I’m thoroughly enjoying my blog book tour (watch out for my mythical creatures Top 10 list next week!) and today’s stop is at Urban Fantasy Investigations, where I have an interview and book giveaway contest.
In the interview, you’ll discover things like what I do in my down time, which character in the Embodied trilogy was my favourite to write, and where I keep my piece of the Berlin Wall.
Who hasn’t been there? The blank page. The blinking cursor. The author’s horrifically empty torture chamber: writer’s block.
Neil Gaiman in a snuggly sweater
Well, according to Neil Gaiman, best-selling author of the Sandman comic book series, Coraline and many more super-imaginative works of fiction, writer’s block is just as much a fiction as anything else that pours out of an author’s mind. In this fascinating interview on the Goodreads website, he talks about how his ambition as a writer has evolved over the years and offers these pearls of wisdom about the dreaded you-know-what (shhhh… don’t say it out loud or it might come true!):
Writer’s block is this thing that is sent from the gods—you’ve offended them. You’ve trod on a crack on the pavement, and you’re through. The gods have decided. It’s not true. What is really true is you can have a bad day. You can have a bad week. You can get stuck. But what I learned when I was under deadline is that if you write on the bad days, even if you’re sure everything you’ve written is terrible, when you come to it tomorrow and you reread it, most of it’s fixable. It may not be the greatest thing you’ve ever written, but you fix it, and actually it’s a lot better than you remember it being. And the weird thing is a year later when you’re copyediting and reading the galleys through for the first time in months, you can remember that some of it was written on bad days. And you can remember that some of it was written on terrific days. But it all reads like you. Fantastic stuff doesn’t necessarily read better than the stuff written on the bad days. Writers have to be like sharks. We keep moving forward, or we die.
So on that note, here’s a toast to all the other authors out there: have lots of fun over the holiday season and then sit at your desk and work. Cheers!
Photo credit: Lvovsky via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND
Insights into the illusory decline in ebook sales, from NPR’s All Things Considered:
According to Author Earnings, the e-book market is thriving, but traditional publishers’ share of it has slipped to about one-third. And Data Guy believes the e-book market will continue to grow well into the future.
I wonder if the mysterious Data Guy is related to Mr. Robot?
Read about the amazing success story of Romanian author Eugen Chirovici (EO Chirovici) who published 10 novels in his native country with some success, then moved to Britain with his family three years ago and is now likely to earn seven figures from his first English-language novel.
The article I’ve linked to makes it sound like Chirovici’s success is out of the blue, but a little research shows this to be far from the truth. His non-fiction works have already been published in the US, he’s a member of the Romanian Academy of Sciences and holds three (!) honorary PhDs in Economics, Communication and History.
I’m a big fan of Vladimir Nabokov (be sure to read the Alfred Appel annotated version of Lolita first), and Chirovici is another Eastern European author who also goes to prove that English doesn’t even need to be your first language if you have imagination, storytelling ability and, oh yeah, maybe a touch of genius.
Goodreads interviewed author/designer Zachary Thomas Dodson about his debut book, Bats of the Republic: An Illuminated Novel. It looks and sounds like a stunningly crafted multi-layered adventure set in the past and the future.
As the Goodreads article says,
With hand-drawn illustrations, meticulously detailed maps, a novel-within-a-novel, and even a sealed envelope the reader must not open until the final moment, Zachary Thomas Dodson’s debut novel is a feast for the imagination.
Read the article for some fascinating insight into Dodson’s process.
Here’s a link to my interview today with Arbiter News, including my inspiration for Starley’s Rust and which 5 people (real or fictional) I would invite to dinner!
Here is the third and final part of my interview with British author Linda Gillard, in which she talks about genre-related hurdles in trying to crack the North American market, fascinating heroines, and her upcoming writing plans.
Me: How are your sales in other territories, in particular North America and Oceania? Do you have any plans to promote your books specifically for those markets or are you happy enough with your success in the UK?
Linda: So far I’ve made no real impact anywhere other than the UK. I’ve tried paid adverts for the US market. They boost sales for 2 days, then they go back to single figures, so I’ve now let it go. I have no experience of paid adverts working, so I’ve stopped buying them. My UK sales earn me a living. I’m gradually getting more reviews on US Amazon and they’re good, so I think my readership there will grow slowly – possibly slower than stalactites, but that’s how it was in the beginning in the UK.
Linda Gillard’s Emotional Geology
I don’t write genre fiction and that’s made it hard to crack the North American market. I’m not sure how well my stories will travel anyway. I’ve been told by American fans that my books don’t have enough sex in them to appeal to readers of romance and paranormals. Most of my heroines are well into their forties. They aren’t the girl next door and never were. Sadly many Amazon reviewers assess books according to whether they’d like the heroine to be their best friend. I’m not writing for those readers.
I think the first duty of a protagonist is to be fascinating, not likeable. Let’s face it, Jane Eyre is not exactly Miss Congeniality. And I’m surely not the only one who’d like to slap Emma Woodhouse. Cathy Earnshaw is a minx at best. Becky Sharp, Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, Scarlett O’Hara, Tess D’Urberville – none of them would have made Head Girl. But these problematic heroines haven’t exactly blighted the books in which they appear. On the contrary, they’re the reason we read and re-read. We relish their complexity, their guts and their moral ambiguity.
I cherish a review of my first two books in a Scottish literary journal that said, “The emotional power in these novels makes this reviewer reflect on how Charlotte and Emily Bronte might have written if they were living and writing now.” That reviewer picked up that my protagonists and stories pay homage to the Classics. A LIFETIME BURNING, with its incestuous twins, is my 21st century take on WUTHERING HEIGHTS. My novel STAR GAZING owes a lot to Charlotte Brontë’s VILLETTE.
That’s a plus for many UK readers. I don’t know if it would be for North American readers. I’m not all that bothered. I write what I want to write in the way I want to write it. I’m indie.
Me: What has your experience been with niche subjects and do you think they fare better in a self/indie publishing environment than the traditional publishing world?
Linda: I think they probably do fare better because there are no editors setting themselves up as arbiters of taste. In the indie world, niche subjects can at last find their readers.
I’ve discovered readers are quite happy to tackle novels featuring challenging topics (bipolar, PTSD, depression, suicide, disability, bereavement, addiction, survivor guilt). My fiction is issue-led because I’m interested in discussing these issues and how they affect people. I think issues like these also increase the drama potential of a story.
Linda Gillard’s Untying the Knot
Issues also give you an angle for your book promotion. I can say to you as a reader, “Try UNTYING THE KNOT. It’s a great love story, it’s funny and it will make you cry.’ Do you care? Probably not. But supposing I say to you, ‘I saw a white van in Glasgow with the words “Bomb Disposal” on the side. I wondered what sort of guy goes into bomb disposal. Then I asked myself, what sort of boy grows up to become a man who goes into bomb disposal? Then I wondered what it would be like, being married to a man in bomb disposal. So I decided to write a book about all that.” Do I have your attention now?…
Don’t tell people your book is good, tell them why you just had to write it.
Me: What’s next for you? Do you take a break between books or plunge right into the next one?
Linda: I usually take a short break after a book, but I don’t stop for long because I’m addicted to writing. But there was a sad hiatus last year when I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Surgery & treatment stopped me in my tracks and I wrote no fiction for a year. Instead I wrote a lot of guest blogs and caught up on my reading.
I started writing a new novel on New Year’s Eve and I hope that will be launched before Christmas. It will be another genre-buster: a contemporary family drama set in a decaying Scottish castle. It’s a bit of a whodunnit, with a love story and a ghost. In other words, it’s a marketing nightmare. But so was HOUSE OF SILENCE, my most popular book. I’m not worried. When readers buy my books now, they expect the unexpected. That’s all part of the fun.
A big thank you to Linda for taking the time to share her absolutely fascinating insights and experiences. You can find out more about her (and of course buy her books!) on her Amazon author page here.
Here is part two of British author Linda Gillard’s insightful and inspirational interview on her experiences in the world of self-publishing.
Me: Since you don’t do the social media thing, how have you built your readership? This is obviously a key issue for self-published authors with zero or miniscule marketing budgets.
Linda: I’ve built up my readership over many years. I was first traditionally published in 2005 and I’ve published six novels in that time. I’m not an overnight success. I had a modest but enthusiastic following for my first three traditionally published novels. Those readers gave me a lot of good reviews. Two of those novels were short-listed for various awards and won one. When I went indie, I already had a following and a good writing CV (apart from being dropped by my publisher for “disappointing sales”.)
Linda Gillard
After I was dropped, I set up my Facebook author page, waited for my agent to find me a new publisher and carried on writing novels. I was preparing for a miracle. I offered to write guest blogs for whoever would have me, so that I could promote my backlist and keep myself visible. When, after 2 years, my agent still hadn’t found a publisher for my mixed-genre novels, I decided to go indie.
There was a sort of impromptu launch party on FB. (Nowadays authors orchestrate these things.) Enough people clicked on the same day to send HOUSE OF SILENCE to #2 in the Movers and Shakers chart and that book has never really looked back. But I broke all the rules. I didn’t blog. I didn’t Tweet. It wasn’t genre fiction. It wasn’t the first in a trilogy. I didn’t ever make it free. But I sold 10,000 downloads in less than four months and Amazon UK selected it for their Top Ten Best of 2011 in the Indie Author category.
I don’t know why it sold. It had a good, professional cover. The blurb was appealing and ticked lots of boxes because it was a mixed-genre book. But who knows why a reader clicks? I keep my prices low (£1.99/$2.99) which encourages new readers to try me. If you check out my Amazon reviews, especially in the UK you’ll see readers try one book, like it, then download several others. (This is why it’s important to have several books out there – you want to capitalise on that impulsive moment when a reader decides they’ve found a new favourite author and have to have the complete works.)
Linda Gillard’s House of Silence
But the main thing I do to build up my readership is keep writing good books that are hard to put down. That brings readers back for more. They also tell their friends & family. That’s what you want – “superfans” who’ll do the promotion for you. Readers hate relentless self-promotion. It’s selfish and boring. But they assume interesting books must be written by interesting people, so instead of promoting my books, I cultivate relationships with readers – in forums, on Facebook, in blog comments. I regard readers as friends I haven’t met yet.
I can’t explain how I write books readers want to read because I don’t know. I just write for myself and always have. I like complexity, moral grey areas, believable characters, lots of dialogue, humour, an interesting and unusual angle (eg a blind heroine, a hero suffering from PTSD, incestuous adult twins). My books don’t belong to any particular genre. I’ve written a three-generation saga, a paranormal, a love story with a 47-year old bipolar heroine. But variety hasn’t been a problem for me as an indie because I market myself, not a genre and I market myself as a writer of intelligent page-turners.
The final part of my interview with Linda will appear either tomorrow or Friday.
British author Linda Gillard has seen a lot of success as a self-published author, having become dissatisfied with being pigeonholed by the traditional publishing industry. Some of her travails were covered in this article on her that appeared earlier this month in The Guardian’s series on independent authors.
I interviewed Linda last week and her answers were so interesting and in-depth that I’ve decided to publish them in several posts over the rest of the week.
Me: You have stated that you make a healthy number of ebook sales even though you don’t participate in social media. Do you ever worry that you could be selling more books if you were tweeting, blogging and posting?
Linda: I used to, but I don’t any more. I’m yet to see any evidence that Tweets sell books in any significant numbers. I was recently featured in the Guardian newspaper as a successful indie author, but despite a massive readership and multitudinous tweets and shares, the article had no impact on my sales. Tweeting can raise your profile and increase your book’s visibility, but my concern now is acquiring new readers.
Author Linda Gillard
Indies have discovered book promotion can take all the time you’re prepared to give it, but launching a new novel is the best thing I can do to stimulate backlist sales and bring myself to the attention of book buyers. My readers don’t want a new blog post from me, they want a new book. I think however successful (or unsuccessful) you are, the best and most lucrative use of your time is always going to be writing the next book. Once I’d come to that conclusion, I stopped worrying about how much I participate in social media.
The exception for me is Facebook where I have a lively author page with 800 followers. I enjoy interacting with readers there and the feedback I get is useful and fun. I also have a website, but apart from that, I just write books. I try to produce one a year. Having found your readers, it’s important to keep them supplied with new books. They are your best marketing tool.
Me: Genre seems to be a problem for traditional publishers who often take a marketing-by-numbers approach (whether through laziness or incompetence) and attempt to slot every book into a neat genre. As a successfully self-published author who mixes genres, can you turn the tables and throw some advice back at the so-called pros?
Linda: What do publishers know? The Time Traveller’s Wife was rejected 40 times before an independent publisher took a risk. It went on to sell seven million copies. In the UK publishers market to retailers, not readers and that’s where they’ve gone wrong. They underestimate the intelligence of the average reader and that reader’s willingness to experiment.
Readers want a good story and characters they can get involved with. Apart from that, they’re open-minded. I see no evidence in book forums, on blogs or in reviews that readers want authors to produce the same kind of book all the time or even a book that sticks to a single genre, yet this is what editors tell any author who wants to mix or change genres. “Readers get confused”, we’re told.
I think this is just an excuse to disguise the fact that publishers don’t really know how to market books except as yet another “stunning debut novel” or “the next Jodie Picoult/Lee Child/E. L. James.” It’s not marketing, it’s cloning.
Linda Gillard’s The Glass Guardian
I know it’s hard to market “a rattling good yarn”, but this is what readers are looking for. Readers want to fall in love with authors. That’s what readers are looking for now when they buy indie books: stories cheap enough to risk trying a new author who might be “the one”.
Publishers would do better to promote the author, not their latest book, build up a following, encourage brand loyalty. Readers don’t want to be disappointed by novels that fail to live up to the hype. They want the next good book from a favourite, reliable author. But how do you make that sexy?…
No one knows how to market quality, but that’s what readers want.
My psychological mystery The New Sense is a free Kindle download today. Montrealers who read it will recognize a host of places (and maybe even some people).
I have to get back to promoting the promotion now but if you want to know more, either click on the cover to read an excerpt on Amazon.com or watch this interview I did last year: LINK TO ME TALKING IN FRONT OF MY BOOKCASE.
If you’re looking for the Canadian Amazon link, click here.
For the UK Amazon link, click here.
And, what the heck, if you’re in Japan, click here.
Sitting at your desk isn't work 