 Is it worth Indie authors entering book award contests? If I tell you that none of the book marketing gurus suggest it as a way of marketing books, then you can probably guess the answer. If book awards/contests sold books, then the marketing gurus would be all over them. The biggest awards, eg The Booker Prize or Pulitzer Prize, sell a lot of books but we’re talking about Indie authors here and none of us are going to get close to a nomination for those levels of awards! But even those levels of awards don’t sell more books for many of their nominees. We can probably all name a Booker Prize or Pulitzer Prize winner, but how many people can name the runners up? Even fewer people can name any nominees? At the most basic level, book contests appeal to the vanity of authors. They say “you know your book is good, so why not come and claim your prize, because winning is a foregone conclusion.” Well, get over yourself. It is readers who decide if a book is any good, not authors.  But I guess all Indies feel tempted to enter book contests from time to time, on the basis that being able to claim that your book is a prize winner will sell you more books. However, sales data doesn’t back that up. Data suggests that being able to put “Winner of the (whatever) Book Award” in your book blurb has very little impact on sales. Being able to put a good quote from a reader’s review in the blurb is far more effective., OK. Maybe winning an award might sell you a few more copies, but what are your chances of winning? The websites that run these awards are businesses and they make money from them, so they want as many entrants as possible. Entry fees can range from as low as $20 (£18 approx) up to several hundred dollars. So, it can be a big money earner for the websites. Let’s say that they manage to attract 1,000 entries. The only books that the readers may be interested in are the winners – or at least the top three. So, you have something like a 999 to one chance of your book winning.  I wouldn’t back a horse at those odds – would you? All the other entrants remain unknown to readers, even if they get a place on the website. They just get lost amongst the other 1,000 entrants that the website attracted to enter the contest. OK, some contests award prizes for the best books in a range of genres. This makes it more likely that an author can win a prize, especially in a niche genre. There are generally recognised to be around 50 genres* (publishers disagree on how many exactly). If you rule out non-fiction, the number of genres shrinks considerably to around 30. But let’s stick with 50. So, 50 winners, and another 100 in second and third places. Add in the overall winners and runners up and that gives you 153 prize winners. But that still leaves 847 entrants without anything to say on their blurb despite having paid their entry fee. And a lot of book contests are considerably bigger than 1,000 entrants, so the probability of winning a prize gets even more remote.  There are book “contests” which, if you pay a large enough entry fee, you are guaranteed to win a prize. You are buying the prize, not winning it.
But readers generally aren’t fooled by those. If they haven’t heard of the prize, they won’t be suckered in by a fake like that. OK, at the end of the day it’s your money. If you want to spend it on entry fees for a book awards, real or phoney, that’s your business. But in terms of increasing sales, you would be better off putting that money towards an advertising campaign. The probability of increasing sales is considerably higher. * Genres are different from book categories. Amazon has thousands of book categories which are created by slicing and dicing the main genres until they are so niche that some have hardly any books in them.. Genres can often be subdivided, eg Fantasy alone subdivides into a dozen different sub-genres, but the overall genre is still fantasy and that is the level at which book contests award prizes. After all, they want to hang onto the entry fees, not pay them out by awarding lots of prizes. 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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 Are you familiar with SMART objectives? They were a big thing back in the 80s and 90s and emerged from the bad habits of bosses, who set their staff objectives without making sure that the objectives were actually achievable. For example, if you were my employee and I were to set you an objective of painting a wall, you would expect me to provide you with paint, brushes, maybe a ladder and possibly even training in how to paint walls. Sad to say, back then not all bosses saw things that way. They would just say “paint that wall” and expect the employee to do it without further input from them. Consequently, objective setting had a very bad name, and a lot of objectives were never achieved. This had a very poor outcome for businesses that were relying on the achievement of those objectives to make them profitable. The reason you don’t hear about SMART objectives anymore isn’t because they are no longer set, it’s because the setting of them is so routine that no one bothers to call them by that name anymore. Now it is just called objective setting (or goal setting). Why should you, as an Indie author, be interested in SMART objectives? Well, if you are one of those people who think in terms of the process of either writing a book or marketing it, then setting SMART objectives is very much a part of that process.  Because if you don’t set them for yourself, you could end up in the same position as the person who has been told to paint a wall but hasn’t been given the paint and brushes. So, what does the acronym mean? S = Specific. M = Measurable A = Achievable (or attainable) R = Relevant T = Time based (or bound). So, let’s unpack those in terms of what you need to do as an author. I’ll be addressing this from a book marketing perspective, but exactly the same principles apply to setting yourself objectives as an author who is about to start writing a book.  SPECIFIC This means that the objective describes exactly what you are expected to achieve. So, you wouldn’t say “sell some books” because that is too vague. Instead, you would say “Sell 100 books”. But we can probably make the objective even more specific when we start to include the other elements from the acronym.  MEASURABLE In essence I’ve already included a measurement in there by saying “100 books” – but that is the end goal. To make sure that you are on the right track and making progress, you might want to break that measurement down into smaller chunks. Perhaps measuring once a week to see how sales are progressing. There may also be other measurements to be carried out, such as the amount of budget that is spent each day, week or month to achieve the objective. That is very important if you happen to be short of cash. Failing to set measurements of success mean that the objective becomes vague and open to interpretation. You can actually let yourself off the hook. As you are doing this for yourself that may not seem important, but it can mean you don’t achieve what you set out to do because you weren’t sure what you expected the outcome to be. Your measurements also need to have targets that are comparable to what others are achieving. So, as a first time author, how many books can a first time author expect to sell? There is no point setting a target of 1,000 books, if first time authors almost never achieve that level of sales. You will just end up feeling frustrated because you failed to hit the target.  ACHIEVABLE This is where we get into the allocation of resources to achieve the goal. If you have been trying to sell books for a long time and made no progress, then you will have to do something different and that means learning what to do. So, you may need training in order to make your objective achievable. That may mean that you need a budget, because training can cost money (yes, I know there is free training available, but we’ll assume that isn’t going to be sufficient). But you may also need a budget to pay for things such as new book covers. You may also need to advertise, which also requires a budget. So, this “achievable” word is probably the one that is most important in setting goals and objectives, because without the right resources to back the objective up, it isn’t going to be achievable..  RELEVANT This also harks back to the bad old days when some bosses would set an objective that the person carrying out the work didn’t think was relevant to their job. Now, if you are a painter and decorator, then telling you to paint a wall is obviously relevant. But if you are an accountant then it has nothing to do with your job. Studies found that people who were given objectives that they didn’t consider to be relevant to them, didn’t put much effort into achieving them. If they did consider they were relevant, however, they would put in a lot of effort. As an author you might have to consider what is relevant to you. Maybe you don’t think that marketing your book is relevant. But if you aren’t going to market it – who is? So, if you don’t think that marketing is relevant to your job as an author, how are you going to achieve that objective of selling 100 books? It can be done, but you would have to pay someone else to do it for you – which takes us back to “achievable” and the allocation of resources to pay someone else to do the work.  TIMEBASED Again, harking back to the bad old days, some bosses would set an objective and not set any date by which it had to be achieved. Was it high priority and had to be completed by the end of the day/week/month? Or was it low priority and didn’t need to be completed until the end of the year? So it is with your objective to sell 100 books. Do you want to reach that figure by the end of the month, in 3 months’ time, 6 months, a year? This ties in very much with measurability, because the longer the timescale you set for yourself the more measurement you will have to put in to make sure you are making progress. It also ties in with resources, because if you have set the target for your objective to be completed in a year, then the budget has to be capable of lasting a year too. There is also the question of achievability. Just because you set your objective to sell 100 books by the end of the month, it doesn’t mean it will be achievable by then – especially if you don’t have other essential resources such as knowledge and budget.  PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER I think I have demonstrated that all the elements of a SMART objective have to be integrated, so that they all work in harmony with each other. It doesn’t matter how relevant the objective is, if it doesn’t have the resources that are necessary it won’t be achievable, for example. If it doesn’t have the right measurements taken at the right time, you won’t know if you are succeeding or failing and if you are failing, you may not know why you are failing. Going back to that original objective of “sell 100 books” we would now re-write it as: “Complete an on-line book marketing training course then sell 100 books within a period of 30 days, commencing immediately on completion of the course but before 31st December 2024, while remaining within a budget of £100.” OK, it doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, but it does contain all the elements of a SMART objective. It doesn’t make the relevancy of the objective clear, but as you are an Indie author responsible for marketing your own books, I think we can agree that relevance is implied.  Now, you may wonder why I have gone to the trouble of explaining all this in a blog dedicated to writing and book marketing. The answer is simple. Many of the questions I see on social media about people floundering around with their writing or their marketing, come down to the fact that the person hasn’t followed the SMART principles. Because SMART objectives feed into SMART planning. All that means is that once you have set your objective, you can create a plan for how to achieve it. And a SMART Plan takes into account all the elements of the SMART objective. If you don’t have a plan, you don’t know what you should be doing, or when you should be doing it.  The number of people I see posting questions on Facebook writers’ groups that start by asking “When should I start doing … (whatever)?”
Sadly, the answer is often “3 months ago mate!” By starting with your SMART objective and creating a plan to achieve it, you can then measure progress towards completion. As has been said many times before “Fail to plan – plan to fail”. Just creating a plan is an objective in itself, because some people have never planned a single thing in their entire lives. Someone else has always created the plan for them and they have just done what they were told, when they were told. I’m not ashamed to admit that the first time I was asked to plan something, I had absolutely no idea how to go about it. It was a hard learnt lesson and one I have never forgotten. I’m not going to pretend that all my plans worked seamlessly, but in general they have a high success rate because I have had to consider all the things that make the plan achievable. And if I am unsure about achievability, I can ask myself what I need in order to make it more achievable so that I include those in the plan too. 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.  I don’t know if authors are targeted by scammers more than any other profession, but sometimes it feels that way. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, many writers are “Newbies” who are ignorant of how the publishing industry works, That means that they don’t have the knowledge to identify a scam when they see it, which makes them easier targets. The second reason is that the publishing industry has always used a lot of freelancers to provide services: editors, proofreaders, graphic designers et al. The arrival of easy to access self-publishing, back when Lulu was founded in 1998, gave those freelancers a whole new market for their skills. It also provided employees with those skills the opportunity to establish “side hustles” to earn more money outside of their normal workplace. That made it very easy for scammers to use those sorts of services to disguise their scams.  I must emphasise at this point that there are a lot of hard working people out there offering their professional skills, who do a good job at reasonable rates. Unfortunately, it isn’t always easy to differentiate between them and the scammers. The scams tend to fall into two types. There are the ones that rely on vanity to draw in the victim and there are those that offer a service which they either don’t provide, or which is such poor quality that it is as good as a scam. Let’s start with the vanity scams.  Let’s face it, as authors, we often think that our work doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. This is especially true for self-published authors who are struggling to sell even a few copies of their book, let alone rise to the dizzy heights of “best seller” status. And that is the feeling that the scammers play on to draw you in. It will often start as a DM or an email, saying how the sender works for a publishing company, or is a representative (perhaps “talent spotter”) for an agent, producer or someone else who can turn the author into the next “big thing”.. The DM or email will tell you that whoever sent it really liked your book and thinks it has a real chance of success and they will help you to get it into the hands of whoever they say they represent. There will be no mention of money – yet. They will often want to speak to you on the phone, because it is much harder to resist a scammer on the phone because they can be so charming and persuasive. OK, let’s unpack that a little bit. Firstly, it is a direct appeal to the author’s vanity (we all suffer from it, even if the amount of vanity varies). It has the author punching the air and saying “Yes, I always knew my book was good.” Essentially, most of the scammer’s work has been done just because of that reaction.  Agents, trad publishers, TV and film companies don’t need to “reach out” to authors to find work to publish., They are inundated with authors and script writers sending them work. Most of it is good work, too. The publishers and producers are spoiled for choice. Simply knowing that can save you from the scammer. There is a variation on that theme, which is the offer to get your book into one of the well-known mainstream bookstores. Barnes & Noble tends to be the bookstore of choice, probably because it is the largest chain in the USA. Again, it’s not how those businesses work. The trad publishing houses are sending them a constant stream of new books, with the added advantage that the publisher is doing the marketing, so the bookstore doesn’t have to. So why would the bookstores need to go through a “middleman” to put a book on their shelves that won’t have that marketing effort behind it? It would just be taking up shelf space that could be used for books that will sell because they are being marketed properly  One of the most common things that is seen in writing groups on social media is the appeal “does anyone know anything about (insert name of business)? They have approached me offering to (insert scam)”. Simply asking the question means the author is suspicious But they aren’t making the post in order to confirm their suspicions. They are making the post in the hope that someone will say “It’s OK, they’re legit. Go with them” Sadly, the responses almost never say that. Remember the main way of identifying a scam is that if it sounds too good to be true – then it’s too good to be true. The next type of scam is the vanity or “hybrid” publishers. Now, I’m not having a go at hybrid publishing as a legitimate industry sector. If you are happy to pay for someone to print a whole load of copies of your book for them to end up in your shed while you try to find some way of selling them, that’s your business not mine.  But there are a lot of scammers describing themselves as hybrid publishers with the sole intention of getting their hands on your money. The best you can hope for is a whole load of badly printed copies of your book, the worst is an empty wallet and no books at all. Do some research. Find out what others have to say about the company. Not on Facebook, but by doing real research. If they are scammers, there will be “red flag” posts on the internet warning about them. If they are genuine, there will also be articles about them describing their business – and I don’t mean on their own website. Someone somewhere will have posted a review saying how well they serve their customers. Two new scams that have appeared recently are the “foreign rights” scam, and the “translation” scam.  The foreign rights scam offers to find publishers overseas who will buy the rights to publish your book in another country. You pay a fee to an “agent” and they will do the work for you. Needless to say, once they have got your money that will be the last you will see of it. They might send you an email from time to time to report “progress” but it will always say “nothing to report yet” or, perhaps, “I have a publisher interested but nothing definite at the moment.” They may even come back to you and ask for more money because they just need to make “one last push” to close the deal. The translation scam is different because there may be a product at the end of it. The problem is that the author of the book won’t own the copyright on the product – the scammer will. Under EU law, and in some other countries, if a translator makes a translation of someone’s work then they own the copyright on the translated version. The author has to give permission, but that just means saying yes in an email. In practical terms the “translator” (the actual work could be done by AI) can sell their version on Amazon and the author can’t do a thing about it and will certainly never see a penny of the royalties.. There is one exception and that is in Germany. There the author retains their copyright even on the translation. So, the first thing to do if someone emails to ask if they can translate your book isn’t to say yes, It’s to say “How much will you pay me for the right to translate my book?”  Scammers try to get around this by posing as a student who wants to use your book as a course work assignment, but don’t fall for that! Finally, we get to the “service” scams, These are often the hardest to spot because there are so many freelancers plying their trade these days. The first question any author should ask is “can I do this for myself, for free?” In many cases you can. Websites such as KDP and Draft2Digital offer a lot of helpful articles on their sites to assist with the self-publishing process. For audiobooks there are similar helpful services on ACX.  For those things where the author would benefit from professional assistance, such as editing, proofreading and cover design, then the warning is “buyer beware”. Use trusted sites such as Fiverr to find the services you need. The reason that you can trust them is that they hold onto the money you pay until you sign off to say you are happy with the product that is provided. That means it is much harder for scammers to operate. If you don’t want to use Fiverr or similar sites, then seek out recommendations from people on social media. DO NOT respond to the sorts of message that say “DM me” or “Give me your phone number”. You have no idea who you are dealing with. If someone says “I used so-and-so and they were good.” then that is different.  Perhaps the biggest area for scams, however, is in marketing services. You just have no idea if the person you are dealing with is actually doing anything. They may promise to send out a gazillion emails to their lists or put out a post on X that will be seen by a gazillion followers, but you have no idea if it is true. Even if you find their pages on X (or wherever) you have no idea if their followers are genuine or not. It is very easy to buy “followers” (fake accounts) and, of course, we all know about the bots that make up so much of social media these days. And, having paid your money and your sales haven’t improved, you have no recourse simply because they won’t guarantee their services. Which means they can keep committing the same scams because they are fireproof.  As we have said many times on this blog before, when it comes to marketing, learning how to do it yourself is always going to be the cheapest (and safest) option. It will also be the best one because no one will market your book with the same passion for it as you have. If you really want to know if what you are seeing, or being offered, is a scam, then check it out on “Writer Beware” which is a website that exposes scams targeting writers. Scams Aimed At Advertisers For those authors who advertise using Meta/Facebook look out for comments on your ads, DMs and emails that tell you that you have infringed Facebook’s advertising rules in some way. They are quite common, especially for new advertisers.  They will usually say that your account is about to be closed or blocked or that your ad will be suspended or deleted if you don’t take action.
There will be a link, and it can be confused with genuine Meta URLs. Some of the communications are accompanied by the Meta logo, so it is easy to be fooled. But, as you can see here, anyone can get hold of the Meta logo. Meta does communicate with advertisers using DMs, but if the message relates to payments don’t click on links, Log in to your FB account and check your account settings. Any issues with payments will be flagged there. For ads, it is easy to check if they are active or suspended in your ads dashboard and then query the issue directly with Meta. If in doubt, contact Meta direct, DON’T CLICK ON ANY LINKS. And please do your fellow authors a favour by reporting the scammer’s account and then blocking it. 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.  When it comes to book marketing, it is never possible to do too much - but it is very easy to do too little. I was reminded of this on a couple of occasions recently, for different reasons. The first was when I attended a local writers’ group for the first time. I had wanted to join them for some time, but the meeting day always clashed with something else I do on the same evening. However, that week my normal activity was cancelled, so I went along. It was the sort of thing I had expected, with the writers reading out bits of their work and being given constructive feedback. All very pleasant and friendly. It was at the end of the evening when I found that nobody there was really thinking about basic marketing. I was asked for my contact details, so that I could be added to the email group. Everyone seemed surprised when I produced a business card with the Selfishgenie Publishing contact details printed on it. I expected to be handed cards in return but wasn’t. None of the dozen or so people present had that most basic marketing tool to hand. Not even the organiser! I commented on it and the attendees seemed bemused by the possibility that anyone outside the group would want to make contact. “What do you do when people ask about your books?” I asked. “How will they know what name to search for on Amazon or wherever?” I could see from the puzzled faces that they didn’t get it. “Well, I tell them my name and my book title, and they remember, I suppose.” Someone replied. I wanted to say “But 30 seconds after you part, they will have forgotten both. But if they find your business card in their pocket, or purse, they will be reminded of you and may look you up then.” But I didn’t say that. I let the matter drop. I just hope that the expression on my face said enough to make the people think about investing a few pounds in the purchase of some business cards for future use. I have found that in the past many people have introduced themselves as “I’m a nurse/plumber/whatever” first and author or writer only as an afterthought.  But if you want to be taken seriously as an author you must first take yourself seriously. You are an author first and whatever else you do second. You are only doing that to pay the bills until you can give up being a plumber/nurse/whatever and write full time. And that means having a business card that says “author”, with the relevant contact details on it so that people remember who you are and look up you and your books, OK, not everybody will do that. Hand out 50 business cards and maybe only 4 or 5 of the recipients will actually look you and your books up. But that is 4 or 5 that wouldn’t have looked you up if they have forgotten your name 30 seconds after you have parted.  The second incident (two actually) was almost as bad, but this time the offender wasn’t standing in front of me at the time. I had just finished reading a book by an author I hadn’t read before. It was by an Indie author, as most of my reading is these days as I try to support Indie authors as much as possible and the best way to do that is to buy their books. The book was pretty good, and I was sorry it had finished. I knew the book was part of a series and I was keen to buy the next title. I was even more keen after I had read the preview chapter the author had inserted at the back of the book.  But when I went to click on the link to take me straight to the book’s page on Amazon …. it wasn’t there. Another simple marketing tool overlooked. The best time to sell one of your books to a reader is when they have just finished reading one of your books. There are a lot of psychological factors at work at that moment and it is important that the author makes them work in their favour. When a reader finishes a book that they have enjoyed they feel a sense of loss. It isn’t as severe as grief, but it is from the same source. They want to ease that feeling of loss and you, the author, can make that happen. It’s why we put sample chapters of our other books after the end of the story.  Strike while the iron is hot – get the reader when they are wanting more. But if you don’t include a link to where they can buy the next book, they’ll just say “I’ll look it up tomorrow.” The problem is that by tomorrow the feeling of loss has gone and they may already have started to read the next book in their TBR list, whether it is a paperback or an ebook. The moment has passed, and the sale may have been lost forever. Obviously, you can’t put a link in a paperback (but you can include the URL as ordinary text), but there is no excuse for not putting one in the ebook version. OK, if the next book hasn’t yet been published and isn’t even on pre-order, then you can’t put a link in. But you can go back and put the link in the moment the book does go on pre-order or is published. If you don’t write series, that’s OK. You just insert the link for the next book you published. Finally, there was the second sin that the same author committed.  There was no request for a review. We all know how important reviews are for authors when it comes to selling books. Some people always post them, some people never post them, but some people will post them if you give them a nudge in the right direction. Just a simple request along the lines of “Reviews are important to authors, so if you have enjoyed this book please post a review wherever you normally review the books you read”. You can even post a link to the sales page on Amazon (if that’s where you sell your books) just to be helpful. That’s all it takes.  We use a publication and marketing checklist when we prepare books for launch, just to make sure that we don’t overlook such simple things. We would recommend that you develop your own checklist so that you don’t forget the same little things.
My takeaways from this blog are: 1. Everybody you meet is a potential new reader of your book(s). 2. Everybody you meet needs a way of remembering who you are, what your book is called and how to find out about your books, and 3. If someone has read your book, that is the time to persuade them to review it and to buy another of your books, so make it easy for them. And if you have forgotten, it isn’t too late to do it now. You may have lost sales in the past but that is no excuse to lose more in the future. As a well-known supermarket used to say in its adverts “Every little helps”. 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 launched a new book, “Operation Chariot”, at the beginning of June this year. Given the popularity of our “Carter’s Commandos” series of books, we expected this new title to fly off the shelf, as fans of the earlier series came back to read this new offering. We were disappointed, The new book did sell, but not in the volumes we had expected. This puzzled us because we had put a lot of time and effort into marketing the book in advance of its launch. We were sure that the thousands of readers who had enjoyed Carter’s Commandos would be thrilled by this new book. So why wasn’t it selling as well as the Carter’s Commandos series, which is continuing to do well?  We checked the data from our marketing campaign and found that we were getting plenty of link clicks to the sales page. But the clicks weren’t converting to sales. Well, not as many sales as the number of clicks suggested we should be getting. If you are familiar with our previous blogs on marketing, you will know that we have always said that if you are getting link clicks but not getting sales, it means that there is something wrong with your book’s sales page. It might be your cover, it might be your blurb, it might be the reviews, or it might be the “free sample” as Amazon now call their “look inside” feature.  We analysed each of those four things in turn to see what might be putting readers off. We quickly ruled out a problem with the cover. The cover image has been used in all our marketing, so people have seen it already and clicked on the link. That is “social proof” (as it is known) that readers aren’t being put off by the cover, so seeing it again on the sales page is hardly going to put them off buying. This applies to the blurb too. The blurb is the primary text we use in our advertising, so if people have seen the cover image, read the blurb and then clicked the link, it means that the two things have encouraged the link click, not discouraged it. Reviews are a tricky one. This is a new book. It hadn’t been read before, so it doesn’t have any reviews. We’ll have to wait for the jury to return on that but at the time of writing this blog the book has garnered 5 "ratings", all of which are 4 or 5 star. So that just left the free sample.  We clicked on it and saw immediately what the problem was. The free sample opened up on the book’s “foreword”. This was a few paragraphs intended to introduce the reader to the new series, why it had been written and the differences in writing style that might be seen by readers of the “Carter’s Commandos” series. What it didn’t do, however, was get the reader engaged with the story. To get to that the reader had to scroll through the whole thing before they got to the proper opening of the book. Why was the free sample opening on the foreword and not on the first chapter? Because KDP and Amazon’s formatting engine interpreted the foreword as a chapter. So as far as Amazon was concerned, it was displaying the start of the story. Readers, however, could see that it wasn’t the start of the story and some of them were deciding not to scroll through to find the actual start. They just went back to scrolling through whatever platform they had been on before they clicked the link.  We had lost a potential sale. Worse than that, we had paid for a link click before we lost the sale! So, what could we do about that? The answer was simple, if a little unconventional. We moved the foreword from the start of the book to after the end. We even added a short explanation to it, to say why it was at the end and not the beginning. This only affects the Kindle version, of course. The paperback version still has the foreword at the beginning where it should be. But by the time the reader has discovered that, the book is in their hands, and they can flick past it if they don’t want to read it. But the free sample is always taken from the ebook version, so paperback readers will also be taken straight into the story when they read that.  Did it change anything?
Yes it did. The sales graph for the book, which had been consistent but low, suddenly took a step upwards. More copies were sold each day from that point onwards. And it cost us nothing but a little bit of time and effort to find the reasons for the disappointingly low sales and to make the changes to the manuscript. So, if your sales aren’t doing as well as the link clicks from your marketing say they should be doing, why not take a look at the book’s free sample to see if the reader is being excited by what they see on the first page, or being bored by the non-essentials that are put into the opening pages of books. 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.  It is a worrying trend being seen on social media, for people to ask questions about how motivation to write is achieved, or how people make time for writing. Part of the reason it is worrying is that it is obvious that the person asking the question hasn’t done the slightest bit of research into what being a writer actually involves. They seem to think that you just sit down, start to write and a short while later you have a finished book to sell. Which means they are really looking for a quick way to make a buck and think that writing may be that way. Poor deluded fools. However, it is the questions around motivation that really puzzle me. The questioner seems to think that motivation comes from without and not from within.  Now, we know that part of the job of a leader is to motivate their team. Having attended (and tutored) numerous leadership courses in my time, I’m quite familiar with the concepts of leadership in terms of motivation within a workplace. For writers, however, there is no leader to provide motivation. It appears to me that the concept of people motivating themselves to do things is an idea that is dying out. Not completely, of course. Talk to any sports star and you will find self-motivation very high on their list of personal qualities. But in the wider world, where people work for vast corporations, it seems to be expected that motivation is something that will be provided by the company, just like they provide toilet facilities. But that is where the world of the Indie author is so different from so many other professions.  There are many types of writer and, for some of them, if they don’t write they don’t get paid. That is probably motivation enough. Some may also lose their jobs if they don’t produce high enough quality writing. Again, it’s a strong motivation to perform well. But for the Indie author, if they don’t write then nothing happens. They don’t get paid, but they weren’t getting paid anyway, at least, not for writing. They can’t be sacked because no one employs them as an author. But the one sure sign that you are an author is that you can’t NOT write. You have to tell the story. You don’t need any other motivation. A real author would never ask on social media “I write a couple of hundred words, then I run out of motivation. How do you keep going?” If you have ever said that, or thought that, then you are not an author. At best you are a wannabe who wants the “glory” of being an author but doesn’t want to actually do any writing.  The same applies to the question of time management, which is really a sub-set of motivation. A real writer always finds time to write, be it formally at a desk, or on the fly while waiting for a bus. They could plan their time better, so they could get more writing done, but they find the time anyway. But the most fundamental thing about time management for Indie authors is being prepared to sacrifice something else in order to make time for writing. Let me use an analogy. If someone wants to be a footballer, their coach will expect them to put in a number of hours each week at practice, honing and developing their skills. If they aren’t prepared to put in the time, their coach will be very blunt with them and tell them they’ll never make it as a footballer because they aren’t prepared to put in the time.  If the footballer says they don’t have time to attend practice, their coach will tell they have to make time, otherwise they are out of the team. And any real footballer would understand that. If you want to make it big, you have to be prepared to focus your whole life around what you want to do. But writers don’t have coaches, in that sense. No one is standing over them telling them they have to practice their writing for the next two hours or they’re going to be dropped from the writing team. But if they are really a writer, they don’t need to be told that anyway, because there is nothing they would rather be doing than writing. So, if you can’t think of a single thing that you would be prepared to drop from your life so that you have more time to write, then you probably aren’t a writer. And yes, that may mean not seeing friends so often, or not watching so much TV or not going to the movies. It may even mean not playing football. But a real writer won’t notice the sacrifice they are making because what they really want to do is write.  So, to summarise. If you have to ask “How do you make time for writing?” you may not be a writer. If you have to ask “How do you maintain your motivation for writing?” you almost certainly aren’t really a writer. But, if you are sat at a bus stop hoping that the bus will be delayed for a few more minutes so you can complete the paragraph you are working on, then you may be a writer, because you are both motivated and you have made time for your writing. However, for those of you that may still be having doubts, I’ve devised this short Q & A to help you decide.  Q1. You are working on a tricky bit of dialogue for your book and your baby starts crying. Do you
a. Stop what you are doing and go and see to the baby, or b. Go to the coffee shop so you can work undisturbed? Q2. You have had a long hard day at work, when you get home do you a. Open a bottle of wine/beer/whisky, and sit down in front of the TV while you drink a glass, or b. Sit down and start working on your book? Q3. Your favourite music act is appearing in town, and you have been offered tickets to their show. Do you a. Take the tickets and go to see the show, or b. Turn down the tickets because you want to get started on the next chapter of your book? Q4. Your grandmother’s funeral has been scheduled for the only day that week when you can devote some time to your writing. Do you a. Go to the funeral, or b. Go to the funeral but take your laptop and hope you can sit at the back and do some writing at the same time? Q5. Your partner has won a holiday for 2 at your dream destination, but the dates are for the same week that you were going to attend a writers’ retreat. Do you a. Go on holiday with your partner, or b. Go on the writers’ retreat? ANSWERS 5 b’s. There is no point in fighting it, you are a writer. 4 b’s. You are probably a writer, but you are easily distracted. 3 b’s or less. Sorry, you’re just a wannabe writer. Note: The above questions and answers are not to be taken too seriously, but if you found yourself seriously considering answering b to all the questions, then you really are a writer. We certainly don’t advocate leaving your baby to cry while you go to the coffee shop to write. No, really, that is not a good thing to do. 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 in this blog are those of our guest blogger, author Chris Graham, and not necessarily those of Selfishgenie Publishing. Making a Name for Yourself… from a novelist’s point of view  Names, where do we get them from? They usually come from our families, both the surnames we get automatically, and the forenames that can be reliant on a number of factors. Sometimes a kid gets lucky, and is given a nice normal everyday name, often from the annals of his or her family’s history. “Oh look… she’s got old uncle Samuel’s eyes. Let’s call her Samantha.” Of course this can backfire. We can all think of a celebrity cook whose father was a famous politician. Doubling the ‘l’ and bunging an ‘a’ on the end of her dad’s name could have gone so badly wrong, but our favourite middle aged man’s fantasy kitchen goddess seems to have done OK out of it (Yes, I do know that ‘Nigella’ is also the name of a herb - case of nominative determination perhaps?).  The Emperor Justinian - who gave his name to all the little Justins in the world. Sometimes it’s the time of the kid’s birth that lumbers them with a name. How many little girls born in the eighties answer to ‘Kylie’, or from more recent years, ‘Beyonce’? I’m sure there are young Bieber fans pushing buggies carrying little ‘Justins’ around the supermarket aisles too, although Justin has been a forename for many centuries. There was a Roman Emperor called Justinian back in 527 AD. Of course, there’s those who simply want to be different, whether famous or not, just for the sake of being being different. Those who, without a thought about when their offspring goes to school and gets the mickey taken out of them, give their little ones names more suited to a pet, a dessert recipe, or an address in downtown New York.  ‘Fifi Trixibelle’ or ‘Strawberry Shortcake’ are not what a strapping thirteen year old lad wants to be known as. Even for a girl they’re a bit on the bizarre side. ‘Brooklyn’ doesn’t sound too bad, though like ‘Lourdes’, and ’Chelsea’, it sounds more at home on a girl. I worry that this is setting a trend. Are we going to see classrooms filled with young ‘Shepherds Bushes’ or ‘Neasdens’ in the future? Perhaps for a transatlantic equivalent they’d be ‘Yonkers’, “Bronxes’ or ‘Haight Ashburys’. But I’m not really talking about our own names, or our children’s names. I’m talking about the names we writers choose for our characters. Where do we get those from? Do they work? Can our readers identify with them? Can our readers even remember which one is which as they make their way through our novels? I was reminded of this when a former publisher asked me to look at a few pages of a submitted manuscript. There were a number of characters introduced within the first couple of pages, of which there were several with the same forename, and others who, because they were related, had the same surname.  Now I know that in the potluck world that we live our real lives in, this kind of thing isn’t uncommon. The crowd I hung around with (and still know most of) had a surfeit of ‘Ians’ at one point. Fortunately, as was the spirit of the time, they all acquired nicknames, and so became ‘Ahmed’, ‘Abdul’, ‘Fang’, ‘Screwy Lewie’, ‘Mr Magoo’ and ‘Ian Mac’. However, to help our readers, we need to have ‘real’ names for our characters that define them. During the narrative, and particularly as markers in dialogue, we may call a character by his forename - full or shortened - his surname, his nickname, his rank - as in ‘the Sergeant said’ - or some other descriptive title, such as ‘the older man’ or something similar. One of my police characters, Detective Chief Inspector Nick Wilson, is known as ‘Nick’, ‘Wilson’, ‘The Guvnor’, ‘Guv’, ‘the DCI’, ‘The Chief Inspector’, (or just plain ‘Inspector’) throughout periods of dialogue and narrative to avoid too much word repetition. Others have similar selections to identify them. So… How do we deal with this? How do we populate our novels with names which are individual?  Every writer needs to compile a list, and keep topping it up: a pool of names for their characters, but how do we come up with these characters’ names in the first place? Where do we find them? Do they grow on trees for us to just go out and pick? Well the answer to that is ‘almost’. In fact trees are as good a place as any to start, as are any other interests that you might have. Trees? Well there’s ‘Beech’ and ‘Birch’, ‘Sycamore’, ‘Redwood’, ‘Ash’, ‘Pine’, ‘Maple’, just for a start. All of them perfectly believable surnames, or they can be with suitable modification like ‘Ashwood’, ‘Oakley’, ‘Elmsleigh’, etc.  I’m into motorcycles, so I’ve gleaned names from that world like ‘James Villiers’ - most post war James motorcycles used Villiers engines - ‘Frances (Frankie) Barnett’ (though she prefers ‘B’ as a nickname) - my first bike was a Francis-Barnett, or ‘Fanny B’ as they were known. Another is ‘Lucas Bright’, and I’ve used ‘Plug Champion’, ‘Tillotson’, ’Douglas’, ‘Benelli’, ‘Blackburn’, ’Henderson’, and ‘Ancilotti’ with appropriate forenames. If these aren’t familiar words to you, Google them. It’ll be a fun game looking for the motorcycle connections. From an interest in pioneer aviation comes names like ‘Saulnier’, ‘Anson’, ‘Guynemer’, ‘Voisin’ and ‘Fonck’. Then there’s towns and counties, with ‘Georgia Didcot’, ‘Noel Caversham’, and ‘Adrian Kent’… more Googling games for you to play. A fellow author published by Selfishgenie litters his books with the names of well-known rugby players from both the present and the past. They say, ‘Write what you know’ ...  Turn your friends into characters Most productive of all, though, is that rich vein of people we know, or have met, that we can mine for suitable character names, though when putting these in my pool, I have a certain convention that I try to follow. I’ll almost always mix the names up, rarely using both forename and surname from the same person as a character’s name. Usually I’ll only use full matches in the case of people who were either long deceased acquaintances, family, or friends, of my late parents’ generation, or are just names I’ve heard. There’s no point in upsetting your mates by using their names in print, then describing 'them’ as someone they may not like to be, though there is one old friend who actually asked me to use his name and physical description as a character in a novel. It was on his bucket list. As he’s a cat lover, and tireless worker for local animal charities he, of course, became a corrupt vet in one of my novels. Sometimes it’s particularly satisfying to name a nasty piece of work as an old boss or other bad memory from your past, but there’s one thing to beware of. When you do choose a name for a really nasty villain, it’s a good idea to Google that name to make sure that he or she isn’t someone really famous, even if you’ve never heard of them, and particularly if your character falls within a similar field. It might not look too good if your mad wheelchair bound evil genius was called Stephen Hawking, would it? Remember history  A lot of names fall out of favour over time (You won’t find many Germans called Adolf born after 1945), so you can add a flavour of authenticity to your historical work by including period names. Archibald isn’t a name you hear much these days (If at all), but right up until the 1960s there were plenty of them about. One was even a ventriloquist’s dummy on a radio show (No, I kid you not). Similarly, Ernest, Stanley, Norman, and others all had their day in the Sun then fell out of favour. A friend of mine said she could tell the age of a woman by her name, with gemstones (Beryl, Pearl, Amethyst and others) all denoting pre-war births, alongside Mavis, Agnes, Agatha, Cecilia and a whole lot more. Flowers were also popular as names until the late 60s but now are hardly used at all (Though I do know a Primrose who is under 30 and there's also the singer Lily Allen). After World War II, many boys were given the name Winston in honour of Britain’s wartime Prime Minister, but you won’t find many with that name these days. Helpfully, there are lists of names popular in different decades available on websites. The “Gender Construction Kit” website provides popular names for decades between the 1950s and the 2000s, for example. And, of course, the national census provides lots of historical names for you to conjure with and you can access that in the UK through the Office of National Statistics website. Get it right… Do the research, then save for a rainy day  Even fictional character names have to be believable, so for foreign characters, or those from different ethnic backgrounds, it’s worthwhile to Google ‘common names’ for a nationality or culture for names, or to mix and match the names of well known people from that nation’s culture or history. But be aware that some cultures alter names to suit a gender, even surnames. For example, in Icelandic culture, a surname ending in ‘son’ may denote its bearer to be the son of the first part of the name… e.g. Erikson as ‘son of Erik’… However the female offspring of ‘Erik’ in Iceland won’t take her father’s surname, but instead will have the surname ‘Eriksdóttir’ (Erik’s daughter). Thanks to a change in Icelandic law, parents can now use the mother's name instead and children can switch to their preferred parent's name when they grow up, if they wish. Yes, I found this confusing too. Likewise, even in English speaking cultures, some forenames that are considered female in one country will be more commonly male in another. In the UK, ‘Tracy’ is usually a girl’s name and ‘Robin’ a boy’s name, but in the US these are more likely to be the other way around. Keep your ears and eyes open. If something comes into your sights, whether in the local curry house, or on the TV news, remember to put it into the pool, even if you’ve no use in your current work in progress. These things will always be useful one day. Add all these names into your list. Don’t bother with putting them in any order as they’re as random as the opportunities to use them but keep adding to the list as new ones come to mind. Don’t forget that there are forenames that can be surnames, and vice-versa. In Scotland the likes of Fraser, Cameron, Donald and others can be either a forename or a surname.  Finally, if you are really stuck, there are lists of gender appropriate baby names published for almost every country in the world.
Many of those lists also provide a “meaning” (real or imagined) for the name, so if you want to indicate that a character has the strength of a lion, you can find which name might be appropriate; Leona for a girl, perhaps, or Leonard for a boy, but there’s also Aerial, Braylen, Dillon and others. 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. 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. |
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