Best writing day ever?

Tags

author talks, Gregory 1, Gregory Hardiman, indie publishing, library, sales, Samuel Plank, self-publishing, The Solo Squid

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!

Kind words and five stars

Tags

Amazon, Heir Apparent, research, review, sales, update

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

Tags

Amazon, Book Report, Fatal Forgery, Gardners, Hatchards, Heir Apparent, KDP, Nielsen, sales, The Man in the Canary Waistcoat, Waterstones

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…

Writing projects a-go-go

Tags

Amazon, Book Report, bookshop, Cambridge, cover, Design for Writers, designer, Gregory 1, Heir Apparent, Plank 7, sales

Here I am, three days after the official publication of “Heir Apparent” – and it’s still exciting!  The new book is selling well: the wonderful Book Report tells me that I have sold sixteen copies via Amazon (I’ll have to wait for the Amazon report to see how many are paperback and how many e-books) while I have delivered nineteen copies to bookshops and sold four copies direct to friends.  That’s *counts on fingers and toes* thirty-nine copies in the first week – although of course the bookshop sales won’t bring in any money until they actually sell to customers.

So what’s next?  Well, I’ll actually have two writing projects on the go at the same time.  The first is a non-fiction book that I have been planning for a while, on my experiences of running a one-person consultancy business – how to be happy and productive while working alone.  (I hadn’t really thought of it applying to authors but I suppose it could… there’s another target market.)  I’ve done the planning and “plotting” (different for a non-fiction book but still important – you always need a beguiling narrative and a sensible structure to keep people turning the pages) and decided on the title: “The Solo Squid”.  It’s partly because when you run a one-person business you have to do everything yourself and you can end up feeling that you need at least eight arms, and partly because early on in the book I talk about working alone being a different kettle of fish and this gave rise to a marine theme.  I’ve booked the cover designer (Design for Writers – who else?) and set myself a January 2020 deadline – better get cracking!

And the second project is *drum roll please* the first book in the new series, set in Cambridge in the 1820s (well, of course) and narrated by a university constable called (I’m almost certain) Gregory Hardiman.  A little while ago I asked for your views on whether I should do “Plank 7” before or after “Gregory 1”, and you were fairly evenly divided on the matter.  Smarter commercial brains tell me that it might be good to get people hooked on a new series before they finish the old one, so that they have somewhere to go.  But, I will confess, the deciding factor was my own cowardice: I simply cannot imagine life without Sam and Martha, and this decision puts off the dreaded day when I will have to put the final full-stop at the end of “Plank 7”.

Happy publication day to me

Tags

Cambridge University Library, Heffers, Heir Apparent, marketing, publication date, sales

As an indie publisher, I am responsible for all aspects of my book’s production – including celebrating its launch day.  So today’s the day, folks: “Heir Apparent” is now officially launched!  Hurrah!  To mark the occasion, I have taken the day off work and devoted myself to matters cultural and, specifically, bookish.  My first port of call was the Cambridge University Library, where I dropped off a copy of the book to be added to their collection (posterity and all that) and visited their current exhibition: “The Rising Tide” looks at the history of women at the university and is terrific.  I particularly enjoyed discovering that women who campaigned to be awarded degrees (the cheek – of course we should have been happy to do all the same work but not get the recognition at the end) were condemned as “nasty forward minxes”.  Anyway, here’s the front of the UK with its wonderful book bollards – you can spin the books around and make them as neat or random as you want.

I then toddled along to Heffers – the university bookshop – and admired the display of “Heir Apparent” on the ledge in the crime fiction department.  For those who do not know Heffers, “the ledge” is a fab place to be, as it’s just at eye-catching and browsing height.

After that it was an excursion to the Fitzwilliam Museum to inspect the recently renovated ceiling of their main gallery – just look at that moulding.

They also had an exhibition of Rembrandt’s sketches of nudes, and I reckon that this one is ignoring him because she’s reading in bed.

And through it all I wore my most celebratory wet-weather footwear: red Fly boots.

Titles and sales

Tags

beta reader, Book Report, chapter, KDP, Portraits of Pretence, 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…

Honing the sales pitch

Tags

Amazon, blurb, cover, design, Heir Apparent, plotting, sales

Today is something of a red letter day for me: after months of writing (and a fortnight of my writing retreat) I finally know how “Heir Apparent” will end.  To be clearer, I always knew how it was going to end, but now I know how it is going to get there.  It’s a mighty relief, I can tell you.  And to celebrate, I am allowing myself to think about life after writing, i.e. publication.  And the task that is occupying me now is preparation of the text for the cover.

The Sam covers – entirely deliberately – conform to a template.  Each has a background image of a document (usually a bit blurry), then a foreground line drawing of a person.  The title goes across the middle of the cover, with my name beneath it.  Across the top of the front cover is a banner identifying the book as “A Sam Plank Mystery”, and across the bottom of the front cover is a complimentary quotation from a reviewer.  And on the back cover is the dreaded blurb – that some authors say is harder to write than the book itself.  I have written a draft blurb and would very much value your views: would it make you want to buy the book?  What can I do to make it more “grabby”?  And please bear in mind that, for continuity and consistency, I use the back cover blurb elsewhere too: it’s the text that appears on Amazon as the “product description”.  So here goes:

In the final weeks of 1828, a young man returns from the family plantation in the Cayman Islands after an absence of six years to be at his father’s deathbed – and to inherit his estate.  But is the new arrival who he says he is, or an impostor?  Anyone who doubts his identity seems to meet an untimely end, but his sister swears that he is her beloved brother.

With their investigations leading them into the complicated world of inheritance law and due process after death, Constable Sam Plank and his loyal lieutenant William Wilson come face to face with the death trade and those who profit from it – legally or otherwise.  Among them is an old enemy who has used his brains and ruthlessness to rise through the ranks of London’s criminal world.  And as plans progress for a new police force for the capital, Sam and his wife Martha look to the future.

Five hours and one cake

Tags

Fatal Forgery, marketing, sales, WHSmith

I know you’ve all been on tenterhooks to know how today’s book-signing session went in my local branch of WHSmith.  Well, not well.  On reflection, this is probably not the shop in which to try to interest people in historical crime fiction by an unknown author.  The staff could not have been friendlier or more helpful; they set up a table for me in the upstairs book department for two hours and then for the next three hours they moved me downstairs into the general shop, by the main entrance (where it’s quite chilly, hence the fetching yellow jacket):

    

Upstairs, there was no interest at all: everyone headed straight for the children’s books or asked me if there was a loo (there isn’t – luckily I have excellent bladder control).  It was good to see so many families in a bookshop, but I have to confess that they mostly bought sticker books “for the car/bus/plane”.  Downstairs there was a little more curiosity, although I am still mulling over this exchange: a woman stopped at my table and picked up one of my books.  “It’s historical crime,” I said, “set in London in the 1820s”.  She put the book down and said, “No” – completely deadpan – before walking off without another word.  No, it’s not historical crime?  No, I’m not interested?  Downstairs was indeed busier, but bestsellers here were chocolate (including Easter eggs), scratchcards and slime.  The most popular book seemed to be something called “Mrs Hinch”, which is about cleaning and was half price.

So let’s get to the hard facts: how many did I sell?  Two books (both “Fatal Forgery”): one to a woman who thought her banker brother would like it, and the other to a nice Slovak chap who was very excited to meet a real author and bought it to prove to his father that he had met an author “even though I probably won’t read it”.  As I had offered a special price on the books (which I had to buy and supply) and WHSmith takes 50% of the sale price, over the five hours I made 98p.  And to cheer myself up on the way home I bought a chocolate cake from Sainsbury’s for £2, so the whole day cost me £1.02.  It’s a good job I’ve resolved to hang fire on the marketing for a while – I can’t afford it.

I have a dream

Tags

audiobook, BBC, Claudie Blakley, Fatal Forgery, library, Martha Plank, PLR, review, sales, Samuel Plank, The Selfies

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.

Fingers crossed, please

Tags

blurb, BookBrunch, competitions, Faith Hope and Trickery, London Book Fair, Mslexia, sales, synopsis, The Selfies

Nothing daunted by previous failures – Mslexia, I’m looking at you – I have entered another competition.  This one is specifically for self-published books, which is an interesting development as several competitions explicitly exclude self-published works.  This competition is being sponsored by BookBrunch – “the daily online news service for the book industry” – and is called (wait for it) The Selfies.  I was in two minds about applying, as it costs £25 and takes a couple of hours to put together the application, but in the end I reasoned that I certainly wouldn’t be shortlisted if I didn’t enter (unassailable logic) and took the plunge.

As well as supplying the book itself – I’ve gone with “Faith, Hope and Trickery” because the competition is for adult fiction published in the last year – I also had to supply a synopsis.  I haven’t written a synopsis since I first hawked “Fatal Forgery” to publishers and agents, as the synopsis is basically a summary of the plot and is used to persuade publishers/agents to take you on.  It’s not the same as a blurb, which goes on the back cover or on sales websites to tempt readers; by contrast, the synopsis gives away the whole plot including the ending.

I also had to provide information about my marketing efforts and plans, and – deep breath – ‘fess up to my sales figures across both editions (paperback and e-book) to evidence (according to the competition website) “an effective and creative marketing and publicity strategy [and] great sales potential”.  We in the self-publishing community had a discussion about the significance of this question: would the judges simply choose the best-selling book?  Would they take into account that a book that had been published eleven months ago would have more sales than one published in November?  Are sales figures any indication of quality anyway?  I thought about fibbing, but in the end told the truth: 86.

At least the waiting period is mercifully short: the competition closes on 21 December 2018, the shortlist will be announced in late February and the winner revealed at the London Book Fair on 12 March 2019.  So as not to tempt fate, I have put a light, squiggly pencil line through the whole of that March week in my diary, with “LBF” written in the most casual way – you’d barely notice that I even care.