End of the Series? Or Just a Pause?
The new book cover – nice one, Simon & Schuster!
This blog piece was prompted by an email I received this afternoon.
The message was from someone who wanted to let me know how sad they were to hear the news that Baldwin and Simon’s series was to end. I know this has affected a lot of readers, so I thought it would be a good idea to explain the situation.
First, please understand that no author wants to upset his or her readers. Equally, for me to kill off Baldwin and Simon would be like murdering my own friends. I didn’t only create these two, I have lived with them intensively for the last twenty years (ye Gods! It’s really that long!) – they are old friends of mine.
However, the sad fact is that I have to live in modern world. There are commercial realities that impinge on an author’s life.
In the last few years, the sales of my books have declined. My last publisher never had a marketing budget for my books. They were allowed to go into the world and sink or swim, basically surviving because of my efforts.
That is why my new publisher suggested changing tack slightly. It is clearly impossible for a publisher to keep on paying for authors whose books are not earning back their money. This isn’t a difficult angle to understand. Publishers are in business to make money.
Some years ago it became clear to me that Headline, my original publishers, had lost interest in the series, and stopped marketing or promoting the books. Because of that I was forced to consider radical changes.
My first idea was, to look at writing a different style of novel, or perhaps change genre. Various concepts were put forward by me, but Headline really didn’t want to have me change. They wanted more of the Templar series. But they wouldn’t advertise or market my books, so clearly sales wouldn’t grow. Which meant my income wouldn’t either. After some months of horrible negotiation, I finally had to bite the bullet and move to Simon and Schuster.
Lots of lovely books!
And – deep breath – it’s been a fantastic move. Suddenly I have marketing, publicity, sales and social marketing support. My new editor is an enthusiastic supporter, and the whole team is fully behind my books. I haven’t had such wonderful backing for many years.
But, and it is a large “but”, no publisher has a chequebook held constantly open. Normally they snap shut like a Venus Flytrap when an author walks into a room. Authors like me have to keep our feet on the ground and accept that sometimes a change of direction can be worthwhile creatively as well as financially.
It was for that reason that I wrote Act of Vengeance and slipped it out as an ebook last year. It’s a modern spy book, and on Kindle it is selling really well. And now, for a similar reason, I’m working on alternatives to the Templar Series.
Ebook only for now. But I can hope!
The next book, Fields of Blood, is a new take on the men who participated in the Crécy campaign. I have taken a small body of men and looked at them, their problems, their fights and their fears leading up to the battle. And there was a lot to consider in there, believe me.
For the future, I will work with two of the characters from this book, and use them to consider later battles in the Hundred Years War campaigns, and in the fighting with the Free Companies afterwards. There are three strong books already planned.
This doesn’t mean I won’t write another Baldwin and Puttock book. It doesn’t mean Simon and Schuster want to kill it off either.
In fact, Simon and Schuster have already republished the first six of the series in their own brilliant covers. They have bought the rights for the next seven books, and as I speak, they are trying to persuade Headline to give up the rights to the remainder of the series. Sadly, Headline are being inflexible, which means that I’ll have to fight for each title, I expect, before I can rescue them from the horrible limbo in which they now exist.
The reason is simple. Although Headline paid tiny advances to me, and although each of the books has fully earned out, paying back both the initial advances with big profits to Headline, a publisher’s assets are only what it possesses in terms of titles.
If another publisher wanted to buy Headline, the value of Headline would lie in the books for which it owned rights. Without them, the publisher’s value lies in a number of desks and phones. Which isn’t much.
That is why Headline is being very difficult about letting us take back the rest of the rights. They did suggest that they’d let me have the rights back for a silly sum – £100,000. That is more than they paid me in advances for my first fifteen books – which means at least double the profits they made from me and my books in those first eight years or so. Which is plain daft – and it changes nothing. The rights will come back and Simon and Schuster will have the whole list.
However, you aren’t interested in the old titles. You want to know what will happen with new books, don’t you?
Well, put it like this: if the republished titles sell well, and Simon and Schuster starts to make good money from the series, Simon and Schuster will want more in that series. If they can see cash flowing into their coffers, they will commission more in the series to keep that money coming in.
Therefore, if you want to see future books in the series, there are ways you can help.
The first thing is, to recommend my books to all your friends. If you know people who are keen on crime books, people who are keen on historical novels, who are keen on the Templars, or who just like a good, entertaining read: tell them about Baldwin and Simon. Put a comment up about them on your Facebook page, or on Twitter or any other social media you like. If you can, go and put positive reviews up on Goodreads and Amazon. These things really do help – and help much more than an author’s wittering about his efforts. Benjamin Disraeli once said, “An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children”.
Harsh, but fair: he was a popular novelist, as well as Prime Minister of Britain during the British Empire.
Simon and Schuster have proved they’re serious about the series.
There is something else you can not do. Do not recycle! If you give the books away, or sell them, that takes money out of Simon and Schuster’s (and my) pocket. We earn nothing from resales of our work. Also, if you buy from a second-hand shop, that hurts us too. Publishers cannot survive if their books are sold through charity shops, second hand stores and exchanged in markets. Publishers and authors depend entirely upon new sales for their survival.
So, sad though it may sound, if you aren’t going to want to keep the books on your shelves, then send them off to be recycled properly.
Yes, I know people are enduring hard times. I know that looking for a bargain is uppermost in most of our minds. But if you can, buy new: you will be supporting authors, publishers and bookshops. And we all want to do that.
With a little luck, if you can help tell people about my books (and other authors’ books you really love), you will help the trade.
More specifically, if you promote mine, it may well lead to increased interest from Simon and Schuster, which may lead to their commissioning more Templar series stories.
It’s also possible that I could write some more books and put them out as ebooks, of course. But it is a lot more effort to write and self-promote that way. For me, to be able to sit at my desk and write is much more appealing.
And it means you get more books to read, of course.
Happy Reading!
Tagged: author, books, crime writing, ebooks, publishing, republishing, Templar series, writing
