The comments at the bottom of the article are worth reading (expand them), particularly the one about the 60% of people who want to be writers, imagining that it’s all J. K. Rowling easy-peasy wealth and celebrity. It wasn’t for her when she was trying to find a publisher for her first Harry Potter book, though fortunately, that turned into a publishing juggernaut which will keep her for the rest of her days.
The John Dos Passos observation quoted made me snort in recognition at the truth of it: “Writers are like fleas, they get very little nourishment from one another.”
( some great stories on writing beneath this article, and do read the comments section )
One of the first pieces of advice that I’d give to anyone considering writing a book, is to develop a hide as thick as a rhinoceros. Everyone thinks that they’ve got a book inside them, but nobody considers what will happen when the book is released into the wild!
Being an author is setting yourself up as a target for criticism and rejection. These brickbats will come from friends, family, readers, publishers, book-sellers and critics. That’s if they say anything at all, for being completely ignored is the usual fate of a freshly published book. This is why writers welcome adverse criticism, for at least it means that someone has noticed you.
As I’ve commented on this blog before, writing a book is relatively easy compared to the Herculean task of actually marketing it. People need to know that something is available to buy if one is to make a sale. One way of doing this is self-promotion – selling yourself.
There are lots of different ways of doing this, and social media is the way to go, assuming that funds aren’t available for a costly advertising campaign. The notion that one can simply write a book, upload it without saying a thing about yourself, and it will sell like hotcakes is laughable. Remembering that most ebooks struggle to reach sales of 100 over a couple of years, is a great goad to get involved in all of this putting yourself about by schmoozing. But I warn you, it feels like pushing a length of string, as no discernible progress can be seen.
I’ve read advice that gaining a significant amount of followers for a blog can take a couple of years. The same thing is said of Pinterest, which I hadn’t previously considered as a venue for self-promotion. I’ve looked at it plenty of times, enjoying the wonderful images that people compile, but hadn’t really noticed anyone trying to sell themselves and their products. As one of the main selling points of a book is its cover design, then it’s easy to appreciate that Pinterest is a great place to gain attention for one’s stories.
I tried all sorts of things to raise my profile, after finishing my first novel ‘The Perfect Murderer’ in November 2014. I didn’t feel like a creative writer anymore for all I produced in three months was four poems. Instead, I researched marketing, blogging, making postings on this blog and FaceBook, as well as updating 44 previously published books to mention these places, so readers could find me.
I started a business account with Pinterest, to promote myself as a brand. I added to my Pinterest boards, though what good they’ve done I don’t know. I like sharing nice photographs and spreading knowledge, but it’s an astonishingly time-consuming process. For example, I did a board on favourite art and thought to add some biographical detail about the artist. This needed checking, so pinning 73 images took me nine hours!
Linking some of these to my existing books could be a bit tricky, but the thing is one links one page to another, then to my blog, to my FaceBook page, to my Linked-In account, to my Twitter feed (maybe), to my Smashwords shelf, to my Amazon page, to the Good Reads book review site.
By which point Paul Whybrow has disappeared up hisown arse!
Referencing myself via the Pinterest boards is easier for some of my chosen subjects than others. For instance, some of the book covers I designed for my stories used copyright free paintings, which I included on the ‘Art I Like’ board, along with my designs. The theory is, that anyone who likes my taste in pinned images, might click on the cover and onto the sales sites where they’re sold.
I’m considering doing a similar thing on Tumblr and Reddit, but that would mean repeating a lot of what I’ve already done, which runs the risk of boring people. Doing this is such a lengthy and involving task, that I now understand why people work as social media marketing consultants.
I was in danger of developing carpal tunnel syndrome, from the amount of clicking that I did on Pinterest. I’ve put together nine boards so far :
*Joy – Pins To Make You Smile *Doom *Animals As Friends *Rust Never Sleeps
*Art I Like *The Road Goes On Forever *Look At That View *Colours Of Nature
*Wise Words
The latter board uses the common Internet trope of placing inspirational quotes on a suitable background image. I’m aiming to include lots of sayings to do with literary endeavours, to encourage other writers – and maybe even myself! Here are some of my favourites :
This is an honest and rather depressing appraisal of what it means to be a writer these days. Unbelievable how low the income is for a Booker Prize-winning author. The title of this piece is what I’m finding to be true – it’s more about marketing and hustling what I’ve written than actually creating the work.
Richard Brautigan is one of the most unusual writers you’ll come across. His style has been described as naive, and he’s certainly surreal, humorous and dark in places. I love his novels, short stories and poetry. He has a unique style, with very short chapters, sometimes of only a couple of sentences. His prose reads like poetry, with clever metaphors.
I discovered him by chance while working at Marylebone public library in Westminster, London in the early 1970s. I was drawn to the unusual title and the cover photo of ‘The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966’. The story is set in a strange library, where the books on the shelves are brought in by the people that wrote them. It reminds me a little of e-publishing, now that I think of it. There’s a romance between the shy librarian and a stunningly beautiful poet. Brautigan poses with a singer called Victoria Damalgoski in the cover photo – she was a folk singer who made a couple of albums but has since disappeared. She’s a dead ringer for Vida in the story.
Brautigan’s writing makes you think, and some of his observations are wistful and chillingly accurate. One of my favourite works is ‘The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western’, which is violent, sexy and funny. It has one of the most amusing entities in fiction. The characters of the cowboy gunmen must surely have influenced Patrick deWitt in his writing of ‘The Sister Brothers’.
Sadly, Brautigan’s sales and fame waned in the late seventies and eighties. He fell prey to various mental maladies including depression and descended into alcoholism. Long obsessed with suicide, he took his own life in 1984. I miss him.
Tomi Ungerer was an author, who specialised in illustration. He was versatile, making work for children and adults that includes delightful tales, protest posters and books, advertising, surreal cartoons, erotica and autobiography.
He’s good at taking a satirical view on things, and his images are compelling, humorous and occasionally unsettling. For such an enormously talented artist, his work and name are not as well known in the English language as they should be. Thankfully, many of his books are being republished by Phaidon, including the lovely children’s stories.
From ‘The Three Robbers’
His attitude to human sexuality is open-minded, so this sort of illustration is not for the prudish. He believes that if we were free to express our erotic nature, then the problems of pornography would be solved.
Ungerer’s observational humour on human relationships, including power struggles and the search for loving fulfilment, is amusing and well observed.
Tomi Ungerer tried his hand at farming in the early seventies, which he later turned into a book called ‘ Far Out Isn’t Far Enough’. This has some beautiful illustrations of the landscape of Novia Scotia, as well as some gritty depictions of rural poverty and life and death. This title was used for a film about his life.
The career of Charles Bukowski should give encouragement to any writer who starts to apply themselves late in life to writing. He was 49 when he finally quit working at menial jobs, including as a filing clerk at a post office. As he said :
“I have one of two choices – stay in the post office and go crazy … or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve.”
He’s sometimes been referred to as the ‘laureate of American lowlife’, and he was certainly familiar with the seedy side of poverty. An inveterate drunk, he turned his experiences into a script which was filmed as ‘Barfly’, starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway.
He penned an amusing Roman a clef called ‘Hollywood’, in which he wrote of the making of the film adaptation of ‘Barfly’, using pseudonyms to disguise the names of the actors.
Bukowski’s weariness with the world meant that he said a lot of truthful things, in what sounds like a cynical way. Even his gravestone is cryptic, with the inscription ‘Don’t Try’. What he intended with this advice was explained as being waiting for inspiration to write something – one shouldn’t try, shouldn’t force work out of one’s system – if it doesn’t come naturally, leave it.
His poem ‘So You Want To Be A Writer’ explains his philosophy well, and should be read by anybody aspiring to be a writer.
‘So You Want To Be A Writer’
Charles Bukowski, 1920 – 1994
if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don’t do it.
if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,
don’t do it.
if you’re trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.
if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you’re not ready.
don’t be like so many writers,
don’t be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don’t be dull and boring and
pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don’t add to that.
don’t do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.
when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.
there is no other way.
and there never was.
I spent most of 2014 writing my first novel, called ‘The Perfect Murderer’. It’s about a serial killer, a veteran soldier who has become a player in real life role-playing game where the victims are really killed. His activities awaken the hibernating bloodlust of a psychopathic murderer, a man who is a respected member of the establishment. He would never be suspected of being homicidal, even though he’s killed once a year for forty years. The moral twist is, that the people he killed were all hardened criminals – so it could be argued that he’s been making society safer.
I started my writing with a loose and adaptable storyline. I didn’t want too rigid a plot, as I knew from previous experience that characters in a story can sometimes behave in ways that one can’t predict. I also reckoned that I’d be learning a lot about my subject matter as I went along, which might alter the narrative. The story involved a massive amount of research, including psychopathy, forensic pathology, police procedure, post-traumatic stress disorder, the conflict in Serbia and self-identity and personality.
I wasn’t sure how long the novel would be and didn’t have a specific target to reach. Mind you, it was still a milestone to pass the 100,000-word mark, though that made me wonder quite how far I had left to go! I anticipated that I’d end up at about 150,000 words. I was right, though, after the climax of the hunt for the killer, I soon realised that my story had left a lot of characters’ fates unexplained, including several undiscovered corpses.
This can be a stumbling block with murder mysteries. There are at least two unidentified bodies in ‘The Maltese Falcon’, though they were dismissed as red herrings. Nonetheless, I felt compelled to add an afterword which added another 18,000 words. This felt fitting and right, as I’ve always been a bit disappointed when a thriller simply ends as soon as the villain is dispatched.
It was more of a coda to the main part of the story, and it gives the reader some comfort about what becomes of the investigators after their harrowing experiences. It was rather discombobulating to finish, mainly because I wasn’t quite sure if the whole thing worked as a tale that would engage a reader’s attention. I’d varied the pace of the action, offering different points-of-view from the detectives and killers, thrown in a few dead ends and sprinkled several of my own red herrings around – but did it work as a crime story with psychological twists?
This was impossible for me to judge, for, after all, I knew what happened next! Although I did a lot of editing as I went along, I still devoted ten weeks to going over everything with a fine tooth comb. When one examines any piece of art in this microscopic way, it ceases to be what it is to a consumer who’s enjoying it at face value and becomes more of a tiresome obstacle course. I was appalled by what I’d missed, particularly in repeating nouns and verbs. The search function in Open Office Writer helped to identify these, though I was still uncertain about how well the plot developed and flowed.
While prowling the literary blogs recently, I came across one by Natalie M Lakosil of the Bradford Literary Agency. One of her postings on ‘Adventures In Agent Land’ is about plot development, and is well worth a look. In fact, she offers really useful practical advice for any writer.
I was pleased to see, from a graph that she included, that the storyline of my novel conformed to what is reckoned to be the approved pattern.
This find was reassuring, and her dot method of judging the ebb and flow of a story is a useful tool to use. I’m still not sure how well my novel works as a reading experience, but I have a trusted and wise first reader who is currently working her way through it, and she says that it’s “gripping.” I am grateful for her assistance, as she’s pointed out several errors that needed straightening out in grammar and punctuation.
Writing, then editing a novel really is a case of not being able to see the wood for the trees.
A report in the Guardian newspaper makes some interesting claims about self-published books.
In particular, I was struck by the figure that 67% of books on the top ebook publishing platforms are written by women. This percentage comes from an organisation that’s new to me, called Ficshelf.
They claim that 61 of the top 100 traditionally published books on Amazon are written by men. This is seen as further proof that men rule the long-established world of book publishing. Male writers dominate in lists compiled by newspapers for best novels.
Somehow, none of this surprises me, for I’ve always believed that more women regularly read books than men, and there’s a tiresome old boy network among book firms. It’s unusual to find a literary agency or publisher that has a woman as CEO.
It’s food for thought. Perhaps I should become Pauline Whybrow to publish my ebooks that have a romantic and spiritual theme, to encourage more female readers …
