F.R. Jameson's Blog, page 29

Me, Writing in the Third Person, in 2017

[image error]F.R. Jameson sat in the basement of his local Pret in a pensive mood. He was wondering what to write. Not that he was struggling with the book. On the contrary, he was making steady progress on that. Where he was struggling was with his latest writing diary that he delivered every week without fail to his followers. An update of steady progress isn’t the most exciting news to pass on, so what could he write?

After taking a sip of chilled Ginger Beer, he stared idly around The Pret. He was on one of the smaller tables, a table that could squeeze on four at a push, but if it was just one man with a laptop then he’d generally be left alone. It meant he didn’t have to write while drowning out loud, enthusiastic conversation right beside him.

The Pret seemed particularly busy. Lots of couples having lunch, a small party (eight) of pensioners refusing to remove their thick winter coats, builders foregoing bacon sandwiches, and secretaries spending their lunchtimes having urgent highly animated phone conversations. All human life was there, as long as it enjoyed crayfish sandwiches.

But at alternate corners of the basement, Jameson saw two other men with their laptops, typing away. What were they doing? Were they sweating through stuff for their office, or freelancing, or maybe writing a groom’s speech? Or, perhaps – and he knew he was stretching a bit here – they too were writing fiction and even though none of them was aware of it, there was a society of authors being formed silently between them.

While Jameson was writing a gruesome death scene, perhaps one of them was typing away at a sci-fi romance, while the other was fretting over organically slipping clues into his Inca private eye yarn.

The thought made Jameson smile. Now, what was he going to write for this week’s writing diary? He was sure inspiration would come from somewhere.

Life (2017)

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LIFE is the kind of film to pit me in battle against my inner 15-year-old self.

The 15-year-old me would have loved it. It was a certified a 15 in this country and so I’m sure he and his friends would have gone to one of the cinemas which then existed on Queen Street, Cardiff, munched away on popcorn and adored it. All the frights and thrills, the ickiness of the monster, the moments of it bursting out of people, even the twist ending. Everything about it would have appealed to me as a 15-year-old.

Yes, of course, at 15 I’d already seen ALIEN, so I’d have been fully aware of its heritage. But at 15, that would have been part of the charm – after all, why aren’t there more films like ALIEN?

Now, 42-years-old and somewhat rounder about the middle, I enjoy LIFE to a certain point, but then just wish I was watching ALIIEN. (Or EVENT HORIZON for that matter, a film I adored a little later for its bringing together of ALIEN and HELLRAISER). It’s fine, it does what it does well (so much so that my wonderful, but not a fan of horror films, wife couldn’t watch it beyond the forty-minute point) but there’s such a sense of having seen it all before that it’s impossible to feel passionate about it either way. It exists, it’s a film that exists.

Even the twist ending is so obviously going to be a twist ending, that even while watching it I was concentrating on the mechanics of how they were pulling off the trick, rather than being involved in the story.

In short, a film like LIFE might be perfectly happy to stand in the shadow of giants, but a giant xenomorph casts a damn long shadow.

 

Fancy a free FRJ horror story? There’s one available here. 

Surviving the Evacuation: London by Frank Tayell

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There’s a lot to be really impressed by here. I say that as a man who doesn’t generally read zombie novels, who thinks that we’re over-saturated by the undead and that most of depictions aren’t that interesting. But, if you spin that on its head, then I suppose the fact there is so much zombie media out there means some of it is going to be good. It’s the law of averages.

The first half of this novel is fantastic. If you too are tired of zombies, I’d still recommend the first half. It’s basically an injured man trapped in a flat watching the world fall apart outside. It doesn’t really matter that it is zombies, it could be Cthulhu sending its tentacles down every street. The horror comes from is being trapped and helpless, in a big city but cut off from the rest of the world. It’s gripped, claustrophobic (which is obviously a type of horror I love) and the scares come from the practicality of having nothing and having no way to get anything.

Once our protagonist gets out of the flat, it’s not quite as interesting (even if this is a book which visits my old stamping grounds of Surrey Quays and New Cross). Still, the fact that it remains self-consciously Robinson Crusoe with added zombies makes it a winner in my eyes. A smart and entertaining read that that takes an intriguing conceit and keeps finding new ways to make it thrill.

 

There are no zombies, but if you feel like a free FRJ short story, there’s one available here.

My #BadMoonRising interview with the excellent Books and Such blog!

Welcome to the first day of Bad Moon Rising! Halloween is one of my favorite holidays and this is the third year I’ve celebrated by featuring horror/thriller authors who contribute to the genres guaranteed to ramp up the heart rate and make you feel like someone – or something – may be looking over your […]

via #BadMoonRising F.R. Jameson #horror #shortstories #IndieAuthor — Books and Such

 

Fancy a free FRJ short story? There’s one available right here!

Me, Not Hitting My Targets, in 2017

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Unfortunately, I’ve come to the realisation that I won’t have my short novel out by Christmas. Despite my stated aim being: start it in August and have it published in December; I’m not going to make that self-imposed deadline.

Drat and double drat!

I’ll be honest I’m more than a tad disappointed. It’s what I’ve been working towards the last two months and to fail is really annoying.

Mrs Jameson did soothe my creased brow by pointing out that it started as a novella and then more than doubled in length. Of course there was going to be a lot more work.

My wife is lovely!

The thing is I will finish the book next month, but I’m not  going to be able to get it edited properly in time. A quick run-through yes, but nothing that’s going to make it the best it could possibly be.

Obviously, I want this book to be the best it can possibly be!

Being quick is one thing, but it’s useless if the product I put out isn’t good enough. I want to make it good enough. More than good enough, and that requires more editing time than I’d allowed.

And if I step back and look at it rationally, then I can acknowledge that’s fine. All of this is a learning curve, and I still have a long way to do before I know what I’m capable of.

On the bright side it means I’ll certainly have two novels to publish next year, and if they’re both good and sell well, then this feeling of despondency right now will have been worth it.

 

Fancy a free FRJ short story? There’s one right here.

Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972)

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Despite this film’s reputation not being great, I’m going to put my delectable, tasty neck on the line and say that there’s a lot that’s good in DRACULA AD 1972. I’m actually here to praise rather than stake and bury it in holy ground. But I’m going to say that with the ridiculous caveat that it’s not well shot, the dialogue is often actively bad, the performances are all over the place and the music is absolutely atrocious. Seriously, if we ever find ourselves in Hell, the soundtrack to this will be in The Devil’s own record collection.

But if you ignore all that, then there’s a great deal to admire.

For the first half at least, we have Hammer’s take on The Manson Murders. There’s this band of blissed-out hippies, who are manipulated by their new charismatic leader. It even opens with them bring involved in a home invasion, although a much more benign, polite, English, middle-class version. Even so, they are the crazy, disruptive, menacing presence of new youth.

Really, they’re no more harmful than herbal tea and they don’t really do anything comparable to what The Manson Family did, but the inferences are made again and again – with a police detective even referring to the cult murders in America. Hammer, although a horror studio, wasn’t in anyway culturally equipped to deal with real life horrors. It knows this though and instead of going to the edge of what’s appropriate and tasteful, stands a good twenty feet back and tries to be risqué from there. The result is tame stuff, but it’s an interesting direction for Hammer to go. Particularly as the film isn’t reactionary so doesn’t see the teenagers as a threat. Indeed, they’re as much victims as villains.

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Of course, the reason these kids have been brought together is to revive Dracula, and in many ways The Count’s appearance is where the film loses its momentum. There is a deeply unpleasant murder scene involving Marsha Hunt, which skirts as close to real life horror as Hammer ever gets, but the main point of interest in that second half is how good Cushing is. His intensity and commitment propels the film forward by force of will. It even has the effect of making Lee, in the few scenes he’s in, seem much more engaged in the role of Dracula.

I’ll be honest, I’d wanted to watch THE SCARS OF DRACULA, but settled for this when it proved to be unavailable on Amazon Prime. I thought I’d have some campy fun with it, but it’s a much better and more interesting film than my memory of it – or its reputation – suggested.

 

Fancy a free FRJ short story? There’s one available here.

 

How to Market a Book by Joanna Penn

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I listen to Joanna Penn’s CREATIVE PENN podcast religiously. The life of a writer – particularly an indie author taking faltering first steps – is a solitary one, and so it’s great to tune into someone who’s taken the route themselves and is eager to hand out the benefit of their experience.

As my post the other day proved, I’m no expert on book marketing. But I’m learning and trying to find the best ways to get my books out there and read. HOW TO MARKET A BOOK is a fantastic tool for beginners (and probably intermediaries too, I’ll let you know when I’m at that level). Penn has been doing this a long time and has picked up so many useful hints to pass on. If anything, there’s too much information in the book, but then the introduction does make it clear that it’s probably best to view it as a smorgasbord to dip into. You can read it in one go as I did, or see it as a reference manual to come back to again and again. Or both. Stylistically, Penn writes much as she speaks, and if you’ve never listened to her podcast, that means basically having a happy, enthusiastic friend encouraging and cajoling

I read it on my Kindle and I’m never overly impressed with the bookmark facility on a Kindle. So really the best compliment I can give this book is that I’m tempted to buy it again on paper, and when I read it next (and I will read it more than once, as there’s too much here to be taken in through a single perusal), I’ll post-it note and pencil-mark the hell out of it!

 

Fancy a free FRJ short story? There’s one available here.

My short story, ADULTERY

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My short story, ADULTERY is now on the great Night, Shapes and Shadows website, and you can read it here.

It is, of course, the first story in my new collection, CONFINED SPACES. If after reading ADULTERY, you want a further glimpse into my phobias, you can pick up the whole lot for 99p/99c.

Just follow these links – UK, USA, Australia, Canada.

While if you’re in the mood for a completely free, scary little number, another short story of mine, SOMETHING WENT WRONG, is available here!

Hope these tales give you the chill of enjoyment!

 

 

 

Me, Marketing, in 2017

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I’m new to the indie author game, and I don’t know much about marketing.

That said, I’ve just finished reading Joanna Penn’s HOW TO MARKET A BOOK, and already regularly listen to her CreativePenn podcast (as well as the Sell More Books Show) so I am learning.

It’s a damnable steep curve though.

This past Saturday I published my short story collection, CONFINED SPACES on Kindle Direct. It’s a collection of seven stories by a virtually unknown author, so I knew that there weren’t going to be many people who’d just charge out and buy it. But I’m building a brand here and I wanted it to try and get it to as many as people as possible.

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Fortunately, every 90 days you’re on it, KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) allows you to give your book away free for five whole days.

But, and this is something I’ve learnt in the six months since I put FOLIAGE online and started this ball rolling, giving books away for free isn’t actually that easy.

From the outside staring in, you’d think it would be. Why wouldn’t somebody just pick up some fiction for no money at all if with just the click of a button?

But then, there are so many free books out there. Millions of pages of free fiction. I know of people who have vowed to never buy another book again, and in a way, I can kind of see their point. There’s enough free prose that even if the average person spent the rest of their lives reading it, they’d never get near the end.

So, even if I put my book free for a couple of days, I was still facing competition at every angle of the 360.

How then to get noticed?

Well, I got the stories properly edited and had a professional cover designed. But the possibility of being ignored was still incredibly high.

My author platform is small, it’s embryonic, but I’m slowly trying to build it up, and besides, this is all about the learning. So, I started to run my own low-fi advertising campaign. There are 7 stories in the book, and so I found 7 images that matched these stories.

These images all were in copyright (some magnificently obviously so – Elizabeth Taylor, and the still from PSYCHO), you can however post all kinds of images on your blog and on Twitter. I’m no IP expert, but as long as I didn’t use them in paid adverts – a big ‘BUY MY BOOK’ over the top of Janet Leigh and John Gavin – then I thought I should be fine.

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(Although I already know that I’m going to be more careful in future and will scour through free stock images to get what I need.)

In the week leading up to publication, I posted one image a day on my blog, Twitter and Facebook. I don’t yet have a huge number of followers, but I have some and the number is growing. They were the obvious place to start. And people did comment positively on the blog, and re-tweet my tweets, so they reached a wider audience.

Then on the day of publication, I wrote a blog-post introduction to the collection on my blog, posted that on Facebook and boosted the post.

My past two attempts, I’ve had mixed results in boosting Facebook posts. I’ll be honest, Facebook is still a huge mystery to me. I didn’t join up until earlier this year, and even now only ever use it for my writing life, not my personal life. But I’m the indie-author mindset now, and if there’s a tool that can potentially connect to millions of people, then I’ve got to use it.

The mistake I made last time, I realised, was to go too broad. When you target your boost, you can choose location and interests. Hitherto I’d gone for a smorgasbord of interests: from ‘ebook readers’, ‘short story fans’, ‘thriller fans’. It was much too wide. I had a lot of clicks, but not many conversions and my budget was pointlessly eaten up.

This time I just went for ‘horror readers’. Nothing else.

It was just ‘horror readers’ in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada and Australia.

Horror readers are after all my people, they are the ones I want to appeal to.

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I set a budget for £120 and ran the advert for a day, and quickly realised it was going much more successfully than last time. Last time I struggled to get above a few dozen copies shipped, this time it was close to 150. I was getting more than one conversion for each pound I’d spent.

What’s more, because I was directing those interested souls to my blog post with the Amazon links, rather than to Amazon itself, I had sign-ups to my mailing list too!

While the Facebook promotion was running, I did bombard Twitter and Goodreads as well, so I’m sure clicks came from other directions. And yes, that would have messed up my data slightly.

At the end of the twenty-four-hour promotion, I was pleased.  Given the last time I did a promotion, it was so unsuccessful it would probably have been cheaper to drive around the houses of those who were interested and hand them a free copy, I was actually delighted.

With the paid promotion over, I then bombarded the various ‘free book’ pages on Facebook, to let people know it was still available for nothing (and kept going with Twitter as well) and got an extra hundred downloads from that.

The end result was more than 250 people now have a digital copy of CONFINED SPACES. That isn’t a huge number, of course it isn’t. If I want to make a career out of this, I’ll have to aim for launches in the thousands. But, I would estimate that that is more than two hundred people who had never heard of me before last weekend, and now have my work on their Kindle.

Whether they read it is another matter, but I’m getting my name known, and – of course – marketing on this book will continue.

I don’t envisage publishing the first part of my big epic trilogy until October 2018, and hope to have a firmer grasp of marketing and reaching an audience by then. Everything I publish before then, I’ll be immensely proud of and want people to read, but they’ll also be a way for me to hone my skills.

It’s all about baby steps in the general right direction, and right now I feel like I’m following the correct path.

 

If you’re interested you can join my mailing list and pick up a free FRJ short story right here.

 

To Kill The President by Sam Bourne

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When I think of Donald Trump in terms of fiction I try to imagine a redemptive arc, Sam Bourne/Jonathan Freedland instead sees plots to assassinate him.

His is the view that probably strikes the biggest chord with the public, particularly The Guardian reading part of it.

Okay, to be fair, the President is never actually named here. But it’s so obviously the current Commander in Chief. Capricious, prone to terrifying rages and capable of eight terrible acts before breakfast. He is the bogeyman to good liberals and then some.

It’s an efficient thriller, with smart twists and turns and a conclusion that might be a little too neat, but which works effectively enough. Strangely though, for a book which comes from a good liberal pedigree (Freedland writes smart, entertaining columns for The Guardian) is how dull those characters on the heroic, good, decent side of the debate are. Maggie Costello, our heroine, is a punchy figure, but beyond her there’s blandness on top of blandness. That’s thrown into particular contrast by the book’s Steve Bannon figure, who Freedland clearly adores writing for. Having the chance to pile up insults from the other side of the debate, with sexist, racist and goading rants about ‘libtards’, you can feel Freedland just letting loose and really enjoying himself with this wildly over the top, demonic figure.

The result is s strangely unbalanced book where the bad guys are far more interesting than the good, and you can feel the author’s interest being truly, truly engaged when he has to write dialogue for them.

Obviously this Presidency is bad, but – in this version as least – until the good guys start finding better tunes, they are always going to be second best.

 

Fancy a free F.R. Jameson short story? There’s one available here.