T.S. Sharp's Blog, page 5

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought… #4

Following on from previous posts about other books that had been bought alongside my short story on Amazon, I’ve discovered another big writer who shares the ‘Also Bought…’ section for ‘Unfamiliar Country’.

It’s ‘Others’ by James Herbert. Herbert is a big hitter in the world of horror novels, and at time of writing this book is currently at #22 in Books > Fiction > Horror > Ghosts and #36 in Kindle Store > Books > Fiction > Horror.

The horror/ghosts keyword tie our books together, but that is where the similarity ends. Herbert has written dozens of horror novels and sold millions of copies of them, as well as had films made from his work. Indeed, the current BBC adaptation of The Secret of Crickley Hall is a Herbert novel.

There’s also a book about weight loss on the ‘Also Bought…’ feed, so it’s good to see some variety on there too…

Chuck Wendig and the hiding of corpses.

This piece of flash fiction is borne from Chuck Wendig’s excellent blog, Terrible Minds. The brief was simple; write some flash fiction about the hiding of a corpse, in less than 1,000 words, and post a link to it from his blog. You can see his post and submissions here.

Here’s mine, knocked up in an hour or so;

~

Dead Weight

Bryony was thankful Cliff had insisted on keeping all that old plastic sheeting in the garage. ‘You never know…’ he always said.

Most of the crap he kept in there was just that; crap. But the big sheets of plastic from new kitchen appliances and household furniture had been perfect for wrapping up Cliff’s battered corpse.  A cheap and recycled burial shroud. He’d probably approve in fact, if he wasn’t dead, his skull caved in and his eyes glassy and unseeing.

Bryony now knew the meaning of dead-weight. Cliff was not a tall man and his strict vegan diet kept him thin. But dead, he’d tripled in density. She’d dragged him onto the plastic tarp and laid his arms alongside his body, the last act of dignity bestowed upon the man she’d battered to death from behind with a tire iron. The life insurance money would be worth all the effort, she told herself. The body was covered over with the excess plastic material and then bound tight with duct tape until he looked like a cheap-ass Egyptian mummy.

Cliff’s lovingly maintained SUV sped south to Florida so that Bryony could lend a hand in the storm relief effort that was starting to take shape after the area was battered by a recent hurricane. Cliff accompanied her, laid out on the bed of the truck and covered over with blankets, tinned food, bottled drinking water, and basic first aid supplies. She smiled at the irony of a dead man lying beneath piles of equipment destined to save lives. Cliff would die in the rubble of a stranger’s house, searching for victims but paying the ultimate price himself when a loose beam or rubble crashed down on him and crushed his skull. Bryony would escape injury but be devastated by her husband’s death, unable to save him as he lay trapped.

Bryony smiled at the simplicity of it. All she needed was a badly hit and already evacuated neighborhood amongst the swathe of devastation and she could pick her spot. The drive would take the best part of six hours, but it would be worth it. She’d be rid of the man she’d never really loved and would eventually pick up a cheque for almost a quarter of a million dollars.

The closer she got to the affected area, the worse the weather became. Rain lashed the windshield and she felt the wind tug at the vehicle as she drove along exposed and largely empty highways. The body of the hurricane had moved out to sea, but its tail still swept the coastal areas as it went. As she joined the county roads the occasional roadblock started to pop up, manned by exhausted-looking FEMA agents, but they waved her on when she explained she was making relief supply drop-offs at the designated disaster centers. Of course, she ignored the temporary signs to the centers and headed off to inspect the storm-wracked little towns along the route. Some already had clean-up crews working in them, groups of volunteers and property owners sectioning up fallen trees and sweeping broken glass. She drove on.

On a stretch of road between two towns she found the perfect location for Cliff’s second death. An old gas station, long since abandoned and vacated by its owners, stood slightly back from the tarmacadam highway. With no one to maintain and weather-proof it against the storm, it had suffered particularly badly. The roof covering the gas pumps had been completely torn from their pillars and scattered across the fallow grasslands beyond. The small mini-mart store had fared no better. The flat roof had collapsed in on itself, exposing skeletal steel girders and rain-soaked wooden planks.

Bryony pulled the SUV in behind the shell of the building so it couldn’t be seen from the road and took a closer look at the interior of the store. Cinderblocks were scattered across the floor like giant discarded teeth, water dripped from everything, and strands of vegetation lay like garlands from what remained of the roof. When the storm wrecked the building, it had knocked down a large part of the gable-end of the structure, creating an easy access point given that the  doors and windows were still blocked by steel sheeting, no doubt riveted in place when the business foreclosed. Perfect.

She opted to leave Cliff in his protective plastic shroud until she was ready to deposit his body into its final resting place. He still weighed a ton, and moving it off the back of the truck and into the ruined interior of the gas station was like trying to drag a ship’s mast over an obstacle course, but eventually Bryony got it where she wanted it. She cut Cliff free from the plastic wrappings and laid him out. Rainwater splattered his face as it dripped from the wrecked roof, mingling with the congealed blood in his hair.

Bryony selected a steel girder hanging from the roof at a forty-five degree angle and with superhuman effort managed to lift it at the bottom and drop the end onto Cliff’s already concaved skull. The perfect cover for the fatal injury she’d dealt the night before. Pleased with herself, she stood looking down at the body. Cliff was lying slightly on his side, shifted by the impact. He rolled over with the extra weight, trapping Bryony’s feet beneath his body and knocking her down. She screamed in shock, his face now turned toward her. At the exact point her eyes met his glassy, dead pupils, the wall at the end of the building groaned and shifted. Bryony tried to free her feet from under Cliff’s body, but she was stuck. She glanced up at the wall, just in time to see it come crashing down, entombing her and her husband beneath a ton of bricks and concrete, where they lay together in death.

~

Thanks to Missy for helping to ‘Americanize’ my work.

See, I wrote Americanize and not Americanise!

Are You Faithful or Promiscious (when reading books)?

I always find myself cheating on the one I’m with. I can’t help it, there’s always another one which looks more attractive, offering more excitement and the allure of the unknown. I then end up with two on the go, switching from one to the other as the mood takes me.

I read at least two books at the same time, not being able to stick faithfully to one title until it’s finished before going to the next in the pile. I mean I read them concurrently, not simultaneously, that would be weird and pretty confusing. I have various reasons for this, but it’s mostly down to the fact that I am a bit of a flibidijibit when it comes to attention spans. Oh look – a spoon!

Sometimes it’s because I don’t like to read a similar type of book back-to-back with another. If I’ve just read some historical fiction, I won’t touch one of the similar books I know are lurking on the ‘to read’ pile. The same goes for crime fiction or fantasy/horror. I at least like to mix it up if I’m going to cheat on them. I also won’t read the same author back-to-back or side by side, despite how much I love their work. I would never read a Cormac McCarthy novel followed by a Cormac McCarthy novel. I’d end up thinking of them as one and the same book. I need a clean break between narratives. Plus writers can get samey in terms of subject matter and style, which isn’t a bad thing, but it would be if you read two or more of their books at once.

Right now I’m reading Chuck Wendig’s Blackbirds, as well as The Real Mad Men: The Remarkable True Story of Madison Avenue’s Golden Age by Andrew Cracknell. So that’s a chunk of fantasy thriller fiction, served up alongside a helping of non-fiction about the Madison Avenue advertising firms of the 1960s. Wendig’s Blackbirds is a dark, sweary fantasy about a woman who can foresee peoples deaths simply by touching them. I bought The Real Mad Men because I am a massive fan of the TV show and was intrigued about how close it was to the real thing. Both are equally entertaining in totally different ways.

Surely I’m not the only person who is unfaithful with literature? I bet lots of people read many more than two books at once. C’mon, own up!

Reviewing Reviewers

I only have a short story, Unfamiliar Country, available on Kindle via Amazon, and it’s only made a handful of sales in a year or so. Enough to trigger a royalty payment in the UK, but not in the US where they pay out once you top $100. Even so, I’ve attracted half a dozen reviews. A lot has been written recently about bogus, paid-for reviews and those written by authors reviewing their own work, so I began thinking about my own reviews.

The most recent review I received was a four-star posting that was positive, albeit slightly generic, but given that it’s only a short story of about 7,500 words I don’t expect much more. The reviewer is one of Amazon’s ‘Top 100 Reviewers’, meaning they’ve posted a lot of product reviews and had a lot of people mark them as ‘helpful’.  This particular review has posted 155 reviews at time of writing.

He also got the name of the main character in my short story wrong, but hey, I’ll forgive him, it was a four-star review afterall. He even provided some constructive criticism, too.

I had a brief trawl through some of the products that the industrious reviewer had posted on Amazon and was pleased to see several books by some of my favourite writers, Chuck Wendig and Adam Baker among them. Inevitably, if you spend a lot of time writing reviews, you end up writing about the more mundane purchases you’ve made. Most of this guy’s reviews were of books, but I did see these items reviewed;

Fresh yeast
Engine oil
A bowl scraper
Wasp powder
A squirrel trap

And these items had sizeable, several hundred word articles written about them.

I’m always pleased to see that someone has bought a copy of Unfamiliar Country, and I’m thrilled when I see that someone has gone to the effort to write a review of it. Especially if they liked it. Reviews can go either way, it’s part of the game, but I suspect that a lot of people who don’t like a product don’t actually bother to post their opinions about it. Maybe that’s a good thing. I’m not sure how I’d cope with a flurry of negative comments. I’d like to think I’d take it as constructive criticism – by taking the aspects they didn’t enjoy or thought didn’t work and work to improve them – but I might just hide in a dark room and cry.

Ever looked at what else a reviewer has reviewed and been surprised? Let me know in the comments section so that I am not the only one who’s done this.

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought… #3

Following on from a previous post about other books that had been bought alongside my short story on Amazon, I’ve discovered a couple of new big writers who share the ‘Also Bought…’ section for ‘Unfamiliar Country’. This time it’s another big name writer with a considerable body of work behind them, as well as several other big sellers.

Firstly, seven Agatha Christie short stories have been bought alongside my short story. Presumably this is the buying history of one particular customer, this would make the most sense, but like I mentioned in the previous posts about the ‘Also Bought…’ factor, it’s nice to be seen alongside writers like this, however tenuous the link may be.

Another notable writer who features in the ‘Also Bought…’ list is Karin Slaughter, a big name in contemporary crime writing. Her book ‘The Unremarkable Heart’ must have been bought by at least one customer who bought my book. But hopefully it’s not one of the 16 people who left her 1-star reviews!

Stephen Leather’s ‘Hard Landing’ features, but this could well have been me, seeing as I bought his ebook and I’ve obviously bought my own. But equally it could be someone else entirely, seeing as they both reside within the crime genre. There are also four books by CJ Box in there too. Box is a thriller writer with 15 novels and several short stories to his name.

I suspect the titles featured in the ‘Also Bought…’ feed change regularly as customers buy new books from Amazon. There also seem to be a couple of cookery books in there, they seem to be a staple in the book buying world. If you’ve got a book on Amazon, check out the ‘Also Boughts…’.

Fantasy Football Writing

Recently I’ve been doing little or no writing in terms of working on editing my completed novel or developing my work-in-progress. I have, however, been writing weekly articles for the fantasy football website I started working for last season. With the new Premiership season now under way, my gameweek wrap-ups have started to hit the website at Fantasy Football Cheat.

In a nutshell, I write a weekly article outlining the weekend’s football results with a view to providing pointers for fantasy league managers.  As an avid fantasy football fan, writing the wrap-ups is a labour of love for me. I spend Saturdays and Sundays watching the results filter through and checking my team’s progress in the various leagues I’m involved with, then spend Sunday night writing an article for other fantasy managers. The website has a huge following, so it’s good to know that thousands of anxious managers are reading my comments and taking pointers from my suggestions.

Last season, I didn’t fare too well in terms of points for my assembled Premiership players, but I was still able to provide (hopefully) helpful advice for viewers of the website. The ironic thing is that while I can provide hints and tips for a fantasy football campaign, I can’t possibly follow all my own advice given that I am reviewing up to ten different matches in one article. Often I’ve suggested that a new signing looks to be in form and could well make an impact in the league and then gone on to see him score a hatrick in his very next match. The back-slapping from the comments on the website are great, but I can’t act on my own advice without incurring massive transfer penalties. Nevertheless, it’s great fun to write.

Each week I have to consciously fight the urge to rant about the football gods not favouring me with a certain outcome, but that’s what the comments section is for. With only two gameweeks gone, I’m doing pretty well at the moment. I opted for Chelsea’s Eden Hazard, new to the Premiership this season, as my captain knowing that it was a calculated gamble. New, highly-tipped players arriving in the English Premiership either set the league alight, or they find it hard to adapt. It can go either way. If you follow the Premier League, you’ll know that Hazard has been a sensation, so his inclusion in my team has reaped massive rewards – securing me 68 points from a total team score of 153 so far. It’s a long hard season, so anything could happen, but it’s good to get off to a good start.

The articles are often 1,000+ words long, and often the problem is trying to keep the wordcount down, especially on weekends with some espectially memorables games in them.

If you are a football fan and have a team with the official Barclays Premier League fantasy football website, why not check out the Fantasy Football Cheat website. You can find my articles here;

Gameweek 1

Gameweek 2

Alongside my weekly round-ups there are great articles by other writers for the site, including transfer tips, in-game commentary and player reviews to name but a few. At the time of writing, there are over 2.5m teams registered for the official fantasy football website, from just about every country in the world no doubt.

Roll on next Saturday!

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought… #2

Following on from a previous post about other books that had been bought alongside my short story on Amazon, I’ve discovered a couple of new big writers who share the ‘Also Bought..’ section for ‘Unfamiliar Country’. This time it’s Ken Follet’s ‘Eye of the Needle’ - a World War Two mystery novel about a German agent in Britain, and Peter James’ ‘Perfect People’ – about a couple’s nightmare in having a genetically engineered baby.

Both books are big sellers, so it’s great to listed alongside them, albeit briefly. Unsurprisingly, my book doesn’t feature on their ‘Also Bought…’ lists.

And like last time, there’s also a new cook book in the list too! People seem to be buying books about murder and cookery, which is slightly worrying.

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought…

Today I noticed that for the first time a big name writer’s book has appeared on the ‘Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought‘ list for my short story on Amazon.

It’s pretty self-explanatory, but the ‘Customers Who Bought…’ feature is a list of up to twenty books that have been bought by customers alongside the item you are currently viewing. In this instance, I was browsing the list that accompanies my short story which is on sale on Kindle – Unfamiliar Country.

Apologies to the authors and titles I didn’t recognise, but the writer I was pleased to see there was David Baldacci, author of 24 crime novels and is a crime writing household name. Baldacci’s No Time Left (Short Reads) is the third book in on a list of twenty books bought by people who also bought my book. I’m not sure why I think this is noteworthy, but still…

What does this mean for me, in terms of sales and recognition? Probably nothing, but it’s nice to be seen alongside a recognised writer with big a publishing company.

From a brief look at the rest of the titles in the ‘Also Bought’ list, the majority look like self-published/indie books in the crime genre, which would make sense given that’s what Unfamiliar Country is about. There are also some suprising titles in the mix too. Notably, two books about chicken recipes, a cheesecake recipe book, a rapid weight loss programme, a user guide for slow-cookers, and a book about ways to make $100.

The purpose of the ‘Also Bought’ list is to cross-pollinate books from customer to customer. My book will appear on the ‘Also Bought’ feed on some of the books that appear in my feed. I looked at Baldacci’s ‘Also Bought’ list. I don’t make the grade. But that’s understandable, he sells thousands of books. So while I maye have featured on there at some point, it would have been very brief given the turn-over of books sold.

On the other hand, Baldacci’s book on my ‘Also Bought’ list received 11 1-star reviews and doesn’t have a single review above 3 stars. So it’s not always greener on the other side!

Have a book available on Kindle? Which other writers have you been listed alongside? Any surprising titles?

What’s In A Name?

I read an article recently about a growing trend to name babies from popular books, films and TV shows, such as The Great Gatsby, Game of Thrones and The Hunger Games. See the article .

This piqued my interest for two reasons; 1) I love big ticket TV shows like GoT and Boardwalk Empire etc, as well as great literature, and 2) I have a child on the way, so we’ll be needing name suggestions. I’m currently reading the first GoT book, so I’m tempted to suggest some of the names for the future Sharp.

Several of the names used in The Hunger Games are ancient Roman names, like Octavia, Seneca and Flavius, which also appeared in the Harry Potter books. These might start to make appearances in the near future too.

According to the article some of the recent hot names are;

Arya – the spikey daughter of one of the rulers in Game of Thrones.

I like this name, but I suspect a little of this is bourne from the fact I love her character in the books/series.
Gatsby – the main character from the F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby. This is bound to see a jump in its use when the Leonardo DiCaprio film of the book comes out later this year. Gatsby Sharp – sounds too grandiose to me.
Theon – This is another GoT name that is seeing some action for newly-borns apparently. Theon Greyjoy is an upstart heir to the throne in the books, and despite the cool-sounding name, Theon is a bit of an impetuous prig. Not something you’d want to be associated with if you were to be named after him.

Suggestions of my own;

Tyler – From the Tyler Durden character in Fight Club, one of my favourite ever films. This might have been a cool name a few years back, but there are a few Tylers around now, and they’re mostly boisterous kids with shaved heads and earings, the ones you see running around the supermarket being yelled at by their mums. So this one is off the table now. Apologies to any Tylers reading this!
Ragnar – This is an awesome Norse/Scandinavian name, but seeing as I already have a dog called Odin, I might be pushing it with Mrs Sharp. Pity.

I’ll keep an eye out for cool names, mining films, TV shows and books for suitable monikers.

Any suggestions?

What if…?

“No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.”

Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

This is also true once you start writing a novel after you’ve outlined the plot or done a synopsis. Recently, when working on a novel-in-progress, I had the idea of changing one of the elements to see how it altered the dynamic. I started to wonder if it made more sense for a character to do action B instead of action A, and what the consequences might be for the rest of the novel.

Here are some ‘What Ifs’ for literary contemplation;

In Fifty Shades of Grey , instead of being a billionaire and CEO of his own corporation, Christian Grey was actually a salesman at Phones 4 U and consistently struggled to meet his sales targets? Then he’d have to pursue Anastasia Steele a bit harder, wouldn’t he?
In Lord of the Rings , a minor character suggests to Frodo at the beginning of the novel that instead of the long and arduous journey across Middle Earth to Mordor, they simply get the massive eagles to fly them there and back? That would make the ring easier to drop off, right?

This kind of thinking, although definitely useful, can spiral out of control until you have characters doing crazy stuff and a plot that resembles nothing like the original concept you started out with.

Here are a couple of minor ‘What Ifs’ I came up with recently for my own work;

What if;

Instead of owning a restaurant that’s struggling to survive, one of my protagonists is trying to set up a restaurant, and is having trouble with the bank and his credit etc. This way I can have his dream in danger of unravelling from the start.

This occured to me the other day when I had to submit a synopsis for a novel I have been working on for my creative writing course. My restaurant owner would be desperate to keep his business dream alive, allowing scope for my manipulative main character to turn the situation to his advantage. I much prefer this idea, but of course it means a slight re-write for my first three chapters. No big deal.

What if;

The mysterious killer character pays the protagonist a visit mid-way through the novel, instead of only appearing at the end? This would give me another character to introduce into the mix earlier on, and would provide a neat narrative loop for that last scene.

This ‘what if’ came to me a while back when re-reading my completed novel Seven Seconds. I needed more motivation for my main character to make the impulsive decision he takes later in the novel, so an extra scene like this made sense.

Of course, adding in little tweaks and wrinkles into a narrative means you have to revisit the work to make sure it still makes  sense across the whole novel. Which means re-writes, lots and lots of re-writes. And what would we do without re-writes? Well, we might even publish something, heaven forbid!

Share your literary ‘What Ifs’ here.

I want to know how different Harry Potter could have been if his adoptive parents had told him he was a wizard from the start. Would he have thought they were nuts and asked Social Services to re-home him? Then the novels could be about his battle with the bureaucracy of social care in modern Britain.

Any others?

PS ; My short story is currently free on Amazon.

UK -Unfamiliar Country

US – Unfamiliar Country