 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.
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 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.  Once again we turn to Facebook for the inspiration for our blog and one of the perennially reoccurring questions on which writers ask advice. “Is it Ok for me to quote song lyrics/use images in my book?” Yes, this is about the laws of copyright, and they are an essential for self-published authors to understand if they want to stay out of the law courts. Unfortunately, instead of Googling the answer, these writers ask other writers, not all of whom have a good grasp of the law as it relates to copyright. First of all, I must give a legal warning of my own, which is that the copyright laws vary from country to country. The major differences are in the duration of copyright after the death of the copyright owner, so it is well worth Googling the law as it relates to your own country. What I discuss here relates to the law as it is applied in the UK and EU. What is consistent between countries is that there is a general agreement that each country will uphold the copyright law as it is applied in the country where the work was first copyrighted. So, if you are in the UK and you publish something that is copyright protected in the USA, then British courts will uphold the USA copyright law if the USA copyright owner asks them to. Copyright law exists to protect the creators of original work (which, of course, includes you and me). The work can come in many forms, written, musical, graphic or photographic, digital or physical and the laws are constantly being updated to keep up with modern technology. But first, let’s deal with a misunderstanding.  Fair Use In copyright law there is a term called “fair use” which allows extracts from copyright material to be used without permission under certain circumstances. Unfortunately, some people interpret “fair use” to mean they can just copy stuff and get away with it. As you may guess by the fact that I have mentioned it, this is not the case. “Fair use” means that under certain tightly defined circumstances, someone can quote or use copyright materials without permission. Those circumstances are: 1. In the context of a review. 2. As part of teaching materials. 3. In academic papers. So, if you aren’t writing a review, you aren’t teaching people and you aren’t writing an academic paper, you can’t use “fair use” as an excuse for using copyright work. For example, in this blog space we also publish reviews of books and always include the book’s cover image. That would be classed as “fair use” because it is being used to illustrate a review of the book. Even if you are doing one of the 3 things detailed above, the amount of copyright material you can use is limited to that which is absolutely essential to make the point. So, you might be able to quote a single line of a song, but not a whole verse. In the event of a prosecution, the defendant (you) would have to prove that the amount of material used was the bare minimum essential to get across your point. So, that’s “fair use” in a nutshell.  If you want to use copyright material under any other circumstances you have to have the copyright owner’s permission and that usually amounts to paying for a licence to use it. Licences aren't cheap, which is why people are always trying to find ways of avoiding their purchase. We just bought one from a museum's image archive to use on a cover and it cost us £162 ($202). And there is a limit in the licence to the number of copies of the book we can sell before we have to pay more. And the maximum number is different for the ebook, the paperback and the hardback versions. If you think that is expensive, if it nothing like the total you would have to pay in damages and legal fees if you were sued for breach of copyright. But hey - it's your money. Copyright doesn’t last forever, so when it expires it is permissible to quote from works, use images etc that were previously subject to copyright. That means that when the originator of the work has died, it may be permissible to use their work. BUT They have got to have been dead for a certain amount of time.  "Age does not weary them." Just because a song was written or a photograph was taken a long time ago, it doesn’t mean it is out of copyright now. Let’s say someone writes a song when they are 20 and they die when they are 90. That’s 70 years. There is then a period when their estate owns the copyright for their work. In the UK and EU that is 70 years, but it may be longer or shorter in other countries. So, in that example there is a total copyright period of 140 years. That means that if the song was written 139 years ago is still in copyright. To put a year on that, it is 1885. But a song written in 1884 is either out of copyright now or it will be later this year, Yes, that’s right. A song written in 1885 may still be in copyright if the writer lived long enough. And the same applies to images, which is why companies such as Getty Images are still able to charge you to use every old photographs, such as those taken during World War I. And just for good measure, in co-authored work it is the date of the last co-author or co-creator to die that counts. John Lennon has been dead for over 40 years, but the songs he co-wrote with Paul McCartney won’t be out of copyright until 70 years after Paul McCartney’s death and he is still very much alive (at time of writing).  But what about using images? The same basic rules apply. Does that mean you could include an image of the Mona Lisa in your book? No. Yes, we know Leonardo Da Vinci has been dead since 1519, which is a lot more than 70 years, but that isn’t the point in this case. You wouldn’t be using the actual Mona Lisa, because that is a physical object, and you can’t put a physical object in either an ebook or a paperback. You would be using an image of the painting, and that image will be subject to copyright. The copyright owner would either be the Louvre museum or the photographer who took the image, depending on the arrangement between the museum and the photographer. The only certain way to get a copyright free image of the Mona Lisa is to go to Paris and take your own photo (you can’t use a flash or “selfie sticks” – I checked). Basically, if you didn't take the image, you probably have to pay someone if you want to use it. Which is where we come to “Free to use” images. If you do a Google search using that term you will come across a lot of sites that offer free images, but they have a hidden trap.  In most cases that “free to use” phrase means free to use for personal use, not for commercial use. To use the image commercially you have to buy a licence (the same often applies to “free to use” music). So, it is essential to check the licensing terms, which will be available somewhere on the site, before you download the image and use it. “Personal use” usually means you can use it to hang on your wall at home, for a personal post on social media or, perhaps, to illustrate a blog. It does NOT mean you can use it: 1. within a book, 2. as part of the cover of a book, 3. as part of an ad campaign, 4. as part of a book promotion on social media, 5. on a banner or a flyer at a book fair.  Items 3 – 5 in that list may be puzzling you, so I had better explain. If you are trying to sell something you are engaging in a commercial activity, so the use of the image is “commercial”, not personal, and usually requires a licence. This has caught out a lot of authors because they didn’t realise that. That list is not exhaustive, by the way. There may be other activities that are classed as commercial. There is a site called “Creative Commons” where you can search for “free to use” media but do check their terms and conditions to understand how you may use it.  Who owns copyright after death? That varies from case to case. Copyright is part of a person’s estate, so the original copyright owner usually assigns it in their Will and if they die without leaving a Will it will pass to their next of kin, just like any other asset. If the beneficiary of the Will (or the NoK) then dies, the same thing happens. As can be imagined, it isn’t always easy to track down the legacy copyright owner after someone has died. This is why authors often set up trust funds while they are alive, so that the fund manages their copyright after death. Others sell the copyright for their work to specialist companies, so they benefit from the work while they are still alive and able to enjoy the wealth. Photographers often sell the right to make money from their work to companies such as Getty Images (but the photographer still owns the copyright). An iconic photograph that appears on the front pages of newspapers around the world may be worth a lot of money to the photographer as those sorts of images are often reproduced to illustrate media articles. FYI – Getty Images and similar companies always charge a lot of money if you use one of their images without a licence (a lot more than the cost of an actual licence), because the alternative is a lawsuit, which you would lose, and which would be even more expensive. So, if you don’t want to pay for a licence, don’t take the risk of using the image!  Public Domain Once the copyright on a piece of work has expired, it becomes “public domain”. That means anyone can publish it and make money from it. For example, if you want to take the complete works of Shakespeare and publish them, you can. However, you can’t claim them as your own work. That is plagiarism. They are still Shakespear’s work, and his name would still have to appear on the cover. Even though Shakespeare has been dead for over 400 years, so he can’t sue you for plagiarism, you would lose all credibility as an author if you were to claim his work as your own. You would certainly never get a publishing contract with any reputable publisher. If you quote or use public domain work, it is normal to credit it to its original creator, even in works of fiction.  What about AI? When it comes to AI generated work, whether text or images, it may be subject to copyright (or it may not). It is such new technology (in relative terms) it hasn’t yet been tested in court, but there are lawsuits in progress. Only humans can own a copyright. So, images created by AI can’t be made copyright by the owner of an AI software company. However, the images used to train the AI may be subject to copyright and that is where the real trap lies. Getty Images did open a lawsuit which alleged breach of copyright for using images that were subject to licencing agreements, to train an AI generator. By inference, they claimed that their licences were being circumvented by the use of AI to make subtle alterations. At the very least the Terms and Conditions of the AI generating platform need to be adhered to in order to avoid legal complications, because agreeing to those Ts & Cs constitutes a legally binding contract. In many cases the Ts & Cs limit the use of AI generated material to “personal”, which we have already covered under “free to use” images. It must be assumed that the use of AI writing software to produce books may also fall foul of the platform’s Ts & Cs if the user then publishes the finished work. However, there are also law suits in progress where authors are suing a well known AI platform for using their work, without permission, to train their AI platform, which is similar to the Getty Images case. The ramifications of such a legal case will have an effect on the users of AI to produce books because they may be infringing the copyright of other authors. We shall have to wait and see. Quite literally, the jury is still out on this. Just as an FYI, a book produced using AI is not copyrightable, because the author isn't human. So have some fun at the expense of cheating "authors" who use AI to produce books and re-publish them, just like the complete works of Shakespeare.  So, what we would like you to take away from this blog is:
1. “Fair use” may not mean what you think it means. 2. Don’t use copyright material without the copyright owner’s permission. 3. Just because someone is dead, it doesn’t mean you can use their work without permission. 4. If using “free to use” images, check the Ts & Cs because you probably need a licence to use the images commercially. 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.  Marketing books is an all year round task, as any successful Indie author can tell you. However, there are times of the year when doing a little bit of extra marketing pays off. The obvious times are Black Friday, Cyber Monday and during the whole of December. Books make a great Christmas gift, so putting some extra effort (and maybe more money) into your marketing at that time is a ‘no brainer’. But what about other times of the year. Well, we believe that there are many ‘red letter days’ for authors, when they can increase their sales if they promote their books on those days. Looking through the calendar there isn’t a month goes by that doesn’t offer some marketing opportunities, depending on which genre you write in. Take February, for example – it’s the month of romance, so a good time for romance authors to put a little bit of extra oomph into their sales. What days fall in which months varies from country to country. Even “world” days aren’t observed everywhere. But this blog tries to identify some of the days that appear in the calendar during each month so that you can see where your books may sell a few extra copies. There seems to be a day for just about everything, so we’ve selected the ones that we think may be important for authors. However, we provide a link to a calendar of all the “days” at the end of the blog, just in case we missed any.   New year, new beginnings. Diet books, health and fitness books, self improvement books and books about giving up bad habits should all do well. 2nd – an unofficial day of celebration for sci-fi fans, chosen because it is the birthday of Isaac Asimov. Get promoting your sci-fi books. 4th – World Braille Day – but it could also be a good day to promote audiobooks 20th – Martin Luther King Day. Writers of black history or fiction get your promotions ready. Also World Religion Day – a good day to sell religious themed books. 24th - International day of education – a text book day for promotions 27th – Holocaust Memorial Day – Jewish and Holocaust themed books.  Half term holidays fall later this month, so children’s authors get to work selling your books so the kiddies have something to read while they are off school. Black History Month, so if you write about black history and culture, this is the time to promote your books. 4th – World Cancer Day. Is your book about living with, or surviving, cancer? This is the day to promote it. 7th – Charles Dickens Day – a good day for promoting stories set in the Victorian era. 12th – Darwin Day – love him or hate him, it’s time to promote those books for or against evolution. 14th - Valentines Day of course. – so shout out those romances. Also International book giving day. Time to remind people your book is the ideal one to give. 17th - Random Acts of Kindness Day – tie your free book giveaway to this day and send a few coupons for free copies to random social media followers. 27th – Pokemon Day – but books about gaming in general may do well.  Women’s History Month, so time to promote your history books or historical fiction that features women. Mother’s Day also fall this month in the UK and Ireland, so a good time to promote books as a present for mums. Depending on the lunar cycle, Easter may also fall this month, so Christian literature should do well. 4th – World Obesity Day – another chance to plug those diet and exercise books. It’s also the start of British Pie Week … coincidence? We don’t think so. 8th – International Women’s Day. See above. 17th - St Patrick’s Day. Get your Irish themed books in front of your readers. 19th – International Read To Me Day. I hope I don’t have to explain this. 20th - Alien Abduction Day. Conspiracy theories and sci-fi 21st – World Poetry Day. Come on poets, show the world what you’ve got.  Again, depending on the lunar cycle, Easter may fall in April. 1st – April Fools Day, so get those joke books out and tell a few crackers. 2nd – International Children’s Book Day. Like International Book Day – but for kids. 7th – World Health Day – get those lifestyle and wellness books noticed. 23rd – World Book Day. Schools go big on this so children’s books could do well. But it is also a good time to remind adults about the undoubted benefits of reading a book.  Elsewhere around the world, it’s Mothers’ Day in May, so giving a gift for mum (or mom) might be a good idea. In the UK half term falls at the end of this month so the kids are going to need more books to keep them occupied. 2nd – International Harry Potter Day. Why not cash in with your children’s and YA fantasy books? 4th – Star Wars Day. May the force be with your sci-fi books. 5th – World Laughter Day. Time to promote your humorous books. 12th – National Limerick Day. There was a young author from Devizes, who forgot he had to advertises. OK, maybe not my thing.  Father’s Day falls this month so time to promote books that dads might love. With the better weather (maybe) here, it’s a good time to promote books about outdoor activities, such as BBQs and golf. 6th – D-Day Anniversary. 2024 marks the 80th anniversary. World War II themed books should do well. 8th - Global Wellness Day. 21st - International Yoga Day. Don’t tie yourself in knots while you promote your fitness and yoga books. 23rd – National Writing Day. Tell people what great fun it is to be a writer, at the same time as you promote your books. 27th - Micro-, Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises Day. We’d never heard of this one, but what a great day to sell your books on business management.  In the northern hemisphere, most schools break up for the summer vacations this month and that’s when the holiday season starts for many people. If your book makes ideal reading while lounging by the swimming pool, for either adults or children, now is the time to start promoting it. 4th – Independence Day, USA. American history obviously, but you can tie in so many books to this day if you think about it hard enough.  Keep the holiday themed book promotions going. 9th – National Book Lovers Day. The publishing industry has worked hard to find us so many days in the year for book promotions, so don’t let them down. 14th – National Financial Awareness Day. A good day for promoting books about financial management, budgeting etc. 16th – Tell A Joke Day. But people need jokes to tell, so promote your joke books.  The northern hemisphere holiday season is drawing to a close and the kids go back to school. But now is the time when all those grandparents who have been on child minding duties take their holidays. So, keep promoting that holiday reading. 6th – Read A Book day. Need I say more? 8th - World literacy day. 13th – Roald Dahl Day. Piggy back your Children's books onto this. 19th – Talk Like A Pirate Day. Well, all those fake pirates are going to need some inspiration, aren’t they? 22nd – Hobbit Day. Get those fantasy books out there.  A big opportunity for horror writers to get their books noticed as Halloween falls at the end of the month. 2nd – Random Acts Of Poetry Day. Poets, commit some random acts of book promotion. 3rd - National Poetry Day. Same as the one in April, but this is for Brits mainly. 4th – World Space Week. The time to promote all things sci-fi. 21st – Trafalgar Day. One for the naval historians and naval fiction writers. 30th – Samain. Like Halloween, but very special for witchcraft.  Black Friday Falls on the last Friday of November and Cyber Monday follows at the start of the following week. Yes, we know it is all commercial hype - but they do sell books! 1st – Native American heritage Month For writers of books about Native Americans.  Christmas is one of the biggest times for book buying so if you don’t promote your work at any other time, promote it this month.
But don’t forget that a lot of people are given book tokens or gift vouchers for Christmas and your book is the ideal thing on which to spend them. For many people the gap between Christmas and New Year is a holiday, so they’re going to need books to read too. And so we end our year of “days”. I’ve selected the ones I think will work for authors, but to find the full list of dates for all the things that are marked, celebrated, remembered or noted, 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.  Advertising is advertising, right? You pay for an ad and they all do the same job. No. Different platforms have different purposes, which means that users use them differently. A reader may be a reader on Amazon, but on Facebook they aren’t a reader at all. While they are on Facebook they are social media users, which means their head is in a different space. That means that you have to approach advertising on different platforms in different ways. To use the big word, you have to adopt a different strategy depending on where you are advertising. Even generic terms such as “social media” aren’t that helpful, because different social media platforms require different approaches to how you use them for advertising. Let’s start with the big differences between Amazon and social media, when it comes to advertising.  If someone is on Amazon it means they are there to buy something. That means the sale is half way to being made because there is no reluctance to spend money. The main barrier you have to cross is the one that makes the reader buy your book instead of someone else’s. On social media people are there for different reasons. Some want to keep in touch with friends and family, what is happening in their local area, they are communicating with people about hobbies, memories, work etc or they are just filling in time watching funny cat videos until they decide to do something else. They aren’t there to buy anything (there is one exception to that, which I’ll cover later), That means you have a large barrier to cross before you even start to tell them about your book.  You have to get them out of their “social” mindset into a “buying” mindset. Or, at the very least, a “tell me a little bit more” mindset. That isn’t easy to do. Which means your adverts have to be pitched in a different way. To go back to the big word used earlier, you have to adopt a different strategy. So, let’s talk about Amazon advertising strategy first as it is actually the best place to advertise. Why? For the reason I gave up above. Its users already want to buy something.  Amazon is a search driven selling platform. While Amazon may suggest things for people to buy, based on their previous purchases (Amazon is still trying to sell me Lego based on a single purchase made 5 years ago) most users have some idea what they want to buy and they go looking for it, using Amazon’s search bar. They may have a very specific idea of what they want, such as “romance involving pirates and buried treasure”, but some have less specific needs and input single or double search words such as “fantasy” or “cozy mystery”. They may even be looking for books by a favourite author, so they just enter their name in the search bar. Which means you have to adopt a strategy that allows the readers to find your books based on searches such as that. And when it comes to author name searches, just because they are looking for the latest Lee Childs book, it doesn't mean they won't buy your book at the same time if you can catch their eye. There are three parts of your book’s description that you can use to help readers to find it. The subtitle, the blurb and the 7 keywords that you put in the book’s metadata* (if you publish using KDP). Using the right words for the genre of book helps your book to show up when you run what Amazon calls an “automated category ad”.  That is the simplest form of ad to set up on Amazon, as they do most of the work for you. But it is also the least efficient because it relies on you and your readers thinking the same way and your readers selecting the keywords that you thought of when you set up your metadata (which probably didn't include author names) A more targeted strategy is to set up ads that use lots of keywords, so that you go beyond the 7 that KDP allows you (you may not even use KDP as your publishing platform). This is where tools such as Publisher Rocket come in handy, because that analyses Amazon’s sales data to see what search words were used to sell a book. So, if your book is similar, you can use the same keywords so that searches show your books to readers in the search results. But even if you don’t have Publisher Rocket, you can still generate lists of keywords because a lot of them are author names and their book titles. You can generate random search terms and see which ones produce results for books similar to yours. You can also search for books like yours and use the names of the authors and their titles as keywords in your ads. FYI, incognito browsing is best for this so that you aren’t shown books like the ones you usually read. You should be looking for about 150 -200 keywords for each ad you run.  Now to social media strategy. You can use keywords for that too – they call them hashtags – but the first barrier you have to cross is shifting people from their “social” mindset to “reader and buyer” mindset, which is no simple trick. We are so used to ignoring ads on social media nowadays that unless we see something really eye catching we just scroll past it. We posted a blog a couple of weeks back which was about “stopping the scroll” (see our archive for April 2024) and that is what we are talking about here. But different social media platforms attract different audiences, and those audiences are looking for different things, That means that the advertiser has to adopt different strategies on different platforms if they want to stop the scroll. If you want to advertise to younger readers you need to be on TikTok and that is very much a music and video based platform. If you can combine the two effectively then you have a chance that your ad will be seen,  But it is also a platform where people talk, so a talking video advert could work too. People like to see other real people on TikTok so if you are a person and you put yourself in front of the camera and start talking, you are probably going to be seen. Obviously, that isn’t going to suit everyone. Some people run away screaming when a camera is pointed at them. If that is you then fine, but it doesn’t mean you can’t use TikTok. You just have to use your creativity in a way that allows you to get your message across in a visually appealing way without you having to show your face on camera. Instagram and Pinterest go together in some ways, as they both rely heavily on images, but just putting an image of your book cover on them isn’t the best idea. The image has to be more than that. It has to stop people in their tracks and get them to say “Wow, I wonder what that is about?”. The image doesn’t even have to feature your book cover. It just has to appeal to people who like reading your genre of books.  Pinterest is a particularly good place to advertise because about 50% of users do go on it looking for ideas for things to buy, which is way more than any of the other social media platforms. It is also a good place to go if you are targeting women readers because they use it for buying more than men. X (Twitter as was) is a bit of a bear garden and I’m not sure it even counts as “social media” anymore as many of the people who use it are far from sociable. But it must sell stuff or businesses wouldn’t use it for advertising. We don’t use it for that, because we aren’t sure that it’s the right advertising channel for us. We do, however, use it as a social media platform and we promote our books on it, but we don’t pay for advertising. Finally ,we have Facebook. We use Facebook for advertising almost as much as we use Amazon Ads and it does work, once you have developed the right advertising strategy.  Research has shown that it is the image that stops the scroll. Then the user reads the headline (the words immediately under the image) and then they read the primary text (the main body of the ad). So, you have to “stop the scroll” with the image, hook the reader with the headline and then sell them the book with the primary text. If they like what they have read, they’ll click the link. They may not click the link just because they like the image, so the three things have to work together. That gives you 3 variables and you may have to try different combinations to find the one that is a winner. Without that Facebook will end up spending a lot of your money and you won’t get much in return. If you want to use your book’s blurb as the primary text, you may need to develop different versions of it to appeal to different readers.  The lack of research into what readers find appealing may be why some authors find it difficult to get Facebook Ads to work for them, because they try just one combination of image, headline and primary text and when it doesn’t sell them any books, they give up. We have proven this for ourselves, using 3 different images but with the same headline and primary text. One image always shows up as being more effective than the other two. We then reduce the spend on the less effective ads and increase it on the more effective one. Facebook even has technology (called Digital Creative Testing (DCT)) to help you find combinations that work. You can upload several different images, several different headlines and several different primary texts and Facebook will run ads using the various combinations. You then analyse the results and decide which ones are winners and which are costing you more than they make back.  Finally, you have the book promotion sites (Bookbub, BooksGoSocial, WrittenWordMedia et al) which, for a price, will send out promos for your books to their social media followers and email lists.
They have rules of their own about what you can and can’t do when using them and they vary too much for us to cover them here. But the same basic idea of developing a strategy that suits the platform applies to them, in just the same way as it applies to Amazon and to social media. So, our key message for this blog is to think about where you are going to advertise, think about why people are using that platform, then develop a strategy that will appeal to that sort of user. Don’t just assume that an ad is just an ad, because it isn’t. * Metadata in book publishing terms means the combination of book title, subtitle, genre, blurb and any keywords you are able to enter. They are critical when you are trying to get your book to show up in search results. 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. For this week's blog we are pleased to turn our page over to one of our authors, Chris Graham, for his take on what makes a good novel. Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog post are those of the blog's author and are not necessarily those of Selfishgenie Publishing.  Your kind of book… What is it that makes a novel your kind of book? Is it the ‘main man’ (or woman), whether it’s a villain or one of the good guys, or is it the settings and the whole ambience of the book? Do you like the mystery aspect of the plot? Are the ‘whys’ and the ‘whos’ more important than the ‘hows’, or do you want every drop of spilled blood to splash off the page or dribble from your Kindle into your lap? (Editor's comment: Gross Chris, tone it down a bit!) Do you like to hear every crunch of bone as our bad guy brings down his cudgel, or as the hero breaks the villain’s jaw with a well-placed uppercut?  On the other hand… Maybe you’re not into ‘derring do’ or the crime fighting. Maybe it’s the interaction between the characters that floats your boat: something that I assume is the attraction of romance fiction, or even erotica, but which can be just as prevalent in crime writing. Do you like every nuance of the characters’ feelings to be clarified? Or perhaps you prefer to work it out for yourself, or even be surprised when two characters end up in bed, or even walking up the aisle? When they do get it together, should every glistening bead of sweat or running teardrop of happiness or remorse be turning the page to a soggy mess? Should every pant of passion be spelled out in breath by breath detail till the lovers can hold it no longer? On the other hand, their feelings may take a different turn, and they begin to disagree about everything, or even start taking swings or kicking the crap out of each other.  Variety is the spice of life… or death. As well as writing, I read too, both for my own pleasure and when proofreading other authors’ work, and it’s fascinating to see how different writers go about their craft. This is for my own interest as a reader as well as from a comparative perspective, to aid my own writing. Yes, I suppose it could lead to plagiarism, but we writers prefer to call it ‘influence’. Everyone from Shakespeare and before, through to Barbara Cartland and her legions of imitators, has done it. Whether they knew it or not. It’s interesting, being a crime writer myself, to note the different types of protagonists in crime fiction. There are the lucky sleuths, often living in tiny communities, who regularly get a nice juicy crime dropped right into their laps. These can be local police officers, like Tom (and John) Barnaby of Midsomer fame, or they can be amateurs like Agatha Christie’s aged spinster, Miss Jane Marple, and Chesterton’s meddlesome priest, Father Brown, but the one thing they share, is an unfeasibly high serious crime rate for such small communities. Then there are the professionals who aren’t limited to their own small localities, like Poirot or Sherlock Holmes, and those ‘big city’ coppers like Lynda la Plante’s Jane Tennison, John Creasey’s Gideon, Biba Pearce’s DCI Rob Miller, or even civilised Oxford’s Morse, from the pen of Colin Dexter, all of whom at least have a reasonable catchment area for their crimes to occur in. With the professionals, we must also include those specialists who assist the police, like the CSI teams, the forensic scientists, as in TV’s ‘Silent Witness’, the psychologists like Thea Hartley’s Resa James, or Fitz from TV’s ‘Cracker’.  Anti-heroes Somewhere between these ‘good guys’ and our criminals, come those in a grey area. Working on the side of the ‘good guys’, but often from the wrong side of the fence, and bending, or even completely smashing, the rules. Characters ranging from Leslie Charteris’s urbane Simon Templar, or my own call girl, Lena Fox, to far more violent heroes like James Mitchell’s Callan, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, and Frank Westworth’s JJ Stoner (a particular favourite of mine). It seems that the men and women in the white hats can be even more varied than the criminals they hunt down, but they usually fall broadly into two types: the ones who the reader identifies with and actually likes, and the absolute evil bastard who’s too far gone for legislative punishment to be enough for. The ones who deserve whatever sticky and often painful end that the author can dream up.  Lena Back again… and again… So, what’s been the common denominator between all these characters I’ve outlined? Yes, they’re all series characters. All of them appear in multiple stories (or are destined to.) More interestingly, they all have quite complex ‘back stories’ running throughout the books or TV dramas. From Fitz’s gambling and tenuous family relationships, or Barnaby’s cosy village idyll, to Resa James and her tangled family and romantic life, and my own Lena and her friends (who very often are more important to the investigation that Lena herself). It’s a little like having your own private soap opera running alongside the crime novel. A soap that continues on from the last story in the series that you read, with a cast of familiar characters that the readers can know and love… or even dislike… maybe even starting out likeable, then becoming that ‘evil bastard’ that we all know and love.  Fun Friends Incestuous relationships… People do say that we writers have a relationship with our characters… especially those of us who write the aforementioned ‘series’ books with regular characters who appear from book to book. The characters you write become like your mates… even the dodgy ones. We’ve all got dodgy mates, haven’t we? But with my ‘Lena’ novels, in some cases all I can say is “The chance would be a fine thing” ’cos there’s a couple of characters in them who’d be an awful lot of fun to have a relationship with. However, we live with these characters all the time, because we’re creating their lives and their futures, so yes, I guess we are in a relationship with them, but wouldn’t that be some kind of incest? I mean to say… these ladies are my own offspring I suppose, so it makes it a bit suspect really.  Killing off your creation… I can remember one point in time when this relationship thing was hammered home to me. I’d decided that one good way to develop the plot of the novel I was working on would be for one of the characters to be murdered. (Not a regular character… This is the first book this one had appeared in.) I’d worked out why she should be murdered, and how it would affect the way I would end the novel (which was why she had to die) so I went ahead and wrote her death scene, even though the plot hadn’t quite reached that point yet. I could then steer the plot towards that point, and then onwards towards the final ending I had in mind. That's how I work. If I have to keep ‘turning the pages’ to find out what's going to happen, then hopefully, so will my reader. It’s only when I’ve got a fair way into the story that I decide how it might end… and even then it can often change.  Guilt… So, I’d done the grisly deed, initially anyway. However, I hadn’t been bargaining for this ‘relationship’ situation. After I’d written the scene, I began to feel really guilty, because she was such a nice character; one of the good guys, who’d already had some real crap chucked at her in the story… and I’d now become the nasty bastard who’d just murdered her in cold blood (well, in a lift, really… but you know what I mean.) It felt like bumping off a daughter. I wasn’t sure whether to use the scene or not. Should I just file it for later use? I can always change names and other minor details to slot it into another book later. Maybe use it to kill off a nasty scheming little slapper or something  I’ve done similar things with a couple of bedroom scenes that were cut from the original ‘Transactions’ manuscript because it was thought by a publisher that the mighty Amazon (no, not the river) might not be happy about too much description when the character has been clearly defined as ‘underaged’. (Her age was necessary to the plot). Apparently anything goes for grown ups, but teens need to be handled with care. As it turned out, leaving some things hinted at, or wondered about by the reader, made the scenes work even better. The original scenes were saved, then later had names, and in one case the character’s physical stature, changed to slot them into a later book (‘Deadweight’ - “Not too bad at all for a big girl”…due to appear under Selfishgenie’s banner soon). They worked perfectly. So, did I have a pang of conscience? What did I do with my charming, ‘good guy’ character? Did I decide that I couldn’t subject this delightful young lady to a nasty messy ‘choking on her own blood’, ‘bladder letting go’ death in a lift?  Chris Graham Did I hell. I used the piece, getting straight down to writing the scenes leading up to it, and following her death, her killer being hunted down by her boyfriend, fuelled by a dangerous and unstable high octane brew of agonising pain, intense hatred, and adrenalin.
This writing lark can be so much fun sometimes. Over to you, blog readers… What kind of novels float your boat? What kinds of characters appeal to you? Which kinds of settings, locations, and situations? I’m sure that’s a question that all authors and budding authors out there would love to know the answer to. To find out more about Chris Graham and his books, 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.   For fans of World War II fiction, military fiction, historical fiction or just good old fashioned action adventure, “Sinner’s Cross” by Miles Watson is a must read book. And, as the research for it is so good, it may appeal to amateur military historians too.
I have to issue a “trigger warning” however. The scenes of combat and bloodshed depicted in the book are not for people with a weak stomach. The descriptions are quite graphic in parts. I’m sure the author would make no apology for that because, let’s face it, war is not pretty and not for the faint hearted. However, in terms of its storytelling, this book earns the five stars I have awarded. To be honest, I almost feel like breaking with tradition and awarding six stars. The story is set against the backdrop of the Battle of Hürtgen Forest, which took place between 19th September 1944 and 16th December 1944. It should be a battle that is far better remembered but was somewhat overshadowed by the Battle of the Bulge which started on the day the Battle of Hürtgen Forest officially ended. The Battle of Hürtgen Forest cost the lives of around 33,000 American soldiers, with another 55,000 wounded and it also took the lives of 20,000 German soldiers. There are also political implications to the battle which may be why it isn’t so well remembered. The battlefield was of very limited strategic value, certainly not enough to warrant the death toll, but it somehow became an obsession for the American generals to capture this obscure bit of forest, which lies to the east of the Belgian/German border and the German city of Aachen. Aachen was the first German city to fall to the Allies, which may have exaggerated the importance of the nearby forest. The story is told in three parts, with each part being seen through the eyes of a different protagonist. First we have Sergeant Edward T Halleck, a hard bitten former cowboy from Texas who has been in almost constant combat since the Allied landings in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942. His war weariness is such that he hardly bothers to memorise the names of the men sent to replace the casualties from his platoon, because he knows their chances of survival make it barely worth his while. The second point of view (POV) is from one of those replacements, “butter bar” 2nd Lieutenant Robert Breese. Breese believes he shouldn’t be in the Army and, if he must be, then his talents would be best used making Army recruitment films back in New York. He has no idea what he is doing in the Hürtgen Forest and even less idea of what he is supposed to do now that he is there. The final POV is from the German side of the battle. Major Martin “Zengy” Zengen is a veteran paratrooper who has fought in every engagement in which the fallschirmjäger have taken part since 1940. He has lost count of how many friends he has lost to the war but, until now, his dedication to duty has been unquestioning. His epiphany, when it comes, takes an unusual form (which I won’t reveal) but it is so deeply moving for him that it completely reshapes his thinking. Each part of the book stands alone, so there is no switching back and forth between POVs, but characters from one part do pop up in the others, so that some of the consequences of some of their actions can be observed. What makes this book so enthralling isn’t the characters, though they are well drawn, it is the story telling as a whole. I found myself living and breathing the combat almost as though I was there. The reader feels every explosion, hears every bullet cracking past their ear and smells the smoke and blood of battle. It is quite unnerving at times just how deeply it is possible to get drawn into this story – hence the trigger warning issued above. The historical detail is exemplary and Miles Watson is obviously a keen scholar of World War II history. He pays attention to the minutest detail, but at no point does he ever cross the line into geekiness. There is a sequel to Sinner’s Cross (the title comes from the scene of much of the action) called The Very Dead of Winter. I have to confess that I read that before Sinner’s Cross (see review in the blog archive) which is why I came back to read the first book. Knowing which characters survive to reappear in the later book, however, made this book no less enjoyable. I can only hope that Miles Watson finds time to write a third book for the series. I cannot recommend “Sinner’s Cross” by Miles Watson, highly enough. To find out more, 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.  One of the common questions seen in writers’ groups on social media is “How much do authors earn?” The question comes in a variety of forms, some trying to disguise the fact that the person asking the question is only interested in making a quick buck and thinks that being an author may be the way. But some people genuinely see being an author as being the road to making a decent living. Of course, for some authors, it is a way of making a decent living. Indeed, some authors become very rich through their writing. But for Joe (or Josephine) Average, the average author, is it a realistic way to make a living? We would say it probably isn’t. I’m afraid we have the data to back that up as there has been a lot of research into this over the years.  Let’s start with some basic facts. 70% of all the authors who publish or are published, never sell more than 100 copies of their books. Some of that is to do with marketing, of course. If no one knows about the book they can’t buy it. Some of it is because the books are about subjects that don’t have a wide audience appeal. They are either on very niche subjects or they are memoirs about lives that just aren’t that fascinating, but the author thought they were. Finally, they just aren’t very good books, certainly not as good as the author thought they were, and can’t garner enough good reviews to encourage people to buy them. Of the remaining 30% of books published, 70% of those won’t sell more than 1,000 copies. That’s about 21% of the total number of books published (so we’re now up to 91% of the published total). Again, the reasons are varied, and marketing once again takes centre stage, but the fact that the book has sold between 100 and 999 copies suggests it isn’t a bad book, per se. But that leaves just 9% of books published selling more than 1000 copies. However, you need to sell about 30,000 copies to make a living wage. That is to say, a wage good enough not to have to do any other work. Even then that will depend on other factors in your life such as the size of your mortgage (or amount of rent you pay), the size of your family and your lifestyle. One person’s living wage is another person’s poverty – or wealth. Less than 1% of authors make what we might regard as “decent” money and only 0.1% ever become rich from their writing. And even then, most of their wealth doesn’t come from their books, it comes from the TV and film rights for their books. So, if you haven’t written the first word of your novel, how do you know if you are going to be in the 99% or the 1%? You don’t.  If you get as far as completing a good draft you start to get some indication of your likely success from the reaction to your work from agents, though it takes some time to gather enough data. One rejection doesn’t mean much. It just means that the agent may be too busy or doesn’t really like your genre, or just didn’t get your “message”. Ten rejections should start the author thinking a bit, but it still isn’t conclusive evidence. According to publishing legend, J K Rowling received at least 10 rejections for her first Harry Potter book. But once you get to around 20 rejections the message should be becoming clear. Even then, the message only applies to that book. Some authors query three or four books before they get one accepted by an agent. What made that book different from the first three? The author will probably say there was nothing different about it. But the agent thought it was different enough to take a chance on it, so there must have been something.  But even then the story isn’t finished, because there is a growing body of self-published authors that are making 6 digit and even 7 digit royalties. So, the agents obviously don’t know everything when it comes to what makes a best-seller. But what makes those 6 digit self-published authors different isn’t necessarily their writing. I have read some of their books. They are OK, but I wouldn’t call them remarkable. In fact, some could be described as mediocre – but they still sell. What is different is that their authors invest a lot of time, effort and (probably) money into marketing. They have become expert at it, which is how they are able to sell so many books. As a small publisher, we have seen this for ourselves. When we market a book, we sell copies. When we stop marketing it, sales dry up very quickly. Authors think that what they are paying us for is editing, cover design, proof reading, formatting etc. Sure, we do those things, but the authors could pay anyone to do those things for them. No, what we are really being paid for, and the way we make our money, is book marketing. Yes, we do the other stuff, but until the book sells we don’t make a penny and neither does the author. Marketing pays for everything. And, while trad publishers may tell you otherwise, it is in the marketing of books that they also make their money. Everything else they do costs them money. Editors, cover designers, proof readers and the rest of the publishing team, all have to be paid before the books have sold a single copy. So, if you want to make money out of being an author, you must first learn how to be a marketer. Once you know how to do that, then start writing your book. Doing it the other way around only leads to disappointment, because it takes longer to learn to be a successful marketer than it does to write a book.  And if you do that, you might just make a decent living out of writing.
Even if you are certain your book is going to find an agent and be trad published, you can’t be certain that will happen. So if/when the horrible truth hits you, it is already too late. It’s fine to have a dream that one day your writing may make you rich but keep yourself grounded with the knowledge that it may not happen. And even if it does happen, it may take some time before it does. To quote Kipling “If you can dream and not make dreams your master;” 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. |
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