Another cover story

Yes, you're right.  It has been a while.  And while I'd love to have something exciting to report, it's actually all been terribly mundane.  Life as an author is not all one giddy social whirl, you know.  However, I do have a few nuggets of information to impart:

1. If you have nothing to say, don't say it.

It's not terribly helpful when one has a book to plug, but as I hadn't anything worth posting, I didn't.

2. The Difficult Second Novel lives!

It has revived and, what's more, I'm off to work on it in a minute so I can't hang around here chatting all day.

3. Looking for Buttons has had a facelift.

Now I'm against facelifts on principle (putting a bag over one's head is so much cheaper, and reversible).  On the other hand, marketing Looking for Buttons as a romance wasn't doing it any favours, so I'm putting the emphasis on its humourous side, with a recategorisation on Amazon and a new cover.

(A new cover, pictured sometime today.)

It's an experiment to see how these changes will affect sales, if at all.

4. And it's FREE!

To kick-start the new look, I'm holding a three-day Bank Holiday Bonanza from today until Tuesday, so get it while you can.  (Or wait until Wednesday and pay for it, that's fine by me.)

Right, that's it for now.  I've got another book to write.  Over and out.

Never knowingly oversold

When you're an indie writer, you're something of a one (wo)man band.  You can rope in other people for some of it, of course.  I can't design covers for toffee (or for books, come to that) so I was overjoyed when a kind gentleman did it for me after a timely intervention by the wonderful Norfolk Bookworm.  But the bulk of it falls on the writer.  Ah, cries the voice of reason, you wrote the book, so why not?  After all, it's all your fault and it's entirely self-inflicted.  But, oh, I do have trouble with promotion.

Partly it's down to inherent bashfulness, which is why most of my family have no idea that the book even exists.  I've managed to overcome this to some extent, irritating my Facebook friends* with intermittent chirpy enticements to buy the book even though all the ones that are going to have done so already (a few are still talking to me).  But selling myself doesn't come easily.  The only way I can bring myself to tell people about Looking for Buttons is if I've got a free promotion running.  The Valentine one went so well I extended it into a four-day extravaganza and the book hit Amazon's humour top twenty in the UK charts.  I was bold that day and actually told a few colleagues, who got quite excited and told more people and so I shifted about five hundred books in a short space of time.  Word of mouth does work, and it's the best sort of advertising.

It seems I am going to have to work on developing an outgoing character.  This is going to be harder than writing the Difficult Second Novel.  Perhaps I should just strap on a bass drum and cymbals and march down the High Street blowing my own trumpet.

* apparently this still isn't an oxymoron, even though I never see most of them for years on end

I'm only doing this because I love you

It's that time of year again, a time for love, a time for hearts and flowers, a time for showing affection through little, or not so little, tokens of esteem, a time for being sold overpriced tat by ruthless flint-souled commercial bloodsuckers exploiting your panicked need to conform to an artificially inflated non-festival.  And I know you feel that need to buy something, anything, no matter how pink, how tacky, to show you care.  So, yes, you could shell out thirty quid on six crispy roses and a card that will go straight in the bin because she really doesn't want to date a man with no imagination.

Or you could gift your beloved a copy of Looking for Buttons.

It's FREE to download from Amazon on February 14th, but I won't tell them if you don't.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Getting technical

No matter what non-scribblers may think, writing is a technical occupation.  You don't just dream up characters and storylines and nurture them into a novel.  Before that happens, you have to get to grips with the tools of the trade.

I suspect as long as people have been writing, there have been writers muttering dark imprecations about those tools.  There must have been stone tablets that shattered just as the chisel was reaching the good bit.  For every breathtakingly illustrated medieval bible, there must have been countless sheets of screwed up vellum lobbed into the fire by a frustrated monk.  The advent of the printing press must have created so many new ways for things to go wrong that Caxton must have been cursed in the same way as a Windows fatal error that occurs just as you were about to save that crucial file.

Which brings me (clumsily) up to date: the writer's relationship with modern technology.  Now you may have noticed by the paucity of illustration and zippy effects on this blog that I am not the techiest of people.  For all their shiny futuristic glamour, computers are merely tools, albeit less straightforward than a hammer, sometimes to the point where I am tempted to juxtapose the two.  But when you dip a toe or ten in the chilly waters of self-publishing, you need to get to grips not only with word processing but with creating a cover image (OK, I ducked that - thanks Graham!), maintaining an online presence and grappling with uploads and downloads, all the time suspecting something somewhere has gone arwy (I'm yet to receive any royalties from Amazon, not sure if that's because I haven't earned enough or because I did something wrong when I put the book up for sale).

Regular writers have publishers to worry about that sort of thing.  When you're a one (wo)man band it can start to creep in and suck out the time and enthusiasm you were saving for the actual writing.

So what I think I need is something to take the next book out of my head and drop it straight into yours, for a small fee of course.  I'll see what I can dream up.

PS Looking for Buttons will be FREE from Amazon this Valentine's Day.  That's got to be better than some wilting roses and an overpriced box of chocolates.

Looking for Buttons is free for Christmas - oh yes it is!

The curtain rises to show a simple domestic scene of pre-Christmas pandemonium.  Downstage a young(ish) woman (LUCIE) sits amid a sea of wrapping paper.  She has bits of sticky tape in her hair and is sobbing brokenly into a piece of tinsel.

LUCIE:  Less than a week until Christmas Day!  How will I ever get it all finished in time?  I must wrap all these presents and get them to Father Christmas without delay, yet there is also the laundry and the cleaning and to do that I must find the floor under all this paper.  The tree is drooping and the Christmas cake is not made.  All I want to do is read a book!  (She sobs.)

Enormous flash, stage left.  Enter FAIRY GODMOTHER, with Kindle.

FG:  Oh, do stop snivelling, woman!  Buck up and pull yourself together.  You'll get it all done, because you always do, and if you don't, well, quite frankly, does it matter?  You don't even like Christmas cake and there's a packet of Cadbury's chocolate fingers in the cupboard.

LUCIE:  I've already eaten most of them.

FG:  There were two packets, so nil desperandum.  Unless you've already eaten both, in which case you are a glutton and I have no sympathy.  Now put down that sticky tape -

LUCIE:  I can't, it's stuck to me.

FG:  I shall ignore that remark.  Shut up and listen.  While you shall not go to the ball -

LUCIE:  Why not?

FG:  You're a hermit.  You hate parties.

LUCIE:  Oh yes.

FG:  Where was I?  Oh yes.  While you shall not go to the ball, you shall have a good book to read over the Christmas period, for - tra la la and abracadabra - Looking for Buttons will be free to download from Amazon for five days, starting on Christmas Day!

LUCIE:  Oh.

FG:  You're supposed to leap about for joy at this point.

LUCIE:  But I've read it several times.  I wrote it.  And I don't have a Kindle.

FG:  Flaming heck, you can't please some people.  All right, here's a second hand boxed set of Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense.  You can have an hour off from the chores to watch the one with David McCallum and then you'll have to get back to work.

FAIRY GODMOTHER waves wand and turns LUCIE into a teapot before turning to beam at the audience.

FG:  Meanwhile, those of you who love romance, happy endings and aren't whinging hermits can download Looking for Buttons free from Amazon, 25th-29th December.  Merry Christmas!

Making a guest appearance

Yes, I know I haven't updated for weeks.  While my writing persona spends her days wearing impractical shoes and reclining on a chaise longue, dictating the latest page-turner to a dapper and handsome secretary clad in an immaculate tweed suit, the rest of me has to deal with day-to-day crises.  Suffice it to say that several hit at once, resulting in no time or inclination to use a computer.

Anyway, this is just a quick update before I return to the World of Worry.  The lovely Jane Wenham-Jones was kind enough to invite me to contribute to the Guest Room of her Wannabe A Writer? website.  You can read my bit here.

Literary networking the Lucie Parish way

One of my biggest regrets about my undergraduate life (apart from studying a subject I didn't much care for in the deluded hope that it would improve my employment prospects, says she, laughing hollowly) was that I avoided Jilly Cooper.

I was shopping with a friend one Saturday.  We drifted into W.H. Smith.  There was Jilly Cooper, PR lady at her side, sitting at a table piled high with copies of her latest novel.  My friend, a great fan, was very excited and decided to get a signed book for her mum's birthday present.  At the time, I had never read any of her novels (this was at the peak of my Alistair MacLean phase).  I felt so ashamed at the thought of coming face to face with a very famous author and admitting I'd never even read so much as a blurb that I bolted out of the shop and lurked outside until my friend reappeared, clutching her trophy.

Since then I've read and enjoyed Mrs Cooper's books (I can't call her Jilly, that would be presumptous, given my behaviour).  Flatteringly, but ludicrously, Looking for Buttons has been compared to her early novels.  Yesterday I read an interview with her in the Times (to which I can't link as it's a subscription-only site) in which she championed character and good writing and generally came across as a thoroughly good egg.  I've been kicking myself about the W.H. Smith incident ever since.

Some years later, I saw Joanna Trollope sitting alone at a signing in my local Waterstone's.  I'd read and enjoyed her books.  I was too skint to buy one and too shy to approach her to say I loved her work, so I just scuttled off instead.

I am so very, very bad at treating published authors as human beings.  It's just as well that Looking for Buttons is only available as an e-book.  If I had a signing I'd be too embarrassed to turn up.




[This weekend, it's a Bank Holiday Bonanza!  Get Looking for Buttons FREE from Amazon from Saturday 25th to Monday 27th August!  It's the last giveaway I'll be holding for a while so make the most of it.]

Facing up to the publicity game

Life gets slightly weird when you publish a book.  Today I was invited to make a guest appearance on a website to promote Looking for Buttons.  Fabulous.  Except I need to provide an author photo.

Ah.

As I've said before, I'm not photogenic.  It's been over a year since I last had my picture taken, unawares, and when I saw it posted on Facebook I wailed about my Cold War-era Eastern Bloc shotputter's arms and pleaded for it to be taken down.  I can only think of one set of recent(ish) photos I can bear to look at, and then I was wearing a furry lion suit to entertain small children at my local library.

I started to wonder when this image-hungry world started to drag an author's mugshot into prominence.   Surely it's a modern phenomenon.  If I looked along my bookcase (or in fact gingerly peered at the teetering overflow pile in front of it, currently nearing six feet high), surely I would find faceless authors.

A random selection:  Terry Pratchett - photo inside cover.  John Buchan - photo on back cover.  Ngaio Marsh - photo on back cover.  Adam Hall - photo on inside flap of dustjacket.  Mervyn Peake - wonderful artist, self-portraits.  OK, maybe it's a twentieth century phenomenon.  Go back further.  Charlotte Bronte - painting by her brother.  Charles Dickens - used to be on a banknote.   Further still.  Christopher Marlowe - the Corpus Christi portait, might be him, might not, great image anyhow so who cares?  I can put a face to almost every author in my collection.  People like to know who they're reading.  I'm no different, so I really can't deny that an author photo is going to become necessary at some point.

But will anybody accept a lion who writes romantic comedies?