many lovely clients, that I have not even opened “The Notes of Change” (the final Sam Plank novel) since the end of October…  But now I can, and the first order of business is to read it again, from start to, well, not finish, but to “wherever I’m up to”, so that I can remember the plot.

Actually, that’s another over-statement, because of course the real first order of business was to turn my efficient business office into an equally efficient but much softer and more creative “writing den”.  My husband very kindly did the grunt work of removing a now-surplus second built-in desk and making good the walls, and then I scarpered while he and a neighbour manhandled the new “sofa of reclining reflection” through the house and garden and up the office steps.  It looks marvellous – and within ten minutes had been colonised by Maggie the cat, henceforward known in her new incarnation as “writer’s muse”:

Maggie thinking deeply creative thoughts – about dinner

And what of this longlist, I hear you cry!  Well, as if to welcome me properly to authordom, on 1 January 2022 I had a wonderful email from the sainted Helen Hollick (quite why she has not received a damehood for services to the self-published, I do not know – she’d certainly have no trouble finding a hat to wear to her investiture!).  Her review website for indie and self-published authors – Discovered Diamonds – has launched a new award.  The Richard Tearle Discovering Diamonds Award is named in honour of one their most prolific reviewers, who died last year, and “Portraits of Pretence” (the fourth Sam Plank novel) has been longlisted for the inaugural award, by dint of having been the Discovered Diamonds “Book of the Year” in 2017.  I can’t wait to see who will join Sam on the longlist, and then we’ll have to be patient until they announce the winner and runner-up in spring 2023.  What with a new sofa and the honour of being a longlist nominee for a new award, my new writing life is off to a flying start.

A trio of triumphs

One of the delights (and downsides) of indie publishing (I’m trying to school myself to call it indie publishing rather than self-publishing) is being responsible for your own marketing.  I find that it’s very mood-based: if I’m feeling optimistic and imaginative, promotion and marketing are great fun, but if I’m feeling a bit low, it’s very hard work.  And no matter the mood, it’s important to remember that marketing is a long game: you can put out feelers and tasters and temptations and hear nothing for weeks – months – and then suddenly something happens.  Today I can report three somethings.

First up, we have the marvellous Richard Tearle.  Richard is a great supporter and promoter of indie writers and publishers, and has a special fondness for historical fiction: some time ago he wrote some terrific reviews of the Sam Plank books, and then he asked me to take part in an interview for his new blog, Slipstream.  The questions were thought-provoking, and the interview has appeared today on Richard’s blog.

Secondly, ages ago – in June – I contacted the webmaster of a site called “Order of Books” and asked for the Sam books to be added.  In essence, people can consult this website to find out about series of books and to get the definitive word about the order of the books in the series.  And today – most unexpectedly – my entry has appeared (although I was born in Brussels, not Germany).  Do go and have a look – it’s a really handy website for those of us who love series (and who wouldn’t want to revisit a beloved character?).

And thirdly, I have solved the mystery of the spike in sales of “Portraits of Pretence” (the fourth – green-covered – Sam book).  For several years now I have been in email contact with a lady in California who teaches an occasional college course on historical fiction.  And in a recent email she mentioned that this month her book club, on her recommendation, is reading “Portraits”.  So thank you, Claire and friends in California: that’s eleven copies on the tally!

(And – too exciting – as I write this, I have an eared cocked for the doorbell: the proof paper copy of “Heir Apparent” is being delivered this afternoon.  If all is well, I might even be pressing that big red Publish button a few days early…)

Titles and sales

Apologies for the silence.  I’ve been away on holiday, plus it’s that peculiar limbo phase in the writing and publication of a book: the draft is out with beta readers and I am waiting (nails bitten almost to the quick) for the feedback.  There’s no point making any changes myself until I get that, although I am allowing my mind to wander to the matter of chapter titles.  My working titles are always terrible – “Sam goes to Chelsea”, or “Freame discusses tontines”, for instance – so I remove those from the beta draft as they contain spoilers for each chapter.  Once the text is finalised, I get to devise proper chapter titles, which I really enjoy.

A while ago I asked you whether I should continue with the final (sob!) Sam book next, or launch into my new Cambridge-set series, saving the seventh Sam for later.  At the moment, I have four votes in favour of starting the new series and two (one by email) in favour of sticking with Sam.  Still undecided…

And here’s a conundrum – although perhaps I shouldn’t mention it in case it jinxes something.  I track my book sales quite closely, looking at the KDP sales dashboard a couple (OK, several) times a day – it’s like a nervous tic.  And someone introduced me to the marvellous and colourful (and free) Book Report app, which takes the sale data and displays it as multicoloured bar charts and pie charts, and even tells me how much money I have made today (£4, thank you for asking).  And these have both revealed a peculiar spike in sales of “Portraits of Pretence” – that’s the fourth Sam book, the one about art fraud.  Ten copies sold in the past month, which is many more than usual.  Has it had a good review somewhere?  Is someone’s book club reading it?  Have some art historians discovered it?  I’m not complaining, obviously, but I am curious.  I’ll carry on watching it…

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).

Let us talk of many things!

It’s all happening today!  First of all, the divine Helen Hollick has featured a little piece by me on her terrific historical fiction blog, Let Us Talk of Many Things.  She gave me free rein – rather brave – and I decided to write about how I explore Sam’s London.  And quite by chance I realised that it is an interesting blend of old and new, as my two most-consulted resources are a map from 1827, and the Transport for London online journey planner!

Secondly, I have taken delivery of my “Book of the Year 2017” promotional stickers.  For those of you interested in the financial side of things, I ordered them from Vistaprint, using – with her permission – the logo designed by Helen.  I chose circular, matte, easy-peel stickers to mimic those seen most often in bookshops, and 120 small stickers (3.6 cm in diameter) cost me £26.03 including delivery and VAT.  That’s nearly 22p per sticker and a wild extravagance, but I treated myself.  I have now put them on the copies of “Portraits of Pretence” that I have in stock, added them to the books in my local bookshops, and posted them to the more distant stockists in Ely and London.  I have also been keeping a beady eye on sales for a spike, given all this publicity, but it is so far proving elusive.

 

And thirdly, I will be launching the “Plank 5” title poll at the end of this week.  My creative team and I (that’s me and the husband) are looking at a long list of possibilities in order to narrow it down to the final five.  The big thesaurus is out – the one with its own special magnifying glass – so it’s serious stuff.  Voting will open on Friday.

Penny-pinching Planks

After all the excesses and jollity of Christmas it’s back to the cold, hard reality of work.  And as this is supposed to be a warts-and-all blog about self-publishing, that work includes totting up my Plank sales for 2017 and trying to work out how much I have made and whether I can yet afford that elegant villa in Ischia.  (Spoiler alert: I can’t.)  Calculating royalties is rather a dark art, as Amazon seems to pay an ever-changing percentage and I have negotiated different deals with different bookshops (for whom I have to order and then deliver copies, so have to take that cost off before I begin), but I’ve had a go.

• “Fatal Forgery”: 20 paperback copies at an average of £1.10 royalty each; 27 Kindle copies at £2.09 each; 9 audiobooks at £1.50 each
• “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”: 6 paperback copies at £1.10 royalty each; 13 Kindle copies at £2.09 each; 10 audiobooks at £1.50 each
• “Worm in the Blossom”: 4 paperback copies at £1.10 royalty each; 15 Kindle copies at £2.09 each
• “Portraits of Pretence”: 8 paperback copies at £1.25 royalty each; 20 Kindle copies at £2.79 each

That makes a grand total of £242.25 for the year.  Out of this will come tax, and then of course I have paid for cover design, promotional materials (such as bookmarks) and the big unknown: my writing time.  Ah well: it might just pay for a nice pair of sandals for that Ischian idyll.

A gong for Sam

Yesterday I was driving home from visiting family and listening to the news on the radio.  They announced who had been given a New Year Honour (for overseas readers, here’s what they are), and I had a little daydream about how marvellous it would be to be recognised (à la Lady Antonia Fraser) for services to literature.  Once home, having been offline for a couple of days, I checked my email and good heavens!  I found that I had been given something even better!  “Portraits of Pretence” – the fourth Sam Plank novel – has been chosen by influential book review website Discovering Diamonds as their Book of the Year for 2017.

Discovering Diamonds is a wonderful place.  I stumbled on it – or rather, the people behind it, before it was created – right back at the start, just as I published the first Sam Plank novel, “Fatal Forgery” and was looking for reviewers.  Everyone associated with the website – and in particular our marvellous leader Helen Hollick – has been incredibly generous with their time, expertise, guidance and encouragement.  If you’re a fan of historical fiction – of any era and in any formats, whether e-book or paperback, Victorian or Roman, self-published or traditionally produced – their reviews are unmissable.

Regular readers of this blog will remember how excited I was when “Portraits” was chosen as their Book of the Month in March.  And now to find that I have scooped the annual award – well!  Naturally Sam would dispute my role, as Helen quite rightly points out that he is the hero of it all: “The three main characters have, through the absorbing series, become good, fictional, friends.  I find them believable, plausible and very likeable.”

I know the fashion is to say that awards don’t matter, that the work itself is the reward.  And of course I do love writing the Sam Plank stories.  But they are not edging Grisham or Rowling off the bestseller lists, there is no-one from the BBC knocking at the door and begging to be allowed to make them into a Sunday night corset drama, and my marketing efforts cost much more in time than they generate in income.  And so an award like this does matter – it matters enormously.  Hopefully it will generate some publicity for Sam, but more importantly it confirms to me that I can write, that the books are worth reading, and that I am right to continue.  Thank you, Helen: to me, this award is priceless.

Sam Plank – a diamond geezer

Well, it’s Sam’s day in the wonderful “Diamond Tales” extravaganza.  As I explained a while ago, the “Discovering Diamonds” blog – which devotes itself to publicising and promoting self- and indie-published historical fiction – is marking the festive season by featuring an excerpt from a different novel each day in the run-up to Christmas, and each has to have something to do with diamonds.  Those of you who have read “Portraits of Pretence” may remember that 1827 marked Sam and Martha’s diamond wedding anniversary, and he decided to buy her something special, in that particularly blundering Sam fashion…  And this is the passage I have chosen for today.

I have so enjoyed reading the other diamonds this month – what a perfect introduction to all sorts of writers who are new to me.  It’s such a treat, having a short story in my inbox every day, written in all sorts of different styles and set in every possible historical era.  And yes, I have been tempted to order one or two – OK, four – books on the back of it.  But, as always when I am in the throes of writing, I have observed my diktat that I will not read anything “within a century of Sam” – because I am easily confused if details get too close to the 1820s.  (And for those of you who track these things, my area of research this week has been printing presses – apparently they were often manned by deaf people, who were the only ones who could stand the constant noise.)

The swings and roundabouts of sales

I know that some of you read this blog with a more commercial eye, curious to know whether it’s possible to make a living at self-publishing, and I promised at the outset to tell you the unvarnished truth about all aspects of this writing adventure.  And this week I have mixed fortunes to report.

You may remember that back in October 2016 I scored something of a coup when I convinced the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge to stock three copies of “Portraits of Pretence”, as it is about art fraud.  I supplied the copies – as I do for most bookshops – on a sale or return basis, and they very promptly paid my invoice for the three copies supplied.  I sidled into the shop from time to time, feigning interest in other items but really checking out the bookshelves, and the trio of “Portraits” was still there.  This week I decided that it would be impolite, and not in the spirit of our original agreement, to stay silent, and so I contacted the stock manager and asked her if she would like to return the books, and she has – I collected them this morning.  To be fair, the staff tried hard: they put the books on different shelves, spine out, front out – they tried it all – but it seems that their visitors buy non-fiction art tomes rather than novels.

On the other hand, Sam is going great guns at Daunt Books in Cheapside.  I find this particularly pleasing because it is directly over the road from where Edward Freame’s bank is in the series (actually a Café Nespresso in real life).  This week Daunt ordered eight more books and my husband kindly delivered them on his Brompton folding bike and collected cash payment for the eight that had sold – some of which found its way pretty sharpish into the till of the aforementioned café (pedalling/peddling is thirsty work in hot weather).  It’s a busy bookshop, this one (it’s not the famous Marylebone Daunt – it’s the City cousin) and the customers are very much my target audience, with their interest in financial (mis)doings.

In short, it’s eight out and three in, and as long as I’m in credit, I’m happy!