Adam Croft's Blog, page 22

As writers, we always want to create something new. Often that something new will be in genres and styles with which we are already familiar, but what about those times when we want to try something completely different? Starting something that’s entirely different to what we have done before can be daunting, so with this in mind, here are some tips for writers who are interested in trying something new.

Read. As much as you can. It sounds obvious, but if you want to write in a new genre, it helps to know what that genre is like. It’s useful to know the things that other writers are writing about so you can work out where your own work might fit – and so you can see what ground has already been covered.
Find out who the big players are. A bit of research never goes amiss. Of course, you shouldn’t let yourself be put off by or, conversely, shaped too much by the authors currently making an impact in your chosen genre, but it’s still useful to know who the most successful writers are and what they have written.
Research the market – and marketing. How saturated is the market for your chosen genre? Do you fit into a niche within it or does your work fall into the mainstream? How will that affect your marketing?
Network with readers. This is something you most likely will already have done with your current work, but you can’t assume that your current readers will be the same people who read your new genre/style. The groundwork still needs to be laid.
Look at links to your previous work. Often, no matter how different your new work may seem to what has come before, it will still have links to your previous projects. For instance, you might be examining similar thematic elements in a new way. Looking for links can help you to chart your growth as a writer and see how it builds on what you have already done, even though it might seem entirely new and scary to begin with.
Write, write write. You can do as much research and read as many books as you like – and you should do both – but if you want to write in a new genre, you need to practice doing just that. Get some words on the page and give it a go.

We’ve known for quite a while now that the e-book market is pretty huge, but is it actually bigger than we previously thought? Recent statistics suggest that this may be the case.

It was previously estimated that in 2012, 567 million e-books were sold worldwide. Now, however, Scott Devitt from Morgan Stanley has estimated that the figures are quite considerably out – and that worldwide sales for 2012 are actually more like 859 million.

This is not just good news for those of us who rely on e-books for a large part of our incomes but also, obviously, for e-book retailers. In particular, it has been estimated that last year Amazon sold around 383 million e-books, which is more than 100 million up on a previous estimate.

More good news comes from Amazon, which has estimated that people who bought Kindle e-readers in 2011 read 4.6 times more books in the year that followed compared with the year before they bought their e-reader.

It seems, then, that e-readers are rather good news for the book industry as a whole. We have seen in recent weeks that the growth in the industry might be slowing, but despite this, we cannot underestimate just how huge this industry is.

You can read more about this story here.

What makes a crime novel a crime novel? Other, that is, than the manuscript itself.

One thing that helps to distinguish a crime novel as a crime novel is the book’s jacket. Walk into any bookshop and you can usually quickly spot where the crime section is (and not just because there are generally big signs saying ‘crime’). There is a distinct feel to the look of many crime novels and the way they are marketed.

With this in mind, here are some of the things you should think about when designing a crime novel jacket.

Style – and readability – of the font

It isn’t hard to think of the kind of fonts that are generally used on crime novels: bold, block text, slightly ghostly yet often-still-quite-chunky script and so on. It’s rare to find a crime novel with a flowing, romantic font on the front cover – that’s not to say you should never do it, of course, but it pays to think about the things that identify your novel for what it is. You don’t want readers to pass over your crime novel because you’ve chosen a font that makes it look more like a historical romance, for instance.

Use of images and colour

There’s also something to be said for the images that you use. There are plenty of types of images that can help to identify your book as a crime novel, but we also need to be careful about going too far the other way. Book covers shouldn’t be too graphic, for example. It’s also common to find relatively dark or muted colour schemes used on crime novel jackets, which is something else to consider when designing your own.

Choice of tagline

Ah, the tagline. This bit isn’t really mandatory, but an intriguing sentence or question to hook a reader’s attention can work well. If you’re going to use one, make sure it stands out but doesn’t overwhelm the rest of the text. The back cover is usually a good place for taglines; it allows them to be positioned prominently without getting in the way of your striking front cover.

‘Author of’

Writing a series of crime novels or had success with a previous standalone novel? Include an ‘author of’ bit somewhere on the jacket. As in ‘author of the DI X and DS Y novels’ or ‘author of the bestselling Z’.

Carefully selected quotes

If you’ve been lucky enough to get a great quote from a respected writer, particularly if they work within your own genre, put it on the jacket. This can be especially useful if you’re not currently that well known; a recommendation on a book jacket might not win thousands of readers, but if it persuades even a few to give your book a try, it will be worth it.

Crime fiction is a popular genre with a lot of competition – so if you’re an independent publisher looking to publish a crime novel, you’ll need to be savvy with your marketing to make your book stand out. Here are a few things to consider when you’re marketing crime fiction.

Think about the other categories your book could fall into to maximise its marketing potential – for example, as well as crime, could it also come under the category of romance, sci-fi, fantasy, thriller or historical novel?
Research the types of blog that might be interested in your book and target them carefully; look into doing guest posts on crime blogs and look for sites that offer to review books.
Consider the first 10% of your novel very carefully. The start of a novel is always crucial, but even more so when you consider a lot of people now read free samples on their e-readers before buying the whole book. The traditional sample length is about 10% of the book, so think about how you can make people want to carry on reading after that.
Think where the hook of your novel lies – what’s the thing you’re going to use to sell it? Do you have an interesting, original detective? Is there an unusual premise to your book that might make people want to read it?
Is it a series? Or if it’s your first book, will it become a series? Crime readers often love continuing series’ of novels, so make sure you publicise it if yours falls into this bracket.
What’s your tagline? You need to grab people’s attention quickly and make them want to know more, often from just a few brief words, so think carefully about your tagline as well as the longer descriptive blurb for your novel.

When your book isn’t selling as well as you hoped it might, it can be easy to get bogged down in complex reasons and technical details – but often the reasons are a lot simpler, a lot more obvious, than you might think.

Poor cover design. This is probably one of the most common things that put readers off books, and it’s something that particularly affects independent publishers. If you’re going to take the time to create a cover in the first place, make sure you take the time to do it properly. And, if you can’t do it yourself, get a professional to do it for you. Your book’s cover is a key marketing tool, and it’s one area where it’s definitely worth spending a bit of money if you need to.
Not marketing your book in the correct categories. At its most extreme, this takes the form of marketing your book as a genre it definitively is not. Most of the time though, it takes the form of not exploiting all the avenues available to you. On Amazon, for instance, you can select what categories your book falls under – think about all the different categories you could make use of to ensure it reaches as many people as possible.
Marketing your book in the wrong place. Trying to promote your crime novel on a romance novel blog or not targeting your marketing at all? That could be a big reason behind your lack of sales.
Not making your book available in as many places as possible. Amazon might be the big one, but don’t forget to make your book available elsewhere too.
Not using pricing offers. If you’ve priced your book too high, people won’t buy it, particularly if you’re a new author they’ve never heard of before. It can be worth pricing your book lower than you’d originally intended to create interest. Pricing your first book lower than your others to entice people in is another option you could try.
Not enough reviews. Reviews aren’t always easy to get, but it’s worth putting in the time to get some from readers, as a positive review could inspire others to try your book.
Not putting enough time and effort in. We want to think that we’re doing all we can to make our books a success, but is this really always the case? Often, the truth of the matter is that our books aren’t selling particularly well because there’s more we could be doing to help them along the way. Spending as much time as possible doing everything you can to boost your sales is important; don’t leave any option unexplored.

Purpose is something that comes into all aspects of writing a book, from your initial intent to sit down and write a novel to the final piece of marketing you do after publication. It is something that is always important, but arguably never more so than when you’re editing your book.

The editing stage is the stage where you question things, where you take your novel apart and put it back together again until you’re certain that it is, with any luck, the book you set out to write in the first place. Purpose plays a crucial role here. For example, when you’re editing your book, you need to be thinking about the purpose of the whole novel. Does it work as a whole, or does it need some work to achieve what you want to?

It’s something that matters just as much when you start to break the book down. What, for instance, is the purpose behind the structure of your book? Why have you chosen that particular structure rather than another one, and what does it bring to the novel that another structure wouldn’t have done?

What is the purpose of having a line break there? Why have you chosen to have that particular chapter length? What is the purpose of that particular scene? What does it add to the book and how does it move the story on? If you find yourself doubting your answers to any of these questions, it is generally a sign that there is something that will require you to re-think and look again at your initial decisions.

This is important as it relates so closely to the believability of your novel; readers need to be able to invest in it and care about it, and believe that the events within it could actually happen, if not in real life then at least within the world you have created. And, if you aren’t sure of your own book’s purpose or the point of particular aspects of it, your readers won’t be either.

What do you think?

The solution might not be the be all and end all of crime fiction, but it is most certainly a crucial aspect of it. If you don’t get the solution to the crime right, the whole novel will fall down as a result of it. No matter how good the rest of the story might be, if your ending is a let-down, you can be certain that readers will remember it.

You need to know how the crime is going to be solved. Coincidences might happen in real life, but if your complicated, wonderful, intriguing plot is solved because of one at the end of your novel, it is likely to feel like a bit of a cheat. After all, why bother having a clever, interesting detective there to solve the crime if someone or something else is going to do it for them? That’s not to say that other factors shouldn’t be involved in the solving of the crime – of course they should – but you need to give your protagonist a purpose (this issue of purpose is one we’ll be looking at again later in the week).

This means that you need to know how your crime is going to be solved; it should be an important part of your plotting. It can be really tempting to leave the solution to your novel hanging when you’re initially plotting it, thinking that you’ll sort it out when you get it to it. This approach can work, but it’s a risky one, particularly if it turns out your solution hangs on something that happens early on in the novel. It can also lead to a lot of complicated editing if things go in a different direction to the one you initially thought of.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t do it, of course, merely that plotting in advance can be useful when it comes to working out the puzzle of your novel’s crime. For instance, what kind of event is going to lead to the big reveal? Will it be a confession from your antagonist? A telling clue left behind at the crime scene or a foolish misstep on the part of the criminal? Whatever you decide, it needs to be believable when the end comes.

In the case of the confession, for example, it can’t just come out of nowhere. The groundwork needs to be laid throughout the novel in exchange for the payoff. We need to believe that the antagonist would really confess – and that the protagonist has encouraged them to do so.

Even if your ending is there to be a big surprise to the reader, it needs to work with the plot. This is why it can be so important to spend time on your planning before beginning to write the novel – even though it might be tempting to dive straight in, telling yourself you’ll work it all out as you go along, when it comes to actually revealing your solution, the potential for it to come to that needs to have been there all along.

What do you think? How do you make sure your crime fiction solutions make sense while still retaining their impact?

When you are spending so much of your time writing, it can be all too easy to find yourself with no time left for reading. And yet, as writers, we should always make an effort to find time to read. After all, for most of us, it was reading that first inspired us to become writers, and there are plenty of great reasons why we should continue to take the time now…

Find out what’s out there

Although you shouldn’t write a book of a particular genre simply because it’s really popular right now, it still makes sense for writers to know what’s popular so that they can get a sense of what’s out there and inspiring readers. This isn’t just important for defining current trends, but also so you know where your book fits in with everything else – something that you can really only get from reading widely and regularly.

Find new ideas

While plagiarism is never cool, other author’s books can still be a brilliant source of inspiration. Sometimes, reading someone else’s ideas can help to trigger your own ideas or encourage you to look at things in a different way. The source of the inspiration might not always be evident, but even just the feeling we get from a book can be a great source of material for our own work.

Build your knowledge

Reading lots means you’ll know lots. Well. It depends, I suppose, but I think it’s relatively safe to say that, generally speaking, the more you’ll read the more you’ll know. Even if you’re not a non-fiction reader, you can still pick up great pieces of information from fiction, and you never know when it might come in handy.

Improve your writing

It’s often said that reading a lot of books can help to improve your writing, and it’s often said for a reason. While the main way of improving your writing will always be to simply write, reading is also a great help. It can be hugely useful to see different styles in print, and you can learn a great deal about what works and doesn’t work for you.

Enjoy some quiet time

Finally, one of the best reasons to find time to read is for the sheer fun of it. We all need to take some time out now and again, and when you’ve spent all day struggling with your own manuscript, it’s wonderfully relaxing to take some time out with one that’s already finished, that you don’t need to edit again and beat into submission.

You may remember a few months ago Penguin bought out the popular self-publishing company, Author Solutions. The move was seen as highly significant at the time – traditional publishers starting to see the benefits of self-publishing as well as the talent pool to be found within it.

Now we have a new development in Penguin’s self-publishing enterprise, as they have taken the decision to open a new imprint of Author Solutions in India. The new imprint is called Partridge, and it highlights the fact that self-publishing is an international industry, as well as an increasingly mainstream one.

Penguin has said that it hopes the new imprint will increase the number of authors in India, and will be monitoring Partridge titles for talent that could potentially be signed to Penguin’s own lists. This is an important point; it shows that traditional publishers are increasingly seeing self-publishing as a potential recruiting ground, something that independent authors interested in traditional or hybrid deals should definitely take note of.

It will definitely be interesting to see what happens with the new imprint in India. For now, you can read more about Penguin’s latest self-publishing move here.

It was announced last Friday that the US Department of Justice has now reached a settlement with Macmillan, the last of the five publishers involved in the e-book price fixing case that has cropped up in the news several times over the past few months. This is the case that saw the five publishers (Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Penguin Group and Hachette Book Group Inc), as well as Apple, accused of colluding to alter the prices of e-books.

The case is continuing against Apple and a trial is set to take place in June. As a result of their settlement with the DoJ, Macmillan has agreed to lift its restrictions on the kind of pricing promotions e-book sellers can hold. This means that retailers will be able to charge lower prices for the publisher’s e-books, and this will be monitored under the settlement’s terms.

We have already seen the e-book prices from other publishers involved in the case become lower as a result of their settlements, which should be good news for readers as titles become more affordable in e-book form.

Still, the case continues against Apple, so it looks like this is a topic we will return to again in the coming months.

In the meantime, you can read more about Macmillan’s settlement with the Department of Justice here.