Sharing another authors success

I had an email from my writing buddy in Spain today, Tracy Saunders. Tracy published her book "Pilgrimage to Heresy" with i-universe last year, and after securing an agent has recently published a Spanish edition, now available in Spanish book shops. She has radio interviews lined up in four Spanish cities, and is nervous as hell that the book is about to become something really big. Actually I am a teeny bit envious, in the best possible way, and naturally I am pleased for her - she has worked damned hard to achieve this and deserves all the success that will come her way. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

The English language edition is still available through the usual outlets - Tracy has been trying to get through to i-universe she tells me, for the last week to order a further 60 copies. If you are considering publishing with this company, who last year were taken over by Authorhouse, take note.

Seriously though, this is one of the best books I read last year. Part fact, part fiction, the book is borne from Tracy's own experience of walking the Camino, the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostella in northern Spain. Interwoven within the text are two love stories, that of the two main characters, Felix and Miranda, and that of Priscillian, the last Christian martyr, and his maybe fictional love. Comparisons to Dan Brown are inevitable and unfortunate, as they were with my own work, but like mine, Tracy's book is nothing like Brown's work, but much more in depth. I won't say too much, as it will ruin the surprise, but this is a tale of love and beauty, of triumph over adversity, but most of all, a tale of intrigue, which I heartily recommend.

For more details see Tracy's website here. She also has a new blog which can be found here.

Is it worth it?

I had a long email from my friend Tracy Saunders earlier in the week, who lives in Spain. She is currently going through the process of publishing her own book, on Christian martyr Priscillian with I-Universe, (A US based print on demand provider who recently merged with Authorhouse). Like many other authors, she is going through the phase of what's it all about, and have I done the right thing, will it be worth it all. I remember it well, as it is something I and a thousand other POD (and no doubt commercially published) authors go through almost every day of their writing lives. I have said it before, that you don't have to be mad to do this, but it certainly helps. I lost my marbles a long time ago, and they are currently rolling about on the floor of the Lightning Source printing plant in Milton Keynes ...

Tracy makes the point though that how are we to ever get over the POD stigma so that we can compete on not just an even footing, but be taken seriously as authors. It is a tough one to answer, as it depends not just on the quality of your writing (which is very much a subjective thing anyway), but also on being seen in the right place at the right time by the right people. This is difficult enough for commercially published authors let alone POD ones. It also though and perhaps more crucially, depends on the opinions of others. The problem is that people still remember the bad old days of vanity publishing, where the books were badly written and poorly produced, but times have changed. A lot of people though have not moved on from those times. This is where we have to work that much harder at changing perceptions.

Where though do you begin? The book buying public do not care how the book they are reading was published, only that is it interesting and affordable. The problem then lies not with the book buying public but with the book trade itself. Hard working POD authors and some of the recent success stories have helped, but most of all what the POD author needs to be do in order to be taken seriously on any level, is to write a damned good book, and get out there and promote it in as professional a way as possible. This is not easy when you are also trying to manage a house and a business, as Tracy is, or in my case when you have no other source of income and everyone keeps demanding free copies before they will make a buying decision.

It is true that the vanity stigma is much more of an issue for American writers, and attitudes here in the UK do seem to be changing fast. Personally I have found the supply chain to be by far the biggest problem, as have the few of you that have voted in the poll on my other blog site. It is not so bad here because we have chain stores in the form of Waterstones, Borders and WH Smiths. Waterstones are easy to get into, Borders and Smiths less so. Spain though has none of these chains, and Tracy's book is not in Spanish, the native language, but written in English.

Spain she tells me, has just ten Bookworld Espana shops (she plans to break out her shortest skirt to visit the main buyer), with very few independents. Fortunes are not made on this. They are not though made on the 300 odd copies I have sold either (not when they are sold at 55 percent discount anyway).

She goes on to ask me the question as to whether it has been worth it all. This again depends on your point of view and why you are doing it. A lot of the things that I am doing now I should have been doing when my book first came out, but neither I nor the book was ready for such exposure. I thought I knew the publishing industry and how it worked, but I didn't, I was just playing at it. I did very well considering, with the limited resources that I had, as well as most other POD authors anyway, but not that many are seriously prepared (or have the time) to do anywhere near the amount of work that I am now doing.

To go back to Tracy's question though - is it worth it all? Of course it is. Writers write not because they want to, but because they have to - it a compulsion that we have inside us that can no more be ignored than the impulse to breath. It is who we are, and what makes us tick, what makes us leap out of bed in the morning, what makes us shout at our partners to scribble down the ideas that always come when we are in the shower. It is the reason we are alive. For the truly serious writer, life and writing are the same thing and you simply cannot conceive of one without the other. It is the reason we are here to share that gift.

108 copies sold last month

A few days ago, I finally got the final sales figures for the month of August and was astonished to find that I had sold 108 copies ! That means that my total sales figures have doubled in just one month, since I sold just 100 copies in the first year of publication. To say that I am pleased then is then an understatement.

25 of these copies were sold prior to the 13th, so could have been from anywhere - libraries order through a different supplier (Bertrams), so as I contacted most of them at the end of July, some may have been through that source, the rest were probably just individuals ordering through Amazon etc. 2 copies were also sold in the United States, so that means that I sold 81 copies through Gardners in around 2 1/2 weeks. Most of them will be to various branches of Waterstones, since I have been busy ringing all 300 or so of them in turn. I started with the local ones first, since they were more likely to order, and have been gradually working through the rest of them from A-Z. So far I have got as far as the H's, so this is a very good start.

This week though seems to have flown by in a blur of book shops, local papers and everything else that happens in ones every day life. I have been checking Gardners site every day, and earlier this evening it said they have 28 copies in stock. This week then has been a little slower than previous weeks, but I am still making good progress. I have some more Waterstones who have signed up and placed orders - namely, Aberystwyth (Wales), Braehead (Scotland), Folkestone (Kent), St Neots (Cambs), Ilford (Essex) and Inverness (Scotland). I guess that they have all then ordered just the one copy, but one copy is one copy, and it is another foot (or six) through the door). The beauty of the Waterstones system is that once you are in a store, and they have ordered your books, then when one sells, then another is automatically reordered. So that means that I will not have to follow up with these stores - they will soon let me know after all if, or perhaps I should say when, the books start to sell.

I also had an order this week direct from my own website - to a lady called Tracy Saunders who lives in Spain. I got to her know via another writers forum (a POD comparison site actually) called Books and Tales, run by the very strangely named Clea Saal. I do find a lot of these American names very peculiar indeed and can't help wondering at their origins. Anyway, Tracy is writing a book, soon to be published by I-Universe about a Christian martyr called Priscillian, and I for one am thorughoughly looking forward to reading it. She seems very knowledgeable on these matters, which is more than be said for myself, as I know very little about this aspect of Christianity.

According to the Surrey Advertiser, I am an expert in a lot of things. They described my book in this weeks edition as a 'philosophical work about the history of man and the meaning of the universe'. At least though they didn't call me Jane, unlike the more immediate local paper, who said that my book 'was proving a hit right across the world'. The piece was entitled 'June finds winner in lost continents', and they then referred to me actually in the piece as Jane! Honestly I know I shouldn't moan as it is all free publicity that helps to sell books, but don't these people employ proof readers. It is bad form to say anything other than thank you, so I will keep my mouth firmly shut from now on.

I actually rang LBC radio earlier this afternoon (it seems like more than 10 days since I sent that book to Southern Counties) to see if they might be interested in conducting an interview. They didn't think they had any show that was suitable, which is a shame, since it seems that their Sunday morning shows do not feature interviews. The only other possibility might be the Friday night psychic show that Edwin Courtenay is frequently on, but I don't really see myself on there to be honest, as it is more about esoteric stuff really - channelling, spells and the like, and that isn't really what my book is about. Still, there are other stations out there, and plenty more fish as they say in the sea!

Will carry podding along nicely then!