My ruminations are partly inspired by running ideas through my mind for my sixth Cornish Detective novel, which I’ll begin writing in a month. My MC Neil Kettle has been a widower for nine years, not dating in that time, but corresponding with an American witness from Book 1. She unexpectedly turns up on his doorstep in Book 5 and they become lovers. Not on the doorstep!
Although my protagonist has an artistic side, his new lover is a talented professional photographer who makes multi-media art pieces, runs several blogs and writes hardboiled crime novels. She’s hinted at a wild past, including involvement with biker gangs, but Neil is disturbed when he does the one thing he shouldn’t have done, by reading her latest manuscript. The details of a 1980s bank robbery contain details of a real heist, hinting that she may have been involved—two people died—she could be a fugitive from justice.
Reading a WIP without permission is one of the things mentioned in this all too true article:
I haven’t dated in a decade, which is down to choice, as I made a deliberate decision to focus on my writing career. At times, I miss not being in a relationship, but being honest, I know that I’d resent interference with my freedom to do what I want, when I want—whether it be writing a new chapter, editing old material or going nuts as I attempt to understand the complexity of my WordPress blog and website.
Perhaps the ideal relationship for a writer is with another writer. There have been many famous literary couples:
Being alone, without anyone to share setbacks and little victories can be draining on the soul. Last night, after several days seeking solutions, I finally cracked a frustrating issue to do with hyperlinked chapter headings disappearing when converted to other formats. I gave a little cheer, realising that no one in the world cared but me. Such is the loneliness of the long-distance writer. I didn’t feel sorry for myself for more than a few seconds, simply glad that I can move ahead today editing my crime novels for publication on Amazon.
At present, I don’t have the time or inclination to date…and, anyway, I’m too damned weird!
What are you like to date or to be married to as a writer?
Do your partner and family understand your funny little ways?
“Unfortunately,
I’ve not found any other methods that work reliably for newbies.
I’m not sure there are any. The cold truth of the matter is that
instant success belongs in the fiction we write and not in the facts
we live.“
“And the final lesson I learnt: living with disappointment. I know most authors recognize the feeling.”
This
year, I’ve been navigating the self-promotion trail, which is
something I wish I’d began six years ago, before writing my first
Cornish Detective novel. If you’re new to writing, I earnestly
recommend beginning a blog (with a newsletter) and posting regularly
on social media. The trick is to get your name known and also to
collect email addresses of subscribers who may, one day, buy your
book.
Remember,
whether you self-publish online or you publish traditionally through
a book company, you’ll be expected to have an author platform, so
best start now!
When I returned to creative writing in 2013, I knew it would take at least five years to get anywhere and so it has proved. It helps that I’m stoical (and bloody-minded!). I had some experience of publishing and being a writer from selling short stories and magazine articles in the 1970s and 1980s, realising that you were only as good as your last published piece—and that it needed lots of luck to get that into print.
I’m glad that one of the first writing guides I read was How Not To Write A Novel: Confessions of a Midlist Author by David Armstrong. Originally published in 2002, what he says about surviving as a non-bestselling author is even truer today. The hardships and ignominy are worse. There are affordable copies available on Amazon and eBay and Kindle:
Armstrong
confirms that it’s a long, hard slog to get anywhere as a writer.
Wannabee authors might well be put off starting.
At
present, I’m wrestling with the hydra of converting my books to other
formats, those most commonly used by e-reading devices, which are
PDF, MOBI and EPUB. This is to make my manuscript flowable, able to
automatically fit different-sized screens. Previously, I’ve
self-published on Amazon and via Smashwords, which rather spoilt me,
for they have meatgrinder software which does the conversion for you.
I should have used Smashwords again, even though I’ve unpublished my 45 titles on their site, to promote them via Draft2Digital. Instead, out of some daft sense of behaving honourably, I attempted to do the job by using Calibre, checking what the converted story looked like with Adobe Digital Editions
The main problem has been that the formatting I’ve used sometimes gets removed by Calibre, resulting in unwanted spacing between sentences and paragraphs. Trying to establish my own house style, I’d used Celtic symbols as section breaks, like this:
Calibre didn’t like that at all, substituting a capital ‘O’ for the key I’d pressed to insert the Celtic Knot. Smashwords meatgrinder did the same thing. This meant I had to remove them all, which took several hours…as did adding them last week. Note to self: stop being a clever dick!
After cleaning the manuscript of extraneous design flourishes, I put it through Smashwords meatgrinder again, which gave me a clean-looking story, complete with an attached book cover. There are still problems with the MOBI conversion done by Smashwords, which is the format used by Amazon for their Kindles.
Smashwords and Amazon don’t play well together, each insisting that any manuscript submitted doesn’t mention their rival. I’d listed my 45 previously published titles at the end of the book, linking them to Amazon, which gave Smashwords an epileptic fit! Removing them improved the MOBI reformatting results, but Amazon’s own meatgrinder will probably do a better job.
Of course, if I had the money, I could pay someone to run a campaign promoting me and my books and to convert my books to other formats, placing advertising strategically, but I don’t, so I’m doing everything myself. Paying for services is no guarantee of success. I’ve read some horror stories of people investing their life savings to promote themselves as writers, selling very few books and facing penury.
I’m 80% towards completing what I planned with blogging, having an author website, designing book covers, reformatting my five crime novels and posting on social media. I’m going to put in a couple of weeks of 12-hour days, to ready things for launching the first two stories in mid-July.
Although it’s taken thousands of hours of work to get to this point, I’m truly not expecting anything much to happen. I’m not a celebrity who’s chosen to write a book (or have it written for them), so I’ve no free promotion that way.
I’m just a nobody trying to be a somebody.
What might help raise my profile, is to do interviews with the local press and radio stations, which I’m loath to do, but needs must when the devil drives. EMOJI Cornwall Libraries have a policy of buying books by Cornish authors and those set in the county, so I’ll make some sales that way (including eBooks) as well as introduce local readers to my name.
What problems have you faced in self-promoting and self-publishing?
What worked for you?
And, what was a waste of time and money?
If anyone needs advice on what I’ve written about in this post, please contact me (before my brain melts).
I might have made the mistakes, so you don’t have to.
This video is nothing to do with writing, but if you’re seeking inspiration for your Fantasy, Science Fiction or Horror story or you just want to be freaked out, listen to the spooky sounds this 80″ symphonic gong produces! A portal into another world:
The first question is what sort of writer do you think you are? I guessed Savvy Writer, but I was wrong, for apparently I’m an Eternal Writer:
Of all the writers, you have the strongest most comprehensive grasp of the writing craft. Consequently, others don’t appreciate how hard you work at it. You make it look easy!
I don’t know about that…most of the time I feel like this:
As I continue my rambling way towards self-publishing my series of crime novels this summer, I had the alarming thought last night, that I hadn’t yet uploaded my first two stories to my WordPress Cornish Detective website to make them available to readers as downloads.
How to do that? Should they be in MS Word (.doc) format or as a PDF…or, both? And, how does the book cover fit into all of this? I found two helpful articles about both formats, then spent three hours faffing around attempting to get the Word (.doc) version to appear on my site. I’ve moaned about the complexity of WordPress before on this blog, so I won’t go on. One of the problems with WordPress is that it’s regularly updated, as are the plug-in widgets that operate it, meaning that online advice about how to do things is quickly outdated.
Getting a blog about writing and a website on my books up and running has felt like the Labours of Hercules.
None of this activity feels like being a writer. And, anything I’ve read about WordPress hasn’t been reading for pleasure. As for my novels, they exist as intransigent digital files—it’s hard to think of them as books.
Weary with frustration, I shut down my laptop and went to bed with five books…I’m a promiscuous reader!
Laying there in the company of real books, that I could feel, smell and move around wherever I wanted them, I enjoyed the sensuality of the experience.
I’m dedicated to self-publishing eBooks this summer, with POD to follow if readers ask for it, but as an activity it feels as sexy as scrubbing bathroom grouting clean!
For the reader, Kindles and other eBook reading devices have advantages, such as anonymity and being able to store many titles, but they’re not alluring or likely to encourage conversation. These are paranoid times, with mass surveillance of the population, meaning we seek ways to preserve whatever privacy we can—including stealth reading.
You know how much it’s stressed to have an opening to a story that hooks the reader making them want to read on? If nothing else, it’s crucial to make the first five pages compelling to attract the attention of the literary agent you’re querying.
I’ve become increasingly mindful of how I write the first chapter, and I usually rewrite it after typing The End to introduce foreshadowing I was unaware of as I set out. We all know that being a writer can detract from being a reader, as our radar is always on looking for techniques and tricks, guessing who the murderer is early on and which characters are going to become lovers.
Just recently though, I’ve read two novels that made me reappraise how to begin a story. One had an exciting start that places you in the cab of the protagonist’s pickup as she’s menaced by a charging elk. Will Dean’s Dark Pines deserves its favourable reviews and I’m looking forward to reading the sequel Red Snow.
My heart raced reading the first few paragraphs, but once the crisis was over, the story slowed as the author set up the inciting incident of a body being found. Click on Look inside to see what I mean. It struck me that this was a false exciting beginning as if Will Dean had been advised by their agent to jazz things up!
Nothing wrong with that, I guess, and I might use the con myself for a future Cornish Detective novel. I still felt a bit cheated. Strangely enough, animals barely make an appearance in the rest of the story, just a couple of deer, crows and dogs.
The other novel that pulled the carpet out from under me has the opposite characteristics. The Cold Dish is the first story in Craig Johnson’s much-loved Longmire mystery series, adapted into a hit television series. I haven’t watched any of them, but one of my best friends, a discerning resident of Wyoming praises them to the skies.
Craig Johnson
The opening of the novel mosies into sight like a laid-back drinker who’s quaffed four pints and is recounting a favourite anecdote of his to you after you’ve joined him at the bar. It’s as if you’ve known him all his life and he you, as he reacquaints you with who’s who and what’s what in his little town.
Granted, there’s mention of a dead body being found in sentence one, but that was reported by two ne’er-do-wells and is probably a dead sheep anyway, so let’s have another beer while the narrator continues his rambling story about local residents and police colleagues.
As a writing technique, it suits the character of Sheriff Walt Longmire, but it’s not designed to grab you by the throat. The Cold Dish was published in 2004—perhaps readers’ attention spans were longer back then—there’s nothing wrong with Craig Johnson’s writing, but I wondered if his relaxed approach would be allowed today. I think that his agent might ask him to add some gore to the opening.
My crime novels always feature the murdered victim in Chapter 1, either while still alive or when found as an abandoned corpse. I’m attempting to bond the reader with the victim, making them eager to know who the killer is and how my protagonist detective works things out.
Have you come across any stories that began in unexpected ways?
What’s the most exciting start to a story you’ve read?
Writing blogger Kristen Lamb recently posted a long article about the collapse and purchase of Barnes & Noble, which is worth a read if you’re confused about the current state of publishing and book selling.
It’s worth reading the comments below the article from writers and B & N employees. One of them mentions James Daunt’s appalling attitude to his Waterstones employees’ wages, which is confirmed in this article:
To see him as a saviour riding in to rescue B & N and its staff, customers and the writers that create its product is laughable. He’s a wealthy man out to make money from what he can, one of the 1% who rule the world who favour the best-selling authors who make the most profit. We all know the phrase “It’s just business”—which is doublespeak for “I’ve behaved appallingly to get what I wanted and there’s nothing you can do about it”—book-selling and publishing are businesses…the most vulnerable will be oppressed. That includes authors.
A few random thoughts:
*I’ve always been surprised that Amazon didn’t swoop in to buy B & N, but perhaps they feared further anti-trust investigations.
Seeing as how they’re establishing a bricks and mortar presence, it’s possible they’ll buy some of the old B & N stores.
* Although many people who work in the book trade love books, be they book-sellers, editors, literary agents, book cover artists or publishers, this doesn’t necessarily translate into respect or recompense for the writers on whom the whole business depends. For any surveys that show there’s been an increase in readership, most of the public are indifferent to books and their creators. As an author, it sometimes feels like everyone is against you—even those who are supposed to be on your side.
Writers are the foundation stones of the book business. If we’re not treated properly the whole building will collapse. Imagine if a supermarket chain decided to only stock the 100 best-selling food products, not promoting anything new or unusual. They wouldn’t last long but might start to sell novelty items to bring more buyers in, maybe have a café, as B & N did. If you don’t believe in what you’re selling, why should anyone buy it? That holds true for the author, their agent, the publisher and then the book shop.
* At the moment, I’m at a crossroads with my writing career. After being with Smashwords for years, I recently transferred to Draft2Digital. I’m happy with their efficient operation, but feel like my Cornish Detective series might sell better on Amazon. Some authors have made millions from being on Amazon.
But, I resent their controlling ways. Effectively, they’re an intelligence agency gathering information on their traders and customers. This blog is available for whoever wants to read it, but I don’t know who’s got access to it. It doesn’t fill me confidence to know that Amazon is spying on me.
I’m loathe to go exclusive with them for my crime novels. As someone says in reply to Kristen Lamb’s article:
...some authors have figured out a sweet spot to milk a good living out of KDP Select. That’s fine, but having all their eggs in one basket could come back to bite them in a massive way if Amazon arbitrarily decides one day to change the payout structure.
I’ve had some experience of their forceful marketing tactics when they suggested I participate in bundling my titles with other low-selling writers’ eBooks, which would have yielded me about 10c profit for each sale! Books are like light bulbs or bars of soap to Amazon.
* Instead, I’ll be staying ‘wide’ for my book launch this summer. I believe in Ernst Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful approach to economics and to living. I intend to market and publish at a manageable and personal level, going grassroots with my marketing, through local libraries, reading and writing groups, Cornish media, self-publishing my series via the D2D aggregator and also selling directly from my dedicated website.
Relying on faceless corporations and huge book store chains means I’d be giving away the tiny amount of power I have over my career. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t grab a publishing deal with one of the Big 5, as happened to James Oswald:
For now, though, I intend to self-publish in eBook format, not worrying about POD until it’s requested by readers.
Writing is a lonely task. Many of us yearn for the support and validation of signing with an agent, getting a traditional publishing contract or interacting with Amazon’s ‘experts’ to market our eBooks, but any of those can fail to provide what they’ve promised. Then what?
It would be lovely to see your novel on a book store shelf, but what if they don’t promote it all? What if the whole business fails? It happens, however big the company. Bosses stick their heads in the sand, pretending that all’s well. Even Jeff Bezos predicted that Amazon would fail one day:
Going it alone, I’m sure I’ll make mistakes, but they’ll be my mistakes—easy to correct—not impossible to negotiate with an algorithm on Amazon or whoever chooses what to stock in the revamped B & N.
One thing that’s not mentioned in Reedsy’s otherwise excellent article is a drawback of ‘going wide’—that is, using an aggregator to distribute your books or doing it yourself, publishing to Apple, Kobo, etc one by one. Should you change your mind, deciding to sign to KDP Select, then Amazon will insist that you take all your titles off whatever sites they’re for sale, before they allow you onto their hallowed ground. In theory, this should happen when you unpublish them on Smashwords or D2D, but in reality, it can take months and many emails to vendors before that happens—meaning your books are in the twilight zone, off most sales venues, but not on KDP Select.
At the moment, I’m contemplating removing my books from D2D to go with KDP Select for my Cornish Detective series, which I think makes commercial sense, but looks like creating loads more frustration for me.
No one said it would be easy (but, why does it have to be so hard?)
It’s as well to remember the old adage “if a thing looks too good to be true it probably is” when considering fantastic offers in the world of publishing.
This article by Anne R. Allen is worth a read, especially if you intend to self-publish:
I’m currently trying to get all of my ducks in a row to begin self-publishing my crime novel series, and I was wondering how best to tackle Print On Demand, so I appreciated what she said:
“If you choose self-publishing, you have to give up the fantasy of seeing your book in the window of your favorite bookstore chain.
It might help to forget paper books altogether. I often see newbies obsessing about choosing a POD company and getting bookstore distribution. But they’re worrying needlessly.
That’s because 90% of the successful indie’s profits usually come from ebooks.“
Even using respectable traders offering services that deliver, it’s easy to haemorrhage money. I’ve struggled to set up an author blog on WordPress, but at least I’ve done so for free. Feeling frustrated last night, wondering what I was doing trying to master which plug-in was the best to create a ‘splash page’, I totted up how much I could have spent to get to the same point, had I gone with a paid web service provider and bought premium themes and widgets, coming up with £575.
Some people think that paying for something is a guarantee that it will work, which is why there are way more thriving vanity publishers than there are prosperous authors.
Me, in my cave! 
