Jen Black's Blog, page 39

Newsletter follow up

A little over an hour ago my first Mailchimp newsletter went out. I hope it doesn't annoy or antagonise anyone! The Mailchimp site I find rather complex, so I am feeling my way with it and have a very slow rate of progress. As I get to know how to use it, I shall improve my news
letter, but this is a start!

The sign-up place is (at the moment) to the right of Tim's ear as you look at his picture, but of course it will move as I add more posts. Top right of the side bar at that point. I hope you will sign up and I shall be interested to see what happens at my end when you do. Evidently it is a legal obligation to have people's permission to send newsletters to them, so if you don't sign up I'll be very sorry but I won't be able to continue sending them.

Tim  slept through it all. Well, most of it.

Newsletters

Memories of France
Trying something new at the moment. The internet seems inundated at the moment with “experts” telling us aspiring authors how to sell more books. I followed Mark Dawson’s posts but decided I could not justify spending roughly £600 on an online course even if the information I learned would jump up my sales by x percent. Cynic that I am, I thought that if everyone followed his advice, then every indie author in the land would be earning thousands every day. Now that just isn’t going to be true, is it?
Seems to me that if it works for one or two authors, that’s great, but don’t expect the same result for everyone who tries the same methods. However – takes deep breath – there is some logic in what he says, so I am cautiously dipping my toe in the pool of newsletters. Sent out an exploratory e-mail to everyone I know whose email address I have on hand. You would think I’d have more than I collected together, but in my naïve days I didn’t keep back-ups and through a PC crash and my natural instinct for paper-tidiness and throwing away anything old (I inherited that trait from my mother; she was a devil for throwing things out. I lost several favourite books that way.) I have only a small number. In a way that is good, for I can build up slowly. It would be soul-destroying to discover that half of the emails were “dead links” or that people didn’t want to know me or my newsletter.
So the introductory has gone out, with no rude replies so far. Now I am exploring Mailchimp on advice from family and friends who all seem to think it is great. It probably is, once I’ve worked my way through it, but right now, it seems so complex it is making my brain ache.

More about Locations

I discovered a fabulous website for maps held at the National Library of Scotland: http://maps.nls.uk/towns/ I used it for the historical novels set in Edinburgh and Stirling in the mid 1540s. The magnification on most of the maps allowed me to see individual buildings on the old High Street most clearly.
Right now I am going through a third or fourth edit - yes, I've lost count - of my FOURTH book about Matho Spirston. I really did not know that the lowly guard captain who helps the hero escape death in FAIR BORDER BRIDE would stay with me as long as he has, but once I'd finished writing FBB, the critique group I belonged to suggested that Matho was character with potential and why didn't I make him the focus of my next book. So I did.
Since then he has survived being captured during a kidnap attempt on the infant Mary Queen of Scots in ABDUCTION and started a new career as courier to Sir Thomas Wharton in QUEEN'S COURIER. By the end of the book, the Dowager Queen, has decided he can be of value to her.
At the present time he is riding through France with two young people he has befriended, trying to discover who has disrupted the Dowager's correspondence and how he can put it right for her. So far, the title is COURIER EN FRANCE, but that may very well change. Will he stay with me? I have no idea; but there are times when I begin to think he was a real 16thcentury person. There was a Matho Spirston – the name appears in the rotas for guard duty in Corbridge when Scots attacks were expected daily, or rather, nightly; but I never found anything more than the name. So in a way, he was real.
Apologies to anyone who tried to read this  and found the formatting somewhat crazy. I only discovered how odd it looked by chance, and have now re-loaded it. Hope it reads OK now!

Locations and stories

I discovered a fabulous website for maps held atthe National Library of Scotland: http://maps.nls.uk/towns/ and used it for the historical novels set in Edinburgh and Stirling the mid 1540s. The magnification on most of themaps allowed me to see individual buildings on the old High Street most clearly.
Right now I am going through a third or fourth 
edit - yes, I've lost count - of my FOURTH book about Matho Spirston. I really did not know
that the lowly guard captain who helps the hero escape death in FAIR BORDER BRIDE would 
stay with me as long as he has. Once I'd finished writing FBB, the critique group I belonged to suggested that Matho was character with 
potential and why didn't I  make him the focus of my next book. So I did. 

Since then he has survived his kidnap attempt on the infant Mary Queen of Scots and became entangled with Meg Douglas and Lord Lennox in ABDUCTION, risen in the ranks to become courier to Sir Thomas Wharton and by the ednof the book, the Dowager Queen, in QUEEN'S COURIER. Right now he is riding through France with two young people he has befriended, wondering who has disrupted the Dowager's important correspondence and how he can put it right for her. So far, the title is COURIER EN FRANCE, but that may very well change. Will he stay even long er with me? I have no idea; but there are times when I begin to think he was real. Certainly the name Matho Spirston appears in the rotas for guard duty in nearby Corbridge when Scots attacks were expected daily, or rather, nightly; but I never found anything more than the name. So in a way, he was real.

MORE ABOUT LOCATIONS (for writers)

Setting Far After Gold in the north west of Scotland was both better, because I had spent many holidays there, and worse because there wasn’t an equivalent large settlement like Dublin. http://www.ullapool.com/ullapool-history is a starting point for the history of the area and the latest large scale maps show where the settlements and brochs, rivers and fords once were and sometimes, but not always, still are.
 I could describe the landscape because I’d seen it, as long as I made allowances for the changes that have taken place. Forests were much larger around the eleventh century and land was undrained and often swampy. Fords and known tracks were important for travellers and travel by sea was deemed much easier than travel overland. I had experienced the weather of the north west in the summer months and late October, early November; research told me which animals once lived there. We no longer have wolves in Scotland, but wolves and bears were certainly present back then.
Orkney is another of those places where research pays dividends. I’ve never been, but archaeology provides a great deal of information about dwellings, artefacts used, crops grown and where settlements were. Google Earth is fantastic for giving an author a feeling for the size of a place and the geography around it. The satellite imagery will give a very good idea of where you might beach a ship or find a way through the mountains and contour lines of maps will suggest whether you might end up in a bog or fall over a cliff face.

Locations (for writers)

I like researching locations for my stories. Contemporary stories in a foreign location are easily researched with tour guides, travel books and all the resources of the internet, but set the story in the past, and it’s a little bit harder to visualise. Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian locations are not too hard here in England as many of the streets and buildings are still extant, but when I made a 4 day trip to Dublin and found that the street I had set my heroine’s home on was still there I was surprised and delighted that I could walk up and down it. 
Why was I surprised? Because I had set my story in the eleventh century – almost a thousand years ago. (The fact that the street looked nothing like the scene I had envisaged didn’t spoil things for me. There might be fairly ordinary brick buildings there now, but the shape of the street was the same, I could see how steep it was, whether I could see the river or the sea from there, and it led to the cathedral that was being built at the time.)
Dublin was a famous Viking stronghold and an ancient settlement even when the Vikings arrived, so maps of the place in those days were easy to find online and print out thanks to archaeological studies. I could really get to know the layout of the Viking town from the maps and they showed the development from the earliest settlement to the 1200s, which covered my period of interest. Visiting the place showed me how narrow the river is now compared to how much shallower and wider it had once been before Lord Sitric confined it and reclaimed what had been swampy, tidal land.
All this came in useful when I wrote VIKING SUMMER published this year, and MAGICIAN'S BRIDE. 

Improving covers

Some of my books have new covers. I'm doing them myself. 
I know  the word is that a professional cover is 
an absolute necessity, but all I can say is the covers I've had done for me have sold less than the covers I've done myself. One I paid quite a hefty sum, too. The other thing that is an absolute must these days for indie authors is editing. One must be edited. 
  
All this is is fine if the graphic artist and the editor comes courtesy of a traditional publisher. There are so many choices these days. Editors and covers artists  spring up on the internet in their hundreds, and who knows what their track record is like? 

I gather from a little ferreting around that the average price for editing a decent length novel by a reputable person is around £5 or £600. Add another £100 for a cover, and you have a £700 deficit against your book before you try and sell it. How many indie authors make that back in a year? In two years? Not many, is my guess.

So until I have an L J Ross type hit on my hands, which isn't likely since I don't write crime, I'll keep on trying to improve my own skills. Some of my first efforts were lame, I am the first to admit it; but I think I'm improving. 

A Review of VIKING SUMMER

2 August 2018
AMAZON UK AMAZON USAMAZON CA 
RomanceVikings 11th Century

Ms Black has a thing about the interaction between the Norsemen and the Gaelic people in the 11th century. Just as in her previous books set in this period, she delivers a well-researched and gripping tale, featuring a young female protagonist, Eilidh.
Due to her brother’s lawlessness, Eilidh has been taken hostage by Finlay of Alba, obliged to remain at his court until her brother pays a substantial fine. But Eilidh grows impatient and when her brother fails to show up on the set date she convinces two young men to help her “escape” Finlay’s court and return home. I must admit to finding this a little implausible as no well-bred woman of this century would ride off unchaperoned with two hot-bloods, and as to the two young men, Finlay is their king and they owe him obedience. However, Eilidh’s act of rebelliousness will come at a very heavy price as the little party of three is attacked by marauding Norsemen.
Soon enough, Eilidh finds herself in Dublin, there to marry the somewhat unstable Kimi Torkillson. Not that Eilidh wants to: no girl in her right mind wants to marry this young man who seems to enjoy hurting people. However, it is marry Kimi or be sold as a slave, so Eilidh is trapped between a rock and a hard place.
Leaving aside my concerns regarding the plot device that leads to Eilidh’s abduction, Viking Summer is a fast-paced and well-written story. Against the background of a vividly depicted 11th century Dublin, Eilidh’s new life takes a turn for the very exciting, even more so when Finlay and her brother show up, determined to somehow find her and free her.
I particularly like how Ms Black describes the religious ambiguity of the era. At times pagan, at other times more than willing to pray to St Patrick and other Christian saints, the Norsemen who have made Dublin their home are pragmatic in their relationship to the gods. They are also cunning traders and brave fighters, more than ready to die on behalf of their lord. Their world is at times very simple, more black and white than grey, but the Norsemen as Ms Black portrays them are no fools, as adept at playing the political game as they are at wielding their swords.
At times, Ms Black’s obvious love and knowledge of the period results in a little too much detailed information which does not move the story forward, however, she does present us with a nicely convoluted plot and a cast of well-developed characters, foremost among which Finlay of Alba makes a lasting impression.
For those in love with the Viking period, this is an excellent read, offering insight into the everyday life of a culture that is often depicted as merely violent but which was much more than that.
© Anna Belfrage

Covers

Holidays are over and it is back to the usual preoccupations. I've actually lost count of the number of edits I've done on the wip. Possibly the fourth? I'm printing it out for the second time as I complete each chapter, because I am still making changes to the storyline, which makes me think this may be the third edit rther than the fourth. There was such a long gap between writing the first chunk of itan, then abdoning it and coming back to it a couple of years later that I can see where changes are needed, particularly at the latter end of the story.

I have lots of plans for the autumn season. Finish the wip,  of course, but also to renew the covers on my earlier stories, and to do a lot more promotion of them. I was surprised to notice that KENP figures are showing up for the weeks I have been away - and I have done not a jot of PR to earn them! The  Amazon Conference I attended in Newcastle  a few days before going to France made me think about it more closely, and e-mails  received from Mark Dawson have inspired me to try different methods. I can't bring myself to pay his price for the course, though I might have done if I were in my twenties, in full time employment and hoping to make writing my future career, but his ideas are wrth trying.

I spent nearly the whole day yesterday attempting to download a free trial of Adobe Premier Elements yesterday and got so frustrated with it that in the end I uninstalled it. It was a sstruggle to register, took fifteen minutes or so to download and then refused to "play." Kept reverting to passwords time after time. It did not encourage me to buy the product, I must say! So I kept my old software and managed to produce a cover - a supposedly ghost Viking ship to represent the Viking magician who pursues a young girl because her power, aligned to his, will make him enornmously powerful.

Travelling

Friday 20th July, 2018
Tim stumbled as he bolted down the steps the other day and caught himself on the corner wall concealed by the shrubs; yesterday and today we’ve noticed that he is limping, not because his foot hurts, which was our first thought, but because he is favouring the shoulder. It is worst when he first gets up from sleep; he’s like me, a bit creaky until we’ve moved around a bit. We’ll give him another easy day with only light exercise and hope it clears up soon.Everything else is fine. The weather is cool enough to allow gardening and walking – typical, isn’t it? Now that Tim is limping and needs rest, we could have gone out and done the circuit: Gite Rural, Peyrouse, down the hill to Saint Maurice and back home along the straight road to the bridges.
Saturday 21st July, 2018Cloudy and cool, with a threat of rain this morning. Tim still limping. Paws checked, nothing found. No lumps, bumps, and he doesn’t seem to feel pain when we try to find a sore spot.
Today, 27th July, 2018Shortly after my last post we lost the internet connection, which we had been expecting. We're now home after a visit to the vet to get Tim cleared as fit to travel, then next day we set off up the country on Tuesday, no problems at Eurotunnel and up England to Newcastle around 4pm on Wednesday. Tim behaved very well, but he is still limping and we still can't find any reason for it. Hopefully it is bruising that will fade in time. So glad we cleared Eurotunnel when we did. I have every sympathy for those who are stuck there.