Back to basics

Tags

Amazon, Faith Hope and Trickery, London Book Fair, marketing, Plank 6, The Selfies, WH Smith, writing

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.

Self-publishing makes you smile – proof!

Tags

agent, awards, cover, Faith Hope and Trickery, IngramSpark, London Book Fair, self-publishing, The Selfies

Apologies for the radio silence: it has been a mad fortnight.  Entirely my own fault, as I work alone and am in charge of my own diary, but everything except the absolute essentials of work and survival shopping/cooking have been on hold – apart, that is, from attendance at the London Book Fair.  For the first time ever.  And as an award shortlistee (is that a word? perhaps nominee is better)!

Of course I had heard of the LBF (as I thought it was trendy to call it, until I heard the old pros talking simply of “London”) but had never really felt entitled to attend before.  And to be honest, much of the show – fascinating though it is to wander around – is intended for publishers and booksellers and agents, looking to schmooze each other and make deals.  If you were an author looking for an agent or a publisher, it would be a handy place to do some research; you can see at a glance which “lists” would welcome your work, and with the lure of a (vastly overpriced, as always at these events) coffee and pastry you might even be able to set up a meeting or two.  I simply enjoyed seeing all the stalls and fantasising about being “author of the day” at an LBF of the future…

But back to the award.  As regular readers will know, I was – amazingly and thrillingly – chosen as one of eight shortlisted entrants for the inaugural Selfies Award, created to recognise writing and publishing professionalism in the self-published world.  I am told that more than fifty entries were received, so getting down to the final eight – and as a part-time author – pleased me enormously.  We were an entirely female shortlist, and it was a delight to meet the other seven authors on the day.  We were all a bit giddy by 4.30pm when we were shepherded onto the low stage of the little theatre set up in the “Writer’s Block” area of the fair, and we each had to announce our name and our book title.  I didn’t win but was consoled by the fact that both the winner (Jane Davis, with her book “Smash all the Windows”) and the runner-up (Jane Steen, with her book “Lady Helena Investigates”) were just the loveliest women.  I entirely forgot to take any photos myself but I hope that the award sponsors IngramSpark (through whom I publish the Sam books) won’t mind me borrowing this one from their Twitter feed:

That’s the overall winner Jane Davis being announced and the runner-up Jane Steen on the right, with the biggest smile in the universe!  (You’ll also spot the purple book cover of “Faith, Hope and Trickery” on the banner behind us – so many people complimented me on that cover.)  Look how happy we all are – that’s self-publishing for you!

Sam’s on the shortlist!

Tags

author, BookBrunch, Faith Hope and Trickery, historical fiction, London Book Fair, Samuel Plank, The Selfies

What a day!  I have received notification that “Faith, Hope and Trickery” has been shortlisted for the inaugural Selfies Award, which I entered back in December.  It’s one of eight books in the running and the winner will be announced at the London Book Fair on 12 March 2019.  I had already booked my ticket for that day, as I’ve never been to the LBF before (I want to walk around with “Author” on my ID badge), and I wanted to support the Selfies even if I was not personally involved.  But now I will be – great excitement!

Today’s press release  from the awards organiser – BookBrunch – is most flattering.  It says that we shortlist nominees were selected from “exceptional works of self-published fiction” and “can confidently stand against the very best fiction being published in the UK today”.

Looking at the shortlist, we’re all women.  Two books are pure crime and two are historical (mine included).  Bizarrely, one is about money laundering and one is about cycling (written by a woman who lives in Cambridge) – and neither of those is mine!  That prize ceremony is going to be an interesting gathering…

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.