Showing posts with label eBooks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eBooks. Show all posts

Why I love reading fiction on my Kindle ...

 


Since I publish most of my fiction on paper, as well as in eBook form, it feels a bit heretical to write this, but I read pretty much all of the fiction I read purely for pleasure on my Kindle these days. It's an old, bog standard Paperwhite and it has been going for years now. It is a bit slower than it once was, although switching it on and off again tends to remedy that, but I'm considering asking for a new one for Christmas. 

I don't want anything too complicated though. An upgrade of this one will be fine. I don't really want to browse the internet or get onto social media while I'm reading. In fact it's one of the big attractions of my old Kindle that I can't do that. I can, of course, download a new book as soon as I've finished the most recent one, which is very handy when it comes to those series you gallop through voraciously, desperate to start the next one. Fred Vargas and her brilliant Commissaire Adamsberg novels, for example. I can look up words and even place names, which comes in handy. And I can take and save notes and juggle with the settings to suit myself. But that's really all I need.

I do a lot of my fiction reading late at night. I'm something of an insomniac. I can wake up at 4am, so wide awake that I know it will be impossible to go back to sleep. That's when I pick up my Kindle, set its light very low, and read for an hour or two before eventually falling asleep, and all this without waking my slumbering husband. Not only that but the Kindle will quietly switch itself off when I fall asleep, and it will keep my place for me. Although it does sometimes slide off the bed and wake me up again when it lands with a thud on the carpet. 

But all this involves practical details, and my love for my Kindle involves far more than that. Years ago, when radio drama was in its heyday, somebody pointed out that they loved listening to plays on radio because the pictures were better. And I love reading on my Kindle, especially in the dark, in the middle of the night, because the pictures are definitely better. 

One of the complaints made about eBooks (especially from people with a vested interest in selling paper books, oddly enough) is that people don't remember what they read on an e-reader. I find that the opposite is true. Although I'd admit that it depends on the quality of the book. NVG fiction will just slide away from you, but NVG fiction on paper will do the same thing. 

There is something magical about entering the world of a good book in the middle of the night, in the dark, just you and the words and the world that the writer has created. The pictures are so much better. Sometimes, a book can be so entrancing that I find myself falling asleep and continuing the story in my dreams. You should try it. It's magic. 


Too Much Hype

Out now in paperback

I'm a voracious reader and depending upon length, I can get through a couple of books in a week. I read most of my fiction on my Kindle Paperwhite, late at night or in the early hours of the morning, with the light off - so that I don't disturb my longsuffering husband, although the thud as the Kindle slides onto the floor when I fall asleep has been known to wake him up with a jump. 

Except that for a few weeks now, I haven't been able to find anything that I really want to read. Which is crazy when you think about the number of books published each year. 

Partly, I put it down to the fact that, having galloped through all of Fred Vargas's brilliant Commissaire Adamsberg novels, I'm feeling bereft without him. 'He' being Adamsberg. I know Vargas is female. But it's like the end of a love affair. Nothing quite matches up to the beloved, so everything I've tried to read since, with a few notable exceptions, has seemed a bit 'meh'. 

If you don't know these books, you could do what I did, on the recommendation of my good friend Alison, who first introduced me to this writer: begin with the magnificent, magical Ghost Riders of Ordebec - captivating pretty much from the first page - and then go back to the beginning of the series. 

I may just have to read them all again, I'm missing Adamsberg and his world so much. 

Since I finished the last one, trying to read more slowly to prolong the pleasure, I've tried for a couple of months to find something equally involving, thought provoking and multi layered. I've searched and I've downloaded samples. And I've become ever more frustrated and angry.  

Hyperbole. That's the problem. 

Every book from the major publishers is now touted as the best thing ever. The over-promotion is almost bound to result in disappointment. Right now, at the tail end of a particularly grim period, I find myself looking for well written fiction, good storytelling, believable characters and a reasonable mix of triumph and tragedy. I don't need the best thing since sliced bread. I just need something well made and satisfying. 

Last night though - and I'm naming no names - I came across a fairly new crime novel that had been praised to the moon and back. I downloaded a sample. I've learned the hard way about being tempted into buying something without first reading a chapter or two, unless I already know and love the author. It's one of the benefits of reading on a Kindle that you can do just that, and then go on to buy the book with ease. Even at 2am. 

Except that when I opened the sample, instead of finding the first chapter, I found ELEVEN PAGES (I counted them in a rage, and I don't use a particularly large font size on my Kindle) of quotes telling me how wonderful this writer and his books were, just in case I was in any doubt. Now all publishers and self publishers add a few positive reviews to our books. I've just checked a couple of my traditionally published titles and there's a page of well chosen quotes. Even Ice Dancing, above, just out in paperback, has a single page. It's normal. But they're meant to reassure the potential reader, not browbeat them into submission. 

By the time I had waded through page after page of turgid and exclamatory praise, I wasn't very well disposed towards the book itself. I read on a bit to see if it matched the promotional overkill. It didn't. It was ordinary. And a bit glib. There was a certain satisfaction to be had in deleting it, but I'd rather have had a really good read. 

Still, all is not lost. I've gone back to Poldark - I read the first two books during the winter, and now I've turned to Book Three. What a relief to lose myself in vivid, well structured writing, great storytelling and above all engrossing characters - the kind of book you look forward to reading and then enjoy so much that you can hardly bear to put down. That magical, enviable sense of entering a world of someone else's creation - one that Vargas's quite different, but still wonderful Adamsberg novels gave me too. 

If you haven't already read them, do try them. 


Self Publishing - Finding the Right Help

Original cover art for Ice Dancing


I don't normally write 'how to' posts, these days . But I keep meeting writers who want to dip a toe in self publishing waters, either because they have old out-of-print books nagging away at them, or because they've written more than their publisher can reasonably cope with, or because they are tired of the long slog towards traditional publication, or because they have a project that they just want to get 'out there'. 

As well as researching a new project for my traditional publisher, I've spent some time during lockdown  revamping a couple of older books. I'd already published both of them as eBooks on various platforms, but I wanted them to be available in paperback. Both of them were well reviewed, and when I went back to them I still quite liked them. Always a good sign. Like most writers, I have several bottom drawer 'practice' novels that ought to stay just where they are - but these had fallen into the gap between publishers.

First I tackled Bird of Passage, and then moved on to Ice Dancing. Let's face it, most print on demand paperbacks are never going to be as lovely as the books my publisher, Saraband, makes. They've produced some wonderful covers and beautifully designed books for me. On the other hand, if you want only a few copies, and also want your books to be available in paperback for those who can't cope with eBooks, then you might well want to look at POD paperbacks. 

My advice to anyone with even a modicum of tech skill - by which I mean if you can handle a blog like this one or sell on eBay - would be to publish your own edited eBooks, but get some help with formatting the paperback. As long as you're thinking of a normal novel or collection of short stories, it has become easier and easier to publish an eBook. I use Amazon to start with, and D2D for every other platform. You need a good clean edited Word document, and a cover, or a good cover image - and that's about it. 

I'm lucky in that my husband Alan Lees is an artist, so I can pinch his images for some of my covers. He painted the cover image for Ice Dancing, for example. Sometimes I use my own photographs. Amazon itself will give you basic cover design for eBooks, and if you're only going for the eBook version, and have a good strong image in which you own the copyright, that's probably all you'll need. But there are excellent freelance designers out there as well and you could and should think of commissioning them. 

Paperbacks are much more tricky. The paperback will demand a formatted PDF and a specific cover design, and if it's not done properly, the upload process will be fraught with difficulty. I took one look at the 'easy' instructions and realised that it wasn't for me! But I didn't want to hand over control of these two books to anyone else either. A friend suggested a company who had published her paperback, but I bought a copy and although I loved the actual book, I found the formatting, both for eBook and paperback, not as good as it might have been in return for quite a restrictive contract. There seems little point in doing self publishing, only to lose control. 

Then I found the excellent Lumphanan Press  here in Scotland. And I've been more than pleased with the service they offer. They will give you the help you need, without the hard sell so often associated with other companies. I wanted a decent cover design, for which I supplied my own images and blurbs  - and I wanted a formatted PDF that I could upload smoothly and that would produce a reasonable book. Both of these were supplied at a price I could afford. Both uploaded without any tears. I tweaked the blurb myself, realising that my original draft for one of the books had been far too long for a paperback cover - something you tend to notice only when you actually see it. 

The other error was entirely my own fault. Post edit, I had managed to delete a whole chapter from one of the novels, and then foolishly reformatted the chapter numbers so that I spotted the omission only at the last minute, when I was doing a final proof check of the PDF. Fortunately, Duncan at Lumphanan came to the rescue immediately and inserted the missing chapter without any fuss. (I always save many drafts so the chapter was still there of course!)

Realistically, I'm not expecting to make much if anything in the way of profits from these two books. And there will be a third that I'll bring out once I've completed my current traditional mega project. But they always felt like unfinished business, a few people had asked for them - and for all that I do most of my fiction reading in eBook form, these days, it's still good to hold the solid reassurance of a paperback in your hand.

If you want more distribution without being tied to that big river place, there are other print on demand options. I have friends who sell large numbers of their very popular self published paperbacks at fairs and shows, and whose local bookshops will stock and publicise their books. There is, if you look for it, a great deal of help out there, plenty of people who know more than I do about this, and are generous with advice.

Just make sure you don't sign away your rights to somebody who will then go on to demand large sums of money for doing many of the jobs you can either do yourself, or sub contract to experts. That's vanity publishing, and still a bad idea.


An Island that Inspired a Novel: Gigha and The Curiosity Cabinet

Beautiful cover art by Alison Bell

This is the time of year in Scotland, still more or less spring, but with summer fast approaching, that I invariably find myself thinking about the beautiful Isle of Gigha. We didn't visit last year, and I reckon that was the first time in many years that we didn't manage to go, even if only for a few days. Our son paddled in its turquoise seas when he was a little lad. We visited with friends (sometimes with a lot of friends!) and sometimes it was just the three of us and then just the two of us when Charlie grew up. I think all the young people who spent time there have happy memories of the place.

The island is bathed in golden light.
We are planning to try to get there later in the year, perhaps in September or October when the place is full of luscious brambles (blackberries if you're not reading this in Scotland!) and the whole island seems often to be bathed in golden light. But my favourite time of year there is still May with its oceans of primroses, violets and then bluebells, or June and early July when the place seems to be awash with wild flowers of all kinds, armies of foxgloves, buttery honeysuckle. As Manus, one of my characters in The Curiosity Cabinet says to Henrietta Dalrymple, when she asks him for plants and bulbs to make a garden, 'Henrietta, the whole island is a flower garden.' And of course it is.

The whole island is a flower garden.
Two of my novels have been inspired by Gigha: The Curiosity Cabinet and (rather more loosely, but still recognisable) Bird of Passage. Both stories are fictional, and so are all the characters, but the landscape is a different matter. And of course I've also written a big non-fiction book about Gigha, a gallop through the prehistory and history of the people of the island: God's Islanders. I can't quite leave it alone!


Ardminish Bay
My husband, artist Alan Lees, feels much the same - and he has painted it on more than one occasion: the picture on the left is Ardminish Bay with the boathouse restaurant in the background and yes - the sea really can be that colour. The air is so clean and there are days when the colours seem to be impossibly vivid.

The Curiosity Cabinet has been available worldwide as an eBook on Kindle for some years now and I've just uploaded it all over again - not with any real changes, but with a few tiny edits and with a sample chapter of Bird of Passage at the end.

I'm in two minds about these 'bonus chapters' myself because I know how frustrating it is to think that you have another chapter to go in a book and to suddenly find that it has ended, and what you thought was more of the novel is actually an extract from another book altogether! But I hope readers will forgive me, because it doesn't seem quite so bothersome in an eBook and besides, Bird of Passage is another novel set in a similar island landscape and I have a feeling that if you enjoy The Curiosity Cabinet you might well enjoy Bird of Passage too. It's a bigger, sadder and more disturbing novel altogether than the rather gentle tale that is The Curiosity Cabinet but the island landscape plays a big part.

I've also published both these novels to various other platforms including Apple, so you should be able to find them pretty much anywhere you want. The Curiosity Cabinet was published in paperback some years ago, but sold out and consequently went out of print quite quickly. Second hand copies do crop up for those who prefer paper, but I'm planning a Print on Demand version as soon as I can find the time to do it. I have a draft of a new novel to finish first!

Still, I'm hoping that paperback versions of  The Curiosity Cabinet and Bird of Passage too will be available before the end of the year.

Manus McNeill? 
The Curiosity Cabinet consists of two interwoven love stories, past and present. Nobody goes back in time - although the problems of the past may be continued and perhaps worked out in the present. It's also a story about the way in which small and rather magical islands such as this one can feel as though they hold the whole history of the place, layers of it, one on top of another. 'Thin places' where the boundaries between past and present seem to be somehow blurred.

So - if I've whetted your appetite a bit, here's a little extract from the present day story. After an absence of twenty five years, Alys has returned to the island where she used to come on holiday. And in her hotel, she has come across the 'curiosity cabinet' of the title - not really a curiosity cabinet at all, but an old, very valuable and very beautiful casket, embroidered with traditional raised work.

'Presently she takes her drink and finds the residents’ lounge again. It is still empty, so she moves about the room examining pictures. They are large oil paintings, grim death rather than still life: birds, their feathers tumbled and bloody, hunks of meat, overflowing platters of fruit and vegetables. There is the inevitable stag, on a heathery hill. There is a grimly handsome highlander, staring pensively into the distance. There are a few portraits of bald-headed, pot-bellied, self-satisfied old men, so dark as to be almost indistinguishable from each other.

And then she comes upon a display case of mahogany and glass. There are objects, neatly arranged on three shelves. But the casket is central. The casket has raised, heavily embroidered panels on a wooden base and little gilded feet. The scenes are biblical. A woman stands breast high amid the growing corn. She is Ruth. ‘Whither thou goest I will go … thy people shall be my people,’ thinks Alys, surprised by her own knowledge, remembering the words from some long-ago reading, a school service perhaps. She hasn’t been to church in years. There are birds and flowers too: long-necked swans and plump seagulls, honeysuckle, wild roses with their centres formed of tiny seed pearls, drooping foxgloves.

The embroidery has faded over time but only a little. The two front doors are open to reveal five drawers, two wide and three narrow, also embroidered with flowers and birds and beasts. There is a tall house in grey silk, with fragments of mica for windows.

She can still hear the child pattering about, giggling.

Other objects, presumably the contents of the cabinet, are spread out on the shelves above and below it. Here is a miniature shuttle, prettily inlaid with gold, and with a few discoloured threads still attached. Here is a needlelace collar, very fine and floral. Here is a tiny pincushion, a painted silk fan and a coral teether. On another shelf is a hand mirror, intricately decorated with semi-precious stones in the shape of flowers: forget-me-nots and pansies. Alongside these precious keepsakes, she is puzzled to see a little collection of pebbles and shells and swansdown. Finally there is a scrap of yellowed paper, with a few words of incomprehensible writing: a letter? A poem? Alys is enchanted by these things and suddenly possessed by the need to know more about them. 

Slowly but surely, Alys finds out more about them: who made the casket and why, who owned it and its contents, what became of it, and what is the connection with her childhood playmate, island fisherman, Donal. And perhaps most important of all, who was the mysterious chieftain of the island, Manus McNeill, who had some great treasure which he lost, and who took to himself a bride from the sea? 

But the islanders are people who can 'keep a secret for a thousand years' and it's only when you belong that you can understand the truth of that hidden past. 

























Why You Shouldn't Boycott Amazon

Old and new: teddies and Kindle
As Christmas approaches, I've been encouraged by a few colleagues and even one or two friends to boycott Amazon. They've called it a monster, a parasite, and a few other nasty names besides, some of them (oddly enough) while making enthusiastic use of it as a distributor.

Do they realise, I wonder, that in calling for a boycott of Amazon, they are in effect, calling for a boycott of the small cottage industry that is me and thousands, perhaps millions of people like me? Literally cottage industry in my case because I live and work and file my tax returns from a cottage. But I distribute - among other places - on Amazon.

If they don't like Amazon's tax arrangements, then they need to lobby politicians to change the law, but they are going to have to do it for all those other mega corporations that do exactly the same kind of legal tax avoidance. As the director general of the CBI says, if the government wants a different result from the tax system, it must change the rules. Mind you, we should be very careful what we wish for.  The latest EU changes to VAT on digital downloads are certain to have the presumably unintended consequence of driving more and more small businesses away from distributing their product themselves and into the arms of the big companies. One can only assume that they were drafted by a bunch of elderly and ridiculously well-paid denizens of Brussels who have no idea how the internet works. Unless there is a change of heart, from 1st January, not only will eBooks cost more, (apologies to my readers, but since my prices are quite low anyway it won't be too draconian) but most EU based digital businesses - people selling everything from knitting patterns to training manuals online - will either have to decide to trade exclusively via the likes of Amazon or not trade within other EU countries at all. The alternatives, for a micro-business, will be so costly as to be utterly unrealistic. On the whole, I've been a supporter of the EU, but when they make cross border trading this stupidly problematic, you've got to ask yourself what's the point? This is the first time that I've genuinely started to think that in any referendum, I might well vote to leave!

Amazon is my main distributor for my self published work. And one of the distributors for my publisher too. Other distributors are, of course, available and I use some of them, but the truth is that at present, nowhere sells as well for me as Amazon, and no other distributor pays me the monthly sum of money that allows me to carry on writing fiction and occasionally publishing elsewhere.

The garden of my 'cottage industry'.
All the same, I don't actually 'love' Amazon although I may joke about it. There are precious few people in the world I love and I can't think of a single company or organisation that merits that kind of affection although I'll admit that T K Maxx gives me a bit of a buzz.

But I do respect Amazon. They sell books for me all the time. And they pay a decent share of the proceeds on the nail, every month, with great efficiency.  Even in the middle of the recent VAT hideousness, they have done what they can to make things easier for the small trader.

There are thousands of people like me in all kinds of businesses, large, medium and very very small. If you want to boycott Amazon for Christmas, that's your prerogative. But don't then kid yourself that you are supporting small businesses, cottage industries like mine.

Because you're not. You are damaging them. Damaging us all: the writer, the chocolate maker,  the coffee roaster, and the fabulous loose leaf tea blender I've just discovered while researching this post, as well as the artist, the crafter, the toymaker and the herbalist. I don't expect they're supporting an Amazon or an Etsy or a Google boycott either.  Many of them have nice little 'high street' or rural shops that are also supported by online selling  Because that's the way it works these days. Even small shops sell online as well. They sell in as many ways as they possibly can. Except to other EU countries, from their own websites after January. That's one boycott I'd be willing to support.

Meanwhile, I'm off to buy some tea. From a small business, a cottage industry really. Probably via Amazon.

The Dubious Scent of Books

The new - and the really old!

This was posted earlier this month on the Authors Electric blog site - but I think it's worth reblogging here since it might be of interest to readers as well as writers.

I used to have a favourite independent bookstore. This was many years ago, long before Amazon was a gleam in Jeff Bezos’s eye and it was run by a couple of people who loved books and writers too. You could go in and chat. They knew local writers and helped to promote them. They got to know their customers and could offer suggestions. Then, one of the big chains moved in over the road with their high staff turnover, their front of shop table displays for which publishers paid handsomely and their three for two offers. When they complained, they were told ‘business is business’ and that was that. Within a year they had closed. Those of us who resolutely kept on shopping with them were clearly in a minority.

Cue forward some years. I’m browsing in the big Borders in Glasgow just along the road from Central Station. The cafe – Starbucks as I remember it – is nice. Sometimes I meet people there. The store is pretty good too. Back then I often browse and buy. There are hand-written staff recommendations. One or two of my books are in there as well. I surreptitiously put them face out, as you do.

Time passes. We live in the countryside but I’m a fairly frequent visitor to Glasgow. Borders has changed though. You have to hunt for books on the ground floor. They are tucked away. I remember noticing newspapers and magazines, diaries and notebooks (not that I don’t like notebooks because I do – most writers do, I think) giftwrap and greetings cards and lots of weird barely book related stuff in glossy boxes, as well as cookery and gardening books, sporting auto (sic) biographies, acres of celebrity tat. Sometimes I browse and take a book to the checkout, but the tills upstairs are seldom open, so I go downstairs to be met by a queue of Soviet proportions and two cash points open. Then I dump whatever I’ve picked up, go home, order off Amazon. Mostly this is because I have a train to catch rather than from any more sinister 'showrooming' intention. Latterly though, I think I’ve lost my marbles because I find my eyes glazing over in there. It’s only when I meet a friend on the train - one I know to be an eclectic reader - and he says to me suddenly, ‘Catherine, do you find yourself looking round Borders and not seeing anything at all that you want to buy?’ and I’m forced to agree with him. Nevertheless, I’m sad when Borders closes. Just a bit. Kind of sad to see it go. But not devastated. Certainly not devastated.

strange, musky, dusty ...
Time passes again. Somebody buys me a Kindle. I open the box and am instantly hooked on the device. What’s not to like? I mean people keep going on and on about the smell of books, but the only books I possess that smell nice in – er – my book, are those old, musty, dusty books I love. I’ve a collection of ancient volumes of Burns’s poetry and other books about the poet and I know they might not smell nice to everyone, but they smell good to me. Extreme age. I like that scent. But then I also like the strange, musky, dusty, sneeze-inducing scent of Victorian paisley shawls! So I can see the attraction, but the ‘smell’ of new books? Even my books? Not so much. Do they smell of – well – anything much at all? Not really. Not after the first few moments.

A couple of years later, my husband gets me a Kindle Paperwhite for Christmas. This time, it’s a coup de foudre: love at first sight. Now, although I still read paper books from time to time, I realise that I hardly buy new books at all. I download novels and stories onto my Kindle and if I find something I truly love and know I want to keep, as an object, as opposed to something I enjoy reading but will never read again, I may buy a paper copy. But in reality, this doesn’t happen very often. Sometimes – like those dusty books of Burns’s poetry – I buy online, from antiquarian sellers. These are often dealers who may or may not have shop premises. It amazes me how ignorant people are of just how many medium, small and micro-businesses are facilitated by the likes of Amazon and eBay. I sometimes buy new paperback books by friends, mostly at events where they are reading, and I think it might be good to have a signed copy. Otherwise, the Kindle is where it’s at for me. I can change the font size and the spacing at will. I can read in bed at night without switching on the light. I can fall asleep and my Kindle falls asleep too, and when I wake it up again, there it is, just where I left off reading. Even when I'm reading several books at the same time. I could sell these devices. 

Now, when I do readings myself, people come up to me and say they’ve got the book on their Kindle. Sometimes they say it quite loudly, within the hearing of the bookstore rep and I feel a faint stirring of guilt. I want to say ‘shshsh’ but I don’t. Because if I'm being truthful I don’t mind too much. And besides, I know that if they have bought the paperback, they will very likely pass it around three or four of their friends, possibly more, whereas if they have got the download, and it’s inexpensive enough, they will very likely tell three or four of their friends about it – and then it will be ‘jam for Georgie’ as one of my favourite authors says. (Can you guess who? No prizes, but lots of stars!)

I also realise that I’m reading more than I have read since I was young. I read voraciously these days, book after book, sometimes waking up in the night, opening my Kindle and just getting in a few chapters when I can’t bear to leave a book alone or when I’m sleepless.

I’m publishing in paper as well as eBook form though (with more to come) and I still go back to the chain bookstores from a sort of lingering sense of guilt, a hankering after that old indie bookstore where I knew the people and they knew me and we could talk about the books we loved. Some bookstores are still like that and greatly to be cherished. I love them, and visit them and buy books in them, even when I know I have too many books in the house altogether. 

But any residual guilt about downloading - legally, of course - has gradually dwindled away. Tonight I found a writer online, who had been recommended to me, one who had written a whole string of novels. I wanted the first in a long series. Would I have found it in my local bookstore? It was some ten years old. So I doubt it. And if, as has happened several times so far this year, I get hooked on a writer and gallop through his or her books, I want the next one now, not next Wednesday when I’m going into town. I want instant gratification. Most voracious readers do. I find it very hard indeed to feel any kind of guilt about this, because guess what? As a writer, that’s what I want too. I desperately want any reader who finishes one of my books and thinks, ‘what else has she written?’ to move smoothly on to whatever else is available while I get on with writing the next one. Don't you?



Visit my website at www.wordarts.co.uk
And if you'd like a taster of the kind of books I write, look out for Bird of Passage on Amazon's Kindle store. It will be on special offer and amazingly inexpensive for a whole week, beginning 1st November.


Orange Blossom Love and other stories ...

Another lovely cover image from Michael Doig
I've been so busy with all kinds of writing over the past few weeks that I've hardly had a spare moment to update this blog. Here in the West of Scotland, we're in that time between seasons when the trees are beautiful - especially the rowans - but the days are shortening all the time. Soon our clocks will be going back an hour and then the nights will seem very long - and very dark.

BUT I've been cheering myself up with working on the first in a series of unashamedly romantic novels, set largely in the beautiful Canary Isles. And really wishing I was sitting on the deck of a catamaran in the sunshine. But if I can't do that, then the next best thing is to write about the islands, and dream about them. And share some of those dreams with readers.


This all began many years ago as a short story called Sardine Burial which - coincidentally enough - has just been republished in eBook form by the excellent Hearst Magazine Company: one of four short stories in a new mini collection of my stories, available on all ebook platforms - but you can find it here on Amazon in the UK and here on Amazon in the US. I love the way Hearst are embracing short stories in this form - mainly because I'm a big fan of the short story myself, not just as a writer, but as a reader.

I experimented with Sardine Burial as a radio play - it was actually produced on BBC R4 years ago - but I really wanted to write it as a novel. Its first incarnation was published and pretty much sank without trace. I'm quite glad, because it wasn't ever the way I really wanted it to be. It's a romantic story, no doubt about it. And why not? But what I really wanted to write was a novel about two people from quite different backgrounds, who fall in love and marry in haste. What happens next? Do they repent at leisure, as the old adage would have us believe? So I went back to the beginning and began all over again. Especially with my hero - lovely Luis - who plays the guitar and sings - and cooks, too. OK, OK, he's a man in a million. But he has his faults. As you'll find out if you read the book.

That's what I've been writing about in Orange Blossom Love.  (Try THIS LINK  instead, if you're in the US!)  This is one of the more sensuous and unashamedly romantic pieces of writing I've ever done. It's a very grown up love story. And I'm afraid it does end on a bit of a cliff-hanger. There was no way round it. You'll see what I mean when you get there! But I'm hoping to be able to get Part 2, Bitter Oranges, out on Kindle in time for Christmas. Or very soon after.

My only worry is that there is an important - and quite different - project which might just possibly get in the way. I'll tell you a bit more about that later because it's very exciting too and it will have to take priority for a while.. But if I manage my time properly, I should be able to do both. And maybe winter in Scotland will be a very good time to visit the gorgeous, sunny Canary Isles, even if it's only in my imagination! On the other hand, Bitter Oranges is set partly in Glasgow. So I might just have to make do with Luis, who brings his own brand of sunshine with him! Always has. Always will.


AUGUST WAS A VERY BUSY MONTH!

Carving by Alan Lees
For all kinds of reasons, August was such a busy month for me that I've been neglecting my blog. I found myself blogging about being a mid-list writer for the astonishingly varied and informative Edinburgh eBook Festival, attending the excellent and entertaining Inverness Book Festival with Lin Anderson and Sara Sheridan, to speak about indie publishing and promotion, while a week later, I was on a Society of Authors panel at the Edinburgh International Book Festival talking about 'Being a Writer in the Digital Age.' This was a bit contentious, but only insofar as one of the speakers found himself playing devil's advocate - and to be honest, I'm glad he did. Nothing like a little grit in the oyster to produce a few pearls of wisdom, and as one member of the audience commented afterwards 'It wasn't totally one sided, which proved to be a very good thing.' I agree. There is a debate to be had, and we should be having it - courteously and productively.

 I heard later that one of the panel had to put up with a certain amount of online abuse and I'm sorry about that. We need to be able to talk frankly about writing and publishing. We need to be able to talk about the challenges facing all of us. If we can talk about collaboration and making the best of things for all of us, so much the better.

Edinburgh is a blast at Festival time. We managed to see The Tobacco Merchant's Lawyer, by Iain Heggie, with John Bett as the redoubtable Enoch Dalmellington. This is a marvellous piece of theatre - funny and satirical and wholly entertaining and I'm so glad to have seen it at last. Every time I see a play as good as this one, I have a terrible longing to get back to writing for the stage - and yet taking anything at all from page to production these days is fraught with so many problems that - after all these years and with a good track record - I do, kind of, find myself running out of steam with that particular aspect of my creativity! I had this conversation with somebody only a few weeks ago who told me that the only way was to 'get a group of people together and do it yourself' and I thought - yes. You're right. It's the only way. But do I have that kind of energy now? All these years after my first play was staged?  I don't think so. Besides, I have so many other fish to fry, you wouldn't believe.

Meanwhile, enough of the excitement. (And believe me, there has been a LOT of excitement of which more in due course) I really need to quit monkeying around and get some writing done - fiction, that is.

PS We also spent an hour in the company of the Amazing Bubble Man. You can watch him on YouTube here. Wonderful stuff.











August is a Busy (Festival) Month


Your Own Skipper

This is a time of year when most of my friends are off on holiday - or just back from it. It's shaping up to be one of my busiest months of the year!

First things first - this week, I'm 'mid-list' Writer in Residence, over at the Edinburgh eBook Festival. There's a regular schedule of posts, but if you can't be there all day (and who can? - it's a little like ANY book festival with a huge range of possibilities) - you can click on the Catch Up tab to the right of the home page and see what you've missed - and go to the post and read it at your leisure if you want!
Here's the link to my first mid-list writer post - but you can catch up with them at any time or read them all of a piece at the end of the week or later on.
Meanwhile, if you find anything you like, all the participants would be very grateful if you could spread the word even in a small way  - especially since there is so much which might be of interest to readers and/or of use to writers, whether indie or hybrid or traditionally published, new or experienced. There's comedy, ghosts, crime, life writing - you name it. And it's ALL free.

Just to make life more interesting (if a bit hectic) for myself, I'm back from the Inverness Book Festival where I was doing a seminar on Digital Publishing with the amazing Lin Anderson and the equally amazing Sara Sheridan. We do an occasional triple act for the Society of Authors in Scotland advising people about the possibilities for eBook publishing and marketing and  we always seem to get a great response and good feedback from the audience. Truth to tell, Sara is so good on the marketing aspects that I always learn something from her whenever we do one of these sessions. And this time, Lin was wonderfully eloquent on the democratizing effects of eBooks and online publishing, comparing these changes to the early days of libraries, when there was a certain amount of angst about ordinary people having access to books - how on earth would they cope without the intellectuals to tell them how to think?

Next week, I'm doing another session on digital publishing - a panel at the Edinburgh Book Festival this time, with Maggie Craig, and Mark Buckland with Lin chairing it. It's all go in the Czerkawska household and as if that wasn't enough, I'm working on revisions of my Canary Isles trilogy, aiming to publish the first book, Orange Blossom Love, by the end of this month. We'll see.

Oh, and there is a piece of bigger news to come - but I'll be posting about that soon!
And before I forget - I have another little trio of short stories out on Kindle right now. Your Own Skipper. These are a bit dark though. You have been warned!

EDINBURGH EBOOK FESTIVAL 2013


Here's a press release from writer and publisher Cally Phillips, who works incredibly hard to make this whole festival happen. I can't do better than let her tell you all about the festival herself - but please do visit and spread the word. I'm participating myself  - in fact I'm mid-list writer in residence at the ebook festival - and I'm also happy to be part of a discussion panel  on Being a Writer in the Digital Age at the Edinburgh Book Festival this year - that's what being a 'hybrid writer' means, I suppose. (Like the roses - hardier and more inclined to repeat flowering!) 

Everybody's doing it.
Now in its second year, the Edinburgh eBook festival is back from the Glorious 12th of August right through to Sunday night August 25th. This is a unique type of festival. Billed as ‘the festival that comes to you’ it’s available online any time of the day and night, with limitless audience capacity and everyone gets the best seat in the house. Dress code optional. And it’s FREE for all.

During the day a regular set of ‘events’ are posted up on the festival site. You access it via your ereader, smartphone, tablet, ipad or computer so that you can literally be in two places at one time. Wherever you are, as long as you have internet or wifi access, you can take part.

Our programme features individual slots at roughly hourly intervals throughout the day from the Short Story slot at 11am, right through to the ‘Conversations’ slot at 11pm. In between we will feature residencies, workshops, ebook launches, and sundry other ‘events.’ We even have the world’s first weathersheep ‘Derek’ who will be providing a ‘sheeping forecast’ each day at noon. Derek is this year’s internet phenomemon and his ‘Fifteen Grades of Hay’ trilogy is the talk of the cyber valleys.

Residencies include Catherine Czerkawska’s Mid-list, Cally Phillips’ Drama Retrospective and Chris Longmuir’s mammoth exploration of the Crime genre. For Sci-Fi buffs there’s David Wailing, as well as Travel with Jo Carroll, Horror with Mari Biella and Ghosts stories dissected with Dennis Hamley. Sue Price will inspire you regarding Functional Literacy and Ingrid Ricks will do similarly about advocacy. There’s a chance for you to participate too. Kathleen Jones will be running a Life Writing workshop and Bill Kirton a Comedy workshop.

There’s plenty more. Mr McStoryteller Brendan Gisby will host the Short Story slot and Roz Morris offers a new spin on Desert Island Discs with her ‘Undercover Soundtrack’ event while Jian Qiu Huang confirms the internationality of the festival with his ‘Conversations with the Universe.’

There are slots on ‘Market Choices’ where writers and publishers reveal ways they have approached publicity and sales and there’s launches of ebooks as well as talk about the relationship between narrator, author and reader. Our festival theme is Beyond the Margins and we hope to explore this concept in a way which will be thought provoking ,fun and open doors and minds as to the possibilities of digital publishing.

The festival opens with a look at Stuart Ayris’ unique, inspired and inspiring ‘Frugality’ Trilogy and closes with Peter Tarnofsky’s latest short story collection ‘Everything Turns Out Just Fine.’

And if that’s not enough, there will also be a FREE Goody Bag available throughout the festival.

Last year we welcomed over 9,000 visitors through our virtual doors. With over 150 separate ‘events’ and featuring oodles of writers – some you know and some you’ll want to get to know – we hope that there will be something for just about everyone. We hope to show you that the digital revolution is alive and well and that Beyond the Margins there’s a whole new world just waiting for you to read and read about.

Daily previews begin on 1st August with some background information about the main participants and events, giving you the chance to ease your way into the technology. But really, if you already know how to use an ereader, tablet, smartphone or pc it’s simple. Just go to www.edebookfest.co.uk and the events will come to you. You can catch up on events you’ve missed with a click or two to the appropriate category. Remember, it’s all free and everyone is welcome.

The festival has a facebook page where you can post your comments and you can follow on Twitter @edebookfest or have your say at #edebookfest.

There’s really no excuse not to visit this exciting new festival now, is there?

The Hybrid Writer

Paul's Himalayan Musk Rose (Not a Hybrid!)

The following is reblogged from my April post on Authors Electric. I thought it was something worth repeating here, on my personal blog,  because the links may be useful to other writers while the idea of some writers doing all kinds of writing, published and produced in all kinds of ways, not just a particular genre or a particular form of publishing, may be interesting to readers as well.

Hybrid is, apparently, the new buzz term. 'You're going to be hearing about hybrid writers a lot soon,' remarked a colleague gleefully. Actually, the term was first invented (I believe) by the excellent Bob Mayer, some time ago but my colleague was absolutely right, and I already had been reading about it here, there and everywhere. I noticed it because I rather like the idea. It's one I'm comfortable with for various reasons and not just because I love roses, hybrid or not!

Now I know that a percentage of new authors self publish in the hope of being noticed by traditional publishing, big or small. Nothing wrong with that either if that's what you've decided you want. The slush pile has all but disappeared, having an agent no longer guarantees publication - nor has it for some time - and stories of traditional publishers trawling Amazon for successful novels are legion. Although if you do hit pay dirt with a best-selling eBook, the deal on offer would have to be pretty good to compete. I've had some good relationships within traditional publishing and production: excellent and committed small publishers, producers and directors who have taught me plenty over the years. Some of these relationships are still ongoing and I'm very glad of them. But I have also experienced the exact opposite in all its hideous misery.

These days I self publish very happily, love the experience of being a 'writer as publisher' and I'm certainly not publishing my work digitally in the hope of being 'noticed' or only by my readers and potential readers.  I'm also publishing in order to make some money. But I'm not totally independent and I doubt if I ever will be. Only some of us on Authors Electric are. Many of us have a foot in both camps. The truth is that (to mix my metaphors a bit) as a hybrid author, you can now have a finger in just about as many pies as you have fingers, especially when you write an eclectic mix of all kinds of work. With me, it isn't just fiction, long and short, but plays and non fiction too. And even with my fiction, there's no single genre and some of my novels are - I suppose -  more 'literary' than others. That's part of the fun of it. Not being tied down any more. Not having to shoehorn yourself into a tight little category because that's what your single publisher wants. Being able to say, 'let's do the show right here,' with some degree of success, being in control, but also being open to partnerships or the occasional traditional deal, whether it's for a story or an article, a review or a play, where what's on offer seems reasonable and non-exclusive.

The problem in the olden days of publishing and production wasn't just discoverability. It was maintaining professional visibility. Even people with whom you have worked successfully and happily in the past tend to forget about you if they don't see or hear from you. It's one of the reasons why so many playwrights camp out in theatre bars. Show face. Chat. Socialize. Now, I find that social media have been an undoubted factor in my rekindling some old professional relationships and that's an unexpected but welcome by-product.

Perhaps the simple truth is that writers have almost always undertaken a mix of work not just in order to survive, but in order to grow and learn and hone their craft. The number of writers who have moved smoothly from creative writing course to literary acclaim is vanishingly small but they also tend to be the most vociferously indignant and embittered about the new state of publishing. Perhaps they just feel threatened by change.

I think many of us would settle for being happily hybrid, writing, talking, teaching if that's what floats our boat, undertaking the occasional piece of contract work for a variety of outlets, aiming to thrive rather than just survive. Thriving is something that has been on my mind recently. Money doesn't buy happiness but it sure makes living a lot more comfortable in all kinds of ways.

Most of us write for love. Well, there's nothing wrong with that either. Nothing wrong with loving what you do even though it's hard work. Even though there's a certain dour mindset which subscribes to the belief that if you love it, it can't possibly be work. But even when we write for love, we can publish for money, especially now. Anyone seriously contemplating a career as a writer might think about doing some kind of business course if only to avoid exploitation. I remember what an eye opener it was for me, the first time somebody pointed out exactly how I ought to go about costing my time. (If you want to know more, you can download a guide from Glasgow's Cultural Enterprise Office, here) And the shocking perspective it gave me on major commercial organisations which still try to tell us that there's 'no money in the budget' to pay the writer for all kinds of extra work. I once found myself trekking through to Edinburgh from Ayrshire for a radio script meeting on my own time and money because there was 'no money in the budget to pay for travel expenses.' Back then, I put up with it. Many of us did. My favourite story from that time was of a friend who had something published in a magazine devoted to cats for which she was paid £5. Not a lot, even in the 90s. They also sent her a copy of the magazine and subtracted the price of the publication from her fiver!

These days, I'll do the odd gig for good causes, but I tend to subscribe to the Harlan Ellison school of thought where paying the writer is concerned. (But then it's a long time since I fell off the turnip truck!)

Meanwhile, I'd like to know how many college and universities offering Creative Writing or Creative Industries courses also offer detailed modules on the self employed business side of writing, everything from simple accounting and tax issues to branding and marketing. I'd lay bets not many of them do. Only last night I heard a contestant on Britain's Got Talent (I know, but it was a VERY quiet Saturday night and I was too tired to do anything except be a couch potato!) saying that he had started a music course at college, but his father had changed it to a business course. And I thought - surely, he would need both.


THE PHYSIC GARDEN, my new novel, now on Amazon's Kindle Store, here in the UK and here in the USA with a beautiful cover by Scottish artist Michael Doig. 

Blogging, Branding, Aromatherapy - and a free download.

Anyone who reads this blog regularly will know (and perhaps be faintly annoyed, for which I apologise!) that I've been playing about with the design of it, trying to find something that looks right for me, reflects the kind of fiction I write and, perhaps most important of all,  is legible. I've been trying to avoid that glaring white text on a black background, which nobody over a certain age can read. Me neither.
It's harder than you think to get it right and yet appearance matters. Just as the cover images of my eBooks tell you something about what you might find inside, so the background of a blog or website tells you a lot about the person writing it.
Which is why I've been experimenting with available backgrounds.
But whenever I found one I liked and no matter how much I tweaked the settings, the text became quite difficult to cope with. I've spent hours at it. For the moment, I'm settling for this seascape especially since so much of what I write seems to have the sea somewhere in it - even The Physic Garden involves a trip to the Isle of Arran for my main characters!
Linked to this is the fact that I've been reading and trying to learn a bit about creating a brand. Not cynically, but with the intention of trying to target those readers who - for want of a better explanation - are the people who will enjoy the kind of books I write.
There's an excellent blog post about this here on Stephen T Harper's blog. The wonderful Seth Godin sums it up, when he writes, 'Unanimity is impossible unless you are willing to be invisible.' And goes on to say that we have to learn to say 'It's not for you.'
This doesn't mean that I want to deter anyone from giving my books a go. But it does mean that we don't all love the same kind of work. (Just as well really.) And as writers, we're always trying to connect with the readers for whom we're really writing, the people who 'get' it, the people who will get some pleasure out of it, become lost in the world we've created - and hopefully, come back for more.
Although we badly want everyone to love what we write, we have to accept that some people won't. Why should they? And we have to learn to say 'it's not for you, then. But that's OK.' and move on.
Which is hard, because most of us remember the occasional negative review far more clearly than any number of positive comments.
It can be an interesting exercise to go to a book by one of your favourite authors on Amazon, one with a lot of reviews, and glance at the one and two star reviews. You can be pretty sure that - even with the most successful writers - there will be a few, sometimes more than a few, negative reviews. Sometimes these are quite illuminating - especially when they are well thought out, well written, but still negative. You may not agree with them at all. You probably won't. Especially if this is a writer whose work you love. But if you pause for thought, you can see why  it may be that you disagree, that you're enthusiastic about a particular book while somebody else isn't,  just as you may adore a particular piece of music while somebody else can't bear it.
A few years ago, when I had aromatherapy massage, the therapist asked me if there were any herbs or scents I particularly disliked (rosemary, when it's too intense) and any which I particularly loved (neroli, always, but any variation on orange and orange blossom.)
She took these preferences into account when preparing massage oils.
I think it's the same with books really. I'm invariably on the look out for whatever the equivalent of neroli is in fiction.
Some of my close friends much prefer rosemary!
On the whole, it's all pretty subjective - and that's quite heartening. Even if you are writing for a tiny, experimental niche market there will surely be somebody out there who will say 'this is definitely for me!'
And why not? It's one of the joys of this brave new world in which we find ourselves.
Meanwhile, the trick with branding isn't to indulge in crazy blanket marketing. It's to find out about your own work, what it is, what it's like, what characterises it -. and then try to find and connect with those readers who have been searching for exactly this kind of book.
Which is all VERY much easier said than done!
(All helpful suggestions gratefully received.)
Meanwhile, for anyone who wants to sample the kind of books I write, The Curiosity Cabinet will be free to download for five days, from 26th February to 2nd March. Quite a lot of people already have this book in paperback, but this means you can get the Kindle edition too if you want. One reviewer has described this as a 'rich tapestry of a book'. Two stories, historical and contemporary are intertwined on a small (fictional) Scottish island. What mostly emerges from the reviews is that people have quite simply found this to be an enjoyable read, one which stayed with them long after they had finished the novel. That's more than enough for me. If you haven't yet come across it, give it a go. I hope you enjoy it too! If you're reading this in the US, you can click here  instead.

Needlework, Wise Women and Kindles

Ayrshire Whitework in magical detail.


Last night, I went to a neighbouring village to give a talk to a group of ladies from the church 'Guild'. They were all what you might call older ladies, the kind of people easily dismissed by the young and cool. The meeting - in a warm, light church hall - began with a hymn and a prayer and ended with a hymn and a prayer. I've done this talk often before. I take my collection of examples of Ayrshire embroidery - along with a few other bits and pieces of interesting old needlework - some of it dating from 1840, one or two other pieces from 1800 or even earlier, and talk about the history of this magical embroidery, where it came from, how it was made, who did it and why. Even mixed groups of men and women seem to enjoy handling this work. It is, it has to be said, so beautiful, so microscopically fine, that you do find yourself wondering, as this audience so clearly did, just how women working by candlelight or oil lamps in dark little cottages, in the early 1800s, could possibly have created something so amazing. They would gather in a single cottage to share expensive candles, or work outside, sitting on turf or straw covered stones, to take advantage of natural light. Their health suffered, eyes and lungs in particular. The work - as so much 'women's work' - was undervalued. And remains rather undervalued even to this day, locally, although collectors in America will pay high prices for fine examples. Embroidery is on my mind at the moment, because one of the characters in my new novel, The Physic Garden, is a talented needlewoman, and her needlework figures largely in the story.

The ladies of the Guild were, as they always are on these occasions, interested, kind, positive, cheerful and hospitable. They could give lessons in how to treat a visitor to some other groups I've spoken to. The 'Rural' are the same. I always come home feeling inexplicably happy, although slightly worried at the average age of these groups, wondering who will come along to take their places. Mind you, the Rural, in farming areas like this one, seems to have no shortage of new, younger members.

At the end of the evening, when we were chatting over the tea and biscuits, one of the ladies reminded me about a trilogy of radio plays I wrote some years ago. It was called The Peggers and The Creelers and it was set here in the West of Scotland, a series of plays about the fishing families of the coast, the inland boot and shoe makers, and the traditional tensions between these two groups of people. I had done some of the research for my Masters degree and then written a series of plays about it. There was a certain amount of mistrust between the two communities and it fascinated me. When the plays were broadcast, people would stop me in our nearby town, to talk about them. One farmer told me how he had been listening in the cab of his tractor, and realised that he was in the very field where the characters were standing.

Last night, the lady told me she still had the plays on tape and listened to them from time to time, because she had enjoyed them so much. Last year, when I was sorting through all my old manuscripts, I found a big box of flimsy typescript. It was The Peggers and The Creelers, written as a trilogy of novels. I had forgotten all about them. Back then, I still did daft things like that. Thousands and thousands of words, just for love. And I remembered that my agent at the time - we're talking many years ago - hadn't even read them because, so she remarked, 'nobody wants historical fiction at the moment.' Last night I found myself talking about all this with enthusiasm. 'I'd love to read them,' my questioner told me. Oddly enough, she isn't the only person to have reminded me about those plays, those stories, over the past few months. And although back then, I could see that this might have been a niche project and something no traditional publisher would want, I can also see now that with the advent of Kindle, and Print On Demand, things might be different. Because the diaspora of people with Ayrshire roots is a large one.

So, when The Physic Garden is finished, and a few other projects are under way, I may well dig out that box of flimsy typescript and - in the second half of this year - see what I can do with the Peggers and the Creelers as a series of eBooks, for Amazon's Kindle, in the first instance. As I packed up my lovely whitework, last night, and got ready to leave, the lady who liked my radio plays said 'I hope you do publish them as novels. I'll look forward to it.'

Thinking, in that company, that I might well be among people who favoured paper books over eBooks (the smell, the feel, the permanence) I said 'Well, they'll be on Kindle first and maybe as paperbacks after that. )
'Oh no, dear,' she said.'I have a Kindle now. Wouldn't be without it.'








Judging A Book By Its Cover

I haven't forgotten about my 'How I Got Where I Am' series, but other things have intervened over the past couple of weeks! I'll pick up where I left off next week. Meanwhile, I feel the need to write a bit about 'cover images' for eBooks. And here's why.

In traditional publishing, you may be consulted about the cover of your book, but you won't have the final say - or, more often than not, any say at all. Marketing, branding, current fashions all take priority. (I used to loathe those headless women covers so much but it's a fad that seems to have faded thank goodness.) As a writer, you will hardly ever be able to communicate with the artist involved.  I liked the original paperback edition of the Curiosity Cabinet a lot  although it was very different from the eBook edition - of which more in due course. As far as I remember, the image of the embroidered casket which the artist used came from the Burrell in Glasgow, where there's a splendid collection of them. (Go and see for yourself!)

There are whole websites devoted to praising or slating eBook covers. There are competitions and awards. I sometimes wonder why we human beings are so darned competitive. Free us up to be what we want to be, do what we want to do, and people will instantly suggest that somebody (preferably themselves) needs to exert some sort of control, judge, make distinctions, create hierarchies. People become so alarmed by the random nature of the emerging eBook market that they suggest a string of controls involving submission and judgement followed by the acceptance and curation of the favoured few, seemingly unaware that they have just reinvented traditional publishing.

Over a long career in writing of all kinds, I've come to loathe that word 'submission' and to consider other models, other ways of doing things. Submission means the 'action or fact of accepting or yielding to a superior force or to the will or authority of another person.' Which only works when that other person really is genuinely superior, a wise teacher, an experienced and respected expert. Writers begin their careers by submitting - we're routinely advised that we need to contemplate scores, nay hundreds, of submissions. We get into the mindset at a time when we really do need a modicum of expert advice, but the trouble is that even when we become seasoned professionals, we too often continue to yield our power, our ideas and significant equity in our product to other people. The fact that quite often those people don't really know their literary bahookies from their elbows somehow escapes us. They tell us how superior they are and we believe them. Relationships which should be creative partnerships become lopsided. Until Amazon came along, there was little alternative.


So where do covers come in? Well, eBook covers aren't really covers at all. They are images, images which you see at thumbnail size on Amazon and other listings pages, images which are enlarged on e-readers, but which can be works of art in their own right. To some extent, this was always the case. Years ago, one of my short stories, The Butterfly Bowl, was published in a glossy women's magazine and the accompanying image was such a small work of art that I bought the original from the artist. But images for eBooks may be an opportunity for creative collaboration of a new and exciting kind.  Let's free our minds from the usual design/marketing/judgmental constraints for a bit. Let's decide that if we want to, we can explore new ways of doing this, too. If we're eBook publishing because we're writing across genres or because what we write doesn't fit comfortably into any single marketing paradigm, then why shouldn't we consider new ways of approaching the images which interpret and reflect our books?

When I decided to publish The Curiosity Cabinet as an eBook, I knew that I needed a new cover image to go with it. A friend, distinguished textile artist Alison Bell - who had read and loved the book - offered to design an image for me. It is her own response to the novel, and a very beautiful one at that. I would no more have looked at it as a piece of utilitarian design than I would look at any other genuine work of art only for what it could bring to the 'pack shot'.

It's an approach which I have largely followed with my other novels, either asking the artist to read the book, or at least talking about the themes in some detail and asking for a creative response, much, I suppose, as one asks a designer to approach a play - discussing the thinking behind the project but then giving them the freedom to interpret, using their own individual  creativity.


The image above for Bird of Passage, by a young digital artist called Matt Zanetti, was a revelation to me. I had discussed the themes, the setting of the novel, passed on some of my own photographs, even  had something in mind. What Matt came up with, though, was utterly unexpected.  But the sheer brilliance of it as an interpretation of the novel, the loneliness of the central character, the sense of his imprisonment in his own past, all of them are there in Matt's superb image. I remember the first time I saw it, it brought a lump to my throat!

Two more novels have covers designed by another young Scottish artist, Claire Maclean. The Amber Heart is a big book, a sweeping love story, set in nineteenth century Poland. I wanted romance on an epic scale. It's a story of a lifelong and passionate love affair. Claire, with a deeply romantic imagination seemed the ideal choice and she produced a cover of such warmth and beauty that I had no hesitation in asking her to work on my next novel, Ice Dancing, as well.
But this was a different proposition.  Ice Dancing is grown up, sexy, quirky. An intelligent love story with a dark side.  The hero plays ice hockey, for sure. (The title is a metaphor for relationships that extends through the whole book!) But it's really  a story about an exotic and charismatic interloper in a small Scottish village - and love at first sight.. The idea of  hockey as 'fire dancing on ice' - the sheer, intensely physical sexiness of it, certainly permeates the whole novel, and that's what Claire seized on. Once again, the image practically took my breath away.




Now, Alison has read, and is meditating on the ideas in The Physic Garden, my next book, a historical novel set in Scotland in the early 1800s. She has remarked that it is a deeply melancholy tale (it is, I'm afraid) and - unerringly - she has honed in on a passage which is absolutely central to the novel. I await her interpretation with interest.

When it works well, we need to acknowledge that the symbiosis between artist and writer can create a piece of art which illuminates and comments on the writer's work. All of this is such a creative pleasure: a new and unanticipated benefit of inde publishing. The odd thing is that, although the covers have been created by three different artists, there is a 'look' about them which seems somehow to reflect my own voice as a writer. That voice is the common denominator and it shows.

Buried Treasure



As you can see from the picture above, if you look closely, even my doll's house has books in it! I'm seriously considering making some tiny, bound manuscripts and stacking them on shelves in various other rooms. Maybe the lady of the house - which is my current pride and joy and refuge from all things online - could be a writer in her spare time. This idea occurred to me because I spent a couple of days last week climbing up and down a real stepladder in my real house, my upstairs study to be precise, with a nice view of the garden and the woods beyond. I've been storing folders and box files on a high shelf that runs the length of the whole room for years now, and I decided I needed to investigate and take stock of exactly what I had in the way of material.

With three full length novels, a couple of short story trios and a few plays already published and selling quite nicely on Amazon, I've been considering what I'm going to publish next and what my future publishing strategies might be.  It seemed to me that I had a lot of work just sitting there. Moreover, I suspected some of it might be good work, not just those early 'bottom drawer' novels you cut your teeth on and then hang onto out of sheer sentimentality, not because you think they're any good, but because it's hard to destroy something you've spent so much time on. So I thought it was time for an assessment.

I know that my PC has two (almost) completed but unpublished novels sitting on it. To be more accurate, the novels are on a PC, a laptop, various flash drives and stored in DropBox and on a Norton Cloud somewhere. So - I'm paranoid. There are also printouts. One, called The Physic Garden, is a historical novel set in Glasgow around the turn of the 1800s. It's related by an elderly bookseller who was once a gardener - although he's remembering the events of his youth - and it's a book about male friendship and extreme betrayal. I'm very fond of it. In fact, I think I'm probably more fond of it than anything else I've written. Oh, it definitely needs work. And it needs more words as well as less, additions as well as pruning. This novel was read (I assume) by a young intern at my previous agency. Her response was that it was 'just an old man telling his story.' Which is true. This casual, stupid remark so influenced me that I wasted several months trying to tell the story in the third person.

It didn't work.

There was no way that my narrator was going to allow his story to be told in anything except his own strong voice. Now, the possibility of publishing The Physic Garden as an eBook has allowed me to go back to my original plan and make this the book I intended it to be. It should be coming to a Kindle near you before the end of the year.

Also on my PC is a rather odd piece of contemporary fiction called Line Dancing, part romance, part literary fiction. I don't think anyone at any of my agencies ever wanted to read this, for the simple reason that it's about an older woman having a relationship with a younger man and none of the young women and men who inhabit agencies ever found anything to interest them in the proposal. But again, when I reread it now, I get that little kick of excitement that suggests the book is OK, probably worth publishing. And aren't there lots of older women out there who haven't quite given up on love?

That's just on the PC. It was when I started rummaging in all those old folders and files that a pattern began to emerge. I would climb the ladder and lift them down a couple of boxes at a time. Many of them hadn't been opened for years and there were not just cobwebs but dead spiders lurking inside. I had to use antihistamine for the sneezing and a vacuum cleaner for the spider skeletons.

Here's what I found:
First of all, there was a huge manuscript called Salt Sea Strawberries. Many years ago, I wrote a trilogy of dramas for BBC Radio 4, called The Peggers and the Creelers. It was about a Scottish fishing community and an inland boot and shoe making town, (not a million miles from Dunure and Maybole, in Ayrshire) and the plays constituted a densely woven series of dramas about the sometimes stormy relationships between the two communities and the demise of traditional industries. This was well before I ever had a PC. It had been written on an old electric typewriter, and now here it was, printed out on that flimsy old fashioned paper. A huge box of it. 130,000 words of it.

I read a few pages and remembered that the original radio series had elicited lots of fan mail. People had loved it. The novel isn't half bad either. Actually - like the plays - it probably amounts to a trilogy of novels, or it will, by the time I've rewritten it. I don't remember my agent - whichever agent I had at the time - reading this one either. She 'wasn't keen on family sagas. Nobody wants family sagas.'
And you know what? I had forgotten all about it! I hadn't forgotten the plays, just that I had actually spent a year or two of my life writing 130,000 words of a novel based on the plays that nobody then would even look at.

Another folder contained a novel called Snow Baby, a manuscript full of my own scrawled annotations. This is contemporary fiction, literary, lyrical, quite poetic. Extracts from it were published in Carl MacDougall's beautifully designed 'Words' magazine, way back in the 1970s. Which was a difficult magazine to get into. We're talking about a very youthful work here, written when I was supposed to be a 'literary' writer but in reality wasn't quite sure what kind of writer I was. I was a mid-list writer for sure - desperate to tell well written stories that would appeal to all kinds of people, but perhaps to women in particular. The problem with Snow Baby was that it was set in Finland and - you've guessed it - 'nobody wants to read anything set in Finland.'

There were also some 70 pages of a novel called The Marigold Child. This was a novel with an intriguing Mary, Queen of Scots connection. I had done the research and although the premise on which it is based is outrageous, everything fits. My agent's eyes lit up when she heard about it. I wanted to write it as a historical novel, but 'nobody wants historical novels' - or they didn't back then, though they do now - so I spent a year wrestling with it to try to give it a contemporary framework. The 70 pages is set in the here and now. I read it through and thought it read pretty well, spooky, with a couple of engaging central characters, but I'm still not sure that it shouldn't be a straightforward historical novel. That may be what it wants to be. We'll see. The point is that now, I can do what I want with it, not what somebody else is telling me might be flavour of the month.



There are besides this, files full of single plays and series with detailed background material. All these were made and produced on BBC Radio 4 and well received. Among them there's a series of plays about a Scottish family of yacht builders, and another set in Roman Britain, all well researched, all vividly written, albeit in dramatic form. By the time these were written, even though I knew in my heart I had material for more novels, I had had enough of soldiering through thousands of words and hoping for the best. There are folders full of detailed ideas and plans for novels, whole plots, meticulously worked out. There are short stories and even some non-fiction pieces. There's a young adult novel - the publisher no longer exists although my television serial on which it is based is still available on YouTube. There's a backlist novel which I always felt was published in the wrong way. Now it seems horribly dated and needs extensive rewriting. But somewhere inside it is a good piece of contemporary fiction - and that too seems a bit like finding buried treasure.

'I wish', said my husband, wistfully, surveying the great heaps of manuscript, 'all this had happened twenty years ago.'
So do I.
But we can only work with what we have and, as of now, I think I just have to get my head down and get more work out there. Lots of it. Once I've whittled my way down the pile I can stop, take stock and decide what might be best to do next. CreateSpace is calling, for instance, since I can't deny that I'd love to have paperback copies of all these.
There's a lot more to come and much of it is already written in some form at least. Editing and polishing takes time - years, probably, but there's an excitement about it all and a freedom that I haven't known for a very long time.
Kindle, other platforms, CreateSpace  - all I can say is, watch this space.