News from the Farm!
2020 limps slowly towards its inevitable demise, and since it's December, it must be time for a newsletter!
Welcome once more to my (allegedly) monthly collection of random thoughts. Perhaps you're scratching your head and wondering how on earth this nonsense got into your inbox. It's possible you were web surfing drunk one weekend and clicked a link. Or maybe you have friends who like to play pranks. Whatever reason, panic not. You can opt out at any time, either by replying to the newsletter or clicking the unsubscribe link at the end. To be honest, I probably won't even notice you've gone.
The reply email address comes straight to me, so if you've any burning questions you want to ask, observations you want to make, offers of film production or the like, feel free to get in touch. I try to answer every email that needs answering, even if it sometimes takes me a while. Oh to have minions to do all these things for me.
But if you do get in touch, for whatever reason, please spare a thought for my inbox and delete the contents of the original email (this newsletter) that appends itself to your message. My poor old Mac Mini is getting old, and struggles with multiple large files.
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One Good Deed
This book is still available for free for anyone looking for something to read. Putting it all into one easily-downloadable file is still on my to do list. Sorry about that.
After the last newsletter someone got in touch, either by email or on the twitters, to tell me they'd managed to create an epub file. Unfortunately, the message disappeared soon after and I couldn't find out who to respond to. Whoever it was, thank you for doing that, but before I make the book available that way I'd like to give it a thorough once over for typos and other errors, since it's never been properly edited. It's finding the time to do that rather than creating the epub file that is the problem!
One Good Deed - landing page
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Competition Time!
It's not long now until book eleven (eek!) in the Inspector McLean series - What Will Burn - is published, and my lovely publishers Wildfire have produced some fine proofs to go out to reviewers. They've also sent me a pile of them, and since I already know what happens in the book, it makes sense for me to pass them on to you.
The usual rules apply - I take all the names of people subscribed to the newsletter, put them in my magic hat* and draw out the winners. So without further ado, here you lucky people are:
1 - Margaret Duncan
2 - Kayleigh John
3 - Iain Cochrane
4 - Lynda-Elizabeth Stewart
5 - Siobhan Staples
6 - John White
I have emailed the winners, but if for some unspecified reason you've not received your notification but your name is up above, please get in touch and let me know. For those of you who didn't win, I'm sorry! I'd love to give everyone a free copy, but I suspect Wildfire might object.
There will be another draw for proofs next month however, so don't unsubscribe in disgust at not winning this time (unless you really want to).
What Will Burn is published in Hardback, eBook and Audio in the UK and in eBook in the US and Canada on February 18th 2021
*not an actual hat so much as an excel spreadsheet and random number generator. |
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My lovely publishers have redesigned the cover of Cold As The Grave to better match the feel of the next two books, Bury Them Deep and What Will Burn. You may recall that the first eight Inspector McLean books were published by Penguin, but I moved publisher after The Gathering Dark.
Publishers do like to play around with cover designs - Penguin did similar for the McLean books when they decided to bring out Prayer for the Dead in hardback first. Prior to that, they were paperback only. For us authors it's usually a good thing, as it shows the publisher is still putting effort into selling your back catalogue. For readers, and particularly those who like an ordered bookshelf, it's something of a mixed blessing. There's something very satisfying about having a whole series, neatly lined up and all following the same design.
These three will all sit nicely together though, along with book twelve once I've written it! I'm delighted with what the cover designers have done. They are some of the many unsung heroes of publishing and deserve much greater recognition for their work.
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Writing News
It's been a strange old month, writing-wise. I'd intended to use the impetus of nanowrimo to get a good chunk of Con Fairchild book three done, but as ever life got in the way.
I'm a big fan of nanowrimo, even if I've never quite managed to do it myself. If you don't know what it is, then briefly, a challenge to write 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November - national novel writing month. Now, I realise 50,000 words is at best a very short novel, and there's a lot more to writing a book than simply grinding out words or chasing word counts. But it's equally true that writing a novel requires a certain amount of dedication (or pig-headed obstinacy depending on who you ask), and sometimes you need a little encouragement to reach the necessary level of focus. There are as many ways to write a novel as there are novels, but I can assure you endless procrastination is not one of them.
Con book three is coming along, but I needed a bit of impetus and November was it. And then my final proof edits on What Will Burn arrived, so I had to put writing to one side and re-read the whole novel one last time.
I'm still on schedule to reach my target of a finished manuscript by the end of the year. Like most of my first drafts it will be a hot mess in need of a damn good brushing down with a Perth pin comb once it's done. But that's another thing they don't tell you about writing novels - what comes out in the first draft is nothing like the book you take off the shelf (or load into your eReader) and read. It's the redrafting and honing and polishing that make a book good, and you can't do any of that until the first draft is done.
Long time followers of my rambling here in the newsletter and elsewhere will know that I'm not good at titles. There's a reason I've been referring to this one as Con Book Three, and that's because I haven't got anything else to call it yet. I am, however, tentatively toying with the idea of Nowhere To Run. It fits in with the other two - No Time To Cry and Nothing To Hide - and even sort of fits in with the themes of the book, but it has been used before, several times.
There is no copyright on titles, and nothing to say you can't use the same one as someone else. There are good reasons for avoiding it, though. For starters you don't want someone buying the other book by mistake, and it's never a good look to be seen as passing your work off as that of someone more famous or successful. Generally speaking, it's less of a problem if the copied title is for a book in a different genre or published a long time ago and not particularly well known any more. Nowhere To Run is the title of a novel by CJ Box published in 2011, a short story published by Rachel Amphlett this year, and also a movie starring Jean Claude Van Damme. Of those three, I'd be most concerned about treading on Rachel's toes, but given how seldom my title choices make it through to publication, I'll not worry about it just yet.
US and Canadian eBooks!
The multi-talented JT Lindroos, whose cover design work I've been using since the beginning of my self-publishing adventures almost a decade ago, has taken my two covers for the US editions of Cold As The Grave and Bury Them Deep and sprinkled them with magic pixie dust. (See, it's not just mainstream publishers who like to fiddle around with cover design!) The results are rather fine.
The reason I made the original versions myself was because JT was busy moving not just to a new house, but an entirely new country. I needed something as a stopgap until the move was finished and he was settled in. I think you'll agree that these two covers, even though they use the same photographs as my efforts, look so much more professional.
You shouldn't judge a book by its cover, of course. But everyone does. When I first began self-publishing, I looked at some of the cover efforts on offer and couldn't help thinking that if they were any indication of the writing inside then I'd steer well clear. I've written about my early self-publishing experiences before - you can find some articles and interviews on the website if you're really interested - and I stand by my original advice that, while you shouldn't spend silly money on producing your self-published books, what money you do spend should go on professional cover design and whatever editorial input you can afford. To which end, here's the cover for the US/Canada edition of What Will Burn, which will be out at the same time as the UK edition (although ebook only, sadly). Gorgeous, innit!
Clicking on any of the images will take you to the book's page on my website, where purchase links can be found for as many different versions and markets as I can track down.
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