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.

Life-sized Sam

Did I tell you that I have managed to secure a book-signing at my local branch of WH Smith?  (For overseas readers, it’s a major high street newsagent, stationer and bookseller.)  I spotted a call to arms from WH Smith, encouraging authors to arrange signings, and leapt in with both feet.  For those of you in the east of England, I’ll be sitting in splendour at the Cambridge city centre branch on Saturday 6 April 2019, from 11 am (I am reliably informed by the store manager than no-one buys books before that hour on a Saturday.)

And to advertise my presence, I wondered what to do.  I’m hoping that the shop will put a poster in the window, and head office has promised to put my signing on their Events blog.  But how to draw people’s eyes to little old me, in amongst the arrays of magazines and stationery and birthday cards?  And then it came to me: I need Sam!  And here he is:

This is a pull-up banner of the sort used at conferences and similar events.  I ordered it online for the princely sum of about £30, having downloaded a template (which gave the size and some sample text boxes) and then spending an hour designing it.  I’m sure I have made a dozen design faux pas, but it’s clear, eye-catching and readable, which is all I wanted.  I’ll need to sell a few books to cover the cost but I figure I can use it at other events – or just set it up in the corner of the lounge for company.

(And I’ve made progress on another one of my writerly dreams: I’m assembling an e-book box set of the first three Sam books.  More on that later…)

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).

The man from WH Smith, he say…

…no.  As you may remember, I took my latest book – “Susan in the City: The Cambridge News Years” – into our local branch of WH Smith.  They weren’t keen on considering the Plank books when I took those in, but I thought that a book by a local author, a collection of columns that had appeared in the local paper, might have local appeal.  I had visions of a lovely yellow display alongside the newspaper…  The manager said that he would put the proposal to head office, and perhaps then I should have heard the distant knell of doom.

Anyway, I called in today and was told that, in the “current challenging book market”, WH Smith does not want to take on any new books until the start of their new financial year, in September.  I nodded politely, but inside I was saying, “Whaaaaaaat?”.  As everyone in the book world knows, physical books – as opposed to e-books – have made a strong recovery in recent months: indeed, sales through bricks-and-mortar shops rose by 7% in 2016.  And as for the idea that WH Smith is not going to put out any new titles on their shelves until September – I suspect that this is piffle.  If that’s really the case, they’re going to kick themselves for missing out on the new Ian Rankin paperback (due out on 15 June) and the new Jamie Oliver hardback cookbook (due out on 24 August).

Mind you, I can see how taking on my title in one branch might be too great a risk for head office.  I was offering them five copies, with them keeping 35% of the cover price, on a sale or return basis.  So if their copies did not sell, they could return them to me in any condition and not pay my invoice for £25.97.  Thank goodness they spotted that threat to their commercial survival – and handed any sales to the other two local bookshops that are stocking it, and to the online retailer they really dread.  Harrumph.

(And in case you think this is simply an enormous bunch of sour grapes, it’s not the refusal that has annoyed me: it’s the dissembling.  It’s the same as the email I received earlier this year from a small airline that I use regularly, informing me that, “in order to improve the customer experience”, they will no longer be offering free drinks on their flights.  We all know they’re doing it to reduce costs and increase profits – and why not? they’re a commercial airline, not a charity – so why the mealy-mouthed not-justification?)

Susan on the Shelf

OK, so it’s not a shelf – and it’s not quite the oak table – but yesterday I was delighted to see “Susan in the City” on the ledge at Heffers.  This is a, well, wooden ledge that runs at about chest height around the mezzanine floor of the bookshop, with the books angled towards strolling browsers, so it’s a prime place to be.  And I am sure you agree that the yellow cover of the book is very eye-catching:

In other news (I know I sound busy, but as all writers will know, it’s much easier to do all of this sort of stuff than to write, and you can still kid yourself that it’s “writing”…), I went into WH Smith and was told that the local manager has sent “Susan in the City” to head office for approval, and that he is going there today on other business and will chase for an answer.  I’m to enquire again next week.

And you may remember that I donated five copies of “Susan” to the Cambridge News (the newspaper in which the columns originally appeared) as prizes in a reader giveaway.  The competition is now closed, and the organiser told me that “we had 30 entries in total – the majority came from Cambridge addresses, with a few from Ely along with a couple from Newmarket and Haverhill.  The five winners reside in Balsham, Sawston, Fulbourn, Stetchworth and Cottenham.”  (Local readers will know what that means – all five are villages outside Cambridge, not Cambridge the city.)  I don’t know quite what I expected, and of course it’s impossible to gauge how many people saw the competition, thought “That’s interesting, but I never win competitions so I’ll just go and buy the book”, but I’m not thrilled with only thirty entries.  The five books cost me £4.50 (sounds cheap, but I bought in bulk and had them delivered by carrier tortoise to save money), so that’s 22½p per person for the publicity!  So maybe not too bad.

A week of promotion

Thanks to all who voted in the “which Plank should I submit to this competition” poll, and the winner (of the poll, not the competition!) is “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”.  So this weekend I will be preparing the first five thousand-ish words of that for submission, and then it’s fingers crossed until winners are announced in February 2018.

In other news, I have been working in Guernsey all week and so have had little time for writing, but I have managed about 600 words.  I’m still struggling a little with the plot of “Plank 5”, in that I have the basic plot but want more complication – you know how I like to have several strands to the story.  But I am reasonably confident that the additional strands will reveal themselves as I go along – they always have in the past.

On the promotional side of things, I read recently in a magazine that Sophie Raworth (an English news-reader on the telly) has a book review blog.  She seems nice and approachable, and so I tweeted her to ask whether I could send her a copy of “Canary” – it’s set partly in Langham Place, now the home of the BBC, and I thought that might appeal.  I have not had a reply, which perhaps is not surprising.  But I do try!

I have also taken my book of newspaper columns – “Susan in the City” – into the Cambridge branch of WH Smith (a large chain of bookshop/stationer/newsagents), to see whether they would be interested in stocking it on their “local interest” shelf.  The manager seems keen – he said that the sale-or-return basis of my offer was crucial – but he still needs to put the case to head office.  I’m hoping to hear by the end of next week.  As regular readers will know, putting copies in physical bookshops actually costs me money (in other words, it costs me more to order the books from CreateSpace and have them shipped from the US than I make from the eventual sales) but I see it as a promotional move, to get the books being read and – hopefully – recommended.  Although, as with all my promotional efforts, it is all but impossible to assess the success of the approach!