Week Forty-One: When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Self-Publish

I have a new book out.

It's a thriller: ALL YOUR SECRETS.

Much like my other thrillers, this is a full-length psychological thriller, with a twisty page-turning plot and a strong local atmosphere.

But unlike my other thrillers, this novel is self-published.

Why?

ALL YOUR SECRETS (UK Amazon)

Apparently the setting wasn't what my publisher wanted. My other two thrillers were set in Cornwall. They wanted a thriller set in London. This new book is set in the gorgeous South of France, a place I have visited many times and with which I have a natural affinity.

Last summer, I submitted two synopses and a 25,000 word sample of my South of France thriller to my publisher. Following a miscommunication of some kind, I mistakenly thought my editor was excited by the sample I'd sent and was planning to acquire the book.

Some months passed while I knuckled down and finished the book before my contract arrived. (Which is something many full-time writers end up doing, working on a book before the contract arrives.) I loved every minute of it though; it was a delightfully tactile, sensual book to write, and deeply sinister too.

In December, a few thousand words shy of finishing ALL YOUR SECRETS, I asked again about the contract. It was only at this point that I discovered my publisher did not want the book.

However, I received a contract for the other synopsis. The book I had not written. With only 8 weeks in which to write it, apparently.

I did the only thing I could.

I wrote the new book. And I did it within the required 8 weeks. It's currently at copyedit stage and will be published in January 2018.

Bizarrely, this is not unusual in publishing. It's the kind of thing that happens to writers all the time. Talented writers. Hard-working writers. Established writers. Full-time writers with bills to pay and no other way to pay them but through their own skill with a keyboard.

Most established writers can tell publishing stories to make your toes curl. Trilogies that flop and are abandoned as a lost cause, leaving one or even two books unpublished. Novels that are commissioned in conversation - like my own bestselling thriller, GIRL NUMBER ONE - and then rejected later, leaving a writer stuck with a book written to a very specific brief that they now need to sell elsewhere. Not always easy.

In the same vein, I was once tipped the wink at an editor-author coffee meeting that my latest outline wouldn't be acquired unless I converted the setting to Faeryland, because 'we're desperate for those'. I wrote 50K of the blasted thing before the editor was made redundant. Needless to say, the remaining editors were politely baffled by the Faeryland setting, and my agent was less than impressed too. I never did finish that one. Though maybe one day ...

So two years after I was forced to self-publish GIRL NUMBER ONE (a book rejected by over a dozen publishers, mind you, which subsequently sold 50,000 copies in a few months as a self-published title, hitting #1 in the UK Kindle Chart), I found myself with yet another unwanted novel on my hands.

You'd think I'd have learned my lesson by now. But hope springs eternal!

This time, I was not contractually permitted to offer it to another publisher - not under the name Jane Holland, at any rate, which has become my 'thriller' name.

However, I was given permission to self-publish ALL YOUR SECRETS.

When the going gets tough in this industry, the tough often end up having to self-publish. Not the most ideal situation, especially when a book has been written with a rather different arena in mind. But I have three children to feed and clothe, and this book took about 4-5 months to write and edit - an expensive time investment for me - so heigh-ho, self-publishing it was.

I proofed the book, made a cover, wrote a blurb, and started telling the poor, long-suffering souls on Twitter that my book was about to go live.

I had a pleasing number of pre-order sales. Those are my fans, and I thank them wholeheartedly for sticking with me!

Then it came out.

A self-published novel that isn't priced at 99p - instead, it's a modest £1.99 - is not the easiest thing in the world to persuade random punters to buy. Nor do I have the surprise of writing in a new genre to help me, as I did with GIRL NUMBER ONE.

So any sales you can waft my way will be hugely appreciated. This book has been written with all my skill and knowledge behind it, the experience of writing several dozen novels, and I feel certain many thriller-reading people will find pleasure in it.

I thank you all in advance for any retweets or Facebook shares or reviews or other promotional help you can offer this new and highly atmospheric book-baby of mine ... The blurb follows.

Thank you!

Jane x

ALL YOUR SECRETS (Amazon UK)

What happens when love is perfect? Too perfect?

When her glamorous cousin Emily drowns, Caitlin flies to the South of France for her funeral, full of bitter-sweet nostalgia for the summer they spent there as wild teenagers. Her aunt Tamsin, once a film star, now suffering from dementia, invites Caitlin to stay at her chateau high above the beach at Cap d'Antibes.

Suddenly the gorgeous, charming Robin is back in touch, son of a Hollywood film producer. 

Tamsin warns her to stay away from him, but Caitlin can't resist her teenage crush. Soon the pair are falling madly, deeply in love ... all over again.

But something doesn’t feel right. What was Robin’s relationship with her beautiful cousin? And what is her aunt trying so desperately to conceal? The chateau on the Cap may be beautiful, but it hides dark secrets.

Was Emily's death an accident? Or could it have been murder?

-- ALL YOUR SECRETS is an atmospheric psychological thriller that simmers with tension and will keep you guessing, from the bestselling author of GIRL NUMBER ONE and LOCK THE DOOR.

Week Thirty-Four: The Ups and Downs of A Writing Career

This time last year, I was in a bad spot, career-wise.

I was out of contract with all the publishers with whom I had previously worked, my debut thriller had been rejected by multiple publishers, and I was only surviving by self-publishing romcom novellas under the name Beth Good.

We were forced to leave our lovely rented farm on the edge of Bodmin Moor and rent a very small terraced house in a Devon town instead, jettisoning over half our possessions and having to part with some of our beloved pets in the process. It was a traumatic time. I started editing other people's manuscripts freelance, but the workload was heavy and the money not quite good enough to get us through. I decided that if I couldn't make money from writing or editing, I would have to get a 'proper' job again. But as I was home educating my kids, it would have to be an evening or night job. Which would mean no time left at all for writing. Or sleeping, in fact!

In the run-up to my job search, I self-published my debut thriller GIRL NUMBER ONE. I hoped for the best, but planned for the worst, in other words.

GIRL NUMBER ONE came out in late September 2015.

After a sluggish start, it began to climb the charts.

In mid-December, it hit the Number 1 spot in the UK Kindle chart, and stayed there nearly a week, selling many thousands of copies.

By then, it had already excited huge amounts of interest and comment, and had come to the attention of an editor at Thomas & Mercer, an Amazon Publishing imprint. I contacted my agent and signed with AP for a life-saving two-book deal. My second psychological thriller, LOCK THE DOOR, is already finished and on pre-order: it will be published January 2017. 

Today, August 9th 2016, a new, revised edition of GIRL NUMBER ONE has been published in digital form. A gorgeous paperback edition will follow in September.

Following on from that two-book deal, possibly because GIRL NUMBER ONE's meteoric rise had come to the attention of the team I had worked with previously at Hodder & Stoughton, I was approached by that publisher to write a Christmas book for them. That story is BERTIE'S GIFT, a whimsical, feel-good adult read about a Beagle on a mission to save both his sister and his adopted family.

BERTIE'S GIFT was a delightful change from my thriller writing - I had to write it almost in tandem with LOCK THE DOOR, sometimes morning for one book, afternoon for the other. It will be published in hardback and ebook on October 20th 2016. It is coming out under yet another pen-name, this time Hannah Coates, in order to differentiate it from my other writing.

I am now working on a third thriller, with a side venture into a brand-new romcom for my Beth Good persona, as I know many readers have been waiting for a new one from me. We are back on our feet financially, and I have been able to abandon the idea of getting a 'proper' job in order to pay the bills. Thanks to the fantastic success of GIRL NUMBER ONE, which came utterly out of the blue, I already have a 'proper' job as a full-time professional writer again - and am very, very happy indeed.

So this post is not only an indication of the often terrifying vicissitudes of a writer's life - even a relatively successful writer - but also a massive thank you to everyone who bought, read and/or supported GIRL NUMBER ONE.

However hard a writer works, they can't get anywhere without readers, and I have been incredibly lucky to have such loyal readers, many of whom have followed me from historicals to contemporary romcoms to thrillers. And hopefully will now follow me to feel-good adult doggy fiction as Hannah Coates!

Thank you, and happy reading!

Week Twenty-Four: Writing My First Contemporary Thriller

Those who know me well will agree that I am a genre-hopper. I hop from one genre to another with scant regard for market positioning, or what publishers and retailers like to call 'author branding'. This is one explanation why, despite having written several dozen novels, I am not a star in any one genre. (I will leave the other possible explanations for you to guess at on your own.) But that does not mean I would not like to be!

About a year and a half ago, while I was still knee-deep in an historical fiction series, it was suggested to me by a senior editor that I should write a contemporary thriller. A crime novel, but not a police procedural. Being a rabid fan of Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels, I embraced the idea with enthusiasm and excitement. At last, a chance to show what I could achieve as a contemporary writer within a popular mass-market genre.

But of course it's also an over-crowded market, and the novel I produced over the next year did not appeal to the editor who first suggested it. It went through several laborious redrafts, then was sent out to other publishers. Nobody wanted it. The rejections differed as to detail but the overall message was the same. Like the three bears' porridge, it was too hot, too cold, too salty, too sweet etc. for the market.

The project was then handed back to me, with the suggestion that I should self-publish.

To say I was disappointed is grossly to understate the matter. It was a serious blow to my self-confidence as a writer, especially as I was by that stage out of contract with all my publishers. After some years in traditionally published historical fiction, that book represented my calling-card script as a contemporary writer. A calling-card that had been handed back to me by a disdainful majordomo, and the door slammed in my face.

After some time nursing my wounds - I wish I could say 'downing tequila on a desert island' but I'm not that cool - I sorted through all the rejections I had seen and picked out the main thrust of their issues. I worked out how I could rewrite the book to 'fix' it. One key change was making my main protagonist older. A simple enough change, on the face of it. But of course that involved rewriting every single page of the book, because in the process of recasting her character, her narrative voice had to change, to mature, to harden. Rather like me as a writer ...

I really wish I had not chosen to write this scary scene so late at night ...

The main differences I noted between writing GIRL NUMBER ONE (the title of my thriller) and my previous novels, mostly either historical fiction or romances, were as follows:

Pace - a contemporary thriller is fast and furious. It has to be, to deliver the requisite thrills and keep an easily distracted reader turning the page. So introspection and description take a back seat, and action comes to the fore. The verb becomes king here, the adjective and adverb have to be rooted out. Not 'I thought' or 'I saw' (I chose a first person narrator) but 'I did'. Dialogue can take the place of internal monologue, which means it has to work harder, to underline character, drop clues and turn the plot.

Tone - the narration of a contemporary thriller is terse, or at least that's how I prefer it. It's also highly self-aware. This is someone who observes everything around them, whether a trained or natural detective, constantly noticing, examining, deciphering, unravelling, understanding. And often without an excess of emotional response, as emotion tends to hamper that process. (Emotional response being the sine qua non of the romantic novel, I often found myself working at the opposite end of the narrative spectrum to my other books.)

Character - the characters in a contemporary thriller are not, in general, those you might encounter in other genres (though that rather depends on the writer). They have to be boldly drawn, sometimes even starkly and at speed, because a thriller is about action and reaction, rather than a leisurely character study. But the main protagonists also need qualities that others around them noticeably lack: massive intelligence, strength, resolve, courage, generosity, kindness, plus a few special skills. They must leap off the page without being caricatures, and linger in the reader's memory, not least because some of them may become suspects later.

Where the narrator is concerned, assuming that is your chief protagonist, we need the reader to care about that person deeply. Otherwise, there will be little reason to keep reading when he or she is put in danger. Such a character must be sympathetic and strongly-drawn enough to elicit an emotional response from the reader. By which I really mean, he or she must feel true.

Truth - a contemporary thriller should seem realistic, even more so than romantic or historical fiction, and the actions of its characters must be completely believable too, even when your plot is unlikely or even preposterous at times. So how to achieve this? In the same way as a sci-fi or fantasy novel, you have to anchor the world of your novel somewhere that feels very realistic, and therefore works to distract the reader from the unlikeliness of your plot.

In my case, I decided to follow the well-worn advice, write what you know, and achieve narrative truth that way. So I based the world of my debut thriller on the Cornish village in which I was actually living at the time of writing. I was then able to describe, with absolute accuracy and consistency, the village layout and its surrounding area, the views, the flowers in bloom at each season, the likely weather, the very feel of the air ... A bit of a cheat, perhaps, but I wanted to nail that 'truth' element of the thriller first-time-out.

Did I manage to nail it though?

The proof of the thriller is in the reading, and I hope you will give mine a shot. You can find a free sample or buy GIRL NUMBER ONE on Amazon. Digital only at the moment, with paperback POD to follow.

GIRL NUMBER ONE Amazon US

GIRL NUMBER ONE Amazon UK

UPDATE: GIRL NUMBER ONE is currently at #3 in the UK Kindle Store (as of December 3rd 2015)