WHY DO WRITERS WRITE?

After a recent talk I gave on writing, some people waited behind to speak with me. More than one of them jokingly remarked, “What do you do with all the money you’re earning?” There are some writers, I know, who write with the hope of making money – a vain enterprise – but the great majority of writers are concerned more about finding readers. One famous writer, whose name I no longer remember, once asked to have written on his tombstone the simple legend, “He wrote only to be read.” Money for him was neither an issue nor an objective.

Reflecting further on this, I have come to the realisation that recognition, or fame perhaps, is little more a motivating factor to the truly committed writer than is money. So what drives the urge? There is simply the creative spirit that desires to bring into being something original, and there is the creative ego that yearns to share that creation. Most writers would confess, if they’re honest, to a secret wish to stand at the shoulders of everyone reading their work, to watch their every facial expression, to decipher their every reaction, and hopefully, to win appreciation, even praise, for their brainchild. So, while writing may appear initially to be a fire in the belly that must need find expression, ultimately it cannot be an end in itself. The creative ego is a hungry beast.

Something of a Dilemma

I am working on my new novel and I'm sitting here wondering about the extent to which loose plotting causes a book to take over the author's thinking rather than the other way round. (Loose plotting is my preferred mode of writing. I like surprises to suddenly emerge from the actions of the characters and I tend to allow these surprises to influence the growth and development of the plot and story.)

I am currently about half-way through writing the third novel of my Inspector Sheehan Mysteries Series in which the Inspector finds himself pitted against a coven of Satanists. It's called The Coven Murders. The book was initially intended to be a straightforward mystery but I have just now completed writing 3500 words that fit more obviously into the supernatural/horror genre. How did this happen? Where do I go from here? I think I'm going to have to run with it and see if I can marry the two genres (mystery and the supernatural) without falling between two stools.

As I have just said, I tend have to let the consequences of character action dictate what happens in my books. All right! That's how it will be. There are going to be some strange, even frightening, episodes in this new book (Black Mass, exorcisms, demons running around!!!) I'll keep you posted about further developments.

Readers' Comments. Don't You Just Love Them

A friend told me recently that my books never failed to disappoint. I hope this was something of a lapsis lingua rather than a deliberate slight. It was, perhaps, somewhat less barbed than Disraeli's comment to an author he had little time for: "I shall lose no time in reading your book." or Ambrose Bierce's less oblique judgement: "The covers of this book are too far apart."

ANOTHER AWARD

I am pleased to record that today I received an email from the New Apple Literary Awards Service that The 11.05 Murders was chosen as the solo "Medalist Winner" in the Mystery category of the New Apple 2016 Summer eBook Awards!

The solo selection is somewhat odd, and I do not have an explanation for it. Others of my books have won similar New Apple Awards and there have always been first, second and third places.

Anyway! Throughout the coming months, New Apple will roll out the prizes associated with the awards, including press releases, tweet blasting, banner advertising, awards certificate, and digital medallions to place on the book's various covers. I look forward to that.

WILDE-LY FUNNY

         I came across this little epigram this morning, written by Dorothy Parker in 1937.

"If, with the literate, I am 

 Impelled to try an epigram, 

 I never seek to take the credit, 

 We all assume that Oscar said it."

        Reading this reminds of a story I once heard about a second-rate writer, well noted for his propensity for plagiarism. He was at a party where Oscar Wilde was holding the guests spellbound with his rhetoric and wit.
       At one point Oscar said something that had everyone laughing and clapping.
       The plagiarist said, "Wonderful, Oscar, I wish I'd said that."
       Wilde replied, "Don't worry, you will."

5th and LAST POST ON WRITING

GETTING PUBLISHED

I will make two totally contradictory points:

One: Getting published is the next best thing to impossible 

Two: Getting published is the easiest thing in the world.

ONE; TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING (impossible)
Many people believe that if the writing is good, the author would be offered a traditional publishing deal. Sadly, that isn’t necessarily the case. So many other factors come into play. Publishers, despite their protests to the contrary, exist mainly for one thing. They want to make money. And that’s not easy for them. There’s an old joke in publishing circles. How do you make a small fortune in publishing? You start with a large fortune. Losing money is a serious possibility if the wrong books are chosen for publishing. Thus they reject anything that doesn’t immediately smell of money. So, if you are an unknown writer trying to break into the business, you are basically on a hiding to nothing, even if you have a good product, You really need to be a film star, a famous sportsperson, a celebrity of some sort, or an already established writer.

Actually, the chances of you even getting to present your MS to a publisher are pretty slim. Nearly all of them require that your work comes to them through an agent. This presupposes that the agent has done all the preliminary dismissing of rubbish and has held on to MSs that might make money. And getting an agent is even harder than finding a publisher. All they want is a guaranteed 15% of a money maker and they are going to waste no time on any MS that doesn’t immediately smell of money.

Submitting your MS
If, by some fluke, you find a publisher who is willing to take what they call unsolicited MSs, there are still many hurdles to cross. Double check their submission guidelines. Follow these exactly or your submission will not even be looked at.

First you have to make the pitch…
- preliminary letter,
- the one page synopsis,
- the three page précis,
- the opening chapters.

All of these preparations have to be top drawer, eye catching , impressive, edited and re-edited, polished and re-polished, even to get a reader to look at the early pages of your book. A poor pitch, your MS doesn’t even get opened. These pages have to grab the publisher’s reader. This is the first impression you will make and the only impression you’ll get a chance to make. So make sure they are compelling and error free.

And don’t think, ‘Ah, well, it gets better as it goes along’. No publisher’s reader will ever reach where it gets better. It has to rock from the word go. The first chapter…the first paragraph…even the first line is vital….If you want to grab a publisher’s reader’s interest, you need to give your opening all your attention and all your skill. So make sure that everything you send is compelling and error free.
Because… very rarely does a publisher’s reader ever go beyond the first 20 pages of any MS. He has usually decided by then whether your MS goes forward to be read by someone else… or dumped on what they call the ‘slush pile’.

Your chances are that fragile, I’m afraid.

TWO; EBOOK PUBLISHING (possible)
This has never been easier and there are some very reputable and reasonably priced firms out there to help you do it. One of the best is the Amazon KDP, i.e., Kindle Direct Publishing for Ebooks.

Getting your book published as an ebook is a matter of getting a few technical details right, getting a cover designed, getting the text properly formatted to fit the Amazon requirements. If you are technologically aware, you could do it yourself and many do. The technologically illiterate, among which number I include myself, generally have to pay someone for such help. But once you have these basics sorted, you can have your book published as an ebook within a couple of days and…suddenly, there it is for sale on Amazon, or Smashwords, or Barnes and Noble, etc.

If you want a paperback version, Lulu and CreateSpace are very well respected POD firms. POD means Print on Demand. Instead of printing an initial run of two or three thousand books, POD firms will only print whatever numbers of books you intend to sell. They will print one; they will print 30; they will print 200. Whatever you order. But they’re American and while you get great value for your purchase prices and high royalties, the postage from the US is crippling. There are very well respected UK firms…two I know about are IngramSpark ( a huge outfit) and XLibris. Pretty much the same services but the postage, I think, should be cheaper. If you are thinking about going this route, do some serious internet research. There is plenty of information out there … and there are plenty of scammers, too. Do your research. Never consider any company until you have googled information about them.

There is also a little known third option

THREE; SMALL PRESS PUBLISHERS.
Agented and unagented submissions are equally considered. If your book is good and well written, and one of the press team falls for it, then you have a great chance of being published. You don’t have to be a celebrity or famous. Small press publisher cover all of the expenses, the authors are involved in every step of the process and their input is highly valued, though devoted committees take on the difficult tasks of copy editing, designing and marketing to achieve professional results. The authors are asked to do a minimal part of the marketing (for example, sharing our social media posts, inviting their circles to the launch, participating in blog tours) and will receive guidance and help every step of the way.
Royalty rates are competitive, and books are systematically available on all three major platforms – printed, digital, and audio – through all major online vendors, such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and distributed by Ingram.

SO, WHICH ROUTE?
My view is that the chances of finding a publisher, or even an agent, are very slim. And even if you find an agent, you might still have to wait forever before you hear back from them. You won’t even know if they are still trying to sell your book or have simply abandoned it. They don’t seem to care about keeping the writer up to speed. You could wait years rather than months for a reply. So, publish your book on kindle while you search for a publisher. even a small press publisher. At least the book will be out there. And you will get the odd sale here and there.
NB. AUTHORS PUBLISH.
There is an e-magazine that offers great help to authors about publishing. It is well worth a look. The address is: http://www.authorspublish.com/Authors Publish

MARKETING
You might improve your chances of getting sales by learning something about marketing…a distressingly time-consuming and frequently frustrating business. But it has to be done. Why?

Well, let me give you an image:
Imagine a huge warehouse full of books, shelves and shelves and shelves with thousands upon thousands of books. You have written a book and it is somewhere in the middle of all of those thousands, actually millions, of books. How would any prospective reader even come across it? What are the odds that any book they lift will be yours? About 4,500,000 to one. Yes, that’s how many books are published by Amazon and those are the kind of odds you face when you throw your book into the kindle ebook store. That’s why marketing, using social media like facebook, blogsites, twitter, professional help, etc., is so essential. You have to do something to get awareness of your book’s existence before the reading public. And that still doesn’t mean that they will actually purchase and read it. And worse still, hundreds of thousands of kindle books are offered at bargain prices, often even free. Thousands of kindle readers buy these books but research has shown that a huge percentage of them end up lying in people’s kindles, never to be read.

One indie writer said, ‘If you self-publish your book, you are not going to be writing for a living. You are going to be marketing for a living. Self-published authors should expect to spend only 10% of their time writing and 90% of their time marketing. There is an awful lot of truth in that…or a lot of awful truth. Marketing is not easy. The sad truth is that marketing your books is far more trouble than writing the books …. and the results are often abysmal.

BUT….. don’t let that deter you. If you do, you don’t really want to be a writer. You write because you have to. And if you have to write, you’ll want to be read. So, self-publish and be damned

HOW DID I FIND A PUBLISHER?
It sure wasn’t easy. I read somewhere a note by a published author who said, ‘If you re not receiving five or six rejection slips a day, then you are not sending out enough MSs’ Lots of well known best seller writers have faced loads of rejections before finally finding a publisher, JK Rowling, Stephen King, James Joyce, George Orwell, Joseph Heller (Catch 22) John le Carré, Herman Melville and loads of famous crime writers.

So, what chance did I have? After loads, literally, of depressing rejections (often accompanied by very positive comments, oddly enough) I finally decided to try a new young, thrusting publishers that I read about. I sent off The Doom Murders. A reader called Bill rejected the book. Surprise! Surprise! When I received his rejection, I read it and said….Uh…well, I had better not relate what I said.. But take my word for it, I said it; I definitely said it.
BUT…. next day, I received a frantic email from the president of the company telling me that she loved the MS and asked me not to send my MS to anyone else until she had time to discuss it with her editorial committee. A week later I received a contract. (She eventually took all my books)

And it’s been great. My books have new professional covers that didn’t cost me a penny although they normally run to about 300 - 500 dollars. Professional editing, usually a minimum of a dollar a page (380 dollars for the average length book I write) expensive … but again at no cost to me. Marketing support…thank God I am not on my own with that any more. Special efforts to get my books on to big-shot distributor networks that I could never hope to reach by myself, e.g. Ingram, one of the biggest distributors in the world. All of my books were posted there just at the end of May and all have just recently been issued in hardback format.
It’s early days yet, First books don’t sell. It takes time to build an audience. A new writer’s first couple of books are unlikely to turn any profit — renowned literary agent Donald Maas talks about a “five book threshold”…so, I’ve still a couple of books to go. But I now have some hope for sales, for recognition, but most important of all to me (and to authors who are serious about their work) they will find me readers. There was a famous writer once, I can’t remember his name, but he said, “All I want written on my tombstone is: He only wrote to be read.” If you’re writing to make money, forget about it. If the money comes, it’s generally a happy accident.

POST No. 4 ABOUT WRITING

WRITING CRIME FICTION

Writing is writing, whether it is about crime or romance. Everything I have been saying applies. But maybe there are one or two other things I might mention.

But first, let me make a confession. When I started my first crime novel, The Doom Murders   I had no idea what I was doing. Any connection I had to crime and criminality boiled down to the one occasion when I had to explain to a cop on the Warrenpoint Road why I was doing 76 miles per hour. Other than that, my connection with crime was nil. I had no idea how to go about writing a murder mystery or how the book should be plotted. I didn’t know how I should leave clues, how to drop in red herrings. I knew nothing of police procedure, police ranks, police stations, investigation procedures, or anything about the kinds of briefings that go on in what are called ‘Incident Rooms’. Yet….The Doom Murders has, to date, garnered over 55 reviews in the USA (most of them 4 and 5 stars), and has won three awards, and I have a number of communications from screen writers and novelists on the USA side, congratulating me on the accuracy and detail of my detective’s investigation procedures. For example, a review from American female crime writer contained this sentence: "The author knows the methodology of a police investigation, as I understand it to be handled in the UK. While I am no expert in law and procedure on the other side of the Atlantic, I am something of an expert on American police procedure, and I found the procedures here believable and enjoyable to read."

As the Americans would say, “Go figure!”

Now all of this might sound like bragging…uh…well...that’s probably because it is bragging. But I need to make an important point. How did all this happen? How could I have gone from abysmal ignorance to this … apparent ... level of expertise? I think you’ll find my answer encouraging. I did only two things and was able to rely heavily on a third.

1.I BOUGHT A LITTLE BOOK barely 150 pages, by Michael O’Byrne (an ex-police officer) called, ‘The Crime Writer’s Guide to Police Practice and Procedure’

2. I PHONED A VERY PLEASANT AND INFORMATIVE WOMAN DETECTIVE SERGEANT at the Newry Police Station who was on duty during a quiet and uneventful evening and who happy to spend an hour on the phone with me answering every question I could think of.

Armed with her answers and O’Byrne’s book, I set off into the unknown with only my imagination, my annoyance at certain religious anomalies that were afflicting the society in which I live, and whatever there was in my head after years of reading crime and thriller novels and watching murder shows on television.

3. I LEARNT TO RELY VERY HEAVILY ON THE INTERNET
I think there’s never been a better time to become a crime writer. With the world of the internet at your beck and call, you can find the answer to hundreds of issues and ensure complete authenticity in all that you write…provided that you check your sources and don’t start making stuff up.

TIPS ON WRITING A CRIME NOVEL

Crime is one of the most popular genres and thus a good area to be writing in…except that the competition is fierce. I have just time to make a couple of points from what I have learned through actually writing a few novels.

1. READ AS MANY CRIME NOVELS AS YOU CAN. Reading bestsellers is the best way to understand what makes a good crime novel. You’ll see how to introduce seeming random groups of events and people who finally come together as part of a coherent whole.

2.CREATE YOUR KILLER FIRST Know and understand his every thought, feeling, motives for killing, how he would go about it. He has to be a real person if he is to be a convincing killer. Be the killer. Live in his head. Otherwise you won’t know what he’s going to do next. It would help if you are psychopathic, a person who nurses all kinds of grievances and animosities, hates everybody around you, and are constantly devising horrible ways to kill half the people you work with. But, most of us will simply have to extrapolate these feelings from our imagination or from tv and books we read.

3. UNDERSTAND ALL OF YOUR OTHER CHARACTERS and make each one of them a real living person. This will also help with plotting because the characters can only behave in accordance with the traits you give them and so much of the action will have to run along lines that are natural for the characters. Plot will develop to a very large degree out of this interaction. So, you need to know all of your characters intimately, how they think and feel. Know their every thought. That will help to ensure real interaction between them and will also ensure that what happens follows logically from the type of people who are involved in the action. Most of the reviews of my books refer to the characters. Norma Miles, a reviewer, said recently about Thje 11.05 Murders   "This is only the second of Brian O'Hare's Belfast set detective mysteries, but already Chief Inspector Sheehan and his team are becoming old friends as they investigate another murder in their city, so well does the author portray his characters." And Max Tomlinson, an American writer, says, "But it’s the richness of the characters that really gives this book its authenticity."

4.THINK UP SOME DRAMATIC KILLINGS
Try to add something to the murders that lifts them out of the mundane…check out the biblically inspired killings in The Doom Murders

5.DON'T CHEAT THE READER; plant plenty of red herrings but also plant genuine clues. (I read a mybook recently in which a character who spoke briefly with the investigator at the very beginning of the book, who was never mentioned again, but who turned out to be the killer. No one could ever have guessed that and, of course, there would have plenty of annoyed readers throwing that book down.

6.ENSURE THAT THERE ARE AT LEAST THREE OR FOUR VIABLE SUSPECTS. It’s a mystery book; you have to keep your readers guessing

7.GET YOUR FACTS RIGHT
If you choose a contemporary setting for your novel there are high-tech detection procedures and forensic techniques to get your head around. Fortunately, the internet makes researching the facts of crime detection relatively easy. There are lots of websites you can use to find out the basics of how an investigation works and how a forensic investigation proceeds.

8. CALENDAR OF EVENTS [KEEP TRACK]
Make sure you keep careful notes on who has done what and when so that your writing doesn’t suffer from continuity errors. Some people use a detailed plan to do this, something they can keep referring back to. Others, including myself, are not great about plans. But the very least you should do is have a calendar of events so that there is a very clear progression When you say something like the following morning, you should be sure that this follows exactly from the Saturday night of the 21st of May or whatever and not actually a week later, a week during which three other important events have taken place.. One of the early drafts of my first novel was full of errors of this kind. I was lucky to spot one…and that led me to check the whole thing for general continuity of dates, times and events. I couldn’t believe how far out I was with a whole lot of them. I am now a great advocate of the event calendar…with each event slotted into its time and date.. This way you can refer back to the calendar if you become unsure of when a particular event is actually taking place in the novel.

9. KEEP BACK-TRACKING ...
... to ensure that the early part of the book has enough information in it to justify additional stuff that you want to bring in later. I always have. I had to keep going back to the murders to add in extra stuff as I progress through the writing. For example, there were times when I needed certain things to happen later in the story but they would not have made sense unless the seeds for them had been sown earlier on and that meant, often, that I had to go back and change, or add to, what I had written before, to plant those seeds. There was a lot of that backing and fro-ing…indeed, it continues to be a significant feature of my writing, even today.