Philosophic ramblings

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Happy endings and other myths

“I write dark because happy endings are boring,” said the young novelist sitting next to me on last Thursday’s panel at the Paraparaumu library.

I’d already had my turn at that question, so all I could do was make faces and shake my head.

I’ve written elsewhere about why endings of any kind are a myth. Nothing in real life truly begins or ends; it simply changes form. As a person and as a writer, I like to choose an upward trajectory as my stopping point for my stories.

As to boring! Leo Tolstoy said, in Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I’m inclined to regard the opposite as true. The path to unhappiness is endlessly predictable; the path to happiness, being strewn with so many more obstacles, is full of twists, turns, and human striving. CS Lewis commented, “How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different the saints.”

Although, to be fair, an unhappy ending for our hero or heroine might be an extremely happy one for the villain! The mermaid failed to win the prince and faded away to sea foam, but the sea witch was up one gorgeous voice.

(Yes, I write dark. But my hero and heroine are guaranteed a hard-won happy ending.)

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They are us

Human inhumanity seems to dominate the news.  Builders who cut corners causing deaths when a building collapses. Airlines who decide to fly a plane known to have a fault. Prominent men who hide predatory behaviour with charm and lawyers. Gunmen who open fire on little toddlers, leaving them dead or critically injured.

Monsters, we call them. What kind of a monster, we ask, would tie a five-year-old in the sun to die of thirst? What kind of a monster would steal the life savings of a widow? What kind of a monster would bully a person until they committed suicide?

In fiction, the lines can be clearly drawn. The villains are, as one reviewer said about one of my books, people we can comfortably hate, knowing they are beyond redemption and that they’ll get their just desserts before the book ends. The rest of the cast are good and virtuous, flawed only enough to make them human.

It can be a tricky dance for a writer of historical fiction who wants to be as accurate as possible.

In every book I read, including my own, the protagonists are on the side of abolishing the slave trade, reforming the corn laws, providing pensions for war widows, and educating the village children. If they own factories, they don’t allow children to work in them and they pay fair wages. They are loved by their tenants and servants, and support all kinds of charities, including homes for fallen women.

In reality, some good people of the time opposed all those things for what seemed to them to be good reasons. Some villains were in favour for reasons of their own. The world has few monsters, and any half-way attentive student of history has to concede that – given the right circumstances – decent people can do monstrous things.

Many regency romances include the concept of ruination. We love our single mothers and even courtesans who find love and acceptance in society. In reality, the idea that women had second chances was a myth. If a gentlewoman lost her reputation, and no one married her smart quick, she couldn’t retrieve it. A few courtesans married peers, but they were never accepted socially. (Mind you, what ‘everyone knew’ was not necessarily grounds for a lost reputation. A level of discretion might mean that even a flagrant affair could be ignored.)

Given the consequences of dalliance to a woman, why are rakes so popular with authors and readers? One reviewer found my Merry Marquis in A Baron for Becky an abhorrent character for his casual affairs. And quite right, too. Even so, the fans who love Aldridge for his charm and generosity are also right. His behaviour towards women can be monstrous, but he is not a monster.

Another reader took great exception to the way the entire village turned on my heroine in House of Thorns. In a review, she took a hundred words to list all the horrible ways every other character in the book behaved, including the protagonist. I was thrilled with the emotional response, but I didn’t agree that Bear was a monster. A clumsy fool, but not a monster.

We took our son to see the movie Shazam! the day before yesterday. It was your typical ‘teenager becomes a superhero and can only save the day after he deals with his personal problems’ story, with some laughs thrown in. Shazam’s contribution to this article was the premise that the seven deadly sins, personified as monsters, dwelt within the villain and wanted to come out and infest the world. At one point, the villain asks his nasty father ‘Who is your sin? Oh, of course. Greed!’ At which point, Greed emerges and swallows the father.

I think almost anyone can become so consumed by greed, lust, sloth, pride, gluttony, envy or wrath that we cease to be humane. The more likely scenario, though, is that we cease to think of others as human. We naturally sort and categorise – it is a major strategy for understanding our world. We’re not wrong to sort and categorise human beings – black, Hindu, capitalist, bi, Australian, green-eyed, environmentalist, or a thousand other labels that are more or less descriptive of one or more characteristics of that group.

We are wrong to think that the label describes every member of the group in detail. We are wrong to demonise or sanctify groups, as Regency society demonised ‘fallen women’ and sanctified the great ladies of the ton.

I want to write stories with real people, and that includes monsters; not just the monsters who have been consumed by their sins, but ordinary men and women who are capable of monstrous behaviour.

If we name those who do terrible things as monsters, we are refusing to face up to the darkness within us. ‘This man is a monster for the way he shot innocent people. I have not shot innocent people. Therefore I am not a monster.’ Never mind that I might have ignored bullying or shared jokes that shuffled people into a group and labelled them. Even though I tolerated the demonising of that group, which is a monstrous act.

I have seen the monsters, and they are us.

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Weeping for those we have lost

Today, my country is in mourning. I was going to just post the wonderful cartoon by New Zealand cartoonist Shaun Yeo, but then I listened to this wonderful video version of our national anthem and decided to add that, too.

The first verse is sung twice, in Maori and then in English. Watch for the words “Men of every creed and race gather here”. [Yes, I know, but it was written in the 19th century]

I remembered writing about our anthem years ago on another blog, so I went to look up the post, and here it is. Still relevant today, I think. Guard us from envy and hate. Good words.

I’ve often thought how peaceable our national anthem is – so many other anthems are military in origin and martial in flavour. But yesterday for the first time these words struck me: ‘from dissension, envy, hate and corruption guard our state’. How many other countries pray for freedom from corruption every time they sing their national anthem?

I looked it up this evening – there are websites that have collected over 400 national anthems from all over the world. It was intriguing.

Only a small percentage are prayers/hymns; most of those ask God to save or bless the country/the monarch, many ask Him for victory over enemies… “Send her victorious,” “God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet.” The national anthem of the Isle of Man celebrates the gifts of God, and in particular the seas that keep the Isle of Man safe.

The Japanese national anthem is a tanka: a five line, 31 syllable poem: “May the reign of the Emperor continue for a thousand, nay, eight thousand generations and for the eternity that it takes for small pebbles to grow into a great rock and become covered with moss.”

Some of the words of national anthems have been left behind by time. Perhaps the US Americans don’t sing anymore the verse that includes the words: “Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution. No refuge could save the hireling and slave, From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave.” Australia has officially dropped the verses that refer to Mother Britain. Stirring though the music is – the words of Flower of Scotland don’t seem to me particularly encouraging: “when will we see your like again?” Ireland’s national anthem also recalls past battles: “In Erin’s cause, come woe or weal, ‘Mid cannons’ roar and rifles peal.”

As far as my researches reveal, a prayer for protection from corruption is unique among national anthems. Not a bad thing among nations, though! (Posted as Joyful Papist, April 2010)

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What Ash Wednesday has in common with creating characters

Outward signs. We burn last year’s palms from Palm Sunday and mix them with consecrated oil mixed with incense, also from last Easter. Inner meaning: we burn all the failed attempts of the year to make a new beginning.

I have been thinking about outward and visible signs of what is inward and invisible. Rituals, actions, habits, practices. They all hint at inner beliefs and motivations. This month, I’m slaving over the backstory, character, and inner motivations of characters for the next four books (one novella and three novels, one of which I need to have completed by the end of May). They’re all crowding my head with scenes that are giving me glimpses of my character’s inner self. But, I have to ask, do they show the character’s true self? Or do they show the mask they display to the world? To write them, I need to know both.

I’m religious, which (to me) means that I love the rituals and practices of my church. I’m also (I hope) a person of faith. I believe, and I try to act accordingly. The books I enjoy, and the books I try to write, are about characters with depth. I want the words I use on the page to hint at dimensions to the character that I don’t spell out in words; not just the rituals and practices, but the beliefs and motivations. And I want them all to be different — not the same hero and the same heroine in book after book with just the physical appearance and the name changed.

My husband has been watching best man speeches on YouTube. (No, I don’t know why, but he has.) The jokes and male-to-male insults of a best man speech are a ritual that indicates the support and affection of the selected friend for the groom. Outward signs with inner meaning.

At Mass today, they had the ashes ceremony for those who missed it last Wednesday, on Ash Wednesday. That day marks the beginning of a period of fasting, abstinence, and prayer in preparation for Easter, more than six weeks away, and the ashes are meant to remind us of the shortness of our lives (‘for you are dust, and to dust you shall return’, says the priest as he marks the forehead of each believer with a cross made from a mix of ashes and oil). They also call to mind the ancient practice of wearing sackcloth and ashes for remorse or mourning. Outward signs with inner meaning.

Oddly enough, one of my characters is a widower who may or may not be called Ash. That’s his name, in the notes about his story that I made close to six years ago; a shortened form of his title. However, in the last month I’ve given him a backstory that includes an unfaithful wife, a manipulative older brother, and a couple of daughters, one (and possible both) of whom is definitely his niece, rather than his own child. This means he hasn’t been Earl of Ashbury for very long, so he might think of himself as Val or Fort. I’m still working on it. Inner motivations. He’s a grumpy devil, and a recluse. He arrived home after his brother’s death three years ago to find that his brother’s widow has sent both girls off to boarding school, washed her hands of them, and departed for parts unknown. He has left them there, figuring they’re better off without him. I’m also still working on his heroine, but I need to know her a lot better before she turns up at his house with a carriage full of children, including his own two, refugees from the cholera epidemic sweeping the school.

I know that he will refuse her admittance and she will demand it, and refuse to move on since two of the girls (including his niece) are showing early signs of the disease. I know she shows her anxiety in contempt for his reluctance, not realising he is already thinking about how to help her. I know that he’ll marshal his pitiful complement of servants to look after the well girls and join her in nursing those who have become ill.  Outward signs with an inner meaning.

I know those things, but I have a lot more work to do before I start to commit the random scenes swirling around my brain onto a page.

I wonder if the whole story could happen around an Ash Wednesday?

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Here, There Be Dragons

 

Synchronicity, much? On Friday, I was part of a government-run workshop on the reform of New Zealand’s copyright laws. On Sunday, I discovered my House of Thorns on two ‘free book’ websites. Both seem to be run out of the same country, but the perpetrator’s name is only on one of them.

He’s a man who is part of a political movement to get rid of all intellectual property protections. He claims that books are ‘loaded by readers with the permission of authors’, but his own site says, ‘we assume in good faith that those who load books have permission to do so.’ He replies to authors who ask for their stolen material to be removed from his site with some version of: ‘I will obey the current law which says I have to take this down, but I’m doing you a favour finding you readers, and if you can’t make money without interfering with my business, you need a new business model.’

I heard some of the same arguments at the workshop: pirate sites help authors by exposing them to readers who can’t afford to buy their books; copyright law currently stifles creativity and economic growth by limiting access to works; people should be able to use work created by others in order to create something new.

So let’s take those points one by one.

Pirate sites do not help authors

The thieves who take our books like to refer to Neil Gaiman, who famously responded to the widespread theft of his books by making American Gods free for three months, and seeing his sales go up. He compared pirate sites to libraries, or borrowing a book from a friend, and those comments been quoted ever since. This was the best-selling and rightfully admired Neil Gaiman, right? With the 10th anniversary expanded edition of a book that was best-selling and multi-award winning on its original release. With all due respect to a magnificent writer, his test doesn’t tell us a lot about the impact of piracy.

Others have had very different experiences. Maggie Stiefvater, a best-selling fantasy author, saw a huge drop in sales when her books were pirated, which led her publisher to cut the number of book copies for the next in series. So she also did a test, creating a book that had the first four chapters, over and over, plus a message about book piracy. Read the linked article to find out what happened.

The pirate sites aren’t doing this for love. They make money from ads and other digital products associated with the site. The pirate that stole House of Thorns commented in an interview I found that he is running a successful business (his pirate site) that pays him well.

Every book people download from his site is a loss to the author, and even a couple of hundred downloads might be enough to change an author’s career, sending the signal ‘no one wants to buy this book’. I have friends who have changed genres or stopped writing altogether because they’ve poured their heart and soul into a book for the hundreds of hours needed to bring it from conception to birth, put in more grueling hours marketing it, and had little or no interest. Good books. Well-researched, well-written, well-edited books. The books they might have written are now lost to readers.

It is professionally hindering advancement of people who would follow the footsteps of great authors who have significantly contributed to the creative narratives that societies need regardless of geographical boundaries and situations.

No one will be encouraged to be authors or to dream big of having their works published because they are not compensated or recognized. The monetary side of publishing a book, for instance, is a manifestation of a person’s recognition of another person’s ability and creativity. By trivializing the act of downloading a material without properly compensating the author or publisher, you are, in effect, putting a big stop to the wheel of what we know as a creative process. [Independent Publishing Magazine]

Most readers who download from pirate sites can afford to buy them

Readers who can’t afford books don’t, by any means, make up the bulk of those who download from pirate sites. The Guardian article notes research showing that most such thieves belong to the higher socio-economic groups and are better educated than average. Even if they don’t want to shell out for a book, thus helping to support creativity and innovation, they have alternatives.

Cash-strapped readers are able to belong to libraries, borrow from friends, buy second-hand. Each of those instances depends on an original sale, and — in the case of libraries — potentially an on-going payment based on the number of copies in libraries (at least, that’s the case in New Zealand).

I read voraciously. I buy books and I borrow from my library, because I expect my author accounts to fund my reading and I just don’t earn enough to pay for all the books I read. But I well know that every pirated book that is downloaded is a lost sale. I won’t do that to another author.

The pirates argue that I’m getting my books to people who otherwise wouldn’t read them. That wasn’t Maggie Stiefvater’s experience, but let it pass. Where did the idea come from that people are doing me a favour by reading my books? Don’t get me wrong. I love my readers, and I’m glad they enjoy my stories. I reckon we’re in a partnership, where I provide the words and you provide the images. But if you don’t think I’m worth the pittance I charge for each book, then do yourself a favour and read someone else.

By the way, I always enable the loan function when I load a book on Amazon, so if you want to lend a book of mine you’ve enjoyed to someone else, you can do it. Amazon has instructions for how that works. I also have a special price set for libraries in the book aggregator I use to reach the places where libraries buy books, so if you’d like your local library to carry my stories as ebooks, tell them that all the novellas are free to libraries, and the novels are 99c (US dollars). I’ve been poor, and I love libraries.

Copyright law protects creativity so people can get on with writing books

If you’ve been around on this journey with me for a while, you know that my goal is to make enough from writing so I can leave my day job. I’m not blaming pirates for my failure to get there so far. It’s a very complicated market, and well oversubscribed with books, including those ladled onto Amazon by people who are gaming that giant’s algorithms. But it bears repeating, every book of mine downloaded ‘free’ from a pirate site is a lost sale — a few cents that would have taken me closer to my goal.

I figure I can at least double my output if fiction was my full-time job. If you think that it’d be a good thing for your favourite authors to write more, then not downloading stolen books, and reporting digital piracy when you see it, is one thing you can do to help.

People should get permission before remixing the creative works of others

The workshop on Friday included creators of content from the gaming industry, musicians, photographers, and artists. I was the only author in the three table-sessions I attended, though others might have been in the room. The other creative types all agreed that their industry had benefited from remixes — games that used characters from popular games, clips of music put together into a new work, images that provided a base from which an artist created something original. I guess the fictional equivalent would be fan fiction.

Under New Zealand’s current copyright law, getting permission to do this kind of work is tortuous and often (when the creator died forty years ago or is unknown) next thing to impossible. I can buy changing the law to make it easier for orphan works to be used in this way, but I still think that some kind of regime that requires best efforts to get permission gives the original creator the protection that encourages creativity.

And I think the moral rights of a creator not to have their work used a way that offends their belief system is pretty important, too.

I write my own stuff; don’t steal it

So those are my random thoughts this sunny morning in a New Zealand autumn. I write my own stuff, and I’m going to continue doing so, despite the sea monsters, dragons, and pirates that infest the wild corners of the indie publishing digital world. I can’t stop the thieves. I barely have time to notice when people steal my stuff and put it up online for other people to pinch. But don’t expect me to be grateful. If you load a book onto a pirate site, you’re stealing. If you run a pirate site, you’re stealing. If you download from a pirate site, you’re stealing. The justifications such sites use are a pack of lies. Don’t be a thief.

Time to go to the day job.

For more on this, see:

Suzan Tisdale on Book Thieves Suck

Maggie Stiefvater on her experiences

The Guardian article, which includes what other authors said

Naturi Thomas-Millard on Digital Piracy Is the Best Thing to Ever Happen to Us, Said No Writer, Ever. 6 Reasons It’s a Bigger Threat Than You Think

 

 

 

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Amazon is haunted, and I don’t like it

I’ve been puzzling for the past two days, since the latest plagiarism / ghostwriting scandal hit social media, about why I find the use of ghostwriters to create fiction so disturbing. After all, I’ve been a ghostwriter myself, many times. I’ve written letters, articles, reports, white papers, and many other government and commercal documents that would go out with some one else’s name on them. After one particular Government Budget, I wrote articles that would appear in the same publication for opposing sides: one by a bishop and the other by a financial planner.

I also have friends who are ghostwriters: who take the stories that other people have to tell and craft the words that make them come alive in a reader’s head. Sports people, politicians, victims of crime, mountaineers, ladies of pleasure — all sorts of people have their names on autobiographies or how to books that were written for them.

So why shouldn’t a busy person pay someone else to turn their idea into a novel that they then publish under their own name? 

I’ve mulled it over, and I’ve come to a conclusion. It’s a lie and a cheat. 

If you’re a pop star, and you want to produce a book about your life or your craft or your favourite recipes, the concepts the book presents are all yours. The book is presenting you. Even if the words are provided by someone else, you are not deceiving the reader. They’re getting what they set out to get — a book that tells your story, or shares your knowledge, or lets them cook the food you like to eat.

When I sell you a fiction book with my name on it, I’m doing something fundamentally different. I am selling you something with a particular voice, a way of building character, a type of descriptive writing, a tone and style that comes from being written by me. My stories are all different, of course, but they carry the same hallmarks. If you buy a Jude Knight story, you expect to read a Jude Knight story — and you will. I write my own books.

I am an author because I write my own books. 

The celebrity who has a ghostwriter write their autobiography is not an author and isn’t claiming to be; they’re a celebrity with their name on a book about them. If that book is about their experience as a round-the-world solo yachtsman and they’ve never been on the ocean in their life, then they’re a liar — not because someone else wrote their book, but because they are misrepresenting who they are.

The person who gets other people to write their fiction books for them is claiming to be an author, and that’s a lie. They are misrepresenting who they are.

But wait, you say, maybe they have written some books. One or two or six. That makes them an author, doesn’t it? Not of the rest of the books they claim, that other people have written, it doesn’t. They’re cheating their reader of the repeat experience of the author’s voice, and to me, that breaks a compact between writer and reader, a trust relationship, that should never be broken.

Most people don’t (and can’t) write a book a month.

So here’s the thing. I don’t publish as often as I’d like. I have various ailments. I have a day job. But even in a perfect world, I wouldn’t publish once a month. If I did, I’d be compromising the quality. I write fast, but I still need time to edit, to proofread, to have the occasional conversation with physical, rather than fictional, people.

And very few people can publish once a month. If you see a writer doing so, be suspicious. There may be a good reason. The amazing Grace Burrowes had a huge number of manuscripts before she published the first, so they came out in quick succession. Others save early books of a series to publish quickly. I plan to do this with the first few books in the Children of the Mountain King series so I can publish one a month for six months. And some people do write fast and have no friends. I’m not saying it can’t be done. 

Just be careful out there. It’s a jungle, and I’ve just discovered that it’s full of ghosts.

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Historical? Romance? Or Thriller? If the genre fits, wear it!

I’ve always had trouble categorising my fiction, which in one sense isn’t a problem. After all, genre is a device for shelving books.

In another sense, it doesn’t help. Booksellers — including Amazon — use genre for sorting books and showing them to readers. If I’m not clear what I’m writing, my books are likely to go to readers who don’t want them!

My weekend at the first New Zealand crime and thrillers convention, RotoruaNoir, has helped me clarify my thinking. Especially my preparation for the panel discussion on Genre Blending. I represented historical romance on the panel. Other members represented horror, young adult, and contemporary romance.

So here’s where I’ve got to. So far, what I’ve written represents any two and up to all three of historical fiction, romance, and crime/mystery.

I write historical fiction

Historical fiction is fiction that is is set in the past and pays attention to the manners, social conditions and other details of the story’s setting in time and place. Such stories may focus on major historical events and characters, but even if they don’t, they should at least recognise such events when they’ve recently happened, or are happening, during the time period of the story.

All but three of my stories (so far) are set in the past, most in the Regency era. I love historical detail, and do a lot of research to get it right. I try to create characters that could only have existed in that time and place, and the events and activities that are natural for people like that in a time like that. Some readers find my women too stroppy and independent for their times. I disagree. History is full of women who defied the current norms to forge their own path. Also, many people judge the whole of society by the pampered debutantes in their gilded cages. To take one example, people have commented on my character Minerva Bradford, who ran a workshop that made invalid chairs. She would not have been unusual for her time. Women of crafter families had always been crafters themselves. Indeed, part of the story is that Minerva’s family is upwardly mobile, and her father wants Minerva to give up the work and become a social ornament, like her betters.

(Not all historical romances are also historical fiction. Some are stories that could happen anywhere or anytime, but the gowns and cravats are a nice added touch. I don’t write those, but I’ve enjoyed quite a few.)

I write romance

Romance is fiction about two people (except at the menage edges of the genre) who fall in love, face challenges, and finish the story with a strong possibility of happiness together. Romance is a subset of the love story category. What sets it apart is the happy ending. I’ve always taken ‘happy ever after’ as meaning ‘having resolved conflicts in a way that gives us hope they will resolve the conflicts that are yet to come as they live their lives together’. Romance is a broad category that includes historical, contemporary, paranormal, science fiction, and suspense. It can also be categorised by the gender, species, and number of the participants, and by the ‘heat’ level — that is, by the emphasis on and level of specific detail in the sex scenes.

I believe in happy endings. I’m living one myself, and so have all my siblings and my husband’s siblings. True love isn’t magic and it isn’t easy, but it is possible and worthwhile. The ending of the written story is the beginning of a life together, which will have its ups and downs, but empathy and commitment will see the couple through. Those are my kind of romances. I’m not one to add a sex scene for the sake of it, but I don’t shy away from leaving the door open in the plot or character development require. Heat level is anything from ‘sweet’ to ‘moderate’.

I’ve written across a number of romance subgenres. Contemporary suspense. Historical suspense. Paranormal suspense. Straight historical. At the heart of it are two people in the crucible of initial attraction, learning about one another and growing to be more than they could have been alone.

I write suspense

The last category I write in is crime/mystery. This is another huge genre with blurred edges. People seem to use the term mystery for stories about solving a crime. Crime is a bit broader, including the effects of the crime. RotoruaNoir had writers from across the spectrum of the genre (most of the following can be contemporary, historical, paranormal, or sf): cosy/traditional, noir (gritty and pessimistic), hard-boiled private investigator, police procedural, spy/espionage, suspense, and thriller.

I’m struggling to fit mine in there. They’re not cosy, since they don’t shy away from gritty detail, but they’re certainly not pessimistic. I do have a private investigator, but he isn’t hard-boiled. Not police procedural. Espionage can be an element. Thriller is about high stakes and swift actions, which might be close to some of my plots. Suspense is probably closest — characters confronting evil and overcoming danger.

I knew I had romance in all my suspense stories. But I went through my titles and listed all the plot lines. With rare exceptions, they all involve solving crimes, from fraud and intimidation to blackmail, people trafficking, and murder. Turns out I have suspense in almost all of my romance stories. Certainly, all three of my contemporary romances are also suspense.

 

So this leaves me needed a new strapline

Okay. So far so good. The first step to fixing a marketing problem is to diagnose the problem. If I didn’t know what I did myself, I can hardly expect to attract readers who like it.

I’m okay with Jude Knight Storyteller as an overall brand. It covers the fact that I don’t stick to one genre but write in the overlap between them. I tell stories. But the visual imagery and the strapline (Stories to thrill, intrigue and delight) could do with some work. Watch this space.

 

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Climbing the Marketing Mountain

The first month of 2019 is trundling by at a great rate of knots, and I’ve only just started my to-do list.

In theory, taking my day job to part time is going to give me heaps more time for writing and marketing books. So how is that working out for me?

Write more and better

My personal romantic hero gave me Dragon dictation software for Christmas. In theory, that should speed up the writing. I’m using it at the moment, and certainly this blog post is appearing on the screen far faster than if I typed it.

To meet my self-set deadlines, I need to average around 15 to 18,000 words a week in the first draft. Typing, that’s around 18 hours work, and I can do that if I don’t do much else. In theory, once Dragon and I get up to speed, I should more than double my writing speed.

I can spend the extra time on all the other stages. Editing, proofreading, commissioning or making covers — and above all marketing.

Market more effectively

One of my top jobs for January is to finish the marketing plan I’ve been talking about for at least two years. I’m still using the trailing elements of the one I created when I first started, adapted and extended as I learned more about the bazzillion book marketplace, but still demonstrably inadequate.

Readers have downloaded more than 90,000 copies of my books (most as ebooks, but a few as print) from the major retailers. It sound like a lot, but the margin is so small that I’m just treading water. I make enough so that my writing mostly pays for itself. I pay for subscriptions to web hosts and research sites, cover design, proofreading, and all the other stuff I need from my author account, though I occasionally have to pay for a workshop or accommodation for a conference out of the money from my day job.

Must do better. To really fly, I need to reach more readers.

The product counts

Top task, of course, is to write and produce the best books I can, and to do it often. What with one thing and another, I’m way behind on my publishing plans. Everyone tells me that, to sell books, you need to be seen in the marketplace with a new book. Around this time last year, I’d had a book out every month for four months, and was beginning to see some results. Then I got sick again.

Another is to have complete series to sell. I keep getting distracted, and I need to focus and finish the two series that I’ve started. One major goal for this year is to get Unkept Promises out and at least write the next Redepenning. Another is to publish the first four in the series that begins with The Bluestocking and the Barbarian (which I’m rewriting as a novel).

This way, I can finish both series in 2020.

But so does visibility

But it’s still only a hobby to amuse myself and a few other people such as yourself if the rest of the reading public doesn’t know I exist.

I’m working on it. First step, write the Marketing Plan.

You can help

Meanwhile, if you’d like to help, please recommend my books to your friends, and ask for them at your library. I’d also love more reviews. If you had time to leave a couple of sentences of honest review wherever you buy my books or on BookBub, that it be a great help.

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Promises to keep

One of my takeaways from the Romance Writers of New Zealand conference had to do with the cost and the value of books.

There’s an old joke about people who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. It’s a trap for those who give away their books or sell them cheap. Hands up those who have an ereader full of free and 99c books they’ll possibly never read?

I guess it’s way too easy, as an author trying to be noticed in a bazillion book market, to focus on the financial cost of an ebook and think that tweaking price is going to help with sales. We know that our book has cost us many hundreds of hours to write and edit. We probably know to the cent how much we’ve spent on professional services to produce the book, and on marketing to get it in front of you. What we maybe don’t think about is how much our readers commit when they buy our books.

The money people pay for a book is the smallest part of their investment. When you buy a book, you’re making a commitment to invest time — anything from a lunch hour to weeks of spare minutes, depending on the length and how fast you read. In return, you expect an emotional payback. You want the story to suck you in, let you live in the shoes of the characters while you’re reading, and leave you at the end feeling satisfied with the experience.

I’m still thinking about whether this insight might change my view on pricing. But I know it’s going to change some of my marketing. I want readers to know the promises I make when I put a book on the market.

First, I promise that things will work out, that my protagonists will have a happy ending (whatever that means to them), that villains will eventually be defeated (and punished even if not in this book). I also want you to have enough information to decide whether my kind of slightly dark and often convoluted story is your preferred type of read.

Second, if you like to read the kind of story I like to write, I promise to take you out of the everyday world into the one I’ve created. I don’t promise that things will go smoothly. They won’t. I don’t even promise that bad things won’t happen to good people. All I can say is, enjoy the roller-coaster. By buying my book, you’re asking me to play with your emotions and I promise to do my best to make the ride worthwhile.

Third, I promise to keep learning and innovating. I’ll work on my writer craft. I’ll try not to write the same story over and over, just changing the names and places. I’ll try new things, some of which might not work, but I hope we’ll have fun, you and I.

Thank you for your investment in me. You cannot know how much your appreciation motivates me to keep writing.

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The fault of the poor

The more things change, the more they remain the same. Some of the rhetoric of economists who support the current financial system sounds suspiciously familiar to my history-geek’s ear, and one prime example is the British government’s reaction to the crisis in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century.

The Great Hunger, as it was known in Ireland, seemed to the British government of the day a fairly minor affair; something the poor had undoubtedly brought on themselves by their improvident dependence on a single crop.

Never mind that it was about all they had time to grow as they laboured for the wealthy, who owned all the land and decided what should be grown there. Wheat crops were harvested and exported, using Irish labour. Those labourers couldn’t afford to buy what they’d grown for their masters, but instead planted potatoes in the small patch of land around their cottages. In 1845, half the potato crop failed in Ireland, but nobody died as a result, partly as a result of government relief efforts. The views of Sir Randolph Routh, the man running the relief programme, make chilly reading when we consider what followed.

The little industry called for to rear the potato, and its prolific growth, lead the people to indolence and all kinds of vice, which habitual labour and a higher order of food would prevent. I think it very probable that we may derive much advantage from this present calamity.

Blame the victim, much?

In 1846, almost the entire crop failed followed by one of the coldest winters on record. The new minority government reduced its relief efforts, and made relief largely dependent on participating in useless public works: roads that went nowhere, walls that surrounded nothing.

From the beginning of 1847, the Tory government came under attack from Disraeli’s Whigs. In response, they introduced soup kitchens, the only really effective response of the entire miserable affair, watery soup being better than nothing. But summer brought the third successive year of crop failures,. The government brought in a Poor Law Act mandating workhouses, but failed to stop the export of corn.

The debates of parliament make chilling reading, as one person after another reflected on the ill effects of helping the undeserving poor, and the need for the Irish to simply make more effort. I get a strong sense of deja vu when I read these remarks in the light of more modern public debates about food, refugee, and other crises where the rich are being asked to share their resources.

That year, Oscar Wilde’s mother had this poem published:

Weary men, what reap ye?
Golden corn for the stranger.
What sow ye?
Human corpses that wait for the avenger.
Fainting forms, hunger-stricken, what see you in the offing?
Stately ships to bear our food away, amid the stranger’s scoffing.
They guard our masters’ granaries from the thin hands of the poor.
Pale mothers, wherefore weeping?
Would to God that we were dead
Our children swoon before us, and we cannot give them bread … We are wretches, famished, scorned, human tools to build your pride,
But God will yet take vengeance for the souls for whom Christ died.
Now is your hour of pleasure
bask ye in the world’s caress;
But our whitening bones against ye will rise as witnesses,
From the cabins and the ditches, in their charred, uncoffin’d masses,
For the Angel of the Trumpet will know them as he passes.
A ghastly, spectral army, before the great God we’ll stand,
And arraign ye as our murderers, the spoilers of our land.

Despite urgent pleas from English officials and others, the government did nothing, many politicians continuing to blame the Irish poor for their own demise. In 1849, as the harvests began to recover in some parts of Ireland, in others the deaths continued. One official enquiry concluded:

Whether as regards the plain principles of humanity, or the literal text and admitted principle of the Poor Law of 1847, a neglect of public duty has occurred and has occasioned a state of things disgraceful to a civilized age and country, for which some authority ought to be held responsible, and would long since have been held responsible had these things occurred in any union in England.

The population of Ireland dropped by half in the fifty years following the start of the famine. Ireland took over a century to recover, and the descendants of those who failed to help when help was needed suffered the retribution of those scarred by the sufferings of their own ancestors. It would be nice to think that today’s politicians could learn from this and other similar tragedies, but I’m not holding my breath.