 Do you know what a datapoint is and why it is important to authors? No, neither did we until a few weeks ago. But knowing about them may explain why some social media advertising is less than effective. Essentially a datapoint is one tiny bit of data that an algorithm can use to connect it to another datapoint. Think about it the way you would think about a pattern matching game such as “Mahjong” (the computer game, not the ancient Chinese tabletop game). If you find tile A in Mahjong and then find a second copy of tile A, you click on the two of them and you remove them from the puzzle, at the same time as winning points.  Every time you do something on social media, you create datapoints which the platform then uses to direct advertising towards you. You are creating multiple sets of Mahjong tiles which the algorithm will use to match the same tiles that advertisers have used. Every time you “like” a post; every time you comment on a post; every time you share a post, you create a datapoint for the platform to work with. Even the words you use in your posts and comments become datapoints. For example, a friend posts an image of a donut they are about to eat. If you “like” the post, you tell the website’s algorithm you that you like donuts. If you comment on the image, you create more datapoints related to donuts.  It should, therefore, come as no surprise if you start to see advertisements for donut brands or donut shops on your timeline shortly afterwards, because the algorithm now knows that you have an interest in donuts, and it can make money for the platform by targeting you with donut related adverts. The reality may be that you “liked” the post because you like the friend, not the donut (you may actually hate donuts), but the algorithm doesn’t know that. It has made up its mind that you like donuts so that is that. Knowing this can help you when you use social media for advertising, because the platform wants to know which users to send your advert to so that they see it. Because when they see it they may click on it and then the platform can charge you for that click.  So sending the ad to the right people is not only important for you, it is important for the platform. So, this is something you need to know about if you want to use social media efficiently for advertising. For example, if you pay for an ad on Facebook, its advertising algorithm goes looking for the right people to whom it should show your ad. It could show it to everyone on the platform, but that isn’t efficient because not everyone will interact with your ad, so it won’t earn Facebook any money. First it scans all the content in your ad (the image, the text, the link etc) and converts it into data points. Then it goes looking for users to match your ad up with. To extend the Mahjong analogy, if your ad is tile A, the algorithm looks for users who also have tile A. How does it know? Your book is the equivalent to the donut we used in our analogy. If your ad includes references to fantasy, the algorithm goes looking for users who have fantasy related datapoints recorded against them.  But the algorithm won’t send the ad to people who have “romance” in their datapoints. We will use Facebook (Meta) as an example, but all the social media advertising algorithms work the same way. Your ad for your book works like the ad for the donut brand or donut shop. It looks for people who (a) like books, (b) like books in your genre and (c) anyone who has ever interacted with posts that use any of the words in your ad and who therefore might be interested in your book. Point C in the para above is the most important if you advertise on social media, because it can make the difference between your ad being seen by the right readers and it not being seen at all. But success breeds success for the algorithm. When it finds a user who clicks on the link in your ad, it then uses that user's other datapoints to find more users like them. It "learns" from its successes to improve its targeting of users. Typically, authors use the blurb for their books as the primary text for their social media ads. That’s fine, it makes sense to do that. However, it can also cause problems. A good blurb will be between 250 and 350 words long. Take out all the common words: prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, adjectives, adverbs etc which are useless as datapoints (because they are so common) and you are probably left with less than 100 datapoints (proper nouns, nouns and verbs mainly).which can be used to connect your ad to the right audience.  Let’s say you write fantasy or sci-fi and you use a lot of made up names for characters and locations in your books. Now let’s say that you use some of your made up words in your blurb, which forms the text for your ads. They are useless as datapoints because they won’t appear as datapoints that Facebook users have reacted to in the past. They have never heard of the land (or planet) of Gigariga and so Facebook’s algorithm won’t be able to find any datapoints that relate to Gigariga. Which means that using your blurb may have reduced your potential number of datapoints from around 100 to a much smaller number, which means that Facebook will show the ad to fewer people. It may even show the ad to the wrong people, the ones who would never think of buying your book. The lesson to be taken from this, therefore, is the same one that applies to using Keywords on Amazon. Make sure you use the right datapoints. This may mean re-writing your blurb.  If your book is a fantasy, then you have to use that word and as many synonyms for it as possible in order to maximise the number of fantasy readers who will see your ad.
The same applies to other datapoints, such as action, adventure, mystery, challenge and thousands more words that you might use. You don’t want to be too general in your wording, so that your ad is shown to readers who never read fantasy, but at the same time your datapoints mustn’t be so narrow (like using your made up words) that Facebook can’t find anyone to which it can show your ad. Just copying and pasting your blurb into your Facebook ad may seem to be quick and easy, but it may also be sabotaging your efforts and causing you to waste money. So, think about those datapoints and make sure they are present in your advertising copy. That is what professional copywriters do every day; which is why their advertising works. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.
0 Comments
 You would think that a box set of 9 full length sci-fi novels, each story 80k+ words in length, priced at £9.99 ($9.99 if you are in the USA) would be flying off the shelf. But it wasn’t. We were wondering why, so we got the team together in Selfishgenie House (a Zoom call made from my living room, to be truthful) and had a bit of a brainstorming session on the subject. Along the way we started to discuss the psychology of purchasing and how it might be working against us. The box set is priced at £9.99, which we think is a bargain. But for the reader that may not appear so. Perhaps they are thinking “If I read the first story and don’t like it, I’ve wasted 8/9ths of my £9.99”.  Why would they think that? Because, at some point, they have bought a box set and that has happened to them, so they don’t want to risk doing it again. We know that books at much lower prices than the box set don’t sell because readers don’t want to take a risk on an author that isn’t well known. So the possibility must exist that people don’t want to risk their money paying more for a box set they may not like. The author of The Magi series is quite well known and has a strong following for a different series. The problem is that the other series isn’t sci-fi, so most sci-fi readers probably don’t know about him and his books. So, as problem solvers, what could we do about this barrier to sales for a box set that should be flying off the shelves but isn’t?  We knew that Kindle Countdown deals had worked for the author’s other series. We had sold the first book of the series at 99p and then got lots of follow-on sales for the rest of the series at the normal price. Would that also work for the sci-fi box set? We decided that maybe we should put book 1 of the sci-fi series on a Kindle Countdown deal for 99p (99c USA) and then promote the hell out of it. But then one of our team pointed out that wouldn’t work unless the reader also knew that they could get the box set for a bargain price. So, how could we get that message across? If we tried to make it part of the advertising copy, it would be far too cumbersome, something along the lines of “Get a sci-fi book for 99p and then, if you like it, buy the whole series for £9.99.” It hardly rolls off the tongue, does it?  But there was something we could do. We could strike while the iron is hot. If someone has just read a book they liked, then the time to sell them the next book in the series is right then, immediately after they have read the words “The End”, because they are probably wanting more of the same. So, it should also work if we do the same thing for the box set. Which is what we decided to do. We edited the manuscript for the ebook of the first book in the series and added this bit immediately after the “The End”. “An Kohli* says, “If you have enjoyed ‘The Magi’, the first book in the Magi series, you can read books 2 to 9 for the bargain price of $9.99 (USA) or £9.99 (UK) with ‘The Magi Box Set’.” Find out more here.” * An Kohli is the name of the main character in the book. We then uploaded the new manuscript to KDP, set the dates for the Kindle Countdown deal and waited to see what happened. Did it work? We are delighted to say that it did.  The 99p book flew off the shelf, though we did pay quite a lot for advertising over the period of the Kindle Countdown deal. But then the box set started to sell as readers bought into the whole series. That was enough to pay back the advertising costs and then reap the rewards. But that wasn’t all. We started to get KENP reads for the box set too, off the back of the same advertising campaign. OK, we don’t earn as much from KENP reads, but money is money! Would the same tactic work for your series box set? We see no reason why not.  Authors are often reluctant to discount their books because they see it as devaluing their brand. Fair enough. If that’s the way you think, then it’s your privilege – but how are your sales looking from on top of your high horse? Some authors have a better reason for not discounting their books, which is that if someone buys the book at the cheaper price, they aren’t going to buy another copy at full price.  But this approach is different, because it uses a sprat to catch a mackerel as we say over here (or my mother used to say, to be more accurate). Even if you haven’t got a box set to sell, but do have more books in the series, the same principle works, though you do have to sell more individual books to recoup your advertising costs. There are other factors that come into play when using this approach. First of all, the surge in 99p sales pushes your book up the Amazon sales rankings. “The Magi” jumped from around 500,000 in the Amazon rankings to 18,000 literally overnight. Its category rankings were even better, at 117, 129 and 196.  Many readers only buy books that other people are reading, so the book appearing to be popular, by being well up the sales rankings, is a definite selling point. The book also starts to appear in a very important list on Amazon, the "also bought" list: “People who bought (insert title of another author’s book) also bought (insert title of your book)”. That list (usually shown in a carousel format) influences some readers, again because they like to read what other people are reading. They feel reassured by other people’s reading choices. And, finally, even though the book only cost the reader 99p, some of them will still review it, so you can gain a few extra reviews for your book which should, if it’s a good review, encourage more people to buy, probably at full price if the Kindle Countdown deal has ended.  And you can do the same thing every 3 months, because that is how often you can run Kindle Countdown deals.
Paying for advertising for a book that only costs 99p appears to be a taking a big chance and we would agree that there is a risk there. But with risk comes reward. People who never take risks never achieve anything and that includes not achieving best-seller status. We can’t promise you that your series or box set will start to fly off the shelf. All we can tell you is that after taking this approach, we had a considerable increase in the sale of our box set. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.  We very rarely recommend products on this blog, so when we do you can be sure of two things. (1) We haven’t been paid to make the recommendation and (2) the product we are recommending has been of some tangible benefit to us.  This is the case with “Meta Ads Mastery for Authors”, a training course provided by Matthew J Holmes. To prove that it works, later in the blog we have posted a graphic showing the increase in Amazon sales we experienced over a 90 day period, for just one of the series of books we publish. Now for our upfront warning. This isn’t a “magic bullet”. It is not going to turn you into a bestselling author overnight. It will take time to learn the strategy and to refine it to make it work for your books. It will also involve some financial risk taking. Most importantly, it can’t turn a bad book into a bestseller (nothing can do that). BUT, if you stick with it, you will get results and those results are going to repay your investment.  Now, fair warning, for Indie authors adopting this strategy - it requires strong nerves. The financial outlay is far higher than we have had to make when we have tried out other marketing tools. It is also quite time consuming both in terms of working through the training materials and then trying out the lessons learnt. But as the old saying goes “You have to speculate to accumulate” and speculation, by its very nature, is risky and not for the faint hearted. However, we wouldn’t be recommending this product if the lessons it teaches didn’t work and here is the proof. We paid for the product on 2nd March 2024 and started to implement the early lessons on 4th March. The graphic below shows results for first 5 months of the year. The red arrow on the graphic shows where we started to use this new strategy (sorry we’ve redacted the actual royalties and sales data, but that is commercially sensitive information). In terms of orders, you can see a dip in month 2 of our experimental period. That is because the orders for month 1 were skewed by a 99p promotion that ran for 7 days. When the orders for that are discounted, the peak for month 1 is much lower, so the overall upward trend is more visible..  To assess whether our ad campaigns were successful or not we have used a calculation called “Return On Advertising Spend” (ROAS) which Matthew teaches in his course.  Essentially, this is the amount of royalties we received divided by the amount of money we spent on advertising, which gives us a number. If the number is greater than 1, our ads earned us more money than they cost. If they are less than 1, they cost us more than we made. We have included some of the cost of purchasing Matthew’s course in the ROAS calculation, as that is part of our costs. We decided to allow 12 months to recoup the cost, so we allotted 3 months’ worth of recovery to the ROAS calculation. Our ROAS for the 90 day period was 1.2 which means we made £1.20 in royalties for every £1 we spent on advertising. While that may not sound every exciting, when you scale that up to the hundreds or even thousands of pounds, the profit actually starts to look very impressive.  We also saw a considerable increase in KENP reads (KundleUnlimited (KU) downloads) during the same period, taking us from around 30% of total income to over 50% of the total. That means our ads reached a lot of KU subscribers. The book we were advertising is Book 1 of a series. We saw an up-tick in the numbers of sales we were getting for Books 2 to 9 during our 90 day experimental period, but some downstream sales won’t appear for several weeks yet, so we have to take them into consideration, but we haven’t factored them into our ROAS calculation because we don’t want to count our chickens before they are hatched.  An unexpected bonus during this period was for increased sales of the audiobooks for the series, of which there are 3 so far. During the 3 month testing period, sales surged to exceed the total for the financial year 22/23 and 23/24/ They now make up 40% of the lifetime total for the 3 books. While the sales link took the Facebook users to Amazon, it appears that listeners to audiobooks saw the ads and went looking for the audiobooks on their preferred sites. But there is no doubt that there is a large financial risk to using this strategy and that risk may not be acceptable for some authors, even though we are able to demonstrate through our own experience that the risk is reasonably low. Which is fair enough. It’s your money so it is you that is taking the risk. But we took the risk so you didn’t have to (you’re welcome).. Matthew does explain that you can spend less each day on your advertising, but that means it will take longer to achieve meaningful results. At the end of the day, it is up to you how much risk you are prepared to take in order to benefit from the sort of rewards that we have shown in our graphic. If that hasn’t convinced you that the product is worth the investment, then nothing will, so thank you for reading this far and we’ll see you next week for our next blog. For those that are still making up their minds, please read on for the rest of the product review.  What the course teaches you. The first thing you are taught is that an ad can’t sell your book. Your book has to sell your book. In other words, a Facebook Ad may get a click that takes a reader to Amazon (or wherever you sell your books), but if all isn’t right with your product page then the click won’t convert to a sale. Matthew recommends running your trial ads on a book that is already selling, so that you can be reasonably confident that your product page is OK, thus removing any confusing “noise” (my word). So, if your book isn’t currently making any sales, despite all your marketing efforts, look at the cover, the blurb, the free sample and the reviews. The barrier to sales is probably one of those 4 things (or maybe all 4). Fix that before you do anything else.  Whether you are new to Facebook Ads or not, the course aims to teach you a new strategy for using the platform for advertising, some of which may go against what you have been taught in the past. It provides tools and techniques both to improve your audience targeting, so you get more bangs for your advertising buck and also identifies better ways of creating ads so that they are more appealing to Facebook’s users. It also takes you into parts of the Meta platform that you may not have entered before, so there is a lot to be learnt.  One of the expressions Matthew uses is “stop the scroll” (which we blogged about in April). In other words, create ads that stop people from scrolling past them, which is the first battle to win for any advertising campaign on any platform. If your “creative” (the combined image, headline and text) doesn’t stop people scrolling, you won’t sell any books. Matthew recommends you run your trials over a 90 day period. This allows you enough time to create a variety of different ads to learn from them, to find out which techniques work best for your book(s), what sort of images work best, what sort of text etc. And those things will vary from genre to genre (its why we are only writing this review now, when we bought the product in March). That doesn’t mean you have to wait 90 days to see any results (as we have shown), only that you will start to get the best results after you have been learning for around 90 days. From experience, however, we suggest that by the time you get to the end of the first 30 days you will be earning enough to finance your experimentation during days 31 to 90.  One of the things the course focuses on is relating your ad “creative” to your sales so that you can learn from your ad’s performance. Facebook is very good at spending your money. They will show your ad to as many people as possible in order to get as many clicks as they can so they can spend your budget. However, not every ad you post is going to perform equally in terms of clicks. Some ads will get you more clicks than others and it is important that you know which are working hardest for you. You will want to “scale” a good performing ad (ie spend more money on it) so it sells you even more books and you will want to turn off poor performing ads so you don’t waste money on them. All of that is discussed during the course. In addition, you will want to identify the type of creative that is getting you the best results so that you can create similar ads and try them out. Image A may look good to you, but image B may get you more clicks because the people who see it like it better. The same applies to text and headlines. Finding out this sort of thing is gold dust in advertising terms. The course talks a lot about how you analyse your data so that you can both scale the ads that work and to identify the sorts of creative that works best for your genre. Different genres attract different readers who are attracted by different creative styles. For some people this will seem scary. For some people, data is something that someone else analyses and the thought of analysing their own data may scare the pants off them. However, listen to what is being said, because there are valuable lessons to be learnt. You may not have either the time nor the inclination to try everything that is taught, but the more you try, the more you learn about your ads and the better you can become at creating and running them. While the course may generate sales wherever you sell your book, it works best with Amazon. That is because using something called “Amazon Attribution” (taught as part of the course) you can track sales generated from your FB ads directly. That means you get the clearest indication of which ads are working and which aren’t. That isn’t possible for other publishing platforms or from your personal website. You can track how many clicks you get that take people to other platforms, but you can’t track how many of those clicks are converted to sales. While you may get sales, you won’t know if they are ”organic” or if they have originated with FB ads. That isn’t a problem with the course, it is a problem with the way sales can be tracked on those other platforms.  As we have said, the strategy works, which is why we have given it a very rare (for us) 5 star rating. Investing the time to learn it is going to benefit your book sales and it really does deliver improved sales. If it didn’t, I wouldn’t have expended so many words on telling you about the product.
Overall, we here at Selfishgenie Publishing are pleased to recommend “Meta Ads Mastery for Authors” and you can find out more about the product here. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so. The views expressed in this review are those of the reviewer and not necessarily those of Selfishgenie Publishing. The author of the review was provided with a free copy of the book.   “But One Life” by Samantha Wilcoxson, is one of those books that has the potential to be significant but doesn’t allow itself to be. There is nothing wrong with the writing as such, but the effect after reading it is “meh”.
The book tells the story of Nathan Hale, who was executed by the British in 1776 for spying during the early days of the American War of Independence. It follows his progress from the time he starts college at Yale through to his demise 7 years later. The story is told through Hale’s own eyes. For those that have never heard of Nathan Hale, it is he who is alleged to have given us the quote “I regret I have but one life to give for my country”, from which the book’s title is taken. Had it not been for his execution Hale would probably have lived and died as an obscure schoolteacher. The fact that he is remembered is probably more to do with America needing a hero in early days of the War of Independence and Hale dying conveniently at the right time. The book is probably best described as a dramatized biography, in as much as it is based on the known facts about Hale’s life but imagines most of the conversations and many of the meetings in which the character participates. This, for me, is the source of its problems as a book. It simply isn’t dramatic enough. Not once during my reading of it was my pulse rate raised or my jaw made to drop. Indeed, on more than one occasion, I’m sorry to say that I fell asleep while reading it. Two thirds of the book is taken up with the progress of Hale through college and at the start of his teaching career. This is an important part of his life because it is when he would have encountered the ideas that gave him his revolutionary zeal. However, I saw nothing that told me how Hale became so inspired, so passionate, about the cause of American Independence that he was prepared to give his life for it. Most of the narrative was taken up with the mundanities of college life and life as a small town schoolteacher. As such it wasn’t very enthralling. We are told that Hale was an active participant in the Linonian Society, a debating club at Yale, which is where he would have encountered many of the ideas underpinning the revolutionary movement in the American Colonies. But we weren’t exposed to any of those ideas ourselves. I felt no passion for the cause that Hale would embrace because I wasn’t shown how Hale became passionate about it. The nature of the debates were so mundane that had they been on TV, I would have changed channels. While the iniquities of the British Crown were mentioned frequently, I wasn’t shown how those iniquities were converted to a desire to be free of them that could, and eventually would, lead to war. Later, when Hale decides to join the militia, it felt as though he was doing it more for companionship than out of any desire to rid his country of British rule. This is important because we are told it caused an irreparable rift between him and the object of his affections, Betsey Adams. The lack of emotional turmoil in making that decision resulted in it feeling bland. The decision should have been tearing Hale apart, but I felt none of his anguish. It is this lack of visible emotions on the part of Hale that makes the whole story so flat and uninteresting. If I can’t feel his emotions, how am I supposed to engage with them? This theme extends into the story of Hale’s active participation in the War of Independence. We are told of two actions in which he participated that are described in such an unexciting manner that the story of a journey to buy milk sounds more interesting by comparison. This was war. War is a terrifying experience. Hale could die a horrible death at any moment. But it sounded less exciting than Hale’s earlier story of smashing the dining room windows at Yale during a drunken evening out with friends. The finale of the story, Hale’s betrayal and execution as a spy, which is all that made him famous, is told with an equal lack of emotional trauma. The scene depicting his betrayal was undramatic to say the least, but what followed was even less so. A man about to die would be living in terror of what was to come. But Hale seems mainly concerned about how his family would take the news. Once again the scene is narrated with a flatness that evokes no sympathy or emotional response. We don’t even get a suitably evil depiction of the British soldiers who carried out the execution. The story that is told is, at best, one of a likeable and competent teacher and at worst an incompetent spy who is lionised for his failure. In a war that took the life of thousands of young American men the fact that his name lives on while theirs are forgotten is a puzzle to me and this book does nothing to unravel that puzzle. But I have awarded three stars, so there must be something positive to say about this book. That is that it is impeccably researched. I have no doubt about the accuracy of the detail surrounding the historical events that are described. But, sadly, historical accuracy is not enough to make a story exciting enough to want to read it. To find out more about “But One Life” by Samantha Wilcoxon, click here. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so. Disclaimer: The views expressed by our guest blogger are not necessarily those of Selfishgenie Publishing. Given some of the subject matter, we have decided not to follow our usual practice of illustrating this blog, except for images that can already be found on this website.  I had better set a few expectations before I really get into this blog. First of all, I won’t be trying to justify myself in any way. Secondly, I realise that my life choices aren’t necessarily mainstream and I’m not, for one moment, suggesting that anyone else should follow my path. Finally, I’m really only going to talk about my books and how they came to be written. If you have already read my first book, “Naughty Girl”, then you will know my story. If you haven’t, then the potted version of it is: normal childhood, met a bloke, got let down by him, had to make a living in the ‘oldest profession’ (to use a euphemism) and then covid curtailed my ability to make money and so I wrote my book in order to try to make a few extra pounds. Nothing remarkable there, apart from the way I made my living, but I’m very far from being the only person, male or female, to take that route. You would be surprised at how many ‘respectable’ people have done it. One of them may even be your next door neighbour and you wouldn’t know it unless (a) they told you, (b) your paths had crossed in a professional capacity or (c) there had been a scandal and their name was revealed. "If they didn’t exist, I would have died of starvation back in the 1970s." B is a particularly interesting reason for knowing. There is a lot of hypocrisy around and many of the people who engage me for my professional services may be your partner or neighbour, a relative or a friend and again you wouldn’t know it, for very much the same reasons. If they didn’t exist, I would have died of starvation back in the 1970s. One in ten men say they have paid for sex. Those are the ones who admit it, therefore the real figure is probably far higher. For all you know, one of them may be the one you married or are in a relationship with. And we’re not just talking about sex with women, of course. And it isn’t just men; 1 in a 100 women have paid for sex too. OK, it is far fewer, but it is still a lot of women. Statistically speaking, there is probably someone reading this blog right now thinking “I had better not let my spouse/partner/boyfriend/girlfriend read this”. So, I had better start answering some of the questions that get emailed to me (via my publisher) about my books, because that is what I’m supposed to be doing in this blog. Not questions about my profession, I hasten to add. The answers to those FAQs are in “Naughty Girl.” "The next most frequent question is whether the stories I tell in Naughty Girl are true." The most frequent question I get asked is if I’m a real person. The answer is yes, but I would say that even if I wasn’t because if I wasn’t, the person who created me would say that. So, believe me or don’t believe me, it makes no difference to me. But I am really real. Arabella Aristo is a pen name, of course. The next most frequent question is whether the stories I tell in Naughty Girl are true. Yes, they are. In fact, those are the stories I considered to be believable. There are far more I could have written but decided they just wouldn’t be believed. It is one of the cases where the truth is stranger than fiction. Question three in terms of popularity is whether I would ever consider naming names for cash. That one usually comes from people who want to make money from my revelations, whether by writing for the press or from blackmail. The answer is a resounding NO. The one thing my clients have to know is that they can trust me to be discreet. I require the same from them, of course. I have no desire to have my photo splashed across the Sunday papers, upsetting my grandchildren. Believe me when I say that the amounts of money offered are large enough to be tempting, but I have never given in to that temptation. Nor would I. I will take my secrets to my (environmentally friendly) grave. "After four decades of my lifestyle, I felt that my story should be heard." Question 4 is about what motivated me to write my story in the first place. If you have read Naughty Girl then you will know that I’m not exactly poor. But I do have bills to pay, and savings don’t last forever. So, the income from my books keeps the wolf from the door without having to rob my piggy bank. But it was more than that. After four decades of my lifestyle, I felt that my story should be heard. Some may take it as a warning to be careful about who they fall in love with. Others may take it as an object lesson regarding how important a good education is. Other people may read something else into it. That is the wonder of books – they mean different things to different people. "Many women in my profession are well educated." All are true, of course. But my chosen partner was a good man when I met him. Circumstances changed that. Nobody can know how things will change when the circumstances change and most of my regrets are only the result of hindsight, because we don’t have crystal balls to give us foresight. As for the education thing, I can tell you that many women in my profession are well educated. I know of some who paid for their education (and are free of student debt) because of the profession. Some of them discovered that the profession paid far better than the one they studied for. And some suffered shortfalls in cash flow (as I did) that forced them to choose between eating or having sex with strangers. "There is a big difference between hypothetical hunger and the reality of not knowing where your next meal is coming from" And before any reader says “I would rather starve”, just wait until that is a realistic prospect before you leap to judgement because there is a big difference between hypothetical hunger and the reality of not knowing where your next meal is coming from. But of course, those circumstances only cover my first book. What about books 2 and 3?  Book 2, “Stalker” was inspired because I have known ladies in my profession who have been in great danger in their lives. Let’s face facts, it is no secret that there are predatory men out there and we working girls make an easy target. Peter Sutcliffe is proof of that, but we can go back to Jack the Ripper if you want to. I’m sure there have been others, but I can’t be bothered to do the research right now. So, taking a few stories from friends and putting them together in a crime thriller seemed like a natural progression once the writing juices had started to flow. They say “write what you know” and I certainly know the sex trade. That accounts for Book 3 as well. “Three In A Bed” is a collection of three short stories that, again, were inspired by stories from friends. Although not all the characters are “naughty girls”, their stories are based on real life events even if I have exaggerated the consequences.  Finally, I am always asked if I have any regrets about my choice of career.
Regrets would be the wrong word, I think. I would rather my husband’s business hadn’t gone bust and risked us losing our home. But those were circumstances beyond my control. It wasn’t a decision I had within my power to make, so I can’t regret it. OK, do I regret marrying him? No, not one bit, because before that he was the nicest, sweetest man. I loved him and I believe that he loved me. Circumstances changed him and they changed me too. Would I have rather had a “normal” job? Of course I would. But back then it was much harder to get one that paid a woman enough money to pay a mortgage. Even today I think many women with my educational background wouldn’t be able to make ends meet. In fact, I know a lot of women who are struggling in that way and are at their wits end. So, I have no regrets about making the decisions I did. “Needs must when the Devil drives.” As the old saying goes. Thank you for reading this and for not judging me (though you probably did). To find out more about Arabella Aristo’s books, see our “Books” page. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so. |
AuthorThis blog is compiled and curated by the Selfishgenie publishing team. Archives
November 2024
|
RSS Feed
Copyright Selfishgenie Publishing 2023
Web Hosting by iPage