by admin | Mar 29, 2017 | A Good Liar, abridging, audiobook, character, Cumbria, Lake District, Pricing, promotion, Publishing, self-publishing, Uncategorized, West Cumbria
I’ve just put the ebook of ‘A Good Liar’ on 
a Kindle store special deal for a week, starting April 1st. I have mixed 
feelings about doing so, but it’s just for a week, and we’ll see how it goes. If it encourages people to read the whole trilogy, as ebooks or paperbacks, it’ll be worth the angst about reducing the price to less than a cup of coffee.
My ambivalence about this stems from knowing how much time and effort any author puts into writing and publishing their work : setting a very low price seems to under-value all that. But, on the other hand, if you want people to read and enjoy your stuff, making the price temporarily very attractive is a way to achieve that. One of the joys of self-publishing is that you can make those choices yourself.
It was recording the audio book of ‘A Good Liar’ that reminded me what a good story it is. The engineer who helped me – Tom Tyson, at the Music Farm in Egremont, Cumbria – is not a great fiction reader, but he was so hooked after the second recording session that he had to read the rest of the story for himself to see what happens.
Jessie Whelan is not an easy character to deal with: she’s self-centred, impulsive, and sometimes insensitive, but she’s had to battle all her adult life, and it shows. She’s also – despite years of abstinence – very interested in sex, which pulls her into a relationship that she could, and probably should, have avoided. Some scenes were really hard to read while I was doing the recording, not just because they portray sexual assault but because Jessie doesn’t really know whether to blame the perpetrator or herself. It’s not in her nature to feel like a victim, although the reader can see that’s what she was. How did Tom react while he was listening to it, I wonder? I didn’t ask him, but I will.
In the meantime, before the next trip to the studio to finish off the edits, I’ll put the ebook version on special offer for a week and see if I can introduce new readers to the trilogy. Maybe some of the millions of Lake District and Cumbria visitors will enjoy the story, and deepen their interest in this wonderful region. I hope so.
by admin | Mar 20, 2017 | A Good Liar, abridging, audiobook, costs, promotion, Publishing, readers, self-publishing, trilogy, Uncategorized
I’ve been reading a piece in this quarter’s ‘The Author‘ from the splendid Society of Authors, about the frustrations of listening to a reader making a poor job of recording your book, and being powerless to intervene. And an
other piece from Alice Jolly about the merits of the partnership arrangement with a ‘crowd-funding’ publisher, as exemplified in her experience of ‘Unbound’. Both are mainly about the relationship between the author, the book and the publisher.
One of the benefits of self-publishing is that the author is never pushed away from important decisions about her book and expected to leave to others the question of cover, design, print run, other formats, promotion – all the things that so radically affect the link between writer and reader.
Very early on I considered who should abridge and read my books for the audiobook version. There were cost implications of course: doing it myself would save a lot of money. But the decision to trust myself wasn’t just about money. Abridging is tricky and requires a feel for the overall story, and who knows these books as well as the person who wrote them? Successful reading too necessitates a feel for the text and the context, accents, nuances of the characters and the plot, and here again the author – if she knows her setting as well as she should – is best placed to do justice to the words. If you have a teaching background, as I do, you’ve spent many years using your voice to engage an audience, and the skills don’t fade, even if you’re talking only to the microphone.
So I found a local recording studio and am doing everything necessary to prepare and read my own books. It’s hard and time-consuming, but I’m learning a great deal about the flow of the text from reading it out loud. And it’s restoring my faith in my own capacity to tell a good tale, after the thankless task of trying yet again to interest an agent. Have a look at an earlier post to hear my agonising about that.I’m asking again – do I need an agent?
If you can afford it, and if like me you have the power to make your own decisions, consider doing your own audiobook. Very instructive!
by admin | Mar 4, 2017 | crime fiction, marketing, Publishing, reviews, royalties, self-publishing, Uncategorized
I’m sure I’ve blogged about finding an agent before: I certainly think about it ‘ad nauseam’, but until this past week I’ve done nothing about it since about 2012. Aversion, avoidance – for whatever reason I’ve put it off, until a necessary change in my route to publication has forced me to take a next step.
The change is necessitated by the retirement of the publishing partners, editor and book designer, with whom I’ve worked since I decided to self-publish several years ago. If I want to continue writing, then I need to do something to fill that gap. There are three possible options:
- find an editor and a book designer, preferably closer than London, establish a relationship and work with them in the same way as before. I take their advice, and pay them for it, and keep overall control of the process and of the income generated by the books. The costs are upfront and considerable, but I’m used to that, and it works, so long as there’s a reasonable rate of sales;
- approach a publisher direct. It would have to be one of the few who will accept ‘unagented’ projects, and ideally they would take on my backlist too, reprints, storage, orders, distribution, and so on, leaving me more time to focus on the writing. You can find independent publishers like this, but keep an eye on the small print, and on the royalties – how much and how often. Ebook only publishers are more generous, as they should be given lower costs, but if you want to produce a paperback in larger numbers, not just Print on Demand, the number of potential publishers goes down. Some are focussed only on crime fiction, which might not suit my future writing plans;
- Find an agent. This is the default choice these days if you want to get ‘traditionally’ published. The majority of publishers will deal only with agents, who act as a ‘first filter’ and protect the publisher from being overwhelmed with stuff they don’t want and can’t sell. Fair enough, but it still feels like you’re dealing with the doctor’s receptionist, who may or may not have the skills to recognise symptons and do proper ‘triage’.
For the time being, I’m keeping my options open by pursuing all three of these routes simultaneously. Down comes the ‘Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook’ from the shelf and I start combing through, doing everything I’ve advised my aspiring writers to do in my workshops and have been so reluctant to do myself.
The list I gathered of possible agents was quite long, and of course almost all of them were in London, which always pisses me off. (I had to explain to an agent in London once that ‘Cumbria’ was actually an English county, not somewhere in Italy where Islington goes on holiday.) Because I’m interested in getting my backlist re-published rather than touting a half-finished draft, it’s a different ‘submission’ process, more factual and less aspirational, but I still feel like the ‘supplicant’ rather than a prospective partner, and I still don’t like it. I’m a mature woman with a successful career, five popular novels and an enthusiastic (local) following. I fear I’m not the kind of client many agents would want to work with – too stroppy, too old, and too far from the literary action, and part of me knows that. But here I am, deserving of attention, but I fear I will get get very little. One good response in the few days since my first exploratory emails went out, one mildly curious, and three rejections so far, worded almost exactly the same way as the rejections I received last time around.
Early days yet. I understand applications to agents take a long time to process: they have to be weighed against each other, as only a small number of new clients can be handled at once. Waiting is always a drag: patience is not one of my strengths. But I am resigned to the delay. Maybe my current circumstances are different enough from five years ago to make the outcome different too.
One independent publisher has reacted fast and positively, but they want only crime books and I have yet to see what their contractual terms might be. If the potential sales are high enough then acceptance of a low royalty might work out. But what if they’re not? Publishers talk about the quality of their marketing, but how can you substantiate that? Amazon ebooks sales figures can be manipulated, and I want my books on shelves, not just in the cloud.
Reading this, I can see why I’m an unattractive proposition. I ask questions and have clear expectations, and five books self-published in five years gives me a bit of clout. Maybe I have the answer to my question, but I keep on asking it. Apart from the first step of getting published, I want some of the extras that could come through ‘traditional’ publishing – access to reviews, to the major book-chain shelves, to radio or TV, or audio book production expertise. I write good stories that people enjoy, and I want more people to be able to find them. So I wait for the responses to my search for professional help, but I’m not holding my breath.
by admin | Dec 4, 2016 | cover, crime fiction, Cruel Tide, Cumbria, fact-based fiction, Fahrenheit Press, Fatal Reckoning, historical fiction, Lake District, promotion, Publishing, research, trilogy, Uncategorized, West Cumbria, Whitehaven
I knew this week would be busy but it’s been more than that: it feels like the start of a new chapter in my short writing life. Two events happened simultaneously. First, my new book ‘Fatal Reckoning’ was officially launched, on Friday at the Beacon Museum in Whitehaven, on the top floor (visible in the photo) with a superb view over the harbour and out to sea. It was a very enjoyable afternoon although I say it myself. One of the best parts was the introduction from the Director of the museum, Elizabeth Kwasnik – an off-comer from Scotland – who said that my trilogy ‘Between the Mountains and the Sea’ had given her valuable insight into the recent history of West Cumbria and its people. The historian in me was very pleased about that.
Second, the night before the Beacon launch the new ebook version of ‘Fatal Reckoning’ appeared on Amazon and the Kindle Store, published this time not by me but by Fahrenheit Press, who specialise in digital publishing, mainly of crime fiction. I’ve been fascinated to see how they set about establishing their books – and now mine – on the radar of crime fiction readers, mainly using Twitter. Chris McVeigh, who started Fahrenheit Press has also written a blog piece about the details of the curious partnership between us, by which they publish digitally and I do the paperback version. Two different formats, two different audiences, two different approaches, and an interesting development in self-publishing. As I explained last week, Fahrenheit’s version of Cruel Tide on Kindle has a completely different cover. Click the link to see it. And while you’re there, check the new ‘Fatal Reckoning’ cover too.
Both these developments have made me think, yet again, about what I’m doing and what next. The setting in Cumbria has to remain central to my writing, no doubt about that. Also, I really enjoyed weaving fact and fiction in the trilogy, and want to do that again. Could I combine that approach with a ‘crime’ story, as I tried to do in the first book in the trilogy ‘A Good Liar’? Does the next book need to be the start of a new series, which might be more lucrative but can be restrictive too?
My fiction writing life will be shorter than many authors, simply because I didn’t start until I was 60. So if the number of books left in me is relatively small, what are my priorities? I don’t want to spend precious time churning out books that might sell but don’t really interest or inspire me. Needless to say, a new idea is already forming, but nothing I want to talk about just yet.
by admin | Nov 26, 2016 | Amazon, cover, crime fiction, Cruel Tide, Fahrenheit Press, Fatal Reckoning, promotion, Publishing, Uncategorized
This is a bit complicated. Just to start things off, here are the covers of the two crime fiction books I’ve published, last year and last week.
I think they’re quite good, but what they indicate more than anything else is the setting – Morecambe Bay in ‘Cruel Tide’ and Whitehaven harbour in ‘Fatal Reckoning’. The fact that they deal with dark deeds is implicit, not unmistakeable. These are the covers on the paperbacks that are in the shops, but they will not be the covers of the ebooks. How come?
Here’s what’s been going on ‘behind the scenes’. The ebook versions of both these books are being published not by me and my imprint ‘HoadPress’, but by an international crime fiction publisher called ‘Fahrenheit Press’ fahrenheit-press.com. They specialise in ebooks and POD, but rarely if ever publish paperbacks, unless there’s an enormous demand, at which POD becomes impractical. Casting around for a way to avoid the ‘agent’ route to publishing I found Fahrenheit Press a few months ago, sent them a copy of ‘Cruel Tide’ as an example of my work to date, and said that the sequel was in production. Long story short: the MD of Fahrenheit, Chris McVeigh, and I met in London, talked about the various routes to market and made the deal outlined above. I find the business of Amazon algorithms etc quite puzzling – as I wrote about a week or two ago. Chris understands that whole business better than I ever could, so why not give it a go, just to see what happens? He’s preparing both books for digital production right now, and when he’s ready I’ll take down my Kindle posting for ‘Cruel Tide’ and he will replace it immediately with his, adding ‘Fatal Reckoning’ as an ebook for the first time. The difference will be the covers, which we have been discussing this week. His preferred covers are completely different than my originals, denoting not setting but ‘genre’. They are very dark and stark, as befits a dark tale in two parts, and he’s called both of them ‘Judith Pharaoh novels’. So simple. When they’re finally agreed and published – in a week or two – , you be able to see them on the Amazon and Kindle websites and make your own comparisons. This is the first time that anyone else has published my work, in any format, I’m fascinated by the experience, so different from a traditional publishing deal.
by admin | Aug 2, 2016 | cover, Fallout, Publishing, title, Uncategorized, Windscale fire
There’s no copyright on book titles. I didn’t realise that to start with and fretted that I couldn’t ever use a title that had been used before, but I can, although it’s still needs thinking about.
The easiest way to check is to do what I did yesterday – draw up a shortlist and then look each title up on the Amazon data base. I know it’s lazy, but it’s quick. Looking carefully at what comes up helps me to decide whether a previously used title could be used again. If the title has been used before, which almost all titles have, I look for various criteria:
- Was the previous book the same genre? I want a title for my novel: if the previous title was for non-fiction, it’s unlikely that someone looking it up would be confused.
- Has the title been used in the UK, or just in North America or elsewhere around the world? If it’s just in the US, for example, I wouldn’t hesitate to use the title again.
- Was the title previously used for a paperback, or just for an ebook? I publish in both formats, and I might still choose to use the title again, although I might slip down the priority order
- How long ago was the title I want used previously
? If it’s within the past year or two, that could be a problem. In 2014, when I was looking for a title for my novel set in and around the Windscale reactor fire in Cumbria in 1957, the title ‘Fallout’ was an obvious choice, and I really wanted it. Just three months before we went to print another novel appeared with that title, published in the UK, and I had to make the choice. In the end I decided to go ahead, but I’ve noticed that since publication we’ve had two copies returned – which I guess arose from the confusion over the title. I still think I made the right decision, though, and the cover is pretty special too. ‘Garish’ someone called it, but at least it gets noticed.
When I’ve checked all these criteria, I find that some titles don’t feel so appealing, as they have been used before many times, and quite recently. The exercise yesterday brought the list of eight possible titles down to two or three, which was helpful. Once my trusty editor returns from her hols the fateful decision will be made and possible covers will then be designed. Still on schedule for publication in November 2016.
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