This publishing world is full of bullets and as I gain more knowledge of the world I see more of them, some dodged by sheer luck, some by good advice, and some by research. That research is something I’m knee deep in. I’m taking a new course about approaching writing as a business, about things a million miles from your muse, like percentages and contracts and sales bases. One thing that this week’s research threw up was just how much debut authors are struggling in the market – especially debut authors under the traditional publishing houses. Their share of the debut authors’ market has dropped from 22% to 9% over 2014-16 (authorearnings.com). Just stop for one minute and think about that. You go to the trouble of finding an agent, of getting a big publisher, and then you find out that you’re getting such a low share of the market (and, let’s be honest, debut author income is small anyway…) Many moons ago (it feels that way, anyhow) I got a r...
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I’ve talked, lots of times, about the importance of online support and communities. It’s an important, and valid, subject. Gone are the days of needing a UK publisher and a US one (unless you’re traditionally published and with an agent, where that model still applies). For self publishers, and many of those with small and medium presses, the book is available throughout the world. (I felt like doing a He-Man: “By the power of Kindle!” right about here. I almost desisted.) What I’ve talked about less is building local networks. Once, they were the mainstay of any author. Getting a book out meant gaining the support of local booksellers, of visiting reading groups, of having your local press do a little bit of coverage about you. There was no internet, no kindle – your name had to build slowly and surely, like tentacles on an octopus, reaching and reaching. Then, in the rush to be on facebook and twitter, to have sales in America (and, to...
This week I finally (! I'm not a patient person and sitting on this one has been killing me !) revealed the cover to my next book, Waters and the Wild (out in July from Inspired Quill) So, let me preen for just a moment before I go on. Preen, preen, preen, lovely, lovely, lovely. Okay. Done. You'll have picked up I really love this cover. Why? Well, firstly, it captures the place and setting so well. It would have been easy, in a book about fairy glens, to have the fairy cliches dominate. But that would have missed the subtleties of the place (and story). Yes, we're in fairyland. But that fairyland isn't just the scenic glens - it's muddy lanes, under dark skies, with shadows all around. It's on bleak hillsides, next to burial cairns. It's in sea caves and gardens. In this story, the fairies are everywhere. So, I love that we have a laneway, in the glens, with encroaching shadows. And I love that it has Amy on the front cover. I don't open t...
About 2 years ago, I took a decision. I decided to ask my then agent (although we were going through the motions, having already decided to part company) to pull Inish Carraig from the remaining editors looking at it. We'd been on submission over 6 months and the comments coming back patently indicated it wasn't hitting the market it was subbed to (which it wasn't - it had been a crossover novel turned into a YA novel and subbed as a crossover....) I decided to publish the book myself. I thought it was too good to sit in a trunk somewhere. I wrote Inish on a whim, had fun with it and was surprised by how solid the final book felt. I wanted to share it. How did it go? Well, firstly - by the time Inish Carraig came out I knew it was a book to be proud of. My beta readers loved it, my editor advised me it was solid, many of the publishers had nice things to say about it. One editor - at a big 5 house - liked it a lot and mused on it for months before rejecting as they di...
Last week, in a national newspaper an author dared to set out the reasons they had decided to give up after their second book on the market didn't achieve what they hoped it might. I won't link to the original article, partly because it's all over the place, anyway, and partly because the sentiments within it aren't what I wanted to write about (I could blog about stickability and bemoan the lack of it, but not this week) No, what I wanted to talk about was, partly, the reactions I've seen all over the internet about it - few of them generous. They've ranged from (and I'm paraphrasing) the writer had it lucky, they had an agent, they were already doing better than most How dare the writer think they were going to make it in two books, this takes years They're a quitter, and we're not Their expectations were so high, they set themselves up to fail. I'm not saying there mightn't be a grain of truth in some of this. I don't know to ...