My blog is actually a book - making the most of your backlist blogs

by Deborah Swift

The Blogger

I've been blogging for more than twelve years now, both here, on my own blog and on other people's blogs. The purpose of the blogging was to make people aware of my books by choosing sites that focussed on historical fiction. So the question is, did it drive much traffic to my books, and why only now, after all this time, am I starting to ask these questions?

The Backstory 

Late last year I decided I wanted a new website. My old one was outdated and looked tired, and I wanted to integrate some new ideas like giving away something free to generate traffic. I went to what I thought was a reputable company that specialized in WordPress websites. This was a massive mistake which I only realized once I'd got involved in the re-design and paid a large chunk of deposit. There never seemed to be the same person answering my queries twice, and when one thing was fixed another broke. Eventually after months of wrangling, crashes and disasters I asked someone for a recommendation and a new designer took over - phew! But what neither of us realized was that all the photos and links to my hundreds of blog posts were now missing or dead and didn't transfer over.

They are now lost and can't be reinstated and to individually find the links or pictures for each post is a massive task. Only posts since August 2020 are visible as they should be. Fortunately I had backed up my posts on Authory, (thank God!) but it doesn't save the pictures, so it would still be hundreds of hours of work to reinstate all the pictures, and the posts still be dead links from other websites. So it led me to the question of was it worth doing and...

Who reads blogs?

I decided to look at how many hits I got on my blog posts and the results were depressingly low. Mostly in single figures. I host blog tours on my blog for other Historical Fiction writers, and these posts were also getting very few hits, despite my desperate tweeting. I began to wonder if I should blog at all, and what was the point of writing stuff no-one would read. Certainly each post took hours of my time to write or set up, for the benefit of a handful of people who my Amazon rankings showed, probably never went on to buy a book. Supposedly traffic 'raises awareness', but what use all this awareness was, and how to cost it into my precious time, was debatable.

The Eureka moment - it's all writing

Following the 'lost blog post' disaster, I copied all the posts from Authory into one document. It was then that I realised - hey, it's all writing! This might seem obvious, but its not until you have more than 100,000 words in front of you that you realise you have produced a substantial body of work. I decided to divide this output into themes, and found I had many posts on the craft of writing, and even more posts on themes around the 17th Century. I began to collate them into e-booklets which could be given away and the first one on writing historical fiction is now available for free to anyone who wants to download it on Bookfunnel. It is a rough and ready document, not to be published or sold, but is there for anyone who wants to read it. The joy of it is that I can just give away this material, and it can have a second life.

How to do this if you want to have a go

First of all, it costs nothing - all the programmes to do it are free. The first collection  - Historical Fiction: 30 Posts on the Craft of Writing was made up as a simple Word Document. (I used the standard Headings function to make sure it would have a Table of Contents when converted.) 

The booklet is an hour's worth of e-reading and just over 20,000 words long, so the posts are in bite-size chunks. I made it into epub and Mobi (for Kindle) files using Calibre, and then made the simplest possible ebook cover in Canva. The whole thing took me a day to do. Yesterday eight people downloaded it. Yes, I know that's not very many, but there are links in it to my books - and who knows, maybe I'll be lucky and sell some! And instead of the posts being lost or never looked at again, they are having new eyes on them. In the next few weeks I'll do the second hour's worth of posts in another booklet to give away. What's more, it feels good to produce something from all those hours of work.

The Pay Off

Because I can see that there is the potential for another booklet on writing, and at least three on historical snippets of the 17th Century, it has re-enthused me to blog. If no-one reads the posts, well it's still writing. I love to write about the craft of writing, and each post goes to make up a larger body of work, which at some time, might become another free booklet that I can give away. The fact the posts might become something bigger has made me keen to write more of them. Because these are not 'officially published' and free I feel no pressure to make sure they are perfect. It is more important to get the work out there to be read.

My next booklet will probably be one called something like 'The 17th Century Miscellany' and will include many posts from this blog, my own blog and other places where I've blogged on history. I look forward to giving it away! If you're reading this, perhaps you've a collection of posts that can be made into a booklet?

Happy blogging!

Deborah's all new website is at www.deborahswift.com

Find me on Twitter @swiftstory

The Market for Historical Fiction by Imogen Robertson

So this is a question for all the writers, agents and publishers out there. What is the state of the market for Historical Fiction at the moment? 

A Scholar seated at a Table with Books - Rembrandt 1634

I do some reading for The Literary Consultancy when my own deadlines allow, and it’s a question I’m often asked. If I think the manuscript I’ve read is of publishable quality, I’ll say so, but that’s different to saying it will be published. And as to money? Might be two thousand, might be twenty, might be fifty, or one hundred thousand. Or one point five million.

Yes, that just happened. And that’s for a book about a book too (the writing and publishing of Dr Zhivago, We Were Never Here by Lara Prescott). I‘ve chatted to two publishers in the last year who said that writers writing about writing is a terrible idea. I have nodded sagely when they said it too. See, nobody know anything. That phrase by the way is the mantra repeated through William Goldman’s ‘Adventures in the Screen Trade’, which is brilliant and painful in equal measure.

I can say with certainty that there is plenty of excellent, crime, adventure, and literary historical fiction being published. Big names such as Wilbur Smith (full disclosure - I’ve been co-writing with Mr Smith), Alison Weir and Robert Harris, literary luminaries like Julian Barnes and Alan Hollinghurst, master warmongers like Harry Sidebottom and Ben Kane, crime lords - S.D. Sykes, Rory Clements, stonking debuts - Stuart Turton, Imogen Hermes Gower and the consistently excellent Antonia Senior, Katherine Clements, Abir Mukherjee. And many, many more. So the talent is there and the publishers are making sure new books arrive on the shelves every week. An army of book bloggers support and promote the love of fiction and audio book sales are shooting up. So that’s all good.  

The Hangover - Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

I’ve also spent time with various writers sobbing into our pints about advances cut to the bone, shrinking foreign markets and the drop off in the sales of hardbacks. We’re not so much a literary elite, I’m afraid, as Del Boys on the 21st century Grub Street, trying to find alternative ways of making a living, publishing our work and fiercely staking out time to write the stories we want to write, all in the hopes that the next project we spend our blood and treasure on will be the one that breaks through and earns big, big enough to give us a chance to sit back and do more writing rather than ducking and diving. ‘This time next year, Rodney…’ 

We would all like to be able to spot trends and know in advance if a particular book is going to be a massive bestseller. (Ideally, before we write it). But in the end sales are in the lap of the Gods. And yes, I know, marketing spend and being named a lead title can be a huge boost, but we all know a superb book can fail to find readers even when a publisher blows the budget on it. We also know another book, universally rejected, can suddenly find a champion and snowball into a huge success. An author whose last book broke sales records sees the next one limp out into the daylight and then retreat, unremarked. It’s the cover, the subject, Brexit, the TV deal, the lack of a TV deal. We can always find reasons for the success or failure of any book after the fact. And we know (now) the moment everyone is in the pub saying that historical fiction is an impossible sell right now, and for God sake, don’t write about writers, is the moment someone lands a 1.5 million deal for doing just that. Nobody knows anything.

BUT

Rules are made to be broken, even the ‘nobody knows anything’ rule. I do believe no writer or publisher ever found fresh markets without being bold about what they write and publish. That doesn’t mean you have to live on soup in a bothy until your masterwork is complete, or hire the Natural History Museum for a launch party and buy advertising space on the side of a bus. It means we need to keep finding stories, places and times which ignite our passions and encourage new writers to do the same. 

So this is what I'm saying to myself and anyone else who wants to listen at the moment: Be bloody minded. Don’t try and chase a market, write the story you can’t let go off even if it goes against the current shibboleths, and find a way to pay the mortgage round the edges if you have to. Be wise about your money on the occasions it does turn up. 

Like, I spend my PLR income on negronis, but I think that is wise. 

Triumph of Bacchus Diego Velazquez 1628

So I think the market for historical fiction is… there. That’s probably all we can ever say to anyone, and it might have to be good enough. 

www.imogenrobertson.com

The Good Book - Federico Zandomeneghi 1897

There's nothing much happening in history... by Eve Edwards

This is not so much a post about history but about the vagaries of publishing historical fiction for a younger reader.  You see, I always ask my agent and publishers for feedback after they've been to Bologna and Frankfurt, usually prefaced by the question 'what's the big trend?'.  I've been doing this long enough to know that the publishing trade gets VERY excited VERY briefly about the next big thing.  We've had wizards, vampires, dystopian, New Adult, now it's real life stories in the style of John Green that are apparently the BIG THING.  Oh yes, and everyone wants middle grade fiction.  YA is out.

And historical fiction?  Well, there's not much happening there apparently.

But like Ozymandias, each conquering trend has its day and disappears into the sands of publishing.

There is nothing like a book fair to get the gossip going.  Even my agent and editors reporting back do so with a roll of the eyes, meaning they know the trend is probably already on the out by the time they are talking about it.  I treat it somewhat like checking the barometer, giving it a tap to see if the weather is going to be fair.  I wouldn't make decisions about what I'm going to write next based on it.

However, I think it is true to say that historical fiction for a YA audience has been struggling for some time, quite unlike the adult market for the genre.  A few core titles are considered enough by many schools to cover key topics - two of the main ones my own children have been handed are produced by Michael Morpurgo, War Horse and Private Peaceful.  (And I'm not envious - really I'm not ;-) )  I find this interesting as I also write for the thriller, fantasy and contemporary romance genres. I have noticed a marked difference in the kind of readers I get for my YA historical.  Dare I say it but they are the kind of girl I was when I was at school: usually bookish, probably quite mature for their age, and keen readers.  They've hunted the books down, rather than seen them on a table in a bookshop or talked about on Goodreads.  I'm the same writer under another pen name doing the same kind of 'reading level' work in contemporary romance but there I get everyone, from the girls who read everything to the ones who rarely pick up a book.  So is it that history just doesn't capture this age group?

This is where I welcome your views.  You see, I love history so I can't see how it might come across as obscure or not their thing.  Complex fantasy epics are taken in their stride.  If you can follow the Byzantine plot Game of Thrones you can probably read War and Peace, let alone most YA historical fiction.  So I refuse to believe younger readers can't manage them.

So perhaps it is part of the decline of a reading culture?  I think there might be more in this.  The English literature syllabus seems to have narrowed to a very few channels and I can't see much encouragement in the history syllabus for reading historical novels (and here I speak as a parent as I've got children doing A levels and GCSEs in the subject).  Outside of school, there is little suggestion in culture that history might interest teens unless it is wrapped up in some kind of fantasy.  Historical drama evokes Downton Abbey and the older age group of audience.  Dr Who does something to remind younger viewers that history can be adventure but there has been a lack of decent historical plots of late (Elizabeth I in the 50th Anniversary - oh dear...)

And finally, there is the innate conservatism in a very difficult publishing world.  No one wants to commit resources to a part of the market which hasn't performed that well, forgetting that successes are unpredictable and can spring from anywhere. In recent times, both The Book Thief and The Boy in Striped Pyjamas have done well for new second world war stories. It might be that in a few years time the next Potter/Twilight/Hunger Games comes wearing an historical costume just as Gladiator shocked movie studios by turning into a hit.

Has anyone else heard differently?  And those of you in the teaching profession or librarians, do you find teens are happy to pick up historical fiction?  Could the presentation be changed to help break down that barrier if it exists?

My next book, Dawn (Penguin), is YA and set in WWI, concluding the two book series on the war as seen by teenagers.  Out 3 July.

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.

Bring out your dead! Or, a new kind of ghost-writer – Michelle Lovric

My subject in this Dickensian week is the ghosts of books past. But first we must take a detour into the construction industry.

Eighty per cent of the energy that a building will use over its lifetime has already been spent in its construction. Therefore architects and green-minded planners are now looking at refurbishing old urban buildings rather than demolishing them. City centres, it turns out, can be a better shade of green than the new so-called ‘green towns’. Moreover, in a city, the energy expended on lighting and infrastructure reaches a higher density of people. If you righteously inhabit a ‘green town’, you still have to get in your car and drive into a real dirty old town to work, shop or be entertained. (Even your cardboard coffin will have to be carried in a large petrol-guzzling vehicle to your green burial site.) If you live in a city centre, you can walk everywhere or use greenish public transport.

So how does this relate to books and publishing? And ghosts, for that matter? Well, in the rush for absolute novelty, I worry about the way many publishers forget their existing buried treasure. Why are so many fantastic books out of print? Why are so few relaunched? Or reprinted? How many authors are dropped at the first sign of sales becalming, with no questions asked about an ill-advised cover or a marketing non-event? Instead, some publishers are addicted to the Next Big Thing. Books are being put in their graves prematurely, in my opinion, and coffin lids are being nailed down on characters who are still breathing. The squirrel who forgets where his nuts are buried is likely to go hungry – some publishers could perhaps nourish their bottom lines if they remembered and dug up some of the valuable material they have ‘laid down’. I hasten to add that many publishers do keep their backlists alive, and all power to their elbows in this.

As an anthologist, I was always dismayed when publishers still claimed permission fees for extracts from books that had been out of print for more than fifty years. I could never be sure if these fees were precisely legal, or if the authors/estates would ever get a taste of them. But I did know that I’d be in time-wasting trouble if I didn’t pay them, so I did. And every time a publisher took my money for one of these forgotten books, I had a faint hope that some fresh, young, bibliocurious editor might descend to the cobwebbed vaults and view the mildewed file copy that (I hoped) they’d kept down there.

But what I really hoped was that the cub editor would think, ‘This is damned fine stuff. And still of interest. We should reprint this little masterpiece! It’s still just as good as it always was. One short life was not enough for it.’

And then we would see a return on a book’s energy – the writing, editing and designing: the eighty per cent of energy required in its original construction. Even if one or all three were tweaked a little to accommodate modern taste, and yes, that pernicious desire for something new, such books would still be greener than anything manufactured from scratch.

I’m not saying that new books should be banned. Quite the opposite. I want all deserving writers to be able to eat and buy a new pencil from time to time. No, what I am proposing is a new kind of ghost-writing: new books could be TWINNED with revivals of old, wonderful books on similar themes. The living authors could talk about the dead ones. The dead ones would talk, subliminally, to readers’ memories. Living and dead authors could go on virtual tours together.

Wouldn’t I love to be lit-twinned with Rhoda Broughton, or Augustus Sala? My latest, Talina in the Tower, is about a Venetian girl who turns into a cat in Victorian times. Therefore I’d love to twin it with the immortal (yet out of print) CATS: Their Points and Classification with Chapters on Feline Ailments and Their Remedies. How to Train for Performing Tricks, etc, by W. Gordon Stables, M.D., C.M., R.N.

The title belies the book’s lovely, arch tone, the irrepressible tendency towards anecdote and editorializing. He bemoans the shameful cat show classification ‘cats of no sex’, who are judged on weight alone. He has ideas for training cats to open and close doors, ring the doorbell and do somersaults on request. He tells horror stories of people who leave cats shut up in houses to starve to death while they go on holiday. Dr Stables has a great cat lexicon too. I have never seen it written before that cats say ‘Wurram’ – but they absolutely do. As for discipline, he admits that ‘there are times when even the most highly-trained cat will deviate from the paths of decency’. In this case, he unfashionably recommends a little bit of whalebone to switch the offender several times across the fore-paws or the tops only of the ears before turning her out of doors. Obviously I vehemently disagree with any corporal punishment for cats. All the better! Dr Stables and I can debate the matter with passion.

Then there’s the genial William Dean Howells, who lived in my own house in Venice at exactly the time that Talina in the Tower is set. His book, Venetian Life, is one of the most charming volumes written by a foreigner about the city. Venetian cats receive some honourable mentions. We’d have plenty to talk about, he and I.

So I’d be happy to go on tour with Dr Stables and Mr Dean Howells, answering questions about all things cat and all things Victorian Venice. I don’t believe the revived sales of their books would damage mine.

Does this sound like ‘Bring out your dead!’?

Is it a crazy idea?

And so was separating rubbish.

And so were energy-saving light bulbs.

And so were hyper-sexed thousand-year-old vampires.

So, no publisher-bashing comments please, as that’s not what this blog is about. Without publishers, there’d be no books at all. Much more interesting is this question: If you’re a writer, who would your writerly ghost-twin be? Who do you imagine opposite you in the Edinburgh yurt, swigging that last medicinal glass before your minder takes you up on stage? Or on that train to the school visit? Or sitting beside you signing at a bookshop?



Michelle Lovric’s website
Talina in the Tower is published by Orion Children’s Books

self-assembly polystyrene coffin prop from Yourspares