Keith's June Newsletter

Hi Folks

Another late newsletter from me. Only a day late, which isn’t so bad. Yesterday I was coming off of night shifts so I didn’t have the brain capacity to write anything. All I could think about was what to stick in my mouth hole.

Today is a bit better but even so there’s a lot to talk about so it’s going to take some effort. I’m having something of a crisis of confidence when it comes to my writing career and I intend to use this month’s newsletter to talk about it.

If that’s not your kind of thing feel free to skip ahead to whatever the next section is. As well as talking about publishing I’m going to do an analysis on Brandon Sanderson’s writing as I (kind of) get to the bottom of why he’s so popular.

Sun’s Out, Fun’s Out

We’ve finally got a bit of sun in the UK so what have I been doing? Sleeping, of course. I’ve been working an unfeasible amount of night shifts this month so any time I’ve not been working I’ve probably been asleep. Sad but true. And it’s been so hot my curtains are permanently closed to keep the heat out. Living in darkness like a fricking vampire. Lovely.

I did get to do one thing as a treat for myself, I went to the Everyman in Altrincham and watched the last Mission Impossible film whilst getting a pizza delivered to my chair. Sadly both were mildly disappointing, the pizza because it was so small and the movie because it was so stupid. There was no character development, too many flashbacks and flash forwards, and very little actual plot that made sense. It was more of a nostalgia tour for the franchise with a few set pieces thrown in, at last one of which would have permanently killed Ethan Hunt for sure. I was a bit bored to be honest. If I’d been at home I’d have been on my phone by the end of it.

I also managed to drag myself to Leeds this month to see my friends at Northodox Press celebrate their fifth anniversary. They’re lovely bunch who have done a lot to champion northern writers over the past five years. I hope to work with them one day, and who knows, depending on what happens with In The Valley Of The Wind (see below) one day might be sooner than you think.

News From The Steam Factory

This is going to be the long bit. As I don’t have many pictures to break it up I’ve thrown in some titles so you know what’s coming next.

Writing Updates

I’ve had a tentative acceptance of my solarpunk short for the anthology I was invited to submit for, subject to a few changes. The anthology is Hull based and they want the stories to be localised, which is fair enough. I’m now just waiting to hear what sort of changes they would like made before resubmitting.

Getting some feedback on Odds Bodkin And The Night Mayor Of London from readers. So far so good. I’m now trying to decide if and who I want to sub it to, which has caused me to have Thoughts and Feelings about traditional publishing, some of which I’m going to share with you now.

Trad vs Indie Publishing

I’ve been sitting on In The Valley Of The Wind for two years now (Two Years? Holy fuck!) whilst it has done the rounds of agents looking for someone to champion it. It takes so long because agents love to not let you know if they like something or not. The vast majority of agents I have subbed have never got back to me, not even with a polite thanks but no thanks. I hate that, but what can you do. They have all these criteria you have to fulfill in order to sub your book - cover letter, blurb, synopsis, set amount of pages properly formatted in a certain type of document sometimes with a specific typeface - but their obligation to you? Nada. Not even an automated email to acknowledge receipt of your submissions package. Like I say, I hate it.

It’s because of things like this that I eventually went indie, publishing my own work to my own timeline without seeking the approval of anyone else. This is fine, but it’s hard. It costs a lot of money and if you’re not an expert in marketing your book will often die the slow death of neglect, as mine so often do.

Small Presses

There is the small press route, which I am thinking about. Small presses like Northodox will take on and champion your book but in return you have to give up a certain amount of control. Also subbing to small presses is as fraught and time consuming as trying to find an agent. If you’ve tried going to agent route then you decide to try some small presses it can take as long again before you exhaust all your options.

I want to sub to small presses for In The Valley Of The Wind because I want the support. I want someone out there selling my book on my behalf whilst I work on other things. But at the same time I want to have a say in cover design and things like that, and there’s no guarantee a small press will give me that.

I did this as a mock up for the cover for In The Valley Of The Wind and I love it. I think it’s perfect (once I commission a more specific image from the same artist) and don’t want to give it up for someone else’s idea of what my book should look like. Of course they may come up with something better, who knows, but for me it’s a worry that I’m going to have to get over if I want to partner with a small press. Do I want everything my own way and no sales? Or do I want to give up some control in the hopes of a wider audience and a review in a national newspaper (maybe)?

The Problem With Self Publishing

Whether you self publish, go with a small press, or publish through one of the Big Five, authors these days are expected to do most if not all of their marketing themselves. Even your Penguins and your Random Houses don’t have a budget for marketing mid list and debut authors anymore. They throw all their money at celebrities in the hopes that their high profiles will generate some kind of return whilst the rest of us wallow about in the mud fighting for scraps. With that in mind, if you’re going to have to do most of the hard work yourself why go with a publisher at all? Why not do it all yourself?

Because it’s hard. It’s a lot of hard work. For example this month, in an effort to go wide, I’ve had to set up accounts on five new publishing platforms. Outside of Amazon and Ingram Spark (who I use to make my books available to bookstores) I’m now on Kobo, Itch, Google Play, Draft2Digital (which includes Apple), and Ko-Fi. That’s five new storefronts I have to maintain along with the two I’ve already got. That’s a lot.

And the annoying thing is a lot of the time it’s a bunch of work for nothing. This month has seen the blog tour I won for Glunda The Veg Witch (for being a finalist in the Book Blogger Novel of the Year Award 2024) come and go and I can say with great confidence that it has not moved the needle one iota. I got some good reviews and some good quotes out of it, but in terms of sales forget about it.

If you want to read some of the reviews here are the best ones, with the last link being a page that has all of them on there.

Witty & Sarcastic Book Club

A Creative Girl Nadia

The Strawberry Post

I’m A Voracious Reader

Now I was always told that things like blog tours, getting your book seen, sells books. It seems like that is not the case. With that in mind I have to ask, what DOES sell books?

Marketing Yourself

The only thing that seems to work as far as I can tell is marketing yourself, the Author as Product with book sales being a side effect. You have to brand and promote yourself, as Chuck Tingle has done to great effect, then when you come out with a new book people buy it because they want to support their friend not because they specifically want to read your book (although they often do). Unfortunately this kind of thing terrifies me as I have a hard enough time creating and maintaing relationships in real life, never mind parasocial ones.

The most successful creatives at the moment build an online community who want to support them. The thing is this takes a lot of work, with people posting on dozens of social media sites every day. I work full time. I barely have enough hours as it is (or enough energy for that matter).

But if you want to be a success, if you want to sell books, then this is what you have to do, which begs the question…

What Is Success?

If selling books is what matters to you and you’re not selling books you’ve failed. If getting your work out there for people to read is all that matters and you publish your own books you’ve succeeded, even if no one buys them. Success is what you decide it is, and if you decide it is a thing then you don’t do anything to achieve that thing you really have failed. You’ve got to figure out what matter to you then do what you can to move towards it.

I’ll be honest, what matters to me is selling books. I’m coming to terms with the fact that I may never do this for a living - Even if I had an agent and a publisher and a marketing team I might still never make a living out of it. I know of so many talented people with book deals and awards who still work day jobs. - but I at least want to know that I was good enough for people to want to buy my books. For someone to see what I’ve done and think, Y’know what, that’s worth some of my hard earned cash. I don’t think that’s too much to ask, do you?

How To Succeed Outside Of Trad Publishing

More and more I’m realising that the trad publishing structure is not for me. To get past the hurdles of agent, publisher, bookshop, and marketing you’re probably going to end up writing something so uninspiring it makes you wonder what’s the point?

And trying to get into that structure from the outside is even pointless. I could probably as an indie publisher get my books onto the shelves of a bookstore, and in fact I have, but without the contacts and the money to get the store to promote my work they just sit there, unseen and unsold, gathering dust along with all the other unpromoted books.

I think the answer is to try something new, to create a sales path outside of the already crowded trad marketplace. When Rolls Royce went to car shows they didn’t sell any cars. They were the most expensive thing there and no one was interested. It was only when they went to yacht shows where their product was unique, and a tenth of the price of what was on display, that their product started to look like an attractive bargain. That’s what I need to do. If I want to sell books I need to be where the book buyers are but the other books aren’t.

NB: A friend told me recently that small presses don’t take on YA books because they can’t sell them. They do most of their selling at book fairs which tend to have an older, more mature attendance. There’s few teens with money to burn so they don’t publish YA books because there’s no YAs there to buy them.

The most books I’ve sold at one time was the Town That Never Was, where I sold seveteen books in one weekend. That seems like the way to go, in person events where I can sell books directly by making a connection with people. Of course I need to be specific. The Town That Never Was is good because it’s a steampunk audence and in terms of books there’s very little competition. I can go to something like London Comic Con but that’s more of a general audience who are mostly there to buy mugs and t-shirts. I might sell some stuff there but I might not cover my expenses as well. I’m not going to get anywhere by flinging mud at the wall. I need to be targeted in my efforts to get a dedent result.

I also need to be online more, rather annoyingly. I need to build an online community so that when I do have something to sell they are there to buy and there to promote. That’s going to be harder to do for the reasons outlined above, but also I do think there are opportunites there. Most of the book marketing I see online is rubbish, with boring graphics and tedious unboxing videos with bad sound. There’s room for a more creative approach, and new ways to get people interested in your work, I just need to figure out what those way are?

Conclusion

So that’s what I’m working on at the moment, finding ways to sell my books that are new and interesting, that work for me, that are outside the traditonal publishing structure, that provide decent returns, and that aren’t too complicated or expensive. If anyone has any ideas I’m open to suggestions.

When I’m Not Writing

As promised, here’s my quick and dirty breakdown of why I think people like Brandon Sanderson’s writing. These are just my impressions but I think they’re fairly accurate.

I wasn’t that into Mistborn when I started reading it, it was just okay. The writing was competent, easy enough to read, and whilst the story was good it didn’t seem like anything to write home about. I started it at the same time as something else and ended up setting it aside to finsih the other thing. I only picked it back up again in the past couple of weeks, and that’s when the revelations came.

Normally when I put down a book I forget who the charcaters are and what is going on. Not so with Mistborn. I remembered everything, so I decided to work out why.

Sanderson’s voice is very present, in that he doesn’t passive anything. The story is right there, happening as you read. Even the histroy flashbacks are active and relevant somehow, often a memory in a characters head rather than information passed down by the author god on high.

He also repeats things, so they’re really cemented in your brain. Important character information is presented more than once in different ways so you knows what they’re about. It gives you a clear picture of who the characters are, making them very memorable.

And he takes his time. Sanderson understands that reading takes less time that writing, so he doesn’t feel the need to rush. He will get everything he wants out of a scene, again describing things in detail so you really see them in your mind’s eye. I myself rush too much when writing, for fear the reader is getting bored. Not so with Sanderson. He knows you will consume a paragraph in mere seconds and he acts appropriately.

All this is why I think Sanderson is so popular with readers, not because his style or stories are particularly unique, but because they are well crafted and personal, told in a way that really connects with the reader and makes them feel like they are their own. His stories are memorable, and when it comes to getting readers hooked that’s the most important thing of all.

Well Folks, if you’ve made it this far and you’ve read everything congratulations, that was a lot of words to get through. And if you’ve only read bits thanks for keeping going. I know time is precious so I appreciate you, all of you, lending me some of yours.

Got some fun stuff planned for July with The Town That Never Was this weekend and possibly a visit to Papplewick Pumping Station the weekend after. Pop along if you get the chance, they should be fun.

If you’re styaing home check out Dimension 20’s Cloudward Ho!, their steampunk TTRPG that they’re doing at the moment. It’s a good laugh. The first ep is free but you’ll need a Dropout subscription to see the rest of it, something I recommend as being good value for money. They have a lot of good shows like Game Changer and Um Actually, with new ones out every week.

Alright that’s it from me. I hope you found all that of interest. Catch you at the end of July when I’ll have pictures to share and hopefully some news on a new creative endeavour I’ve been working on. It’s not books, it’s something else. More details as and when they become available. 😉

Toodle-pip for now.

Keith