Tag Archives: Writing process

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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My new detective – Biddie O’Sullivan

Posted on by under Crime writing, Life and stuff, Mac Maguire, Writing process

As a writer, I try to make plans but I’ve learned that, sometimes, such plans can very quickly go out of the window. I was halfway through Mac Maguire’s fourteenth adventure, A Murdered Crow, when a new idea hit me pretty much out of the blue. It was all Mac’s fault really as I had him reviewing some crime novels as part of his investigation into a murder and, in order to give him some clues, I had to invent a couple of authors and their fictional detectives. One of these fictional characters was called Detective Inspector Biddie O’Sullivan who works out of Cork City, Ireland. As I say, Biddie was invented just to help Mac’s plot along but, somehow, she stuck in my head.

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Writing about what you don’t know

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

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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The recipe for a good murder mystery…

Posted on by under Crime writing, Mac Maguire, Writing process

I’ve been reading one of Miguel Barclay’s cook books and I really like the simplicity of his recipes. The book is based on the notion that you can eat well for just one pound ($1.20) a portion but, besides the fact that they taste good and are nutritious, the real appeal for me is that all the meals are quite quick to cook. To explain, I used to love cooking and found it to be something of an antidote to the stress that had built up during a long working day and commute. I didn’t even mind if the recipe was complicated, it just gave me more time to unwind.

That was great when I had the energy or spoons to do it but now I’m finding that, by the time I’ve cooked the meal, I might not have enough energy left to enjoy it. So, Miguel, with his quick recipes, has helped to restore my love of cooking by allowing me to spend less energy in the kitchen thus allowing me to enjoy the eating part too. I was looking at one of his recipes yesterday and I started wondering what would be a good recipe for a crime story. This is my take on that…

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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 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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On being 72 and what I’ve learned…

Posted on by under Life and stuff
birthday cake with lit candles

Psalms 90:10 – ‘The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.’

Well, at least I’ve made it past the three score and ten but I am always conscious that I might ‘fly away’ any day. This got me thinking about what wisdom I might have gleaned over the years. This is probably not going to be the longest post that I’ve ever written as I’m not sure how much I’ve really learned. But here we go anyway –

Todays headlines are tomorrow’s fish and chip wrappers

To explain to non-UK readers, when I was young and I went to my local fish and chip shop, I would order several meals for my extended family and, while these would be individually wrapped in fresh white paper, the whole order would then be consolidated and wrapped in several sheets of old newspapers. It’s an old saying that means that whatever you might think is important or sensational right now, it will soon be just old news relegated to wrapping fish suppers.

Lesson learned is that whatever you might find that’s upsetting or worrying right now is unlikely to last very long. Everything changes, sometimes for the worse and sometimes for the better, but nothing ever stays the same. Life is like roller coaster so buckle up and enjoy the ride.

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‘Mac’s Christmas Present’ – Just published!

Posted on by under Christmas and New Year, Crime writing, Mac Maguire

I will be the first to admit that this has been a very difficult year. It has been a year when I have struggled to get into any kind of flow with my writing. Until very recently that is. I am so grateful that, at last, I will be able to publish something in 2022. Not only a book but a Christmas book too.

I have been trying for the last few years to write a Mac Maguire novel set at Christmas but, however hard I tried, nothing came to me. So, it is in something like wonder that, very late in the day, the plotlines for Mac’s Christmas Present popped into my head.

Like my third book, The Weeping Women, it features two cases. However, at around 40k words, it’s somewhat shorter than most of my books so I will be selling it at a reduced price.

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I want to write my first crime novel but how and where to start?

Posted on by under Crime writing, Disability

I was asked this question by someone recently and I gave them an honest answer.

‘I’ve no idea,’ I replied.

I got quite a puzzled look when I said this as I had just told the person who had asked the question that I had published twelve crime books so far. I had to explain further. What I meant by this was that, if there was a right or easy way to write your first book, I certainly hadn’t found it. If my journey in writing could be compared to a drive say, from New York City to Washington DC, some two hundred miles or more, then my journey would have taken in Washington State some three thousand miles away. Nothing about the route I took towards publishing my first book, The Body in the Boot, was straightforward. Let me explain…

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