‘Very French; and weighed down by heat and melancholy’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Claire King

I’ve now got Eric Satie’s Gnossiennes on repeat in my head – and so will you once you’ve read this week’s Undercover Soundtrack. Satie helped my guest conjure a lulling, heady summer in France; a five-year-old girl running wild while her mother grapples with tragedy, late pregnancy and looming disaster. The novel is The Night Rainbow, the author is Claire King, and she’s on the Red Blog with her Undercover Soundtrack. Even better, you could win a copy for sharing the post and commenting!

‘Songs to capture sadness, isolation and heartache’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Stacy Green

It’s an extra pleasure to be hosting this week’s guest. For a number of years we’ve corresponded about agents, publishing options and writing questions, and many of her queries have resulted in useful posts. Now here she is with her first novel, a romantic thriller called Into the Dark, published by MuseItUp. If you guessed she needed a dark soundtrack you wouldn’t be far wrong. She is Stacy Green and she’s on the Red Blog with her Undercover Soundtrack.

Should you serialise your novel on Kindle… like I did? The results of my launch experiment

About a month ago, I launched My Memories of a Future Life on Kindle in 4 parts. A Dickensian adventure in serialisation, rekindled for the ebook generation.

I had great fun and plenty of hair-tearing. For instance, it was never clear exactly how long the Kindle store would take to make the episodes live, so I had to publish days in advance and keep them quiet until the witching hour. (Some of you still seemed to find them…) My computer was starting to look like a duplication hallucination with multiple covers, textfiles and whatnot.

But was it a good idea? If you’re releasing an ebook, should you serialise too? Today Jane Friedman has invited me to her blog to tell all.

Not that Jane?

Jane is a former publisher at Writer’s Digest and a prolific and respected speaker on writing, publishing, and the future of media, including South by Southwest, BookExpo America, and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Her expertise has been featured by sources such as NPR’s Morning Edition, Publishers Weekly, GalleyCat, PBS, The Huffington Post, and Mr. Media. She has consulted with a range of nonprofits, businesses, and creative professionals, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Creative Work Fund, and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. It says it all that one of her nicknames is ‘Not-that Jane’.

Before I started, I wondered in a blog post if serialising my novel would be genius or plain dumb. Come to Jane’s blog, where I confess all…

3 ways to try My Memories of a Future Life: Read a sample on Kindle, or on Bookbuzzr - or I can read it to you

Novels tell the deepest truth – guest post at Women Writers

When I ghostwrite, it’s a collaboration. The editor, the ‘author’ and various other parties will be involved with it from birth. Together we hammer out the plot. I go to them first with my research questions. We chat about how it’s going. Of course the majority of the work is mine, but by the time I deliver the manuscript it’s as though it’s been written in public.

Writing my own novels is not like that at all.
The first time an agent talked to me about My Memories of a Future Life, it was a surreal experience. I met her in a cafe in Covent Garden, on a freezing cold February evening. We sat outside in the penumbra of a gas heater. As people scurried past on their ordinary way home, a person I had never met before was talking to me, in great detail, about regression to the future. The tangled dynamic between four people. Music and its ghostly role in the book’s world. It wasn’t like any other book I’d written, it was more like a long and elaborate secret I’d been keeping. It was so bizarre I was struck monosyllabic. I still haven’t quite got used to it.
I’m over at Women Writers today, talking about the curious and special relationship writers and readers have with novels. Do join me.

The A303, a storyteller’s road: finding the landscape for your characters

Today I’m guesting at Women Writers, a newly minted blog to highlight contemporary women writers and readers. They wanted me to wax inspirational, so I chose a key place in my novel – a narrow 92-mile trunk road in England.

Trust me, it’s legendary. When you take the A303, you travel not just in miles, you sail a metalled sine wave back through time. Come over and enjoy the ride…

If you normally blog about writing, how will you promote your fiction?

Yesterday Laura Pauling asked me about my decision to self-publish My Memories of a Future Life. She also had another question:

‘Now that you have fiction you’re promoting, will you be blogging about topics other than writing? Kristen Lamb, who blogs about social media and platform building, said recently that bloggers shouldn’t be blogging about writing to find their readers.’

Laura, you’ve nailed perhaps the most difficult question for writer/bloggers. Most of us start blogging and find – hey presto – we’ve got lots of readers who are writers.

But not all our writer/readers will like our fiction, because everyone’s tastes are individual. And we hope that far more people are going to buy our books than just other people who write. Because although the blogosphere may seem infinite to us, it’s only a tiny grain of the reading world.

In mainstream publishing, authors get noticed by writing and talking about their novels’ subjects and issues in big-circulation media. This is where a traditional publishing deal can be really worthwhile. They will punt you in front of readers you can’t reach on your own. This is what publicists do as well, although there’s one area where bona fide publishers are still ahead – because many reviewers simply won’t look at self-publishers.

If this is starting to sound waffly and generalised, then it is. Every book needs a different sales approach. You have to identify where your specific readers are likely to be, and then reach out to them. I can’t tell you how to do that for your book; all I can do is tell you what I’m going to do for My Memories of a Future Life.

My biggest problem is that it isn’t a genre novel. If it was supernatural, paranormal, historical, sci fi et al I could trot over to the lovely collectives who review those books, find the forums and spread the word that way. I could review books myself, talk about other novels in my genre that I like. But instead I have a contemporary, offbeat story about a lost soul trying to find where she belongs. It should be a story anyone could read, but I need a better target than that.

I have a platform, but as Laura has pointed out, it’s about writing. And I like to keep it that way. You may indulge me with the odd splurge like this (and really it’s still about publishing) but one thing I’ve learned from many years in magazines is that readers want you for a certain thing, not for others. Here is where you want fighting talk about writing – and here is where I want to write it. If I want to write arty farty pieces about kick-ass pianos (which I had to learn about for my novel) that doesn’t belong here unless I make a useful writing point out of it. (Although that book did teach me a few hefty lessons about writing, and I hope you won’t mind me sharing them from time to time.)

Similarly, on my Twitter account @DirtyWhiteCandy you want writing advice. I’m not going to dilute that either.

So here’s my marketing plan for spreading the word without annoying you all. If you’re in this position, you might find it helpful too.

• A parallel Twitter account – @ByRozMorris. I’ll use that account to chat about my fiction, but also about subjects that inspired me to write the book – stage hypnotists, memory tricks, illusionists, mysterious injuries, music and, of course, kick-ass pianos.
• Blogging at other venues with a wider remit. I’ve been invited to be a regular guest blogger at Kindle Authors UK, a collective of professional UK authors branching out with independent projects that are too edgy, bent and challenging for mainstream publishers. Watch out for me on the 20th of each month – but drop in there at any time and you’ll find a lot of pro writers with exciting indie projects. I’m also blogging at Women Writers, who have invited me to talk about any subject close to my heart  and link it loosely with my book. I’ll signpost these guest spots with short introduction pieces here, as I usually do, but if they’re not your cup of tea they won’t be clogging up your inbox.
• Creating a website for My Memories of a Future Life. Behind these walls I’ve been constructing a parallel world of the red piano, which I’ll be opening soon. I’ll post material there that’s specific to the book, for those who are curious.

All books have to find their audience, and this is how I’m going to find the readers for mine. But without intending to, I’ve already been building curiosity for it – I mention it in Nail Your Novel and I’ve been getting inquiries from people who want to buy it.

But I do have a big secret weapon to send it into the Kindlesphere with a bang. It’s either a really good idea or a totally dumb one. But hey, you only live once. Or maybe more than once… I’ll be revealing that in a couple of weeks…

Have you solved this problem of developing a platform for your novels? I’d love to know what you’re doing. Especially if there’s anywhere you can suggest that I should introduce myself! Share in the comments!