Social Media

For the first time in history, we are able to sustain friendships, and engage in conversations with groups of people, all over the world. I have friends in countries I've never visited, on every continent. Some of them are people I met and subsequently connected with online when they moved away. Others are people I first met online, who have become good friends. All of this has become possible through the advent of social media. To begin with, these online contacts didn't seem like real people at all. The first time a Facebook friend of mine turned up at one of my book signings, it felt surreal meeting her in the physical world. Since then many of us have met in the real world, as readers often come along to my events, sometimes travelling long distances for a signed book and a chat. It's always a thrill meeting people who read my books.

The only problem with social media is that it's so addictive! I frequently pop over to Facebook to reply to comments on my latest post, or see who else has been posting. Twitter is another site I frequent, putting up a tweet or responding to other people's comments. I've connected with some interesting people there as well.

So we are living in interesting times, in terms of human relations. We have our family and friends in the real world. Next are our virtual friends, real people we connect with via the Internet. Finally, there are the fictitious characters we read and write about. Whether real, virtual or fictitious, any of them can become our friends, and any of them can confound our expectations. The characters I create often surprise me. As an author, you might think I would be able to control my characters well enough to avoid them catching me off guard. They may be unpredictable to a reader, but they should not surprise whoever created them. As other authors will confirm, this is not always the case. My characters sometimes deviate from the paths I map out for them. That can be frustrating, but it is also part of the fun of writing, making the process more organic and creative. Like real people, they can have minds of their own.

Leigh Russell is published in English, and in translation throughout Europe. Her Geraldine Steel and Ian Peterson titles have appeared on many bestseller lists, including #1 on kindle. Leigh's work has been nominated for several major awards, including the CWA New Blood Dagger and CWA Dagger in the Library, and her Geraldine Steel and Ian Peterson series are currently in development for television with Avalon Television Ltd.

Journey to Death is the first title in her Lucy Hall series published by Thomas and Mercer.

Links to all Leigh's books can be found on her website http://leighrussell.co.uk

Blogging

I wrote somewhere, rather pompously, that if you call yourself a writer you have a duty to at least try to write well. In my books I do my best to express myself clearly in correct English. This takes hard work because, as Robert Louis Stevenson said, 'The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.' 

Many authors, some of them very successful, seem to pay scant attention to the quality of their prose, which I think is a pity. Others, like Ian McEwan or Kazuo Ishiguru, express themselves so lucidly that it is a pleasure to read their books just for the beauty of the language. 

In my own way I'm a bit of a pedant, and quite old-fashioned. For example, I try not to including contractions in my work, although there is no good reason why a writer of commercial crime fiction should avoid them. There may even be an argument in favour of using them, as 'don't' and 'can't' speed up the pace, where 'do not' and 'cannot' maybe slow it down. I suppose decades of teaching teenagers how to write 'properly', in correct, formal English, has left its mark on my writing. 

But writing for a blog is different - especially when it is a post for my own personal blog. Here, I am  free to use excessive punctuation, for example!! (Would I ever use double exclamation marks in a book??? Of course not!!!) What might look inappropriate in a novel to my blinkered eyes, seems perfectly acceptable here. 

Of course blogs are not solely outlets for trivia. Many bloggers analyse, critique and comment on important issues in culture and current affairs. A blog can be whatever the writer chooses to make it, and we are fortunate to live in a period where blogs are so many and so varied.

In his droll and whimsical novel, Tristram Shandy, the eighteenth century writer Laurence Sterne set out to break all the contemporary rules of fiction, in an ingenious parody of the rather self-consciously worthy novels of the time. I think Sterne would have relished the liberty of a blog.

http://leighrussell.co.uk

The Death of the Novel?

First as reader, now as author, all my life I have  have been permanently engrossed in at least one book.  Like many people, fiction is, paradoxically, my 'reality'.
One of the appeals of fiction is that it offers us an escape from life where the pace of change seems to be speeding up all the time. Most events are consigned to the relative oblivion of history after a year, or a month, sometimes even less. As HW said, "a week is a long time in politics."
But sometimes it can be instructive to take a longer view, so let me take you back in time to 1666, the year of the Great Fire of London. One of the most remarkable records of that event comes from an eye witness account by Samuel Pepys, whose diary has survived. This is not a novel. Not only is Pepys telling us about real events, but he couldn't have been writing a novel in 1666 as the form did not yet exist. It would not emerge for nearly another century.
The first novel in English was published in the mid 1700s. It took the form of a series of letters, as writers had not yet envisaged the concept of the prose narrator as a character in its own right, or even as a disembodied omniscient authorial voice. The letters were a clever device, taking the reader inside the thoughts and feelings of different characters. This allowed for intimate first person narratives, from different view points. It was entirely new, or 'novel'.
Today we retain the name, but the form itself is no longer ground breaking, or even 'novel'.
There has been a lot of discussion recently, some of it on this blog, about dwindling book sales, and 'discoverability' for authors, and how they can attract more readers. But perhaps the real problem lies, not with the proliferation of authors, or the failing quality of writing, or that people are no longer reading, but with the form itself.
Has the novel had its day? And would that matter?
We can access stories from other sources - films, television, games, the media - but these are not the same as novels which go into more depth. Through the medium of stories, the best novels offer us insights into contemporary life and morals, and hence ourselves. Think of any great novel - Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, Moby Dick, Dickens, Hardy - not only were they instrumental in changing opinions at the time, but they provided a record of society and how people were thinking at the time they were written.
Which brings us back to Samuel Pepys, whose diaries tell us about his daily life in the 1600s - no different to a modern blog. Perhaps we have come full circle, and the reason new novelists are struggling to break into the market is that the novel form has outlived its popularity.

Postscript
No sooner had I finished writing this post than I came across an article about "embracing the artistic potential of social media". Really? Here it is:

"David Mitchell To Put Next Work On Twitter
"Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell is to publish his next work on Twitter. The British writer has penned a short story, titled The Right Sort, in 140-character instalments. It will be serialised in clusters of about 20 tweets at a time over the next seven days. In total there will be 280 Tweets.
But while embracing the artistic potential of social media, Mitchell himself is not a tweeter and had to open a Twitter account for the project."

The end of the novel as we know it? Sigh. Sometimes I would prefer not to be tuned into the current zeitgeist, but then that is the job of an author.
Or is it?

BLOGGING

For far too long I've been using my blog simply as a platform to post my news. And you have to agree, there has been a lot of news to post. Yet when this blog first started, over five years ago, my intentions were very different. My original plan was to write a kind of diary of my journey to becoming an author. Along the way I became so busy being an author, that I lost my impetus to blog about it. To report on my journey has begun to resemble a list of boasts - CWA Dagger Award shortlist, accolades in journals as diverse as The Times and Star magazine, on both sides of the Atlantic, voted and selected for Best Fiction lists, hitting Number 1 on kindle and iTunes, and regularly appearing bestseller charts on amazon, Waterstones, WH Smith, amazon... yes, I'm boring myself. So my blog petered out, apart from the occasional interviews with other authors, and sporadic  posts about yet another promotion, special offer, or bestseller list. Only this week, COLD SACRIFICE was a 'Buzz Book' on iTunes, ROAD CLOSED reached the Top 10 on kindle, and DEATH BED was selected for the amazon kindle summer promotion, reaching Number 3 in crime and thrillers.

It's time to get back to the original purpose of this blog, and explore issues concerning the world of publishing, from the perspective of an author. I have no 'inside knowledge' beyond what I can gather from my own experience. So here's where I am right now.

My debut, CUT SHORT, came out in 2009 as an A format paperback - small, cheap, with a monochrome cover. By 2011 my first three titles had all become bestsellers, and my publisher 'branded' the series, bringing out all the titles in the series in B format, with lovely colourful shiny matching covers. You can see them all on my website LEIGH RUSSELL  if you want to see how smart they look. The row of covers on the virtual shelf on my kindle isn't quite the same.

Here's my little bookcase at home, like a trophy case, only hidden away upstairs where no one else can see it, with 15 editions of  my books on display plus three bookmarks. If you look carefully on the extreme left, you can see the eye on the proof copy of the first edition of CUT SHORT is looking in the opposite direction to the one on the spine of the sale copy.

When CUT SHORT was first published, a fellow author advised me to ask my publisher to bring it out as an eBook. Wait for my next statement... I wasn't quite sure what he was talking about! I'd heard talk of 'eBooks' but it was all something of a mystery to me then. Six months later, the eBook duly came out. The same process occurred with ROAD CLOSED. By the time DEAD END was published in 2011, eBooks were firmly on the map. The eBook was available to download on the same day the print book hit the shelves. Meanwhile, sales of eBooks began to overtake the print version. I'll deal with my response to that in another post. DEATH BED was due to be published in 2012. The eBook was released on December 2011, six months ahead of the print book. The same happened withSTOP DEAD, and that pattern seems to be continuing for the time being. I can't say "for the foreseeable future" because things are changing so fast, it's hard to look ahead.

Sales of eBooks are growing. Some statistics cite them as representing 20% of the market in a rapidly growing sector, other sources say they are now at 25% of the market.

In a statement accompanying its fourth quarter and full year results for 2012, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos neatly summed up where he sees the future of book retailing heading–especially for his company. “We’re now seeing the transition we’ve been expecting,” said Bezos. “After 5 years, eBooks is a multi-billion dollar category for us and growing fast – up approximately 70% last year. In contrast, our physical book sales experienced the lowest December growth rate in our 17 years as a book seller, up just 5%.”
(US Publishers Weekly, January 2013)

From the perspective of an author, it makes little difference in terms of income. The standard percentage royalties an author earns from sales of eBooks is higher for an author than on print books, as the publisher's overheads are far lower. Certainly the sales on eBooks are potentially huge compared to those of print books. My own books have sold hugely in eformat compared to the sales of my books in print.

Personally I'm in two minds about eBooks. I'm thrilled to be earning a living from my books, if a modest one. But I still love the look and the feel of physical books.

Oh, and the links here are to the eBooks on kindle... but you can find links to the print books as well on my website: WEBSITE

I'm back

In a shameful dereliction of my blog, I haven't posted here for... well, longer than I can remember. Now I'm back I really don't know where to begin. Meanwhile, I have been posting almost daily brief updates on facebook so please check it out. You'll find lots of photos of recent events at bookshops, and festivals, this year, including drinking champagne with Jeff Deaver, and catching up with fellow authors Lee Child and Peter James at CrimeFest https://www.facebook.com/leigh.russell.50
In other news, my wonderful publisher has secured a fabulous deal with an Italian publisher, and brought out a special limited edition hardback of Death Bed, signed and numbered. These are only available from my publisher directly so do check out the link which you can find on my website http://leighrussell.co.uk/
I've been busy visiting bookshops and libraries.  It's so important to support them both. Last Saturday I visited Waterstones in Guildford to sign my books.  This is apparently the busiest store in the entire chain. There I sat, watching a queue of women lining up to pay for 50 Shades of Grey. For all the ccriticism of this book, denigrated as a jazzed up Mills and Boon, it has been a sales phenomenon thanks to all the hype about 'mummy porn'.  I said my title would have to be 50 Shades of Purple... But seriously, I have to admit it doesn't appeal to me.  My publisher (who also hasn't read it) suggested (joking?)  that I write an 'erotic crime' novel.  You can read quite a few responses to that idea on facebook!

Oh well, I have to go. It's time to revise my WIP...

Thank you very much to all of you  who have continued to
follow this blog even though I've been largely absent. I'll
try to do better!

Too busy to post

Note to self: Must post soon. I've been so busy...