Adam Croft's Blog, page 14

Let’s assume that you’ve already self-published one book and now you’re trying to decide what to do next to build on your success. In some ways, this can be more difficult than publishing something for the first time. When you’re just starting out, you don’t have a base to work from so there’s nothing to live up to except your own expectations – but second time around, you’ll naturally want to improve what you’ve already achieved.

If you are currently looking to build on your self-publishing success, here are a few things you could try. As always, please do let me know what you think in the comments.

Get another book out. It might sound obvious, and it might be a big ask when you’ve just finished publishing your first book, but one of the best ways to capitalise on your self-publishing success is to do it all again. Building a back catalogue – and a track record – is crucial if you’re hoping to make progress.
Look for areas you could invest in. When they self-publish for the first time, many authors do most of it themselves. Doing it all again is a good time to start thinking about where outside support could help you – such as in editing or cover design to make your books more professional.
Research what’s new. There’s always something new in self-publishing, whether it’s a new platform through which to publish your work or new types of deals and offers that you can use to help with your promotions. Make sure you keep on top of what’s happening so you can use new developments to build on what you’ve already done.
Use your previous book. If you got lots of positive reviews for your first book, think how they could help you promote your next book. Is there a great quote that you could use for the cover, or something that people picked up on that they really liked?
Know what your ultimate goal is. It’s much easier to know how to build on your existing success if you know what it is that you really want to achieve. Building an action plan is always easier with an end result in mind, so give the issue some thought before deciding on what you’re going to do next.

Promoting yourself and your work is something that all authors need to do, whether they are self-published or not. Once you’re used to it, it becomes a way of life – just part of what you do as an author – but it can be daunting when you’re just starting out and not used to marketing yourself. Nerves are normal: it means you care and there are plenty of things you can do to help manage them and get yourself off to a good start.

Remember that your book is the most important thing. Of course, you matter too. Your author brand is important and you definitely need to think seriously about it. However, your book is the centrepiece. Take a step back and think how you would promote the book if it wasn’t you who had written it. The objectivity can often help you think of effective ways to promote your work.
Remember how much you want to be an author. One of the reasons people get nervous about promoting themselves and their books is that they worry people will judge them. Remembering how much you want to do this and be successful through your writing is important, and even if you do get a bad review, you can be proud that you’re doing what you love.
Start small. There’s no rule that says you have to go all out with your promotions straight away. You could start with a few Tweets or Facebook posts and go from there. There can also be something oddly comforting about not having too many social media followers when you’re starting out; it gives you the chance to find your feet with a smaller audience before moving on to bigger things.
Practice on your friends. Buy them a beer to get them on side and then try out your promotion plans on them. You could also ask them how they, as someone who likes you, would go about promoting you and your work.
Believe in your book. If you believe you’ve got a good book on your hands that’s worth publishing, it’s worth making the effort to promote yourself to make sure you give it and you the best possible chance of succeeding.
Consider getting someone else to do the promotions for you. If you’re really unsure about promoting yourself, or if you have got to the stage where you’ve done all you can on your own, it’s worth thinking about getting a professional to help you. It’ll be one less job you have to worry about and if you get a good pro onside, the investment should be more than worth it.

What are your tips for promoting yourself and your writing?

It’s a question that all crime writers must ask themselves at some point during the writing of their books: how many people should they bump off throughout the story?

It might be a slightly grisly topic to address at this time on a Wednesday, but it’s a topic that can have a huge impact on a crime fiction novel. How many characters die throughout the story will obviously affect the book that you write, and the story you are aiming to tell will also affect how many characters die in the process.

A serial killer novel is often a very different beast to a book with a single death, after all. When they are done right, one type of book is no less compelling than the other, but they do differ significantly.

The sources of tension are likely to be different, for example. If you are writing a novel about a serial killer, one of the key sources of tension is likely to come from who is going to die next and when. If you are writing about a single murder, the tension will come from other places, such as the actions of suspects.

Something else to consider is how many bodies your book actually needs. Deliberately writing a book with a high body count is one thing; bumping characters off just so something happens is something else entirely, and it isn’t always a good thing. If you’re killing characters to add excitement to the story, it might be time to look at the story you’re trying to tell in the first place.

I think this is the issue at the heart of it, the one that ultimately affects how many bodies your crime novel will include. Getting the story right is the most important thing. Everything you write should be essential to the story you are trying to tell. Whether you are going for the multiple murders or the one-death-per-book approach, the needs of the story must always come first.

We are often fed stories of people reading less, of book sales struggling and an ever-more competitive market, so it is always cheering to hear of good news relating to book sales.

It was reported last week that spending on books was up in the UK last year, by 4% to £3.3 billion. That figure includes both print and e-book sales. As you might expect, e-book sales did particularly well, with sales up 66% in 2012 according to publishers.

It is also thought that sales of printed books are also holding their own, despite signs of decline in recent years.

You can find out more about this story here, and please do let me know your thoughts in the comments box.

In a blog post last week, I took a little look at writing about things you know nothing about. In a similar spirit, today our topic is imagination: a valuable tool for all writers, particularly when you’re trying to write a story about a space traveller having yourself never stepped foot out of the British Isles.

In fact, along with the ability to put sentences together, I’d say imagination is one of the most crucial aspects of being a writer. Without it, there would be no stories in the first place, let alone leaps of faith and dreaming minds that can either lead to stunning works of literature or a steaming mess in novel-form but either way are more interesting than a story about nothing at all.

Imagination is also what gives our work much of its originality. As well as the benefit of your unique experiences and view of the world, how your imagination works will have a huge impact on who you are as a writer. It influences the kind of things that you write and how you go about writing them. It lets you write about things you will never be able to experience in real life.

Plus as writers, we are also relying a lot on the imagination of the reader – their ability to fill in the blanks for themselves and flesh out in their minds the story you have written for them. The success of fiction depends on us all having the ability to some extent to make-believe.

I think that’s a wonderful thing. We spend so much of our lives bound up in the practicalities of things that it’s brilliant sometimes to be able to let all of that go for a time and make something up instead. Whether from the perspective of the writer or the reader, imagination is something none of us could be without.

Crime fiction is often cited as the most popular genre out there, but why is it that we love it so much?

I think there are a variety of reasons for this. One is that it doesn’t shy away from dealing with difficult subjects. Instead, it tackles them head on. In short, it doesn’t treat people as idiots. It treats them as grown-ups.

There is also a realism in much crime fiction that people can relate to. The stories might be set in places that are unfamiliar to us and be about things that we have no direct experience of, but we all know what crime is and are highly likely to have direct or indirect experience of it ourselves. It’s something that is tangible in our own lives, something that we can connect to while at the same time allowing us to look at things from a safe distance.

It allows us to look into the lives of other people – often ordinary people, people who we could know or even be ourselves. There is something compelling about that; the fact that even though many crime novels wouldn’t happen in reality, there is a seed of truth in them and things happen in them that could be real.

They also engage the brain. The plots are interesting and often complicated. They require us to think and concentrate, and the genre boasts some of the most compelling characters in literature. Plus there is a huge amount of variety in the genre, from Scandinavian crime fiction to police procedurals, psychological thrillers, the traditional whodunit and gritty urban events. There is something for everyone to love, and plenty for crime lovers to devour.

We can never run out of crime stories, and there are always new interesting crime writers coming along and doing different things with the genre. With all of this to offer, it is no wonder that readers keep on coming back for more.

There isn’t a writer out there who hasn’t made mistakes from time to time. It is part of the writing rite of passage: you have to colossally arse something up before you can properly call yourself a writer.

The important thing is how you react to those mistakes and what you take away from them. Luckily, there are plenty of things for us to learn from our prose-based disasters. Here are ten of them.

What doesn’t work. Obviously. A large part of writing is about working out what works and what doesn’t.
What you like writing. Some of our writing mistakes come from the fact that we don’t really like what we’re writing, either because it’s not our favourite style or it’s a story you’re not that bothered about. There are important lessons to be learned here.
How to edit. In any first draft you write, there will be mistakes. Learning how to fix them is one of the biggest lessons of writing.
A thick skin. Sometimes your writing mistakes will make it all the way to the reading public (or at least the few friends you’ve been brave enough to show your work to). Criticism (hopefully constructive) may follow. It can be hard, but developing a thick skin is important.
The benefit of experience. Maybe that particular story didn’t work, but at least you tried it and you’ve got a bit more experience under your belt.
How to find the promise in your work. A key skill for writers to develop is to find where the good bits are in your work; even if most of it ends up as a write-off, there is always something worth saving.
What styles suit you. You might be hopeless at poetry but wonderful at short stories. A large part of finding out what you’re good at is about trial and error.
How to construct a good story. If you’re finding mistakes or problems in your plots, it shows you’re thinking critically, and that you know something isn’t quite right with the story – which means you’re halfway to putting together a story that actually does work.
Better spelling and grammar. We all mess up our grammar from time to time, and we can’t just rely on the computer spellcheck to fix it for us.
How much you want to write. If you’ve just written the biggest mess in the history of writing but you still want to carry on, to make it better and write more, it just goes to show how much you want it. And you can’t buy passion.

It might not happen very often, but I imagine most of us can recall an occasion when we got to the end of a novel and thought: what was the point of that?

Naturally, this isn’t something we want to happen when readers get to the end of our own books. We don’t necessarily want to give them all of the answers and there is always room for a bit of intrigue, but we still want to leave them feeling satisfied with the book they have just read.

This is why purpose is so important. Not everything has to have deep and hidden meanings, but a little thought behind the intent of your novel will go a long way. For instance, what is the motivation for your characters? This is one of the most important questions to address, because what your characters want and how they go about getting it will form a large part of the driving force of your plot.

What is the purpose of your novel? Or, to put it another way, what is the story you are aiming to tell? What does that particular subplot add to it, and why is that character necessary? All of this links not just to the idea of intent, but also to editing.

Editing is where we really drill down into the story, cut out the bits we don’t need and make better the ones that we do. We can’t do this without knowing what the point of it all is, or else we wouldn’t know what we need to get rid of and what we need to call attention to.

Nor would we have anything to measure the final novel against: it’s worth knowing what we were hoping to achieve so we can see how close we eventually came to doing just that.

One inevitability about writing a novel – or at least about writing more than one novel – is that, at some point, you are going to have to write about things that you have never done and about which you know nothing.

For instance, your characters will have jobs you know nothing about. Your plot will demand a scene in which someone fixes a complicated problem with the car despite you not being entirely sure which bit is the radiator when you open the bonnet for a look inside. A large chunk of your story will depend on a subject with which you were entirely unfamiliar before you started to write it.

It happens a lot, and so we need a strategy for writing about things we’ve never done, and about topics on which our knowledge is limited at best.

One obvious solution is to do some research to learn about whatever it is you’re planning to write about. Talk to people who have that job or who know about that subject, and give yourself a crash course in it.

That’s one strategy, but there is sometimes a slight danger of loading your manuscript with too many facts and details as a result. You’ve done the research and it’s only natural that you’ll want to share what you’ve learnt, but it’s important to be careful and sparing with the information used. It doesn’t always take much to make something believable.

In a way, this is the great thing about writing about stuff you’re unfamiliar with; often all you need is a few salient details to lend your story credibility. After all, your story is about the characters; focusing on their point of view and experience of things is more important than getting every single technical aspect correct.

Besides, this is fiction. We’re allowed to make stuff up. It’s one of the best things about our craft. Research is important as it allows us to write about things we’ve never experienced, but there is also a lot to be said for the interpretation your own experience brings. In many ways, it is about how you use that to your own advantage rather than worrying about becoming an expert in whatever it is you’re writing about.

What do you think? How do you go about writing about things you’re not an expert in?

It is often said that you should write what you want to read. On the face of it, this makes pretty good sense, if only because it will hopefully increase the satisfaction you get from writing the thing in the first place. But is it advice you should always stick to?

I would suggest that, as with so much other advice about writing, it is best taken with a pinch of salt, because it really depends. It depends on what you want to write and read and where you want to go with your writing. Writing what you want to read purely for your own amusement is different to if you are writing with the aim of getting a career out of it.

One of the benefits of writing what you want to read is that it will, with any luck, be full of passion. With a bit more luck, it will lead to you writing something new and interesting that only you could have written, because no one else’s mind works in quite the same way. With even more luck, the book that you want to read will also be a book that other people want to read.

However, if you aren’t quite so lucky, writing what you want to read could involve a couple of pitfalls. One big one is that you run the risk of writing something that is purely an exercise in wish fulfilment – if you’re writing just for the fun of it, that is absolutely fine, but if your goal is to write a compelling and believable story, it isn’t always the best thing to do.

A good story should always be the goal of the writer, no matter your reasons for writing. While what you want to read might very often be a good story, this isn’t always guaranteed. Then again, writing something you know you will like is always a good place to start – a good a place as any.

What do you think? Do you always write what exactly you want to read, or do your stories end up taking you to other places?