Monthly Archives: September 2013

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New authors: Dawn of the Dead

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IF you are a new author or book reviewer, click away now because this is going to be ugly.

In my author blog, Life’s an Idiom, I touched upon the problems that new authors face with the vast quantities of books being published on a daily basis and the development of a virtual slush pile created by this massive-scale production. In an inexorable tide of new publications thronging the market on an unprecedented scale, how does a new author swim to the surface and get seen?

I’m afraid to say that, if I knew the answer, I would already be a best seller and probably wouldn’t be blogging from my £5 million home somewhere in the middle of the Caribbean. Unfortunately, irrespective of whether you’re traditionally published or have gone it alone, the real work begins after the book is written.

Most publishing houses, especially the small indie ones, don’t have a marketing budget of any description. The big ones save their money for those authors who are already a brand name. This means publishers expect their authors to be pro-active on the promotion front and bombard the social networking sites, bloggers, book reviewers and any one else who will listen, with news of the new book, how great the author is and how anyone would be an idiot not to invest cash and time in the package. They also expect authors to arrange their own press releases, book launches and even invest in copies of the book for promotional work.

The biggest problem is, there are just too many new authors all doing the same thing and are seething across the internet, breaching protocols and etiquette of the social networking sites and unwittingly turning themselves into spammers.

There is a very fine line between promotion and spam – both are unsolicited marketing tools by way of bulk messaging used in an effort to promote awareness and sales. The former, however, is discriminate, the latter suggests a lack of careful judgement and selectivity.

Targeting like-minded people who are doing the same as you is considered acceptable by an unwritten code between new authors.  But it is not other authors who buy your books; it is readers.

Taking into consideration that every person on the planet who is able to read is a potential target, how can a new author be selective in their approach to promotion? One answer is to target book reviewers.

Now, there are thousands of avid readers who have cottoned-on to the fact that putting themselves out as book reviewers will give them an eternal number of free books. That’s the plan, anyway. Unfortunately for everyone, as soon as someone announces that they are looking for books to review, they are met with an irrepressible bore of new titles hurling themselves through their email, swarming like a great zombie plague and completely overwhelming them.

This is why many established book reviewers have either closed their lists or stipulated that they will only read books published by traditional publishing houses. Others have learned to become discerning and, just like publishers, send rejection letters to authors and titles that fail to inspire them. It’s a humiliating and demoralising process for any author, and especially for those who write quality fiction, to be turned down by a book reviewer who can’t string a good sentence together.

Saying that, there are a few people out there who seem to really care about the plight of new authors and offer their support willingly and for free. I’ve started a Pinterest board on them and expect it to develop through time.

I have still to be convinced whether blog tours, freebies, author interviews and blog parties really equate to sales. I have a number of interviews, guest blogs and reviews lined up over the next few weeks, so will report back after these have taken place. 

Many new authors arrange blog parties and invite their contacts to meet them online with a view to bombarding Amazon with sales at a certain time in order to swell the rankings. See, for example, Janice Horton’s How to Party Online who says that organising a virtual party via the social networking sites has certainly worked for her. I’m not much of a party-goer, so haven’t tried this method out yet, although I understand how it could work successfully.

Having taken a good look at which authors are selling well, there is (with a mere handful of exceptions) one overriding determinate factor amongst successful authors: they write books, lots of them.

And there’s the rub: one book doth not an author make. So it is really a question of keep writing, keep publishing and keep promoting. Find a balance between that author self and the marketing self and split your time doing both: I would say one third in promotion and two thirds writing the next book. Very few authors become one-hit-wonder-millionaires over night and, really, who would want to be labelled as such?

Get it right. Get it written and get it out there; then get it out there and get it written, in that order.

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Promotion Promotion Promotion

ImageTHE most difficult aspect of any business is getting people to invest in your product. No sales means no business.

Five per cent of publishing success is in the writing of the book while the other ninety five per cent is taken up with marketing it. With tens of thousands of new books being produced each month with internet publishers, it’s very easy for a new author, and even a well-established one, to get buried under what is now becoming the bottomless virtual slush pile of e-Books. Very few new books are an overnight success, the probability calculated at one million to one, and the precious works of many new writers will never see the light of day. 

Most authors are not entrepreneurs and, when writing a book, rarely give a thought to the journey ahead of them in marketing it. For the majority of us, there is no easy path to success. It should be true that, if a product is good enough, it will market itself; this belief, however, is hopelessly naive. Even traditional publishers require their authors to be pro-active in marketing their books through social and traditional media and it apparently takes a new author at least eight months from publication to acquire an effective audience. Many never will.

Of course, with any new product, quality is key to success. Good writing and good design should be the minimum starting point when building a sales platform. Even before ‘The End’ is written, authors should not sit back and congratulate themselves for being so clever. The real work begins with self-promotion. This means pulling in a healthy following on Twitter and Facebook and joining a number of reader/author sites like Goodreads. When the book is published, then it’s time to find those nice people who are willing to review your novel and promote it for the price of a free copy.

I’ve read and heard mixed reports on whether paying a blogger or promotion site for their services actually helps increase sales. They tend to use the Twitter, blogging and Facebook platforms to inundate the social network sites with information on how good a book or author is. The trouble is that a lot of readers (the target market) will see this effort as tantamount to spam. Also, the higher the number of followers per ID on the likes of Twitter, the more people will miss the tweets.

I am relatively new and green to social networking but, for the past few weeks, have been working like a dog on promotion. I now have over 1,500 followers on Twitter but not too many on Facebook, as I tend to regard the latter as a personal message board. This is probably a mistake and I’ll have to change my tactics if I want to reap the benefits of this obviously powerful marketing tool.

Good reviewers are few and far between. Most of them are so inundated with review requests that they are forced to close their lists for long periods of time. Many of them will not review self-published authors nor even authors of small independent publishers. I have been fortunate enough to find a few very good people who are committed to supporting authors through their sheer love of reading and are willing to give up their time and effort to be part of the publishing process. One in particular approached me to ask if I would be prepared to give away a book to mark her book review blog’s first six months of success: http://sunmountainreviews.wordpress.com/2013/09/15/six-month-blogoversary-giveaway. Of course, I was delighted to do so. The book is now out with at least six independent reviewers who don’t know me and I can only hope they’ll like the book and rate it favourably.

I’ve had a number of author interviews and book promos on targeted promotional sites like Goodreads (http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7244296.Sara_Bain), Smashwords (https://www.smashwords.com/interview/IvyMoonPress), BookGoodies (http://bookgoodies.com/?s=sara+bain), humanmade (http://www.humanmade.net/sara-bain), The Reading Room (http://www.thereadingroom.com/books/details/the-sleeping-warrior-sara-bain/8029173) and Awesomegang (http://awesomegang.com/sleeping-warrior-sara-bain/) as well as a few more on blogs, eg Reading Renee’s blog: http://www.readingreneereviews.com/2013/08/the-sleeping-warrior-by-sara-bain.html?zx=f7e3f47efe20d543. Most of these great people I have found on Goodreads, which is an amazing place on the internet that brings authors and readers together. Another networking site for readers is Riffle which, at the moment, is in beta version but looks as though it is probably going to be quite big – although, I haven’t had the time to sit down and decipher how it works yet.

I’ve also bugged a lot of writer friends to help promote my book through their blogs (eg, Bill Kirton: http://bill-kirton.co.uk/?p=1324) and a few more are scheduled across the internet over the next few months. In turn, I have started up an author interview part of this blog which not only reciprocates the generosity of my fellow authors but also serves to widen my audience.

I’m still working on it and probably will be for the next eight months at least. I have to aim to receive and host as many independent reviews, author interviews and guest blogs as possible and, once the printed copies have been made and delivered, will have to work hard on traditional methods of promotion like book launches, press releases and Uncle Tom Cobbly and All …

Such a lot of work for one little book but, as they say, ‘no pain, no gain’.

 

 

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Anne Stenhouse

ANNE Stenhouse is better known in Scotland as a performed playwright. Her production, M’Connachie and JMB explores the unruly alter-ego of Peter Pan author JM Barrie and was received in Scottish theatres with loud applause. More recently, Anne has turned her writing talents to fiction and her debut novel, a Regency romance entitled Mariah’s Marriage, was picked up by Canadian publishers MuseItUp. Now Anne has produced her second fiction Bella’s Betrothal which will be launched at a private party in Edinburgh on September 28.

Who do you think you are, Anne Stenhouse?

ImageNot sure where to go with this. I’m Anne Graham, wife and mother, but there is a core being who will always be Anne Stenhouse, the individual and writer. I’ve always been a story-teller and to some extent that sets you apart from others. Maybe they sense the inner questioning and crafting already going on in your head before the last bit of chocolate cake is stolen.

Does drama help write fiction?

I think it has helped me. Many writers write truly woeful dialogue because they’re afraid of it. I love dialogue. I think in rehearsed conversations rather than strings of facts. I think dialogue makes fiction come alive. I also think having written drama, you have a good eye for the scene – how long it should be and who should/should not be in it.

Your play Peter Pan Man was a great success: intelligent, sharp and well executed. How far do you think you got into the mind of J M Barrie?

Thank you. I enjoyed researching it after Carol Metcalf of Theatre Broad said what she wanted for the Peter Pan Man evening. My contribution became M’Connachie & JMB. Barrie was an extraordinary man and I’ve no sense of having sussed him at all. You think you’re getting a handle on something and then you discover another layer. For example, he played cricket obsessively. He was a great writer, but he had no time for, or understanding of, art. The contradictions are endless and his personality was complex. He cast off his wife, but supported her financially in her later years.

When writing the script, did the behaviour and thought processes of the characters surprise or even shock you in any way?

Well, M’Connachie is the first non-human I’ve written, although he is Barrie’s alter ego, so perhaps he’s human after all. I think the total self-absorption displayed by Barrie and accepted as the norm, was rather shocking. We’re more used to greater equality in marriage. The range of Barrie’s work was surprising: a successful journalist, dramatist, novelist and short story writer morphing into a sought-after speaker.

Your first published novel, Mariah’s Marriage, is set in the Regency period. Is this an era that particularly inspires you?

Yes. It was an era of huge contradictions and social inequalities, but it is the start of modern English. That makes Jane Austen readable and accessible in a way that many writers are not. I also love the scope for playful between the sexes dialogue and repartee, while deploring the non-existence of human rights for women (and most of the non-gentle population).

Mariah is feisty and forthright, an unexpected twist to the usual Regency romance formula. Did you intend her to behave like this from the onset or did she grow a strength of will over the story’s development?

I’m afraid the minx was like this from the outset. I love her.

Tell us about Bella’s Betrothal.

ImageBella is another  feisty and forthright young lady, but she’s beset by what we would call in modern celebrity terms, ‘a bad press’. She needs to get away from her London-based existence and takes up an offer from her Scottish relatives to remove to Edinburgh. Even before she reaches Edinburgh, her reputation strews trouble and misunderstanding which climaxes in the betrothal of the title. So, has she become engaged to a hero or a villain?

Does your publisher help to promote your books by arranging blog tours, launches, author interviews, press releases etc or do you find you have to do most of the promotional work yourself?

Yes, lots of help. MuseItUp send out copies of their books for review. They run a readers’ site on FB. They host a blog and run monthly themes where an author can participate. They have a writers’ social site where blogs can be advertised and blog visits arranged. All the usual stuff. Being on the authors’ list of the Bookshop is permanent advertising. My link is here:

https://museituppublishing.com/bookstore/index.php/our-authors/69-our-authors/authors-s/168-anne-stenhouse

Why did you choose to find a publisher for your novels?

I wanted that stamp of acceptance that comes with someone else providing editing and cover art. Having been in the rehearsal room, I knew that not everything I thought I’d written was what I’d written. This turns out to be as true of prose as it was of drama. I have enjoyed working with Judy B Roth and Greta Gunselman as editors and it’s great to discuss covers with CK Volnek.

What are you working on at the moment?

There’s that superstitious feeling about not saying too much. I do have a third novel on the go, but…

Learn more about Anne at: http://www.annestenhousenovelist.wordpress.com/

Buy her books at: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Anne-Stenhouse/e/B00D2UINKE

Like her Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/AnneStenhouseAuthor

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Michael Brookes

SCI-FI and horror author Michael Brookes’ day job involves creating interesting worlds and characters to tell stories for the games industry. Compelling and intelligent, his novels cross the great divide of the traditional sci-fi and horror genres to provide readers with unique plots, intriguing characters and multi-faceted story lines that keep the pages turning. Michael writes with polished finesse and his distinctive approach to fiction is exciting, refreshing and ingenious.

1. Who do you think you are, Michael Brookes?

ImageLike everyone I am many things, most of my time is spent working and writing so they provide convenient labels for what I do and what I think about. My day job is an Executive Producer for an independent video game developer. I’ve always enjoyed playing games and to spend my time developing new ones is a great way to earn a living.

I’m also a writer, mostly in the horror and science fiction genres. Although I consider myself a writer of stories, if those stories take me across genre boundaries then that is fine.

I also volunteer as a technical editor for my local community magazine Littleport Life. Pretty much everything I do involves writing in some way.

2. We all love our heroes in fiction, why did you choose an anti-hero as the main protagonist of The Cult of Me?

It’s always fun writing evil characters, in many ways they can be more ambiguous compared to ‘good’ characters. I enjoy featuring paradox and juxtaposition in my story and there is something fun in having an evil man doing good things for the wrong reasons.

For the protagonist in The Cult of Me I wanted a human character to balance the more obviously powerful angels and demons that he would be coming up against throughout the trilogy.

3. How much of your day job influences the plot of your stories?

Games are a relatively new form of telling stories, most games tell the story in a linear fashion, the same as most books or films. However for some games the manner in which the player can explore the story is much wider.

A good example of this is the game I am currently working on called Elite: Dangerous. It’s a space game set in our galaxy, but a thousand years in the future. The entire galaxy is available for the player to explore and there is a rich history building up to the game’s starting point.

With such a vast area (400 billion stars) we can’t rely on traditional storytelling to provide interest and contest to the player. World building itself is nothing new, but the freedom that the player has is something only really possible via an interactive media like games. To facilitate this we use procedural generation of content not only for the locations, but also for the narrative. This means that the player experiences their own stories with common elements shared by other players in the game. It also means that the narratives evolve with the world automatically as well as through injection of events by us as the developers into the game world.

It’s an exciting development in the way that stories can be told and something I’m proud to be a part of.

4. To what extent is Faust 2.0 an allegory of the darker side of the internet?

ImageThe internet does have its dark side, this is most notable by the crime, hacking and content like snuff films and child pornography that exists. This really is a reflection on us as the users rather than the technology itself. For the most part it’s how a technology is used that makes it good or bad.
However there is an intrinsic danger to some technologies, one such concept is called the ‘Technological Singularity’. This is the idea that technology can reach a stage that its evolution races beyond our ability to understand or control it. One of the possible triggers for such an event is that of an emergent artificial intelligence. Faust 2.0 explores this specific idea, but is also the first in a series of books that looks at other possible triggers.

5. Amazon is changing the way in which readers choose to read. Do you agree and why?

I’ll admit that, despite my love of technology, I was a late adopter of ebooks. Now I’m a convert and I read almost exclusively on my Kindle. That being said, I do still love the feel of a physical book, but the convenience of ebooks has won me over.

What Amazon has done is not new, the technology has been around for years, what they have done is made a successful business out of it. More importantly they have made it an accepted technology and that has brought with it the empowerment for self-publishing with the potential to reach a wide audience.

Naturally that has resulted in a flood of releases and the quality of many of those has resulted in a poor reputation for self and indie publishing. That’s why I believe that we have a responsibility to make sure that what we release is of a standard. While telling a good story should always be the prime factor we also need to make sure that our work is properly edited and proofread.

6. I see that Milton’s take on Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost is your favourite story. You say it’s ‘sublime’. Is it Milton’s unorthodox approach to traditional philosophical and theological argument that hooks you or simply his skill as a wordsmith?

For me there are two things that are guaranteed to attract my interest. The first (and foremost) is the big idea. I love stories that tackle big ideas and Paradise lost takes on the biggest ideas of all. Who are we? What is our place in the universe? How did we come to be? Milton tackles all of these questions and more. Not only that, he puts them into a context that we can appreciate.

Also, his writing demonstrates the majesty of his faith in a way that even those of us who don’t have it can see what it means. With modern understanding its easy to pick holes in Milton’s presentation, but you can see how he married the revelations of his time with his religious convictions.

His ability to craft words has also stood the test of time. It’s tricky for many modern readers, but well worth the effort.

7. What in your life encouraged you to become a fiction writer?

I’ve always loved reading. Books have provided a gateway to worlds and experiences that were impossible by other means. Reading other people’s stories inspired stories of my own, or questions that I wanted to address. Paradise lost is a good example here, when I read it God doesn’t come across very well. I’m sure that wasn’t Milton’s understanding, but without Milton’s faith and his perspective, my view is different. So I asked, if God is real, why would he ignore his creation in the way that he seems to have done? That question led to The Cult of Me and The Third Path trilogy.

8. What comes first: character; scene or plot?

It varies although it usually starts with a question or a scenario. What if God is real, yet our understanding of science is also real? How would a being who came into being with perfect self-awareness but no sense of identity come to identify itself? Sometimes I’m inspired by an odd thought or scenario that then turns into a story.

9. An Odder Quintet is a selection of stories with dark twists to the plots. As an obviously experienced writer, how do you maintain that element of shock when it’s all been done – whether well or badly – so many times before?

I write stories primarily for myself and I’m fortunate that others enjoy them as well. Some of my endings (especially for the novels) are planned in advance, others evolve along with the story. Many of the dark twists come from understanding who can gain from the circumstance they are in. My favourite twist is from a story called The Yellow Lady from my first short story collection An Odd Quartet. That started as a simple ghost story, but how the story resolved itself evolved as I wrote it, but I was pleased by the twist.

10. Do you have a work in progress? If so, tell us what we can look forward to.

I’m currently in the editing phase for my next novel Sun Dragon, it’s a more traditional science fiction story of the first manned mission to Mars after a rover has discovered actual life on the planet. You can of course expect my trademark twist on the tale!

You can learn more about Michael on his blog at: http://thecultofme.blogspot.co.uk/

Buy his books on Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Michael-Brookes/e/B008OGD8KG

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Mary Smith

Mary Smith eAWARD-winning writer, Mary Smith, can turn her pen to just about any style of writing. She is a journalist, features writer and novelist with immense talent and it’s no surprise that her yearly events schedule is hectically-packed with tours, commissions, projects and interviews by the press. Mary’s spell abroad in Afghanistan showed her a very different side of life there to what the world’s media has recently portrayed. Her books No More Mulberries and, more recently, Drunk Chickens and Burnt Macaroni expose a gentle, human side of this troubled country before the rise of the Taliban. 

Features, journalism, novels and poetry are all variations of fact and fiction that each requires very different styles. How difficult is it to turn your approach to writing on and off in any given project?

Well, if I’ve had articles to write to a deadline I find it difficult to switch immediately to writing poetry or fiction. I need a bit of head space in between the different types and styles. I might clean the house, though that makes me bad-tempered, or I might do some research for a project. It is easier the other way round. If I’m working on fiction or poetry and am commissioned to write a magazine feature, which has a deadline, then I can go straight into the journalism.

How would you describe your individual style when writing fiction?

Goodness, you ask difficult questions, Sara. I guess I would say my fiction style is engaging and accessible. Someone once told me he’d picked up No More Mulberries, not sure if it was his kind of thing, and said he found he ‘just slipped right into it.’

 To what extent has your time in Pakistan and Afghanistan influenced you as a writer?

  • Front cover - small I spent ten years working in Pakistan and Afghanistan with a small health organisation and that time has been hugely influential on me as a writer in so many ways. While I was working in Afghanistan I began writing articles which were regularly published in The Guardian Weekly and the Herald Saturday magazine. I wrote because I wanted to share my experiences and my discoveries and understanding with people back home who would not have the opportunity to live in those countries. There is something about Afghanistan which gets under the skin and never leaves and it has certainly informed much of my writing – both poetry and prose.

Would you advise fledgling authors to take a course in creative writing?

  • I think some creative writing courses are extremely useful for fledging authors. I took a creative writing module at university which was excellent and pushed me in new writing directions. I would never have written poetry if I hadn’t taken the course – or monologues. I discovered I enjoyed writing monologues, something I developed further when Cally Phillips was dramatist-in-residence in Dumfries and Galloway. Spending time with a group of writers is also of benefit. I do think, though, people should be very clear about what writing courses can and can’t do. When universities promote their MLitt courses they highlight the names of the handful of ex-students who have ‘made it’ since taking the course – they do not mention the hundreds of students who never get published. If someone wants to take a course to hone the craft of writing, learn about and try different genres, enjoy the buzz of being with like-minded peers then I’d say go for it. If someone thinks signing up for a Masters in Creative Writing means publication is just around the corner I’d encourage them to think again.

You obviously have a deep knowledge of life in a troubled country. Was it difficult for you to find a literary slant in your novel No More Mulberries and narrative non-fiction Drunk Chicken and Burnt Macaroni?

  • It took a wee while to find my voice. I started by writing non-fiction, wanting to introduce readers to the people of Afghanistan but when it was being returned by publishers and agents they all said there wasn’t enough of ‘me’ in it. I didn’t want the book to be about me – it was to be about Afghan women and their families – and didn’t really understand I wasn’t being told to write about my role in Afghanistan but to find a way to let readers feel they were on the same journey as the narrator.  I was writing as an objective reporter rather than as someone very much involved in the lives of the people about whom I was writing.

What message are you trying to convey to your readers in your works?

  • no_more_mulberries e In both the novel No More Mulberries and the non-fiction Drunk Chickens and Burnt Macaroni: Real Stories of Afghan Women I am trying to provide readers with a different view of life in Afghanistan, especially for women, than the one portrayed by the media. We are told – on television, in newspapers and in many novels – Afghanistan is one of the worst countries in the world to be a girl because of the lack of education; enforced marriage at a very young age – and given the impression Afghan husbands are brutal wife beaters. I am not trying to say life is just fine for Afghan women. It’s tough – there are husbands who beat their wives, just as there are here – a lack of health resources mean a very high infant mortality rate, working in the fields is hard, hard work but it isn’t right to give such a one-sided picture.  My friend’s daughter won a scholarship to study in India where she graduated with a degree in electrical engineering and, back in Kabul, now works for the leading telecommunications company in the country – and is about to embark on a Masters programme. She has not been married off. Her father was not some rich warlord but worked as a driver then an office administrator. In the novel I also try to show the men, too, especially those who want to be more liberal have a huge weight of cultural baggage to shed. Dr Iqbal was ostracised as a child because he had leprosy. Returning to his village as a doctor with a foreign wife gives him status again but his behaviour and attitudes are constantly under scrutiny by the villagers to ensure he doesn’t step out of line. Could be anywhere in rural Scotland, really – except for the leprosy!

Does poetry help to hone your skills as a writer?

  •  Well, you may not think so when reading the answers to your questions but writing poetry does lead to writing with greater precision and conciseness – both skills required in journalism.

What other subjects interest you enough to write a book about them?

  •  I’d quite like to write a book tracing the parallel lives of two women born on the same day – one in rural Scotland and one in Afghanistan. Obviously the circumstances of their lives would be very different but I’m interested in highlighting the similarities in their outlook on life.

Do you have a work in progress at the moment?

  • My current project is a biography of a woman who became an engineer in the 1920s and was Scotland’s only car manufacturer. She was a real pioneer in many ways – taking part in trial driving and competing against men, establishing a hugely successful laundry business – yet few people have heard of her today so I’d like to tell her remarkable story.

For more information on Mary check out:

Her website: http://www.marysmith.co.uk

Buy her books on Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mary-Smith/e/B001KCD4P0

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Bill Kirton

ABERDEEN-based Bill Kirton is more than just an author. His books have been widely published to high acclaim and read by fans across the world. His novels, in particular his award-winning Jack Carston crime series, explore some of the darker sides of life in technically perfect narrative which reveals a remarkable insight into the strengths and fragilities of the human mind. He is an author who lends his time and support in helping other authors and his advice is constructive, non-judgmental and always sincere.

1.    Who do you think you are, Bill Kirton?

ImageI can think of a variety of answers for that one. The obvious one would be ‘Yes’. Then, perhaps, ‘What’s it to you?’ or, if in pretentious mood, ‘One never IS anything, one is always BECOMING something’. Or perhaps, ‘It doesn’t matter who I think I am, other people will form their opinions and I’ll be stuck with whatever labels they choose to apply’. So, shall I compare me to a summer’s day? No probably not. I’m a bloke who writes stuff.

 2.    What would you say to me if I introduced you as a crime writer?

I’d sigh and reluctantly accept the label (see above) because most of my novels have at least an element of crime in them and, naturally enough, readers like to know what they’re buying into. Before I started doing novels, I used to write radio and stage plays and none of them was about crime. My interest really is in people and why they do what they do. Motives are interesting, so I suppose crime provides an extreme context for investigating behaviour. I’m not moaning about it, but it can be inhibiting. So OK, I’m a crime writer but, mainly, I’m a writer.

3.    Speaking of criminal minds, some of your killers are particularly dark with very violent psychopathic predisposition, how do you get into their minds and see the world from their eyes?

You see, that’s interesting. I don’t agree with that at all. I just did a quick check and, in the 6 novels which are crime fiction, there are eight deaths, only three of which are murders. The only psychopath/sociopath I can think of is the policeman in The Sparrow Conundrum but the mayhem, violence and killings there are all so far over the top that I hope it’s clear the effect is intended to be comic. The main character in The Darkness does some horrible things (including a premeditated murder) but readers have said that they understand and sympathise, even empathise, with him. He’s definitely not a psychopath, and that’s what I wanted to achieve. I wanted to follow the thought processes of a normal ‘good’ person who contemplated and did these things.
The late Elmore Leonard said of the bad guys in his books ‘I don’t think of them as bad guys. I just think of them as normal people who get up in the morning and wonder what they’re going to have for breakfast. And they sneeze and they wonder if they should call their mother and then they rob a bank’. I think it’s much more chilling to set crime in a really ordinary context.
I admit that some of my characters are quite unpleasant people and, to answer your question more directly, I’d say that, when I find myself having to be inside their heads, I just discard my own normal restraints and let the worst aspects of me loose. I make them behave in ways I find detestable, and yet I’m the one who’s thinking up their behaviour. Weird, isn’t it?

4.    And the protagonist of your crime novels, Jack Carston, has faced many psychological demons as part of his day job. In what way has this affected him across the series?

ImageA lot. I’m not sure whether it’s obvious to readers but it is to me. I think his problem is that he, too, is interested in people and motives rather than all the CSI stuff. He’s also appalled and saddened by how some people behave. In the first couple of books, he’s doing his job (well) and getting the results. Then there’s The Darkness and it starts him thinking of the sort of things he himself might be capable of. And once he starts on that road, the whole notion of good and evil which is supposed to be at the core of crime fiction is called into question. I think the scene which confronts him near the end of The Darkness has stayed with him through the next two books. The actions of university professors in one and queer-bashing oil workers in the other confirm that morality is a flexible, unreliable concept. I suspect that the next one I write about him will be the last in the series and he’ll really break the mould of the traditional police procedural cop.

5.    How much about yourself have you learned from your characters?
Wow, these are hard questions. Well, I can’t dodge the fact that I’ve put a lot of my own reactions into Carston but the interesting thing there is that, when I see and hear him doing and saying things, I can see that sometimes he’s being childish or hasty or unnecessarily sharp with someone, and I think it’s made me more likely to check myself in equivalent situations. Maybe the steam he lets off from time to time is mine.
8579526More interesting is that, especially in The Figurehead,  I’ve had to spend a lot of time inside the heads of female characters. It’s not for me to say whether the results are convincing but I was certainly aware of making myself think differently. It’s hard to explain but I’ve always thought and said that we’re all people. And yet there’s no dodging the fact that the male/female inequalities are still stark and gross in so many areas. Strangely, though, when I was writing sequences such as the scenes between Helen and Jessie, I felt a greater sense of strength, honesty and even security in how they were behaving and responding to things. These were women operating in an even more stifling social context and yet they were survivors, they put up with the injustices and rose above them. It seems men always have something to prove – Helen and Jessie didn’t.

6.    Stage and radio plays, songs and sketches, flash fiction, short stories, novels, stories for children and books on effective academic essays and dissertations: your author’s repertoire is vast. How easy is it for you to switch between writing styles?

Whichever way I answer this, I’m on a hiding to nothing. If I say it’s easy, I sound boastful; if I say it’s hard, I’m a whinger and should try to do some real work for a change (see above, under ‘labels’). To be honest, though, it’s never struck me as difficult. If my four-year-old granddaughter’s on my knee wanting a story, I’m hardly going to start with ‘A long time ago, on the pavement outside a café on the Boulevard St-Germain, Jean-Paul Sartre examined the states of being and nothingness’, am I? Equally, a postgraduate student opening one of my non-fiction books wouldn’t be very impressed if it started ‘Once upon a time, down in Dingly Dell, there lived a fairy called Stanley Henderson’.
Wait a minute, though, that suggests that I write with a particular audience in mind, which isn’t true. I’ve never thought of it before but now you’ve made me do so, I realise that, even before you’ve started putting words on paper or the screen, you’ve already settled into a mindset and opened an inner dictionary of terms and a stylistic mode that are appropriate to it. When I’m writing a crime novel, for example, the Dingly Dell words are still there, but behind a closed door.

7.    Would you consider your sense of humour comical or cynical?

This is like a therapy session. I bet you’re going to slap a bill on me when I’ve finished. First, I think humour is essential. There are obviously some contexts in which it doesn’t work but ninety-odd percent of the time, it fits and it’s necessary. I admit to being cynical but it’s more of a resigned cynicism than the caustic, bitter attitude the word suggests. The world and everything about it is absurd. It’s great to be alive, though, and absurdity doesn’t generate despair, it’s a source of laughter. Look at the characters in Samuel Beckett’s works – all in desperate circumstances but being presented to us in ways that make us laugh – not all the time, but a lot of it. The real cynicism is when self-important (and self-deluding) politicians pontificate about what ‘the people’ want and simultaneously take the piss out of those ‘people’ by mouthing platitudes which are insults to their intelligence. They’ll definitely go to hell.
So what’s my answer? Well, first I want people to laugh so the aim is to be comical. If the laughter makes them think, too, that’s a bonus but it’s just an add-on. It’s the laughter that counts.

 8.    In what way does your lifestyle affect the subjects you write about?

I’m not sure I have a ‘lifestyle’. I mean, I’ve become a comfortable middle-class git who can indulge himself in more or less anything that takes his fancy. I’m not rich but I’m definitely not poor. I’m never involved in anything dramatic so using incidents from my own days would only result in my books just crawling into the top five million on Amazon. In fact, the truth probably is that my lifestyle is my writing. It’s what I spend every day doing, either writing commercial stuff for money or books and stories. Maybe I use the books to live an alternative life, getting into situations and having conversations that’ll never happen to me in reality. I’ll be doing more socialising than usual in the next couple of months but that’s because I’m giving some talks and doing some workshops so, again, it’s about writing. I obviously need to get a life.

9. You are a published author but your more recent works are successfully self-published. What advice would you give to anyone who wants to publish their own works?

Do it. Definitely do it but, but, but…
… respect the tools you’re using. Don’t send it off until you’re absolutely certain that it’s as good as you can make it. And yes, that means grammar and spelling as well as narrative arcs, POV, and all those other things that creative writing tutors are at such pains to stress. Get other people to read it critically and give you their honest opinions. Best of all, have it edited professionally. It’ll cost you, but it’s money well spent. The old ‘Vanity Publishing’ label has vanished but in some quarters there’s still a feeling that self-published material is, by definition, rubbish. Please don’t do anything that gives ammunition to those who make such claims. There’s plenty of evidence that self-published books and those produced by independent publishers are at least as good as traditionally published ones. Equally, though, it’s so easy to self-publish nowadays that you could pick words at random from crisp and cereal packets, newspapers, gas bills, whatever, then put them in any sequence you like, call it ‘Forbidden Sex in the Jungles of East Anglia’ and get it listed on Amazon. Sadly, the title would even get you a few sales. Being a writer is more than putting words one after another.

10. What’s next in the Bill Kirton book list?

10899620I’ve had three projects on the go for ages. One is a sequel to The Sparrow Conundrum of which I’ve written a couple of chapters so far. Another is the final Carston. I know what it’ll be about and I know how it’ll end, but I haven’t yet done the necessary research or written anything down. I’ve decided to concentrate instead on the sequel to The Figurehead and that’s proving very interesting for me because Helen is going to get involved in her father’s business, John has an unusual commission to carve a figurehead and there’s a troupe of actors arriving in Aberdeen to perform nautical melodramas. At the same time, John and Helen ended The Figurehead with what I described as ‘a lovers’ kiss’ and here we are, twelve months later, so what have they been up to in the meantime and where will their love go from here? So that’s all interesting stuff for me to be investigating. The only problem is that (see my answer to question two above) I also have to have a crime in it somewhere, and that’s the bit that’s proving tricky because I’m much more interested in all the rest.
I also quite like the idea of trying a different genre, maybe a comic sci-fi, but it’ll only happen if it happens.
Can I go now? Am I cured?

Sorry, Bill, one psychoanalytical session does not a sane man make but thanks for sharing your thoughts with us.

Find out more about Bill and his works at:

Bill’s website: http://www.bill-kirton.co.uk

On Goodreads at http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1100307.Bill_Kirton

Or visit his Amazon author page: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bill-Kirton/e/B00D918C2K

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Publish and be damned

BalloonsI EVENTUALLY managed to sort the ePub problem by copying and pasting the offending chapter into a web editor and cleaning out the rogue formatting. It worked and Smashwords sent me a mail congratulating me for publishing my book so successfully. Unfortunately, the version failed to update to qualify for their premium service and got stuck in the process.

A really helpful bloke called Bryan eventually managed to sort out the problems and now the book is available in all e-formats on their site.

I wish there was a Bryan on Create Space and FeedARead as he would have averted the extra cost of £35 and £29, for another set of proofs and unwarranted revision respectively.

One lives and one learns.

The Ivy Moon website is being built this week. There was a bit of delay as my web builder was snowed under with school news. I have made a temporary site for my personal author’s website at http://www.spbain.wix.com/sarabain which I will link to http://www.sarabain.co.uk when I get a chance. I will then get the whole thing rebuilt because I don’t like unrelated ads on my site.

For personal reasons, all this effort pales into insignificance against the fact that my book can now be pre-ordered on the Waterstone’s website. I see the lips curling in incomprehension, but that’s a feat I thought I would never achieve.

Over the past few days, I’ve been promoting the book which is gradually dripping into the raging tidal wave of newly published novels. Goodreads is like manna from heaven and I highly recommend it to any authors who are drowning under the effort to promote their works.

With the benefit of experience and hindsight behind me, I have every intention of supporting authors by hosting guest blogs, interviews and reviews on the Ivy Moon website. We are currently writing a page into the site where authors – and that’s any author (whose works do not commit a crime nor offend public decency) – may upload some blurb, cover artwork (thumbnail) and link to their new work of fiction.

I hope that the site will grow into a place where authors and publishers can feel free to promote their works and target readers at the same time. I also hope that, over time, Ivy Moon will become a free and valuable reference for all authors. This is a dream for the not-too-distant future and one I believe can be realised without much effort.

In the meantime, I am sorting out a wash of reviews, interviews and guest blogs in order to get the book paddling on the surface of that wave at least. It will take time, but I’m determined to get there.

I am now ordering a small print run for a physical book launch and to give away to members of the press for review. I hate the spotlight but it has to be done.