by admin | Jul 20, 2015 | crime fiction, Cruel Tide, self-publishing, trilogy
One of the many things that made Margaret Thatcher anathema to me – even now after all these years – was her apparent complete absence of self-doubt. It’s a ‘fundamentalist’ trait, I suppose, which manifests itself in similar ways whatever the beliefs of the believer. I have a reputation – undeserved, surely – for expressing myself quite forcefully at times, about Margaret Thatcher for example, but underneath it all I am frequently assailed by self-doubt and one of those times seems to be upon me now.
The ms of Cruel Tide is with my editor Charlotte and I’ll get it back for approval in a week or so. We’ve corresponded and talked at length about several previous drafts, but even so waiting for her editing suggestions feels like waiting for an exam result. Did I do a good job? Is it really crime fiction or just another character-driven story with ‘events’ like the trilogy that went before it? Was it a good idea to link it to the trilogy, or was that choice driven by commercial considerations? Is Cruel Tide as well-written as it should be? Does the dialogue work? On and on the questions go. I could lay some of them to rest perhaps by re-reading the text yet again, but I daren’t, and anyway it may be too late. Once the production machine begins to hum along there are few opportunities for major changes. Tweaking only from now on, and I do want the book to be ready for the shops well before Christmas. Now I’m thinking like a publisher rather than a writer, but when you self-publish you have to be both.
I was hoping that sales would be quite brisk as the summer moves on and more visitors arrive in the lake District, but things seem to be slow. Ebook sales go up and down without any explanation, and I can’t tell whether any of my promotional activities have any impact on anything except direct sales, which are always good when I’m ‘performing’ somewhere. Fortunately I so enjoy the ‘performing’ element of this work that I will continue to do it regardless of whether it sells books or not. Sometimes I yearn for a larger audience and somewhere other than a village hall or church rooms to do my work, but it’s the same old problem of breaking in to the ‘festivals’ circuit that many self-published authors like me face. What does it take to get enough recognition to be asked to do things that will build a reputation for quality? I know I can engage and entertain larger audiences as I’ve done it for decades in my previous life as an education presenter, but no one in the book business would take any notice of that. On paper I’m another elderly unagented northerner who writes and publishes old-fashioned stories, and I’m popular on the Cumbrian WI circuit. Nothing wrong with that, but it may not get you noticed by people wanting to sell tickets for ‘Words on the Water’ in Keswick or the Hay Festival. I look on Twitter at fellow-writers enjoying their contributions to book festivals and I think ‘I could do that!’
Nothing like a good moan. My partner thinks I should have more faith in myself. ‘Keep going’ he says. ‘The books are good, and eventually someone who matters in the book business will notice them.’ Maybe he’s right, but I’m not certain: the doubt is not enough to stop me thinking about the next book, however, and the current mood will probably pass. In the meantime I wonder if all this introspection is just unnecessary and a waste of energy. I’m incredibly fortunate to be able to live the life I have and afford the luxury of high-quality self-publishing. I’ve been writing fiction for less than five years and hopefully getting better with practice. Self-doubt is probably appropriate and realistic and OK. Get over it.
by admin | May 25, 2015 | Authenticity, fact-based fiction, readers, trilogy, West Cumbria
Living as I do in Herdwick sheep country, the idea of sheep being ‘hefted’ is something you take for granted. It means that the sheep are ‘hard-wired’ to remain within a certain terrain and not to roam beyond it, even though they are often on common land on the fells (hills) and unhindered by walls or fences. Lambs born into the flock will learn the details of that landscape and become experienced leaders of the flock later. As well as being useful for farmers, being hefted is a life-saver, when sheep need to find shelter and know which wall would offer the best protection from the wind and snow.
Since I started writing fiction set within this landscape, I’ve realised that people can be hefted too, born and raised in a place that becomes imprinted on the mind, and grows over time. My neighbours can tell me what flowers used to grow in the disused quarry across the road sixty years ago, or when a certain house was extended, or where the old road ran before it was straightened and ‘improved’. I remember my first harvest supper in the village hall, when the after supper entertainment was a quiz: in family teams we were shown slides of the minutiae of the village, a gatepost, a chimney stack, a wood pile, a fence, and asked to say exactly where it was. Some of the teams got all thirty of them correct while recent ‘off comers’ like me struggled to identify half a dozen. That was ten years ago, and I’d be more successful now.
But being intimately familiar with a local environment doesn’t necessarily mean you’re ‘hefted’. The additional criterion, as I understand it, is that you are unwilling to leave and always try to return. I wonder if I pass that test? I love to travel, and do so regularly, but increasingly once I’m off the plane I long to be back in my little patch of heaven in West Cumbria. The final stage of the journey west leads over Corney Fell on a winding single track road, at the summit of which you get the first view of the coast, from Black Combe to the south up to St Bees Head further north, with the Isle of Man on the horizon and the coast of Scotland from the far side of the Solway west towards Kintyre. The view is of course dependent on cloud cover and visibility, but even if I can’t see it, I know it’s there and my heart lifts.
The place where I live is imprinted on my mind in ever-increasing detail, and now attached to it are the fictional characters that I have scattered around the area. I could show you where my heroine Jessie Whelan lived at almost every stage of her life, where her son John and his wife Maggie first met, walked, and fell in love. There’s the street in Kells where the McSherry family lived, and the route the two women took to work at the Haig Pit. In the current book, ‘Cruel Tide’, I know the wood where a body was found, and I’ve found the house high on the Furness fells where the final scene takes place. The problem of writing in this way is that the locations are so clear in my own mind that I can forget to describe them fully enough for my readers.
One of the reasons the books sell so well locally is that readers love to see their familiar territory described and peopled with stories that are authentic and plausible, in terms of their own lives and experience. The joy of shared recognition of a building, or a view gives the reading experience a special dimension that appeals to the ‘heftedness’ of local readers. The challenge is to provide that same emotional response for others too.
Of course I’d really get a kick out of putting on a ‘Jessie Whelan’ tour for the trilogy, all around its setting ‘Between the Mountains and the Sea’. For the new book (out in November) and the series that will hopefully follow, the tour would start with the extraordinary landscape of Morecambe Bay. Maybe it’s time to buy a bus.
by admin | May 16, 2015 | Cumbria, Lake District, readers, self-publishing, selling, trilogy
A group asked me to talk about publishing my own books, and I heard myself saying to them ‘Publishing is the easy part, selling is much harder’. For me, that’s true, because getting my work into the hands of readers is part of what motivates me to write in the first place. I’ve been struck recently by the number of people who claim to be writing just for the amusement of family and friends, and don’t appear to be interested in reaching readers beyond that group. That’s not enough for me. Maybe because I’m older, I want something to leave behind me, in the memories and on the bookshelves of as many people as possible.
So how do you sell, and how many is enough? As I write this, James Rebanks ‘The Shepherd’s life’ has been in the best seller charts for weeks and must have sold many thousands. It’s a great book, and I’m not begrudging him that success, but he seems to have had some things going for him that the rest of us might not have. Even before the book was published, for example, he had 40,000 Twitter followers, which has since risen to 60,000. If only 10% of those followers bought a book, that’s still a lot of sales! And either through Twitter or his publishers or agent he’s had massive media coverage, which must have helped too.
So how do we lesser mortals sell our books? One way that works for me is to sell directly, usually after doing a presentation or visiting a book club group. People like to buy from the author they’ve just heard from. Fortunately, I really enjoy that side of the business. As a professional presenter in education for decades, I’ve had plenty of practice in marshalling ideas and facts quite fluently without notes and love the stimulus of responding to whatever questions people may have. I can also offer ‘deals’ as I think fit, which makes buying the full trilogy an attractive prospect. I love selling the full set, as it means they may read all three books in the right order and get the reading experience as it was designed to be.
Another route to market for me has been through a local wholesale distributor, Hills of Workington. They take a 50% discount, but they service almost every book retailer and tourist outlet in Cumbria, apart from the south-east corner, and selling to them by the carton is more efficient than trying to reach each outlet myself. The first orders were on sale or return, but that’s not really necessary any more as the three books in my trilogy, all set in Cumbria, sell steadily, and do well in the tourist season. The beauty of historical fiction is that it has an almost infinite shelf-life. The books will have the same appeal to visitors in ten years time as they have now.
Listing the books in both paperback and ebook formats on Amazon and Kindle brings in a steady trickle of orders, and the big national and international distributors Bertrams and Neilsen contact me for books too, but it’s a cumbersome business. I’ve done the workshops about how to increase your ebook sales with promotions, manipulating the ‘best seller’ lists and reducing the price to less than a cup of coffee, but I’m not thrilled about that. If writers like me produce something of worth, it demeans the process if we sell our work for peanuts. And I can’t be bothered obsessing about selling as much as possible if it takes too much of the time I want to spend writing. Some of my time obviously must be devoted to marketing and promotion, but not too much.
So I totter along, wishing I could sell more, longing for the feedback from readers that so rarely comes, thinking about how, where and when to organise my own promotions. Most of the time I enjoy it. I dream of being ‘discovered’ and selling the TV and film rights, not to make a fortune but just to see my stuff reach more people. That would be fun. I need to invest in new ways of doing things, using video on my website for example, or making this blog more entertaining, but that would use creative energy that seems to be constantly diverted into the next book. What I really need is a savvy publicist who’s prepared to work for nothing. Dream on.
How many sales is enough? If I cover the costs of self-publishing to my own high standard, involving proper professional help, that’s enough. My accountant reckoned I should aim to make as much profit over five years as I would done if the money had stayed in my current account, and with interest rates at rock bottom that’s not much. ‘Back yourself’, he said, and I liked the sound of that, so I did.
by admin | Oct 15, 2014 | A Good Liar, Cumbria, Fallout, Forgiven, trilogy, Windscale fire
I’m beginning to think of ‘Forgiven’ the second book in my trilogy ‘Between the Mountains and the Sea’ as the middle child, quite quiet, somewhat overshadowed by its more noticeable siblings. The eldest child, ‘A Good Liar’ was the first, long awaited, with a troubled pregnancy and long labour. When she arrived, to quite an elderly mother, she was greeted with delight and some surprise that she had ever been born at all. The youngest child, ‘Fallout’ created less trouble and worry in pregnancy, as by now the mother knew roughly what was going on and felt more confident. This new baby was louder and forced her way into the family with a freshness bordering on the brash.
Child number two ‘Forgiven’ came along quite quickly after her elder sibling but was in turn overshadowed by the youngest before she had found her place in the family. She is quiet, more thoughtful and perhaps too easily overlooked, but has a grace and charm all of her own. Secretly, for a mother must never admit to favourites, I love this middle child the most. She made me cry more as I created her, and still does. There’s a poignancy in the story, as Jessie Whelan faces her darkest moments, and makes the hardest choices. At the end her loneliness seems set to continue as she hangs on determinedly to her independence.
‘Forgiven’, is currently the least popular of the trilogy. It’s relative of course: all three books have been well received and sell steadily, but still boxes of the eldest and youngest books leave the shelves with greater speed, and ebooks sales have the same pattern. That means that some of my readers at least may not have read the full story told in the three books, which I’m sad about. Between my heroine’s early troubles and her eventual acceptance of love the quieter time is being overlooked. Set in 1947 Forgiven in some ways as ‘unforgiving’ as its context: the post-war years in West Cumberland were difficult. On the first anniversary of VE Day one of the local councils turned down a suggestion of a party to celebrate. ‘We’ve nowt to celebrate,’ they said, ‘and nowt to celebrate with.’ Unemployment, poor housing, rationing, coal shortages and the bitter winter of March 1947 added up to a cold, hard few years, before the resurgence into the 1950s. In my village mains electricity didn’t arrive until 1953, and only three years later the first nuclear power station was officially opened by the Queen, to be followed the year after that by the world’s first nuclear reactor fire, which forms the backdrop to the third book in trilogy ‘Fallout’.
History was moving so quickly then that the immediate post-war troubles were almost forgotten. And so it feels with the slower sales of the book that was set in those difficult times. But it remains – I believe – a much better book than its elder sibling, and a necessary precursor to the youngest of the three. In ‘Forgiven’ Jessie faces some of her inner demons and makes her worst mistakes as a mother. Maybe that’s why I have such an emotional attachment to this book, and wonder why it is seems to be attractive than its fellows. Maybe this is what happens with trilogies: does anyone out there know if the middle books of the three do less well?
If you’ve read this far and you’ve not read ‘Forgiven’, beg, buy, borrow or download it and see what you think, even if you’ve never read either of the others. Then go backwards to ‘A Good Liar’ for the backstory and forwards to ‘Fallout’ for the denouement. I love Jessie, and I want to see the middle years of her life, tough though they were, celebrated and enjoyed.
by admin | Jun 30, 2014 | character, Cumbria, fact-based fiction, Fallout, Forgiven, historical fiction, Lake District, research, trilogy, writing
Tomorrow evening I’ll be talking to the ‘Friends of Whitehaven Museum’ about the Jessie Whelan trilogy, which has the overall title ‘Between the Mountains and the Sea’. It could be quite a large group, some of whom may have read all three books and others may not even know of their existence. My appearance is part of their regular programme of speakers, and I guess I’ve been invited not as a writer but as someone who has researched and recorded slices of local history in fictional form.
So, I’m thinking: what should I talk to them about? The one thing we all have in common is the setting, and the meeting will take place just across the harbour from the site of the major backdrop event in Book 2, ‘Forgiven’, the explosion in the William Pit in August 1947 that claimed the lives of 104 local men and boys. Think of the impact of that on the local community: all those funerals, day after day, and the thousands of people whose lives were affected, children left without fathers, wives without husbands. I’ll tell them how I tracked down the transcript of the NCB report on the accident, including the accounts from the three men who survived, and how I researched another facet of ‘Forgiven’, the lives of the Displaced Persons in their camps in Cumberland in the years after World War Two. Book 3, ‘Fallout’ was set at the time of the nuclear reactor fire at Windscale, just south of Whitehaven, in 1957, and in doing the research for this book I accumulated far more detail than I could possibly have used in the story, much of which was not clear at the time, even to those who were working at the plant. That too will probably be part of what I share with the group. People are usually interested in the past history of where they live, especially when that history is as rich as ours.
As a writer I should be discussing the triumvirate of character, plot and setting, but talking about setting alone would take us far longer than the limited time I’ll have, and I must find time to say something about the process of turning local history into fiction, which presents another set of challenges worthy of conversation. I’ll try to explain how the characters were born and developed as I wrote about their lives, and how I have tried to have both setting and character drive the plot. Looking back, the process of writing looks far more rational and ordered than it felt for me at the time. I’m now learning more about how to structure and plan a work of fiction, but – in the words of the metaphor – the stable door is banging in the wind and the horse has long gone. Maybe it’ll make for a better effort for the next book. In the meantime I’ll reflect on what I thought and did at the time and not pretend that I consciously followed rules that I was mostly unaware of. Considering that admission. the books turned out better than they might have been.
I’m doing many talks to various groups around Cumbria over the summer, and each one will be different, which sounds inefficient but it’s the only way to keep things fresh. If the people I’m with seem willing to talk I’ll ask them right at the start to help me frame our discussion through their questions and interests. Managing those unanticipated expectations, adding important bits of my own and doing it all within a short time frame is enjoyably risky. It’s like really good teaching and I love it.
by admin | Jun 1, 2014 | Cumbria, historical fiction, trilogy, writing
I won’t be posting a blog piece for a week or so, while I’m doing a long walk through Cumbria, from Carlisle in the north to Ulverston in the south, via Caldbeck, Skiddaw, Rosthwaite, Elterwater and Torver. For those of you who know this region, those names have meaning. For those who don’t, aren’t the names themselves wonderful : a mix of Norse and Celtic and Saxon. All along the route we’ll be walking on trails first travelled centuries ago – tracks and bridleways and coffin roads – through settlements that date back hundreds of years, and landscapes that have evolved with changing times.
That’s part of the reason I have to live in England, where such a rich history is right under your feet. We’ll walk to the Victorian station early tomorrow, take the train to Carlisle, come out of the station, turn towards the south and start walking. For the next six days the concerns will not be deadlines and logistics and work plans but the more basic matters of weather, physical effort, food and water. We’ve booked accommodation along the route, so at least we know where we will sleep, but the rest will just happen.
What interests me is what will be in my head as we walk. Will my mind turn only on the here and now, or will it default to the usual agenda: new characters in the next book, or the plot, or how best to promote my completed trilogy beyond Cumbria to a wider readership? It would be really good to have a break from all that and live a more elemental existence for a few days, but I don’t know whether my over-active brain will agree. One of my fellow-walkers has been reading ‘Fallout’. Maybe he’s finished it by now. He may want to talk to me about it, and I know I’ll enjoy that, despite the desire to focus on the landscape, or the clouds, or what to have for lunch and where to eat it. We’ll walk and we’ll talk, and sometimes we’ll be quiet, and it’ll be great.
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