Wednesday Writing: Typecasting?

I was mentioned in dispatches by fellow Crooked Cat author Jane Bwye.

Jane commented on how I’d broken away from the tried and tested line of light-hearted whodunits into grittier and more esoteric areas, but then returned to the whodunits. Jane’s comments were not a serious analysis, but she hit the nail on the head when she said that as a writer you’re always keen to push the boundaries.

The Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries have been remarkably successful. More so than I ever imagined, and the 12th title, A Killing in the Family, like most of its predecessors, has rocketed up the Amazon UK Cosy Crime chart within days of its release.

There is always a risk of boredom with any series, and there are always those projects on the hard drive which yearn for attention. The Flatcap series of cynical and ribald humour is an example, so too are the Spookies series, the second of which, The Man in Black is due out in November.

Further examples are the three “hard” novels on my list: The Handshaker, The Deep Secret and Voices. They are recognised by others as good examples of their genres. Voices, in my opinion, is the finest book I’ve ever written, and in contrast to the STAC Mysteries, which take less than three months to write, it took almost two years.

And yet, these books do not sell. And that is a factor of the very success the Sanford 3rd Age Club books have enjoyed.

A perennial worry for actors is typecasting: playing the same type of role over and over again in different movies/TV shows. It’s a problem which can affect authors, too. Can we imagine Agatha Christie writing chicklit? Can we seriously see Conan Doyle emulating Alan Sillitoe and Stan Barstow with a slice-of-life melodrama? Would Stephen King succeed if he wrote a romcom?

I’m not nearly so well-known as any of these authors, but even I’m typecast as a whodunit writer, and it makes life difficult when I try to plug these grittier works. On Amazon book pages there’s always a line of links and images under the heading, “Customers who bought this item, also bought…” On checking the book pages for my hard-boiled works, I find that customers still turn to STAC Mysteries and Spookies. That’s just as true of Voices, which is about as far removed from cosy crime as you can get.

The obvious solution would be to write these under a pen name, and there’s some justification for that when I check the Flatcap pages. There are few people looking at STAC and Spookies when they’re buying Flatcap. Trouble is, Flatcap isn’t written under a pen name. Each cover carries my real name.

Pen names create yet another problem for the author: separate accounts. The Handshaker was originally published under the pen name David Shaw, and that meant having two accounts. I already spend a greater part of my day trying to raise visibility (it’s called marketing) of David W Robinson and Flatcap, and if I spend any more time at it, I might as well give up writing altogether. I won’t have time.

And yet other authors seem to manage quite well. My very good friend Lorraine Mace sells children’s books in her real name and hard-boiled crime thrillers as Frances di Plino. But then, Lorraine always was better organised than me.

And perhaps that’s what this rambling and inconclusive post should be telling me. Get organised.

That’ll be the day.