Scheherazade's tips for surviving 1001 nights as an author - Katherine Roberts

Scheherazade: 19th century painting by Sophie Anderson

Let me introduce you to Scheherazade, the Persian princess who bought us the 1001 enchanting tales more popularly known as the Arabian Nights.

Some of you will have met her before. She was quite famous in her day, and many of her stories such as Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Sinbad the Sailor and Aladdin and the Magic Lamp have become classics.

Her own story is no lesser tale. Legend tells us that when Prince Shahryar was jilted by his first wife, he declared that no other woman would ever treat him that way again. To make sure of this, he bedded virgins and then ordered their execution the very next morning. Once word got around, most girls were understandably terrified of being summoned to the prince’s bedchamber. Scheherazade, however, saw this as a golden opportunity.

Knowing the prince’s love of fairytales, each night Scheherazade told him a captivating story created from her extensive knowledge of legend and myths, always stopping just short of the ending. If the prince wanted to hear the end of the story, he had no choice but to spare her life so that she could continue the tale the next night. This went on for 1001 nights, during which time the prince fell in love with Scheherazade and made her his queen.

It’s clear Scheherazade had invented the ultimate serial, which is still a popular form for children’s fiction today. But serials are also popular among adults. In the Victorian era, novels were tested on the public in serial form first, with episodes appearing in the newspapers and periodicals of the day. For example, Charles Dickens shot to fame after publishing serial episodes of the Pickwick Papers in 1836. Alexandre Dumas originally wrote The Three Musketeers as a serial, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes for serialization in the Strand magazine.

These days, you’re more likely to find serials on TV in the form of soaps. However, the ebook format seems to be encouraging a revival of the serial in literature, with successful authors captivating their readers by publishing novella-length episodes of around 20,000 words at regular intervals. Later, these short books can then be bundled into a boxed set for the full-length novel experience. Freed from the constraints of publishing a paper edition for trade distribution, such ebook serials can appear over a course of months, or even weekly or daily, mimicking the nightly tales of Scheherazade.

Ali Baba plots his next move in the thieves' den.

Scheherazade was the ultimate debut novelist of her time - virgin, highly motivated, intelligent, educated, and beautiful with it (just look at that portrait!). She literally put her life on the line every time she opened her mouth to begin a new story. Many newer novelists publishing today will no doubt identify with her. But, having lost my publishing virginity, survived my 1001 nights as an author and divorced the prince, is it possible to create a serial the other way around?

As an experiment with this form that is both ancient and new, I am in the process of dividing up my 150,000-word Alexander the Great novel “I am the Great Horse” into ten episodes of around 15,000 words each, aimed at a slightly younger readership than the original novel with the addition of historical anecdotes at the end of each chapter, bonus stories by the other horses and illustrations. These ten short books will be published initially in e-format between now and Christmas, with print editions following once all the episodes are done. So if you know a young reader with a Kindle (or Kindle app on their phone), I'd love to know what they think!

FREE DOWNLOAD TODAY!

ONLY 99c / 77p

These days, if our stories fail to arrive in the marketplace regularly, captivate our readers, and leave them eager and waiting to buy the next one, their authors are seldom put to physical death. But our books might well get the executioner's chop for one reason or another, which can have exactly the same effect on an author’s career. I've heard that a gap of 12 months in New York publishing is enough to kill a career these days. So if this is your first night with the prince, and you’d like to enjoy 1000 more of them while he falls head over heels in love with you, then why not make Scheherazade your role model, too?

Note: 1001 nights = 2 years 9 months, possibly the average length of a debut author's career today? Discuss below!

***

Katherine Roberts won the Branford Boase Award in 2000 for her debut novel Song Quest. She writes history, myth, legend and fantasy for middle grade/teen readers. Find out more at www.katherineroberts.co.uk

The first two titles of the I am the Great Horse Serial are now available for Kindle (other ebook channels coming soon):

1. Prince of Macedonia * FREE DOWNLOAD TODAY *
2. Treachery at Thebes

The Public Part of UK Author Earnings - Katherine Roberts

April 6th marks the start of a new financial year, and I have a new History Girls post to write... so you can probably guess what this one is going to be about! In the same way that I find it impossible to create anything while I'm thinking about money, I also find it impossible to blog about creativity. Instead, I thought I'd show you a graph from my finance file that counts as vaguely historical since it covers my 14-year career to date (and that feels like a long time in publishing these days).

UK library loans of my books (Year 2000 - 2013)

In case you can't read the figures up the left hand side, these show the approximate lifetime loans for my books. Years are across the bottom, and book titles are written on the curves. Here they all are, listed in order of popularity:

The Great Pyramid Robbery - 56,000 loans (heading off the top of the graph)
Spellfall - 35,800
Song Quest - 28,000
The Babylon Game - 20,000
The Mausoleum Murder - 18,800
The Amazon Temple Quest - 17,200
The Olympic Conspiracy - 15,000
Crystal Mask - 12,900
The Colossus Crisis - 8,000
The Cleopatra Curse - 8,000
I am the Great Horse - 6,800
Sword of Light - 5,500
Dark Quetzal - 5,400
Lance of Truth - 200

Notes:
1) Figures correct to June 2013, as reported by the UK Public Lending Right office.
2) My final two Pendragon titles Crown of Dreams and Grail of Stars are not shown on this graph, since they both published in 2013.
3) Data is not gathered from every library every year. Each year a different sample of UK libraries is taken, and the results are scaled up to account for the whole country - this means it's possible zero loans can show for a book that actually loans quite well in the author's local library, whereas a sample taken from an author's local library where their books are popular might skew figures for that year the other way. (Over time, though, the sampling system should be fair to authors wherever they live.)

You would probably expect books with earlier publication dates to show the most lifetime loans, and indeed my most-loaned title The Great Pyramid Robbery (historical fiction, hooray!) was published back in 2001, while my second most popular title Spellfall (fantasy) was published in 2000. You might also expect books that have had several editions to show more loans than the others, and happily my award-winning debut book Song Quest (currently in its third edition at Catnip, after being first published in hardback by Element and then in paperback by Chicken House) comes in a clear third.

Books only published in the last couple of years will obviously not show many accumulated loans yet, but already the first title of my Pendragon series, Sword of Light (published in 2012 and chosen for the Summer Reading Challenge that year), has performed one of those fascinating crossovers on the graph and is now officially out-loaning the third title of my earlier Echorium Sequence Dark Quetzal (published in 2003).

In fact, if you look carefully at the graph, you'll see several places where my historical titles have overtaken my fantasy titles in the loan stakes, which makes me wonder why children's historical fiction is not easier to place with publishers. On the other hand, this is only a UK graph, and historical books are not popular everywhere. My Echorium Sequence titles (Song Quest, Crystal Mask, Dark Quetzal), which all have surprisingly flat curves on the graph, sold better than their loans suggest particularly in the US. My Seven Fabulous Wonders books on the other hand, even the one shooting off the graph, did not sell in America - or at least only as export copies - since they were not taken on by an American publisher, although they did get translated into several European languages where their historical settings are presumably more familiar with readers.

I find library loans quite interesting, because they are - or used to be - a fairly accurate reflection of print sales, and it's true The Great Pyramid Robbery and Spellfall were my top two selling titles in print. It also used to be that loan figures for a title were higher than the UK print sales, at least in my experience - but lately there's a different pattern emerging, with books selling as many or more copies in print as are being borrowed from libraries. Also, I've had my backlist selling as ebooks with online retailers for a couple of years now, and out of those books I am the Great Horse - although flattening off now on the loans graph - last year outsold the rest of my backlist put together. So perhaps ebooks are taking over where library loans flatten off?

I am the Great Horse - now an ebook

I'll admit the flat part of the curve occurring at a lower rate of loans for each successive book is rather worrying. Is this because of the recent library closures? Cuts to public funding? Or the frustratingly slow period in my career a few years ago? I'd have to compare my graph with other authors' PLR graphs to be sure if it is a trend... but Sword of Light (second curve on the right) looks to be reversing that for me, so perhaps there is some hope yet for my future as an author. Also, this graph shows data from UK public libraries only, and does not include loans from the many excellent school libraries around the country that I know keep copies of my books on their shelves so children can  borrow and read them if they want to. That's a good thought to end on.

Right, that's enough displacement activity! Just got time for a few fun figures to warm up before tackling my accounts...

The reason this graph lives in my finance file is because each one of those loans has earned me between 4p and 6.2p under the Public Lending Right scheme (the rate per loan varies each year). So, over the course of my career to date, working with an average of 5p per loan, my most popular book so far The Great Pyramid Robbery has earned me approximately £2,800 (or £200 per year), and all of my titles added together have earned me a total of  £11,880 (or about £840 per year). I'm always a little uneasy about PLR, since it comes out of people's taxes who might never read books... on the other hand, libraries are one of the public services we pay our taxes for, and there is a cap on payments to limit the burden on the public purse.

Historically, the PLR payment has not always existed for authors, but library loans clearly account for a large section of my readership, as they must do for many other authors. I'd be interested to hear readers' views on whether authors should be paid for these loans, especially if/when ebook lending takes over from print.

***

Katherine Roberts writes historical fiction and fantasy for young readers.

Her latest series the Pendragon Legacy about King Arthur's daughter is now available from Templar in hardcover, paperback or ebook. Meet the heroine Rhianna Pendragon and her friend Prince Elphin of Avalon in the free ebook prequel Horse of Mist.

More at www.katherineroberts.co.uk

The History Girls’ Guide to Becoming an Authoress at the End of the World as We Know It– Katherine Roberts

“May you live in interesting times” is a curse in some circles but, like it or not, authors today are living in very interesting times. There has been some wild speculation about the death of publishing as we know it, the death of printed books, the death of literature, the death of agents, and the death of professional authors (of which mine has been greatly exaggerated). But the only thing that’s really changed is the way a story gets out of the author’s head and into the reader’s head... the writing, publishing and distribution process, in other words. Because stories are same now as they were thousands of years ago, when cavemen told tales around their campfires at night.

So let’s take a look at how an authoress might fare in the different eras of publishing so far (this is a History Girls Guide, so I’m afraid any boys reading this will have to speculate wildly at each stage to see how they fit in). All eras wildly speculative - if you want a more serious history of printing, try Wikipedia.

Campfire Era (3,000 BC-ish)
Training: Woman experiences being dragged off to a cave by her hair to get to know her future husband.
Getting the story down: She can’t write, so she just tells the story around the campfire, explaining to her children how they came into the world in terms of the moon and a stork… a myth.
Debut novel: The day others in her tribe listen to her tale.
Next book(s): If she’s a good storyteller, there will be demand for more.
Authoresses who thrived: We’ve no idea, since nobody could write their name.
Bestseller: cave paintings (mostly of men hunting bison).
Note: In more civilised parts of the world, they had cuneiform writing and could "print" on clay with cylinder seals.

Scroll Era (500BC – 500AD)
Training: Woman probably can’t write herself, so sings or makes up poems and tells stories.
Getting the story down: If she's lucky (and young and pretty), an admiring male scribe writes it down for her.
Debut novel: Handwritten on several scrolls stored in a box.
Next book(s): Ditto. If her books prove popular, more handwritten copies will be painstakingly made of each one.
Authoresses who thrived: Sappho, Scheherazade?
Bestseller: The Iliad.

Dark Era (500 - 1450)
Training: A girl might learn to read and write if she's lucky, though most schools at the time are run by monks for boys.
Getting the story down: by hand.
Debut novel: made into beautifully illuminated books by those monks, or possibly printed using a woodblock technique developed in a more civilised part of the world.
Next book(s): ditto.
Authoresses who thrived: Any ideas? (These were the dark ages, obviously.)
Bestseller: Kama Sutra in more civilised parts of the world. The Bible in Europe (blame those monks).

Print Era (1450 - 1900)
Training: Educated lady of independent means writes a novel beneath her embroidery.
Getting the story down: by hand.
Debut novel: She sends her book to a publisher (often a family friend) or publishes it herself. Paper copies are printed on the new printing presses to sell in physical bookstores.
Next book(s): If her book is popular, more might be printed. Very few authors can afford to publish, so she'll probably continue until she chooses to retire from writing or throws herself into a lake in despair.
Authoresses who thrived: Bronte sisters
Bestseller: Wuthering Heights.

NBA Era (1900 - 1997)
Training: Working woman of limited means writes a novel in her spare time and submits it to publishers’ and agents’ “slush piles”.
Getting the story down: Typewriter and (later) desktop computer.
Debut novel: Publisher draws up a legal contract with the author and prints paper copies to sell in several thriving bookshop chains, hundreds of dedicated independent stores, plus (later) a handful to sell online with the fledgling amazon. The Net Book Agreement ensures that discounting is illegal so all stores have an equal chance at survival and the author gets a fair royalty from sales.
Next book(s): If she continues to deliver good work, the same publisher (or the same editor) continues to publish her new books until she chooses to retire from writing.
Authoresses who thrived: Enid Blyton, Jacqueline Wilson.
Bestseller: The Famous Five.

EPOS Era (1997 - 2010)
Training: Young woman leaves school and goes to University to do a creative writing course and learn the ins and outs of the publishing business. Meets talent-spotting young agent, who gets her a 2-book publishing deal. If she doesn’t get a publishing deal, she’ll probably go on to teach creative writing, or find work as an editor.
Getting the story down: Computer.
Debut novel: Publisher draws up a legal contract with the agent, then prints paper copies to sell in the big bookshop chains, a handful of remaining independents, and online at amazon. Many copies are sold at discount following collapse of the NBA.
Next book(s): If authoress sells enough books (either by good word of mouth and/or large publisher's promotional budget) according to Nielsen's Bookscan figures* based on electronic point of sale, more books are commissioned until she chooses to retire from writing. If she’s not so lucky, her publisher drops her after the first 2 books, and her agent must find another publisher.
Authoresses who thrive: JK Rowling, Celebrities in other fields.
Bestseller: Harry Potter.
*Nielsen Bookscan does not cover all books sold, so some authoresses of this era have good reason to throw themselves into a lake in despair.

Ebook Era (2010 - ????)
Training: Teenagers, housewives, get-rich-quick entrepreneurs, creative writing graduates who didn’t make it out of the starting gates in the EPOS Era, and experienced authors dropped during the EPOS Era who have not yet thrown themselves into a lake in despair, publish worldwide via. amazon's kdp.
Getting the story down and publishing: Computer with an internet connection.
Debut novel: Sold online as an ebook original, mostly at amazon. No copies in physical bookshops (hardly any physical bookshops left anyway).
Next book(s):  If she’s lucky, word-of-mouth spread by online social media sells her books worldwide in enormous quantities, and publishers come to her begging for the paperback rights to sell in the few remaining bookshops.
Authoresses who thrive: E L James
Bestseller: Fifty Shades of Grey.

Obviously there is some overlap where unusual opportunities exist - for example the first Harry Potter was published at the end of the NBA era, allowing the series to build momentum just in time to take off in the EPOS era, and quite a few American authors who could not get published at all in the EPOS era made their name at the start of the Ebook era by jumping straight in. I began my writing career at the start of the EPOS Era (Song Quest, 1999), and am entering the Ebook Era as one of the experienced authors who did not drown herself in despair (though I came quite close to drowning myself in the bath at one point), so your view of the publishing industry might be quite different from mine depending upon when and how you started, and how long you have been writing. And if you're a reader, then maybe you've noticed the falling prices of books and the fact you can't find your favourite author in the shops any more.

Since all the above is of course wild speculation, feel free to add your own theories to the comments below to improve this unauthorised History Girls' Guide to Becoming an Authoress at the End of the World as We Know It... better be quick if you're thinking of becoming one, though, because according to an ancient Mayan prophecy the world might end on 21st December 2012.

***

Katherine Roberts is a children’s author currently published by Templar.

Book 1 of the Pendragon Legacy Sword of Light will be out in paperback and ebook later this month.
Book 2 Lance of Truth publishes in hardcover on 1st October 2012.

Visit Katherine's website for more information www.katherineroberts.co.uk

Visit Katherine's astore to see all her books (EPOS Era and Ebook Era) available online at amazon.