Reviewing numbers - and thanks

The last couple of days I’ve been under the weather. Strange expression, that. Aren’t we always under the weather of one sort or another? Anyway, I’m taking an unwelcome break – as to a welcome break, which is a chain of motels, I think – jotting down a few ruminative thoughts on numbers.

Reviews are always welcome, as is feedback. No writer can always get it right, but we’d like to think we get it as close as we can – close to entertaining, making readers think, perhaps, evoking memories of a place, or simply being lost in a tale for a few hours. We don’t write for the money (though that’s a measure, and it’s nice), and we don’t write for glowing reviews (though they can be emotionally uplifting), and we certainly don’t write to become aunty sallys at the fairground (mistakes happen, but they shouldn’t mar the entire book, surely?).

I’ve been looking at the numbers of reviews for my currently available books and they make interesting reading.

Amazon UK

Write a Western in 30 Days - 7

Sudden Vengeance - 4

Blood of the Dragon Trees - 8

Spanish Eye - 3

The Prague Papers - 2

The Tehran Text - 0

Catalyst - 1

Bullets for a Ballot - 9

 

Wings of the Overlord - 5

 

Amazon COM (US)

Write a Western in 30 Days - 11

Sudden Vengeance - 2

Blood of the Dragon Trees - 6

Spanish Eye - 7

The Prague Papers - 1

The Tehran Text - 0

Catalyst - 0

Bullets for a Ballot - 45

Wings of the Overlord - 0

That’s a total of 111 reviews for 9 books. However, some reviewers are good enough to post their review on both the UK and the COM site; others may not have access for one reason or another. And some reviews are not duplicated on both sites, but are original to the one site. So that total is a little misleading. Still, it’s good to know that that all those readers have taken the time not only to read my books, but have also made the effort to review them.

So, the purpose of this post is to offer my thanks; I’m grateful for your consideration.

 

 

PS

I’m not counting the westerns, written under the pen name Ross Morton. Some of these have Amazon reviews, but in the main they’re read by library borrowers or reviewed on dedicated western sites:

 
Death at Bethesda Falls
Last Chance Saloon
The $300 Man
Blind Justice at Wedlock
Old Guns
The Magnificent Mendozas

And I’m not counting those that are Out of print

 
Amazon UK
Pain Wears No Mask - 9
Death is Another Life - 1
When the Flowers are in Bloom – 0
 
Amazon COM
Pain Wears No Mask - 4
Death is Another Life - 6
When the Flowers are in Bloom – 4
 

Book Choice!

The weekly magazine TV Choice is printed here in Spain. Besides the multifarious TV channels, it features articles and puzzles, a book review and a short story.

The latest edition, #214 (23-29 August) promotes my crime novel Sudden Vengeance and also mentions two other books, Blind Justice at Wedlock and Blood of the Dragon Trees. (The choice of the western was a surprise, I’d have thought they’d have selected Spanish Eye, since that’s set in Spain as well, but I’m not complaining!)

The editor kindly printed my prize-winning story ‘Nourish a Blind Life’, too.

To read either of these images, please click on them. (If you can't read the story here, you can read it on an earlier blog - here

 

 

 

The title 'Nourish a blind life' is taken from a poem:

For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain
If, knowing God, they lift not hand of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?

- The Passing of Arthur, Tennyson

The story evolved in a day after I’d read about a man stricken blind as a child and abandoned by family and the system, yet he was saved by a kindly carer. This is my attempt to put myself in his shoes. 

"I read a lot and like to think that I’m fairly hardened to the human experience. Your story, Nourish a blind life, however, moved me enormously. With a powerful understanding you avoided any mawkish melodrama. The ending, although sad, gave satisfaction knowing the narrator was soon to be free! Thank you." – Eve Blizzard, dramatist and author
  

“Why isn’t it selling?”

Today I was telephoned by an acquaintance whose autobiography has been published as an e-book by a small press in UK. She despairs because the book hasn’t sold very well at all, barely getting into two figures.

I sympathised. I pointed out that no matter how well written, sadly, autobiographies by ‘unknowns’ – that is people who are not celebrities – will not sell well unless they’re aggressively marketed. Even then, it will be an uphill struggle; but I've seen it done. A small publisher will have little or no marketing budget. I would advise against paying large sums of money to advertise the book, too. I asked if she used the Internet. Her answer: no, but I have a friend who does…

Whether we authors like it or not, if we want readers, we usually have to get involved in marketing our work. And that means books published by publishers as much as those self-published.

‘If I could I would always work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be known by their results.’ – Emily Bronte.

Most authors would prefer simply to create the next book. Now, that’s fine, but if the first one doesn’t get out there, a second one won’t necessarily do any better.

Things haven’t changed all that much, really, since the ‘good old days’.

Mid-list authors, like Jack Higgins who served his apprenticeship on crime and action fiction, were retained and nurtured in the hope of finding an audience that would not only follow them but also in the belief that the author would produce that breakout novel after years of honing his craft (as Higgins did, spectacularly, with The Eagle Has Landed) .

Mid-list authors didn’t sell in large numbers, as a rule, but gained a following as they added to their output. Reviews in the press for mid-list authors were virtually non-existent. Sales, not reviews, determined whether the mid-list author would be retained.

I’m generalising here, and there are always exceptions even to generalisations, but the trend seems to be along these lines.

Nowadays, publishers’ so-called mid-list authors are rarely maintained by the big five, since they’re considered uneconomical. They can’t afford the cost and time to nurture mid-listers.

Actually, mid-listers haven’t gone away, they’re read in the e-book world.  

E-book authors are also published in Print On Demand paperback format, but these are not mass market paperbacks, so they’re always going to be dearer to buy.

Print reviews of mid-list authors in e-book or POD are virtually non-existent.

Now, however, new authors and mid-list authors can market their books via the social media. Now, they can gain reviews online at online bookstores, and in various book blogs and Facebook groups. Indeed, mid-list authors can obtain reviews where before they never could.

You can probably see where this is heading.

‘A boy has to peddle his book.’ – Truman Capote.

Authors need to market online, because that’s where your book will be visible most.

Yes, authors love to have their books on bookshelves in bookstores. But stop to think about it. Unless you’re a big name, who commands considerable shelf-space, you’ll be lucky to see one or two copies of your book there – and they won’t be there long, because every week thousands more books are published, all fighting for that same limited shelf-space; your book’s life on the shop’s shelf is measured in weeks, if not days. Online shelf-space is slightly more egalitarian – new unknowns can rub shoulders with the famous by dint of the category or selection of the online browser.

I’m a writer, not a salesperson! That’s the cry of many authors. Fair comment. But it won’t wash in the floodtide of competition out there. You’ll just be sunk – almost without trace.

Primarily, I believe the majority of writers have to write because they want to be read; payment for honest toil is welcome, of course. But we need to be read – and unless we produce a tome that sells by word of mouth, we’re going to have to market it. No, don’t use the sales pitch of a snake-oil salesman – ‘a wonderful account of…’ Be honest about what your book offers; it won’t be for everyone – so think about the niche market it will appeal to, and try aiming your endeavours there. If you get honest reviews, quote them, because the reviewers have been good enough to read and comment on your work, after all.

‘A book is like a garden carried in the pocket’ – Chinese proverb.  Now, the author has to sow the seeds to see his book grow in popularity and readership.

This doesn’t mean posting a blatant sales pitch every day on Facebook. Besides being irritating to regular browsers, they’ll be deleted from email links without reading. You need to genuinely connect with your online readership. If a subject crops up that relates to your book’s theme or subject, fine, give it a plug, but don’t belabour the point. The most annoying adverts on TV are the ‘shout ads’ that demand you use this, buy that; I’m surprised they’re still around, surely they turn off most viewers?

Bear in mind what Isaac Asimov once said: ‘Writing is the most wonderful and satisfying task in the world, but it does have one or two significant flaws. Among those flaws is the fact that a writer can almost never make a living at it.’ You might, if you grasp the marketing nettle. If you don’t, then you probably won’t.

 

Why do you use a pen name?

I’ve been asked that over the years, as, doubtless, have many other authors who fall into that category. There are reasons.

Let me start by pointing out that my real name is Robert William Nicholson-Morton (no secret, it's on my website). Yes, quite a mouthful. When cheques were the normal form of payment, I hated signing them with that name – more like a squiggle. In truth, I hated signing cheques anyway!

When I joined the Royal Navy, my name-tally ended up as R.W.N-Morton. Having a double-barrelled name had its amusing side. When I appeared for duty one evening, the Leading Hand called out ‘Morton’ and I answered, ‘Here!’ Then he called out ‘Nicholson!’ So I said, ‘Here!’ I quickly added, ‘But I don’t want two jobs.’ Inevitably, in true forces spirit, I had to have a nickname. I became ‘Nik’ – I insisted on dropping the ‘c’ so I could sign my cartoons that way. (I thought there couldn’t be another Nik Morton around – and there wasn’t for some years, but now there is, and he’s a distinguished doctor in UK! But I got there first.)

That’s one reason to opt for a pen name; you’ve either got a common or familiar name or your name is already on the covers of published books. And although it doesn’t deter some authors, a long name is harder to fit onto a cover than a shorter snappier one.

I digress.

Way back in 1971, when I first started submitting short stories and articles, I wrote as Platen Syder. Being in the RN, I felt it prudent in case I ended up having some possibly controversial piece published. (I’d slightly adapted the name of someone I’d signed-up to join the Navy in Gosport, Platten Syder, who now lives in Truro, UK). Despite the name being in front of them, some magazine sub editors managed to give me the byline Playten Syder!

 

By the time I was publishing the magazine Auguries (http://auguries-magazine.blogspot.com.es/), I was using Nik Morton. (When courting my wife-to-be Jennifer, she knew me only as ‘Nik’ for a short while, and to this day I am still Nik to virtually everyone. Schizophrenic, who me?)

When I ran book reviews in my magazine, I had a small stable of reviewers; but the volume of books meant there were still too many for them to cope with. So I reviewed some books under the names Maggie Weaver, Nicola Williams as well as Nik Morton, to avoid the name monotony!

Eventually, after many years, my first novel acceptance was Pain Wears No Mask by Nik Morton, in 2007. Within a month or so afterwards, I wrote my first western and felt it should be under a different brand, so Ross Morton was invented. Ross was my late mother’s maiden name. Bear in mind that this was in the traditional publishing arena, where genre branding is considered important. The reasons for this are manifold: readers’ expectations possibly top the publishers’ list. If a reader buys a Nik Morton book, they expect it to be a crime novel. This is a little nonsensical if the cover and blurb of the book stated the story was a western, or a science fiction dystopian novel, surely? Nik Morton is considered a ‘brand’, in effect.

So quite a number of authors over the years have adopted pen names to get out of the ‘brand’ straitjacket – Ruth Rendell became Barbara Vine, for example, and recently J.K. Rowling hid behind Robert Galbraith for The Cuckoo’s Calling, perhaps because she felt she’d never get a dispassionate review as herself. Years ago, Doris Lessing did something similar with the pen name Jane Somers for two books. And yet there are exceptions, of course; she also successfully switched genre from ‘mainstream’ to science fiction with her Canopus in Argos sequence, eschewing a pen name; perhaps the success of her remarkable dystopian novel Memoirs of a Survivor helped.  

 

Nowadays, as any reader or writer knows, publishing is changing. There’s a recognition that maybe readers are happy to read an author no matter the genre she or he writes. Of course there will be those who won’t touch a western or a science fiction novel ever – or not again, not after reading a bad one. (You mean, there are no bad detective, mystery, romance novels? Fancy that!)

Things have become a little blurred for me and my pen name usage. I was commissioned to write a western, chose the title, Bullets for a Ballot, but then baulked at the byline – Nik Morton or Ross Morton. The publisher had published my short stories as Nik Morton, and that was the name most familiar to a US readership, so I clouded the issue and settled on Nik Morton!

I have a horror-crime-romance cross-over novel written as Robert Morton – Death is Another Life. My science fiction and horror short stories were published as both Platen Syder (or Playten Syder!) and Nik Morton, so the confusion persists.

Should a writer use a pen name, then? It’s his or her decision. There’s a great deal of excellent advice and background material on pen names to be found in the blog of Kristine Kathryn Rusch (former editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and an incredibly prolific writer in several genres); just one instance: she wrote the popular novelization of The Tenth Kingdom as Kathryn Wesley. Her blog is: http://kriswrites.com/2013/10/02/the-business-rusch-pen-names/