What does a book cover really mean?

This is a bit complicated. Just to start things off, here are the covers of the two crime fiction books I’ve published, last year and last week.

I think they’re quite good, but what they indicate more than anything else is the setting – Morecambe Bay in ‘Cruel Tide’ and Whitehaven harbour in ‘Fatal Reckoning’. The fact that they deal with dark deeds is implicit, not unmistakeable. These are the covers on the paperbacks that are in the shops, but they will not be the covers of the ebooks. How come?

Here’s what’s been going on ‘behind the scenes’. The ebook versions of both these books are being published not by me and my imprint ‘HoadPress’, but by an international crime fiction publisher called ‘Fahrenheit Press’ fahrenheit-press.com. They specialise in ebooks and POD, but rarely if ever publish paperbacks, unless there’s an enormous demand, at which POD becomes impractical. Casting around for a way to avoid the ‘agent’ route to publishing I found Fahrenheit Press a few months ago, sent them a copy of ‘Cruel Tide’ as an example of my work to date, and said that the sequel was in production. Long story short: the MD of Fahrenheit, Chris McVeigh, and I met in London, talked about the various routes to market and made the deal outlined above. I find the business of Amazon algorithms etc quite puzzling – as I wrote about a week or two ago. Chris understands that whole business better than I ever could, so why not give it a go, just to see what happens? He’s preparing both books for digital production right now, and when he’s ready I’ll take down my Kindle posting for ‘Cruel Tide’ and he will replace it immediately with his, adding ‘Fatal Reckoning’ as an ebook for the first time. The difference will be the covers, which we have been discussing this week. His preferred covers are completely different than my originals, denoting not setting but ‘genre’. They are very dark and stark, as befits a dark tale in two parts, and he’s called both of them ‘Judith Pharaoh novels’. So simple. When they’re finally agreed and published – in a week or two – , you be able to see them on the Amazon and Kindle websites and make your own comparisons. This is the first time that anyone else has published my work, in any format, I’m fascinated by the experience, so different from a traditional publishing deal.

‘Angst’: does it undermine creativity, or inspire it?

There’s a Woody Allen movie – which one is it? – which opens with the young Woody talking to a psychiatrist. The boy is appalled by the idea that the universe is expanding, which he sees as a sign of impending doom. After the ‘angst’ of the past few months, I think I understand how he feels.

First there was the UK referendum decision, which was a shock. I went to bed before the first results came in, and when I turned on the radio the following morning I just sat in bed and cried. The immediate political implications – Boris Johnson? Nigel Farage? Michael Gove? – were dire, and the bigger picture – retreat to an offshore island cut off from Europe – was worse. Since then the future looks no better, with years and millions wasted on untangling a 40 year old legal, commercial and cultural framework that needed tweaking not tearing up.

Then there was Trump, and my mounting disgust at the man and everything he represented and stood for.
I longed for him to be not just defeated but annihilated.

 

 

 

 

Again, I woke the morning after the US election to find my worst fears realised. I sat with my head in my hands for a while, trying not to think seeing and hearing the ghastly man for the coming four years, and grieving the departure of the current President whom I and millions of others admire for his intelligence, rationality, optimism, grace and humour. The contrast could hardly be more extreme and disheartening.

There’s nothing to be done about either of these events and all their nasty consequences, but it’s taking me a while to pull myself around. For days I didn’t want to do anything. The new book seemed like a futile gesture, a waste of time. Future writing projects held no interest. But slowly the energy is returning. My writing is something I can do on my terms, inspired by my ideas and the glorious landscape all around me, which is still there and will continue, unless Mr Trump’s nasty little fingers stray too close to the nuclear button. My tiny contribution to creativity can’t overcome fear and hatred and racism and misogyny, but it might just push back a little, and every little helps.

Algorithms for Marketing? What?

I was talking self-publishing with an old friend who writes and publishes in a different genre to me, and does very well. Most of his sales are on Amazon, both paperback and ebook formats. ‘It’s all about algorithms,’ he said, and I nodded sagely. I should have said straight out that he’d have to explain, but I didn’t. Since then I’ve cast around to understand what this is about, and ended up – as we all do – ‘googling’ the term to see what turns up. This appeared, in an article by someone called Samuel J.Woods, who is clearly American from his spelling of ‘behavior’. It was helpful, up to a point…

“An algorithm is a set of (well-defined) instructions for carrying out a particular task. It’s, for the most part, deterministic, predictable, and not subject to chance. It works for all cases and gives a (presumably) correct answer.

Lots of people approach marketing this way, especially with the lure of “Big Data”.

You look for predictability in buyer decision-making and behavior, so you can scale a campaign.”

OK. Still not quite sure what you will do next after this analysis. And I’m wondering how much time this process might take, or at least how long it would take me as a data novice. My friend did say it took a long time, but he clearly felt it was time well spent.

Part of me thinks I should ‘get with the programme’ as the Americans say, embrace the new world of Big Data and grow my sales that way. But the other part of me thinks that life is short, especially at my advanced age, and maybe I should spend my time doing something more enjoyable than sitting at the laptop. Last year, my ‘direct’ sales, that is books sold direct to the reader by me, were greater than all sales through Amazon or my website. I know it’s wasteful to work in this way: I can only be in one place at once and sometimes I have to drive quite a way to reach my buyers. And I have to entertain my potential readers first, with a talk or discussion of some kind. Groups are sometimes quite small and I know it doesn’t make sense commercially, but here’s the thing – I enjoy it. It helps that I live in a stunningly beautiful area so the driving is often scenic. And I meet hundreds of people, mostly women, who love my stories and tell me so, and share stories of their own.

Now I’m doing a deal with a California-based book publisher and marketer who lives and breathes algorithms and reckons he could increase my digital and POD sales, especially in North America. He’s explained the dark arts of his expertise, but most of it sailed well over my head. I could do all this myself, or I could get him to do it and share the profits – if there are any. No brainer really. So we’re talking about the two crime books, for a year’s deal. I can carry on doing everything I do now, talking to my readers, publishing and selling ‘real’ books to them and the distributors and bookshops. The new deal marks my tentative entry to the brave new world of algorithms.

I’ve just noticed the title of the article from ‘Samuel J. Woods’ quoted above. The title is ‘Algorithms are cool, except they don’t work for marketing: heuristics do.’ What? Back to the definition of ‘heuristics’ that follows:

“A heuristic… is an experience-based technique that helps in problem discovery, learning, and solving. It basically helps you come to a “good enough” solution — close enough to the best, optimal, solution. It’s like a set of educated guesses or “rules of thumb”.

If you approach marketing this way, you have a greater chance of success (in generating leads, sales, or what have you). Why?

Because marketing is, inherently, unknown and disorderly.”

Back to the drawing board. Stick to what you enjoy, and don’t expect that any single approach to marketing is going to be enough.

 

‘Foreshadowing’: can it be overdone?

Louise Doughty had a profound impact on my fiction writing when I first met her on an Arvon course in 2008 called ‘How to Write  novel’. She was already a well-published author, although not as famous and celebrated as she has since become. More importantly for me at the time, she was an inspirational teacher. I wonder if she has the time to do similar courses these days?

Recently I met her again at the Killer Women day in London, and bought her book ‘Apple Tree Yard’ which she signed for me. Since then I’ve tried to read the book, and thought about a plot device she uses known as ‘foreshadowing’, where the writer obliquely alerts the reader to a future development. The caricature of this device would be – ‘Little did she know that…’, or ‘If only he’d known then that…’. The foreshadowing in ‘Apple Tree Yard’ was more subtle than that, but it served the same purpose.

The first time foreshadowing was used in ‘Apple Tree Yard’, I was interested. The second time I was surprised. The third time I was irritated, and after that I gave up. I felt I was being manipulated, and it annoyed me. The text was also dense with detail, which had to be ploughed through to get to the plot twist that had been dangled in front of me. I found myself flicking ahead. Delayed gratification of one’s curiosity clearly doesn’t work well for me.

Now I’m wondering, what are the limits to using the foreshadowing device? Its repetition in this story must have been considered carefully, and survived – I suspect – some discussions with the editor. Writer and editor must have decided on the final form, and not bothered that a reader like me might find it clunky and intrusive. ‘Apple Tree Yard’ has been widely praised, so the critics too must have found the foreshadowing device more acceptable than I did. Maybe I’m just too impatient and perverse to let myself be pulled by the nose through the story, because that’s the way it felt.