Category Archives: Self publishing

The ups and downs of self-publishing

Posted on by under Crime writing, Self publishing, Writing process

So, you’ve written your book, had it read and done the rewrites. At long last it’s time to push the ‘Publish’ button on the Amazon KDP site. So, what happens now? A huge booming silence usually. You next have to kick start your book sales by doing some marketing. I won’t go too deeply into this as what might be effective for your book might not be effective for mine and vice versa. All I’ll say is that you will need to advertise in some form so it’s important that you do your research and choose the options that best suit your book and the demographic that you’re aiming at.

Okay so your marketing is now working and you’re looking at your KDP book sales and ‘pages read’ to see what happens. Your book sales go up – Yippie! Then they go down again. Then up, down and all over the place. What’s happening? If you expected to be able to fine tune your marketing strategies by looking at your book sales, I’d forget it.

Let me explain.

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Don’t rush to publish – create a process and stick to it

Posted on by under Crime writing, Self publishing, Writing process

This is some advice that I wished had been given to me when I was publishing my first book The Body in the Boot. The big problem was that, now that I had a completed book burning a hole in my hand, I desperately wanted to get it out there as quickly as possible. And so I did. However, since that time, I have had to re-edit and republish the book several times in order to get it anywhere near to a reasonable standard. However, I was lucky in that most of my readers forgave me for the typos, poor editing and formatting saying that they liked the story. However, more than a few also pointed out its shortcomings which, although it stung a little at the time, in the end proved to be immensely helpful.

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Writing about what you don’t know

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Writing about what you know is probably good advice for any writer. However, if you’re writing a series, sooner or later you are going to have to try something new. This happened to me by book six, Two Dogs. Part of this book, by necessity, had to be set in Paris so I was somewhat taken out of my comfort zone. In subsequent books, The Chancer and The Eight Bench Walk, I take the reader to the North-West of Ireland and then to Cyprus. I can’t say how well I’ve achieved this, as only the reader can judge that, but I’ve certainly had no adverse reviews as yet regarding the locations of my books.

Getting facts about a location wrong can seriously annoy your readers so let’s see what resources you can use to ensure that this doesn’t happen.

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Do it yourself book covers – Part 4 – Ebooks and paperbacks

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Once upon a time, books were precious objects and meant only for people who could afford them. They were mostly leatherbound and often with tooled gold leaf such as this first edition of Dicken’s classic Christmas novel. Books like these were put on display and were as much a status object as having fine paintings or furniture. Even more, perhaps, as it implied that their owners were of a sensitive and literate disposition.

Although a sort of dust jacket was in use as early as the 1820’s, it was a century later that they became ubiquitous. Publishers also found it cheaper to produce ornate dust jackets than ornate tooling and binding and so the book cover was born. Now, books became a display item in shops and visual information about the book was immediately available to a purchaser.

Paperbacks were being produced in the 1840’s in Germany so they are hardly a new idea. However, they took off in the 1940’s with Allan Lane’s Penguin books. These tended to be mostly reprints of existing titles but in the 1950’s the paperback revolution really kicked off with original titles being published en masse for the first time. These were books that just about everyone could afford and original genre fiction such as romance, science fiction, westerns and, of course, crime became wildly popular.

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Do it yourself book covers – Part 3 – Using images

Posted on by under Crime writing, Self publishing, Writing process
herat is a lonely hunter cover

While there are some book covers that don’t use images like the one on the left, I’d guess that these are in the minority. However, in this case, the stylised 3D font used in the title is a sort of image anyway. So, the first question you might want to ask is, does my book cover actually need an image? If the answer is yes then read on.

If you search in Amazon books for a particular genre and scroll down the covers then you will see that the huge majority of book covers use an image. If the search is for crime novels then you will also see that many of the covers are quite similar; dark colours with a solitary figure usually in silhouette. Of course, the plus point of this is that this is useful visual shorthand for telling the reader what genre they’re looking at. While I’ve read that putting a human figure on a cover sells books, I’ve never actually found any hard evidence to support this. There’s a lot of information out there about what makes the best cover and a lot of it is quite contradictory. So what’s the best course to take?

I’ve honestly got no idea. Anything I say in these posts is just my take but, for me, my covers are an integral part of the book. While I obviously want people to read my books, none of them have been written with commercial considerations in mind. I’ve just tried to write the stories that come to me as best I can. I feel the same about my covers. I don’t want a gloomy cover with a solitary figure unless that’s what I feel the story needs. If you look at my covers, you can see that they’re all quite different but, hopefully, they all reflect something of the story inside. I’ll use three examples to illustrate this.

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Do it yourself book covers – Part Two – How to compile your cover

Posted on by under Crime writing, Self publishing, Writing process

You might wonder at the word ‘compile’ being used in this context. After all, it means ‘ to collect information in order to produce a list or a book‘ or, indeed, a crossword. However, I think that it’s quite appropriate as every book cover can be viewed as something of a puzzle.

Firstly, I’d like to demystify the art of producing book covers a little. Many writers think that this involves some dark technical arts and skill sets that they could never achieve. They are wrong on both counts. When I worked at the BBC, I was for the most part embedded in web design teams. These teams would be self-contained and have all the skills required to produce a state of the art website, in this case BBC Sounds. The team was comprised of coders and designers but also others who looked at the structure of the website and who were responsible for turning audience data into better websites.

The designers I worked with fascinated me. For all the high tech available, they most often selected the simplest techniques to get where they wanted to go. Pencil sketches and sticky notes for the most part and only towards the end, when the designs needed to be formalised, did they start using software. Even then, it would sometimes be relatively simple software. I learned that not all designers are experts at Photo Shop and the like.

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Do it yourself book covers – Part One – Introduction

Posted on by under Crime writing, Self publishing, Writing process

When I published my first book, I was lucky in that I knew someone who was a talented graphic designer. I gave him a brief and he came back to me with some wonderful images. This worked fine until the designer was no longer available and I was faced with a dilemma. Get a new designer or do it myself. I opted for the latter.

You might think that this was a bit presumptuous of me, after all I’m a writer not a designer. However, I had worked at the BBC for nearly fifteen years with some of the best designers around and a fair bit of it was bound to rub off on me. So, every cover since book nine – The Tiger’s Back – has been done by me. It’s not up to me to judge my own work but I get my readers, who sanity check my books before publication, to also comment on the covers. So far, so good.

But it’s a lot of work and what do I really get out of it?

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I want to self-publish but where do I start?

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My advice to new authors is to always give the traditional route a chance before turning to self-publishing. However, it’s my feeling that self-publishing may be the only option for many writers. I read an academic paper last year, one of the first to look at authors from a Black, Asian or other minority background. One of my major takeaways was around the barriers that exist for authors from all minorities. There is a practice that exists within most publishing houses called ‘comping’ where submitted books are compared against previously published works to get an idea of how commercially viable they might be. So, what’s the problem?

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If you’re self-publishing then who are your most important readers?

Posted on by under Crime writing, Self publishing, Writing process

The answer isn’t complicated, it’s those people who you ask to read your book before you publish it. I’ve touched on this subject a few times in my posts so why write about it now?

My latest book, A Concrete Case of Murder, took quite a while to write. Too long for my liking. Writing is never an easy process but, due to a confluence of adverse circumstances, writing became impossible for some months. Since retiring, I have been publishing two books every year, however, A Concrete Case of Murder took over eighteen months to complete. Having a series of ten books already published, most of which were well-received, I found myself getting a little paranoid about this latest one. I think that my paranoia was mostly triggered by an offhand remark someone made which was something to the effect of, ‘If it was hard to write it will probably be hard to read’. It was not a comment I appreciated all that much.

And so, the seeds of doubt were sown. All I could do was carry on writing and then trust to my readers.

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Self-publishing – some positives and negatives

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KDP logoI started categorising my blog posts when I restyled my website and I was surprised that I had only blogged once about self-publishing. So, here is blog post number two. In talking to other authors, I realised that quite a few of them have only tried the traditional route because they are either still unaware of what self-publishing can do or find the whole process a bit opaque or even scary.

You need to be aware that when I say ‘self-publishing’ I mean Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing or KDP. KDP is basically the only game in town. It will publish your book in virtually every major market but you have to play by their rules. I talk more about this below. So, if you’re having problems with finding a traditional publisher, you should definitely read on. Continue reading →