Debbie Bennett's Blog, page 9

A Cabinet of Inspiration

I was rummaging through my filing cabinet recently, looking for some pre-digital photographs from an American holiday so I could scan them in and use them to illustrate a post on another blog (using photos as inspiration for stories and scenes - can't link it as it isn't yet live...)

Apart from the usual folders one has in a filing cabinet for bills, car documents, bank stuff and other household gubbins, I have stacks of junk I hoard. Things I've picked up over the years that inspire me, remind me of people and places and that might trigger a story or provide research material.

I got the leaflet on the right at Hack Green Secret Nuclear Bunker in Cheshire. This place is a Cold War relic and well worth a visit if you're ever near Nantwich (fascinating journey underground into a nuclear bunker - the scariest thing being the civil service furniture that was still being used when I started work in London. Those lurid purple and green chair covers ere enough to scare anybody). But does anybody remember these actual leaflets being delivered to houses in the 1970s? I do. I remember being thoroughly terrified by the idea of nuclear war as a child - watching the BBC drama Threads and wondering what was going to happen to us all.

What else is in my folder. A Rand McNally road atlas of the USA. Great for mileages and logistics but probably redundant in the days of Google maps. More useful are the tourist guides to the National Parks. I've got the original tv script for an episode of Urban Gothic - the one I novelised which eventually appeared in an anthology alongside Christopher Fowler, Graham Masterton and Paul Finch, amongst others.

There are also several 'Europa' newsletters. These date back to the early 1980s when I was involved in a wargames campaign based on the 30 Years War in Europe. This involved a lot of scheming and plotting - there were a dozen or more people involved and the girl who ran it produced these exquisitely-detailed newsletters containing 'letters to the editor' and local news snippets as well as the main issues of 17th century Europe. Remember that this was pre-computer and very much a labour of love typed up every month on a typewriter, literally cut-and-pasted, and photocopied. So much rich detail for anybody writing historical fiction (which sadly has never interested me yet).

I have masses of police leaflets too. Everything from the Forensic Science Service glossy brochure to the Crown Prosecution Service leaflets of sentencing and court procedures - if nothing else these are useful for me to know what is and isn't in the public domain when I'm writing crime.

I'll go through it all eventually and chuck out the stuff that has outlived its storage space. But most of might come in useful one day and I'm far too much of a squirrel!

Are We Ready Yet?

So you're all eagerly waiting the new book. You are, aren't you? I'm not just shouting into the abyss here?

Well the paperback is (unofficially) out. I had to publish it in order to be able to order stock myself. Amazon hasn't yet caught up, so it's not on my author page, but you can search for it. I'm not putting up links etc here until I've "launched" it properly in the next few weeks, although I've already sold three! The ebook will come out on most platforms around the same time - or a day or two beforehand. You can even pre-order at smashwords now in any ebook format that takes your fancy.

Whether it will ever be available at kobo or their subsidiaries remains to be seen. At present none of my titles are available there; not even my YA fantasy Edge of Dreams where the most erotic action is a single very chaste boy/girl kiss....

An Indie Ebook Watershed?

A couple of days ago, UK high-street retailer WH Smith took the unprecedented step of switching off its entire online store and replacing it with a “holding page” explaining the reasons for this action. This was apparently due to customer complaints after a number of ‘inappropriate’ books were retrieved by the website search engine while customers were looking for children’s books.  More information and examples can be found at a variety of online news sites, such as the BBC, the Daily Mail and the Mirror. Even the Guardian is getting in on the act.

For those readers unfamiliar with the store, WH Smith has a branch on most UK high streets and sells books, stationery items and magazines; the bigger stores also sell CDs and gifts. It has a generally wholesome image, promotes Richard & Judy book titles and is considered family-friendly. Not the place you’d expect to find hardcode pornography then – even the lads’ mags are doubtless regulated to the top-shelf where small fingers can’t innocently pick them up with a comic. I say doubtlessbecause in all honestly, I’ve never looked …
So why do they exist in the online store? Because WH Smith – like many other retailers – takes a data feed from Kobo, an ebook retailer that publishes books from anybody and everybody with little or no vetting of the contents. Kobo itself takes data feeds from other ‘ebook aggregators’ – websites that distribute a book to multiple online retail sites on behalf of the author or publisher (and either charge a per-title flat-fee or take a cut of the profit in return for the service). Kobo is slightly different however in that it also allows authors to upload direct to the site.
This isn’t uncommon in the online retailing business. But as the sale of ebooks and ebook readers has taken the market by storm, ebook aggregators and retail sites have never really invested time or money in content-filtering – ensuring that not all books get published, and those that do are regulated and tagged appropriately to ensure that they do not fall into the wrong hands. Many of the books that have caused this furore have apparently violated the t&c of the sites in question and may even been illegal. WH Smith is potentially liable for prosecution - hence the reaction to pull the entire website.
And with the explosion in ebook sales comes the realisation that anything can be published. By anybody. Whether there is a market for it or not. Since Fifty Shades of Grey , there’s been a race to the bottom, even from the big publishers to produce ever more explicit erotica. Who can blame the independent authors for wanting a slice of a very lucrative pie? But with no gatekeepers, no content-filtering and little quality control from the online publishing/retail sites that Amazon’s KDP, Kobo Writing Life, Smashwords etc, there is nobody to police the increasingly smelly cess-pit of internet pornography. And some of the stuff out there is horrific. Just the other night I glanced through some new titles available via Smashwords. One in particular stood out with tags that would make your eyes water, a blurb that was offensive in the extreme and certainly not something any self-respecting author would want to be connected with. Does nobody at Smashwords even take a cursory glance at the titles uploaded?
Rape-fantasy and incest are not topics I would personally want to read about. I don’t believe in censorship, but if authors cannot or will not self-police or self-regulate, do we really have a choice? There is a world of difference between pornography written for titillation and memoirs about child-abuse. Or a textbook on healing or psychology, or the description of a rape in a crime novel. Do we deny victims of abuse a voice? It’s the glorification of it that is the issue – therefore simply searching for keywords or titles will never been a means of identifying books which should maybe be in a category all of their own, and invisible to store search engines unless explicitly invoked. But then who is to say that Fifty Shades or even titles like Lolita should be banned? Even Lady Chatterley's Lover was considered indecent in its time. 

So what will happen now? I sense a watershed moment for ebooks. WH Smith has said it will remove 'all self-published books' before it re-opens its site. So that will leave Fifty Shades and other ‘legitimate’ erotica titles, and readers will lose the ability to buy some amazingly good books of all genres from writers who for a variety of reasons do not always publish with a publishing company. Kobo has already deactivated possibly all titles it considers to be self-published, regardless of genre or content - none of my titles are currently available to buy. Other ebook sites like Barnes & Noble, Apple and Sony are doubtless considering their own actions. Even the mighty Amazon has pulled several books recently. And how do you define self-published anyway? Anybody can set themselves up as a publisher. Anybody can buy ISBNs. We are in danger of throwing out the entire bathroom as well as the baby with the bathwater.

For the record, I think that WH Smith has made the right move in the short term. It remains to be seen how the company will deal with this crisis in the medium-to-long-term and how companies like Kobo react. Now you may say that children should not be surfing the net unsupervised and I agree with that. But even with supervision, do you really want your five-year-old seeing book covers and blurbs that are at best distasteful and at worst illegal? And imagine the online revenue that WH Smith is losing by pulling the entire online store while they work out what to do next. That shows you just how seriously they are taking these allegations and their concerns may not be unfounded if some of the offending titles are found to be illegally obscene and not just morally obscene.
Maybe sites like Amazon and Smashwords should be charging independent authors to upload a book for sale? Perhaps that would generate sufficient revenue to employ staff to vet books offered for publication. At the very least the retail sites should be employing better filters on their search engines. It's not rocket science these days.

I predict that October 2013 will be a turning point in self-publishing and ebook retailing and I hope we go forwards in the right direction.

Rock Night!

So last night I went to a rock concert. In the village. Yes - sleepy little Moulton in Cheshire hosted Wille and The Bandits, an indie band who've toured with Deep Purple and Status Quo and are apparently on the verge of making it big. Now I've seen the Quo and Rainbow in concert and am not averse to a bit of rock (the red leather mini in previous posts might be a bit of a giveaway?) But in Moulton? Hosted by local music appreciation group Malt 'n' Music, the gig was a huge sell-out success and our little village hall was rocking until late.

But it got me thinking. The last live music concert I went to was probably Meat Loaf way back in the early 1990s at Wembley. I stopped going to standing-only venues (Deeside ice rink in my teenage years) as I have a real fear of large crowds. Standing in the middle of hundreds of people is my idea of hell and I like the security of a seat - yes, and the comfort too as I get older!

But when I was 17 or so, I used to see a lot of indie bands. In the backstreets of Birkenhead (say it with a Scouse accent - it has to be done - Beerkin-ed), behind Hamilton Square station was a place called the Sir James Club that used to host lots of local bands. My friend Ruth and I would go and watch whoever was playing on rock nights and on several bank holidays they'd run 24-hour rock-marathons with several bands and a rock disco. Sometimes I'm amazed that my parents were so relaxed about all this - although maybe they didn't always know! I even remember dancing on the tables in the BierKeller in Liverpool one Saturday night ....

So I did a little bit of digging. I don't think Alternative Radio ever made it big, despite winning Battle of the Bands in the 1980s. But apparently they are still touring....


Or how about French Lessons? Another 80s band and I still have their albums on cassette. I even managed to run them through some software and convert them to digital files a few years back, so the tracks are on my iphone now and still as good as they were 30 years ago. I recommend them - can't find anything on YouTube but you can download for free from their website.

Who would I go and see now? I did like the small local venue of our village hall. I liked being able to dance at the front and knowing most of the people there. On a bigger stage I'd like to see Blackmore's Night as I've always loved Ritchie Blackmore's stuff and I like the way they've rocked-up Bob Dylan and other folk tracks. I'd probably go and see Jethro Tull again too. And I confess I'd love to see Alice Cooper in concert, though I don't think I'd dare ...

I'm looking forward to seeing what Malt 'n' Music put on next locally. And I really, really want to get my daughter Clare up on stage - even if she only performs one song. She's singing in a competition in a couple of weeks and has such an amazing voice, but she's a classical singer and is far happier with something from Rodgers and Hammerstein than anything from the top 40. She sang at a friend's birthday party last month and blew everyone away ...

Cover Reveal!

So here's the new cover for Calling The Tune. I think it fits rather well with the other two, doesn't it?

It's finished. Wrapped up earlier this week in a flurry of action. I wasn't quite anticipating where we ended up, but you can never tell with these things. I do most of my editing as I go along, so it's now gone out to a trusted reader, who I'm confident will tell me exactly what is and isn't working and what I need to rewrite and/or change. And then I'll be onto final edits.

And so the journey is over. I've lived with Michael for so many years that I'm sad to say goodbye to him now, but I really do have to leave him alone to get on with his life. We've met sister Kate, partner-in-crime Amanda and in Calling The Tune we also get to know trainee reporter Becky. And then there's bad-boy Lenny who makes another appearance ...

Hopefully the finished product will be available this side of Christmas in ebook and paperback. There are a couple of advance review copies up for grabs for anybody who doesn't mind finding the last of the typos, and who can provide me with a quote I can use on the paperback. You'd also need to agree to post a review on amazon within a few days of it being available, so the quote is verifiable. Email me if you're interested, thanks!

Acting the Part

It's hard, this writing thing. Not the writing so much - although that can be a long, hard slog sometimes, but the rest of it. The promotion, the selling, the publicity of it all. Now I don't spam. Never have, never will. When I release a book, I will send a one-time-only email and/or facebook message to people I know have read my stuff and I have interacted with in some way, be in in person or online. But I won't keep mithering, or tweeting or pushing myself into people's faces. That's not what I do. I'm not a pushy person by nature. Although people who know me might find it hard to believe, I'm really quite shy. Everything else is an act.

Here's the proof! I was 20, I think.When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I owned a bright red leather mini-skirt. I wore it to student parties in Liverpool in the early 1980s with red fishnets and a black leather biker jacket (I was a wannabe rock-chick).  Why am I telling you this? Because to wear an outfit like that, you have to "be" the person that goes with it. You can't be shy or sit in a corner. It's a statement outfit that demands a statement personality to go with it. So you act. And I did. Frequently. It's not always easy to do - sometimes it requires a huge effort that half a bottle of wine doesn't fix on its own!

So I have mixed feelings about my almost-full-page article in this week's local paper, complete with huge photograph (which actually isn't too bad, given that I usually look fat, old and drunk in photographs - photoshop is my friend...). I talked to our local reporter for half an hour last week; I know her reasonably well - enough to chat with at village events and she'd said she'd like to do a feature on me.

But it's so personal, having your background splashed across a page and knowing your neighbours and work colleagues may read it. My reasons for starting writing in the first place came from a time in my life as a young teenager when I didn't have many friends. Somehow seeing that in black and white makes it more real, I don't know why. It's history.

And then there's the nature of what I write. It isn't nice. People judge other people on so many different levels, and I remain concerned that there will be those who will read a bit of my book for the novelty value and then judge me by what they read. It's nonsense, I know - some of the big crime writers do far more and it isn't a problem. But I don't have that validation yet - right now I'm just me. One person. Thankfully I have a lot of great friends who appreciate me and love what I write.

But of course - as every real writer knows - there's something of you in everything you write. You bleed a little onto the page every time. You open yourself up to criticism, ridicule and abuse. It's like self-harm sometimes, letting the blood flow and coming up feeling like you've produced something real, something worthwhile. But it hurts. It really does. Witness the current furore online, where some poor new author is allegedly being mercilessly bullied before she's even released a book. It's tough enough out there without wearing your heart and soul on your sleeve. And all that probably sounds horribly pretentious, but it's true.

I don't regret doing this article at all. If I'm to grow as a writer I need to reach out more. There will be people who hate my books - I expect that. But I hope some might like them too. Finding somebody who connects with what you do, who sees the blood on the page, makes it all worthwhile.

But then a work colleague came in the other day after being away on holiday and told me he'd taken my book with him, read it in a day and thought it was better than the first one. If that's not a result then I don't know what is

Lightbulbs and Photography

As I wrote on facebook recently, the really, utterly, amazing thing about seat-of-your-pants writing (as in having no idea where you are going until you get there), is that every now and again your character says or does something that explains their entire backstory.

There I was, minding my own business, writing a conversation between a major character and a character who started off with a relatively small part to play, but is becoming more important (because he's a bad boy, but so damned cute and I secretly fancy him). And suddenly ... wham! ... lightbulb moment. There's a look that passes between two people and I know his entire history in that moment. And it explains everything and gives me a way forward for this particular plot-strand.

Sometimes my subconscious is so awesome that I want to kiss it! It sets me up, makes me write things that make no sense at the time and it won't let me delete them. And it's not until ten, twenty, fifty thousands words later that things fall into place and I understand the why of it.

And photography - that's the local paper, which sent a photographer out to my house yesterday. My local paper is doing an article on me, so heaven knows what will come out of that. No hiding away now, is there?

Calling the Tune

It’s Eddie’s trial and Michael is reliving things he’d much rather forget. Giving evidence means he can’t hide, and there are still people looking for him and old debts to be repaid. And when trainee reporter Becky follows him out of court, she gets more than a story when Michael is on the run for his life.
But running away never solved a problem. Michael realises he has to face his demons head-on if he's ever going to be able to move on with his life - and now he's on a collision course with his worst nightmare.
Available in ebook and paperback towards the end of 2013 - let me know if you want to be added to my email list to be notified when it's out. I don't spam - it's a one-time only per book email, I promise!

Writing Groups

I can't remember if I've ever done a post on writing groups, so I thought it was about time I did, or at least updated you all. You see I joined a new writing group about six months ago...

Let's define writing group first, shall we? There's probably one online, but I'm going to go with my own hot off the keyboard - a group of people who enjoy writing for pleasure or profit, and meet to exchange ideas, network and offer mutual support. You may or may not agree with that definition, but this is my post.

There are several different types of writing group:

The mutual back-scratching group. Here everybody will love your work, darling. They will listen in rapt silence (while they're probably thinking of what to buy for tea tomorrow) and tell you how wonderful you are and how perfect your prose is. Utterly useless. Run away. If your work was that perfect, you'd be JK Rowling by now, wouldn't you?

The rottweiler group. Here they'll lay into your reading like a group of rabid dogs and rip it to shreds. Nothing pleases these people and they're generally so unsure of their own abilities they'll do anything to bring you down to their level. Again - run away! And have faith in yourself. You know when you've written good stuff. Trust me, you do.

The sit-com group. There'll be a man in mirrored shades who writes celebrity exposés. The woman in a barbour jacket and green wellies who wants to be the next Jilly Cooper. The young lad who's really only there to see if there are any fit birds who write about sex... A great group for material, but not so good for support.
The ramblers. These people like to talk a lot about how the group runs. Who should take the money, how long everybody should read for. Or who gossip for two hours - and totally forget the purpose of the meeting is the writing. We all need administrators but keep it simple, guys!
The group that works! A group that has rules and structure, but that doesn't take up too much time. Where everybody gets a chance to shine, read their work out and receive helpful constructive comments. Where it doesn't matter if you're aiming for publication or just enjoying the words for themselves. And nobody is more important than anybody else.
I've seen all of the above. Some have worked at different times in my life. I'm still a member now of a great group that meets very infrequently, but it's more about our shared history and long friendships than anything really productive. Oh, and food of course. Always the food.
But six months ago I joined a local group that meets once a month. And it's fun! They're a great group of people - men and women, all ages, all stages and types of writing. And everybody listens and everybody contributes. And it's so useful. I come away motivated - by the ten minute compulsory writing exercises, if nothing else. I'm lazy and it does me good to be forced to produce something right then and there. But there's never any pressure to read it out if it's not right, or the brain refuses to play. I'm not a poet but I'm enjoying listening to other peoples' poetry, and it's lovely to share my own triumphs and rejections with people who understand what I'm talking about.
So thanks Vale Royal Writers Group. I'm proud to be a member!

Free? Free? FREE?

What is this free of which you speak? The days you get to price your book at zero on Amazon's KDP Select. (See link for a blog post I wrote a while back explaining how it works). That means you get zero, zilch, nada for each and every "sale".

Why would I want to give my work away for free? Authors say making the first book in a series free generates sales of subsequent books. That may indeed be true for them and if so, I'm happy for them. But I just can't get my head around the concept. I don't want to just sell book 2 (and book 3 soon) of my crime thriller series - I want to sell all 3 books. If I want to make one free, I'll do it when I want and for as long as I want - via Smashwords, which will let me set my own prices.

My books aren't exactly expensive at full price. I work hard to write them - hundreds, if not thousands of hours. I want people to make a decision to buy and hopefully read my books, not download a freebie and probably never look at it. My ebooks cost less than the price of a cup of coffee. Anybody who doesn't consider that one of my books is worth the price of a cup of coffee is not my target audience.