Category Archives: Writing

Writing

Advertising

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I freely admit that I’m intolerant of commercials on television, and I always mute the sound or change channels to avoid them. I’m similarly averse to advertisements in magazines, newspapers and online. My ally in avoiding them on the computer is the free app called AdBlock, which I’ve added to Google Chrome to prevent ads loading – it helps speed up how quickly pages load in this way.

Strange then, that I should rise this morning with the name of Adrian Wapcaplet on my mind. This enterprising ad executive features in The String Sketch by Monty Python, which sums up the madness of the advertising industry for me. Perhaps it’s all of the research that I’ve been doing recently in how to sell my books, by raising my profile as a writer through blogging, Twittering, making FaceBook posts and comments on writers’ forums that has made me more aware of the power of advertising.
This sketch is brilliant.
The String Sketch
( from Monty Python’s Instant Record Collection )
Adrian Wapcaplet: Aah, come in, come in, Mr….Simpson. Aaah, welcome to Mousebat, Follicle, Goosecreature, Ampersand, Spong, Wapcaplet, Looseliver, Vendetta and Prang!
Mr. Simpson: Thank you.
Wapcaplet: Do sit down–my name’s Wapcaplet, Adrian Wapcaplet…
Mr. Simpson: how’d’y’do.
Wapcaplet: Now, Mr. Simpson… Simpson, Simpson… French, is it?
S: No.
W: Aah. Now, I understand you want us to advertise your washing powder.
S: String.
W: String, washing powder, what’s the difference. We can sell anything.
S: Good. Well, I have this large quantity of string, a hundred and twenty-two thousand miles of it to be exact, which I inherited, and I thought if I advertised it–
W: Of course! A national campaign. Useful stuff, string, no trouble there.
S: Ah, but there’s a snag, you see. Due to bad planning, the hundred and twenty-two thousand miles is in three-inch lengths. So it’s not very useful.
W: Well, that’s our selling point! “SIMPSON’S INDIVIDUAL STRINGETTES!”
S: What?
W: “THE NOW STRING! READY CUT, EASY TO HANDLE, SIMPSON’S INDIVIDUAL EMPEROR STRINGETTES – JUST THE RIGHT LENGTH!”
S: For what?
W: “A MILLION HOUSEHOLD USES!”
S: Such as?
W: Uhmm…Tying up very small parcels, attaching notes to pigeons’ legs, uh, destroying household pests…
S: Destroying household pests?! How? W: Well, if they’re bigger than a mouse, you can strangle them with it, and if they’re smaller than, you flog them to death with it!
S: Well surely !….
W: “DESTROY NINETY-NINE PERCENT OF KNOWN HOUSEHOLD PESTS WITH PRE-SLICED, RUSTPROOF, EASY-TO-HANDLE, LOW-CALORIE SIMPSON’S INDIVIDUAL EMPEROR STRINGETTES, FREE FROM ARTIFICIAL COLORING, AS USED IN HOSPITALS!”
S: ‘Ospitals !?!?!?!!?
W: Have you ever in a Hospital where they didn’t have string?
S: No, but it’s only string !
W: ONLY STRING?! It’s everything! It’s…it’s waterproof!
S: No it isn’t!
W: All right, it’s water resistant then!
S: It isn’t!
W: All right, it’s water absorbent! It’s…Super Absorbent String! “ABSORB WATER TODAY WITH SIMPSON’S INDIVIDUAL WATER ABSORB-A-TEX STRINGETTES! AWAY WITH FLOODS!”
S: You just said it was waterproof!
W: “AWAY WITH THE DULL DRUDGERY OF WORKADAY TIDAL WAVES! USE SIMPSON’S INDIVIDUAL FLOOD PREVENTERS!”
S: You’re mad!
W: Shut up, shut up, shut up! Sex, sex sex, must get sex into it. Wait, I see a television commercial- There’s this nude woman in a bath holding a bit of your string. That’s great, great, but we need a doctor, got to have a medical opinion. There’s a nude woman in a bath with a doctor–that’s too sexy. Put an archbishop there watching them, that’ll take the curse off it. Now, we need children and animals. There’s two kids admiring the string, and a dog admiring the archbishop who’s blessing the string. Uhh…international flavour’s missing…make the archbishop Greek Orthodox. Why not Archbishop Makarios? No, no, he’s dead… never mind, we’ll get his brother, it’ll be cheaper… So, there’s this nude woman….
Writing

Are women hardwired to love thrillers?

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A report in the Telegraph newspaper last week, written by thriller author Rebecca Whitney highlights how it is women who predominantly read this genre of crime novels.

whitneysmall

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/11440540/Thrillers-and-crime-novels-Are-women-hardwired-to-love-them.html

As Mark Twain observed – ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.’

Some of the research findings quoted in this report, such as 68% of readers of thrillers are women, need to be taken with a pinch of salt. Any survey is dependent for its accuracy on many different factors. What’s produced from a poll taken at a conference of fans of crime fiction would produce different results to a street survey of passing shoppers.

This newspaper report makes a number of sweeping generalisations about how the sexes are hardwired differently, that had they been aimed at proving differences between the races, would have caused outrage. Nevertheless, the writer’s thoughts on how women relate to working out how to resolve an unhappy situation to restore order, is a precise way of summing up what happens in the story arc of a thriller.

Crime stories are one of the best-selling genres of fiction, with a figure of 25% commonly bandied about for online sales. This partly influenced me, when I was thinking about what to write about for my first novel as 2014 began. I’d already written fourteen short stories and novellas, as well as several hundred poems in the previous eighteen months. These tackled love and romance, science fiction, the paranormal, self-identity and thrillers with a twist to them.

I had a number of concerns that I wanted to address about the state of modern society. These included CCTV, the dehumanising effects of video-gaming, exposure to violent images and how demobbed soldiers remain traumatised by what they’ve seen and done in combat zones. Such themes suggested a psychological thriller to me, and as part of the overall atmosphere of paranoia that I intended to create, I would emphasize how the system, the establishment, protects itself with cover-ups when it makes mistakes.

I worked long and hard on ‘The Perfect Murderer’, which took some 4,000 hours to produce. I was pleased with the result while being unsure if it worked as a story that would grab a reader. Fortunately, a trusted friend volunteered to be my first reader. She has a fine mind and keen eyes, so is good at pointing out semantic mistakes and dodgy grammar. I was interested to know what she would make of the plot, as she doesn’t normally read thrillers or crime novels.

The Perfect Murderer - a novel about a serial killer who makes no mistakes.

Writing is a bit like being a magician, in that you know how the trick is done, but you’re not sure if your sleight of hand and misdirection has worked on the audience.
Whether ‘The Perfect Murderer’ will sell is another matter. Its success may be assisted by my bumbling attempts at self-promotion through the social media, and also by my free book giveaway on Smashwords.
I hope that what Rebecca Whitney says about women being the main readers of thrillers is true if the downloads of my erotic verse collection are any indicator of my potential reading public. 1,000 took a collection called What Do You Like? and I suspect that they are mainly female. I pray that they also like crime novels with a psychological twist, and that they remember my name when I publish the novel.
As a marketing strategy, giving away sexually suggestive poetry as a way of selling a novel featuring two sociopathic killers, sounds unlikely to me. But then who knows? As the old saying goes – ‘You have to go fishing where the fish are’, which is what I’m trying to do.
I wonder if my bait will work.
Writing

Just one in ten authors can earn a full-time living from writing, report finds

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This article was in the Daily Telegraph today :

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/11550871/Just-one-in-ten-authors-can-earn-full-time-living-from-writing-report-finds.html

That only one in ten authors earn a full-time living from writing doesn’t surprise me. I have forty-four titles online at Smashwords and Amazon, and I’m as poor as a church mouse. The report pertains to British authors, but I somehow doubt that the figures quoted would be a lot different for American writers.

I found its references to self-publishing a little confusing, as it looks like they’re not referring to ebooks at all, but rather what was once known as vanity publishing, where writers pay for hard copies of their books to be printed. Clicking on the blue highlighted The Business of Being an Author link in the article will give you a PDF copy of the report.

The statistic that 42.3% of earnings are accrued by just 5% of authors is shocking. That there’s such an imbalance in how readers choose what to read proves people buy what they know, and what everyone else is talking about. The book needn’t have any literary worth, with the Fifty Shades series being so poorly written that they’re pathetically trite.

J. K. Rowling has better technique but was allowed to run roughshod over any editing considerations on the back of her financial success, making the later books in her Harry Potter series bloated. There’s such a thing as being too successful, for she’s gone from being an impoverished mother living on state benefits, to having a net worth of one billion dollars. This means that she needs to employ a team of bodyguards, to prevent kidnapping attempts and terrorist attacks.

Why would want that situation? I’d be happy to just earn a decent living. After writing a 160,000-word psychological thriller in 2014, I’ve spent the last six months researching ways of promoting myself and my books, making social media postings and chasing literary agents and publishers who accept direct submissions. This feels like mixing wallpaper paste each and every day, compared to the joy that I got from creative writing.

I will endeavour to persevere though, for I know that it’s all a case of getting the ball rolling. After all, J. K. Rowling could still be living on benefits, had the eight-year-old daughter of a senior publishing executive not said that she liked the first Harry Potter story – causing him to give it another look. Twelve other publishers had already rejected it.