Spoiled for choice?

Gaps on bookshelves? In my dreams.

I can honestly say that reading has made me the woman I am today. It's not a hobby, it's a way of life, something I do every day in a variety of places. However tired I am, it's impossible to settle down to sleep without picking up the book on my bedside table. The prospect of a train or bus journey without something to read is unthinkable. And yet recently I've had to downgrade myself from a 'voracious' reader to an 'enthusiastic' one, due to a lack of time. 

Taking all this into consideration, why is it that when I finish a book these days, I find choosing which one to read next so challenging? Am I overwhelmed by sheer numbers (500 or so on real and virtual shelves), like when I try to buy shampoo in a big branch of Boots? Or has my selection of what to read next become more critical because I don't have time to waste on a book which may prove disappointing?

I’ve experimented with different ways to tackle my vacillation. Sometimes I stand in front of the bookshelves, close my eyes and put out a hand. I’ve even resorted to asking my husband to pick a title, but for some reason I’m never happy with his choices. Most recently, I declared October my Scandi-crime month. And this seemed to work.

Pulling together all the physical copies of qualifying titles, many of which I'd owned for years, I piled them on top of the filing cabinet. Books by Sjowall & Wahloo, Larsson, Mankell, Indridason and Fossum stared at me every time I entered the study. And I started working through them.

This makes it sound like a chore but how could it be? I enjoyed some more than others, and haven't managed them all yet, but I've definitely read more this October than I have for a long time. So I plan to continue reading by monthly 'theme' for a while.

Inspired by this year’s Book Week Scotland (24-30 Nov), November is my Scottish Crime Fiction month. I've already started the Frederic Lindsay.

December’s theme is going to be friends’ books. I’m privileged to know a lot of writers yet rarely seem to get round to reading their books. Because Christmas will be spent lounging on the sofa reading while John cooks to his heart’s content, I should be able to make good progress through the list I’ve come up with for this.

And then in no particular order, I intend to spend a month each on:

Non-fiction:

Short stories:

Later on in 2015 I shall revisit old favourites and the few ‘Golden Age’ crime novels I possess, and take in some crime fiction debuts.

Do you ever feel spoiled for choice and if so, how do you choose what to read next? And can you suggest any reading themes I should consider? Remember, my aim isn’t to buy more books (aye, right!) but to read the ones I already own.

Meeting my readers

There's no such thing as an average reader

I was privileged to spend time with the novelist Sylvian Hamilton in the years leading up to her too-early death in 2005. We talked about books and writing, and she shared some of the exciting aspects of being published, like the creation of the cover design for what was sadly destined to be her final book, and her scrapbook of fan mail. Back then, if a reader enjoyed a book, the only way they could communicate this to the author was by writing to them, usually via their publisher. I remember Sylvian’s delight whenever a new card or letter arrived, and how carefully she added them to her collection.

These days, readers have a plethora of ways to contact authors and give their verdicts on books they’ve read. No Stranger to Death has been reviewed on Amazon (all 5-stars, so far), GoodReads and blogs, and I’ve received messages from readers via my own blog, Facebook and Twitter. I also have friends who live locally who’ve told me to my face what they thought. However, last week was the first time I met total strangers who had read my book. I attended the monthly get-together of a local book group, and a few days later, I stood up in a village hall to do a reading and answer questions. Here are some of the things these experiences taught me.

Readers don’t care how a book gets published

None of the book group members realised I had self-published No Stranger to Death. Some had bought it from a shop, others had used Amazon, one had taken it out of a library. Their motivation for choosing to read it was that I was a local author and ‘it looked good’. While I was selling and signing copies in the hall, no one asked who my publisher was. That said, an elderly gentleman expressed concern that he had ‘only’ borrowed a copy from the library: did I get any income from that? I was happy to reassure him that Scottish Borders Council had purchased the libraries’ copies from me, and told him about PLR. 

You can never know your characters well enough

Although I don’t go as far as noting my characters’ shoe sizes and favourite foods, I‘ve lived long enough with them in my head to know how they would react in most circumstances. But I was completely thrown to be asked what Zoe Moreland’s star sign is. My confession that I didn’t know earned the response that she must be a Scorpio, due to her ‘emotional strength’.

Everyone experiences a book differently

I asked the book group if anyone had guessed whodunit. They had all suspected different characters, one of whom was a kindly doctor, the least likely killer you could hope to meet. And that was why it had to be him: he was ‘too good to be true’. The legacy of multiple murderer Dr Harold Shipman obviously lives on in some people's minds.

Readers can develop feelings for your characters too

I love reading and getting caught up in a story, so this shouldn’t surprise me. But I never expected anyone else to feel so strongly about the people I created. A book-group lady was particularly upset at what a bully one of Zoe’s fellow doctors was, given all the other awful things happening to her at the same time. Another reader said that when she got to the part where Zoe’s car goes out of control she found herself saying, ‘No, no, no’ out loud. And as for what everyone wants from the book’s sequel: I’ve been told to bring Neil back, make sure Mather and Kate end up together, and tell what happens to Zoe in the light of her mysterious visitor on the very last page.  

How readers choose their next book is a mystery

Remember the book group said they chose to read No Stranger to Death because ‘it looked good’? I asked them what factors contributed to this, but they couldn't point to a single aspect, such as cover design or blurb. Others, however, do have specific criteria by which they select a book. During the second event, I met a lady who enjoys crime fiction but will only buy a book if she doesn’t think it will be ‘scary’. I was happy to reassure her that although I deal with dark themes, she won’t find extreme violence or graphic descriptions of blood-soaked crime scenes in anything I write.

It was amazing and gratifying to hear how characters, places and situations I have created are now in other people’s heads. If I learnt one lesson from meeting readers it is that No Stranger to Death was a different experience for each of them and they all had unique responses to it. These responses are impossible to predict, proving that one of the best piece of advice for writers is ‘Write for yourself’. Write something you would enjoy reading and there’s a good chance others will enjoy it too.

Photos courtesy of www.freedigitalphotos.net

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted . . .

. . . Now, if I only knew which half."

I started off not knowing what to blog about this week. Not due to a lack of subject matter but because there is too much to choose from. You see, I’m planning the marketing campaign for No Stranger to Death.

Many people will probably equate marketing with paid advertising, but it’s actually so much more. And thank goodness for that. Like most self-published authors, I don’t have the money to spend on above-the-line promotion, so instead I must be inventive.

There’s no end of information on the internet for self-published authors. I use the term ‘no end’ purposely. Google ‘book marketing tips’ and you’ll get more than 58 million results (that’s more than Downton Abbey, though less than Miley Cyrus). Even working through the excellent post on the Your Writer Platform blog, ‘101 Quick Actions You Can Take Today to Build the Writer Platform of Your Dreams’, is a challenge. Of the 46 ideas I marked as worth considering, so far I've done . . . seven. 

As well as having to be inventive due to lack of budget, the self-published author must also maximise another scarce resource: time. This means I mustn’t waste my time telling people about No Stranger to Death who would never want to read it anyway. Quick Action number 4 of those 101 is ‘Research your target audience’, but I would put it at number 1. If I ruled the world, reading at least one book each month would be mandatory from the age of six. However, hard though it is hard to fathom, not everyone reads for pleasure and – even more shocking – not all readers enjoy crime fiction. So before I can start connecting with my potential readers, I need to find out who they are.

Here’s a question for you. Which of these people is most likely to be a crime (or, as they say in the USA, mystery) fiction reader?

It’s hard to find concrete evidence of exactly who reads crime fiction most avidly. I even searched the Open University digital library (which has information on everything) and came up empty. I’m sure large publishers have researched this, but they’re keeping such valuable information close to their chests. However, an article on the HarperCollins Killer Reads website, ‘Why are women so attracted to crime fiction?’, suggests it’s a given that far more women than men read crime. This is backed up by a survey carried out in 2012 on behalf of the Crime Writers’ Association, which states that the typical crime reader is ‘a woman, aged sixty-plus, married but with no children living at home . . .’

Although slightly older than I expected (until I remembered how old I am now), the CWA’s findings confirm what I suspected. I’m basing my assumptions on personal experience: years of meeting fellow crime fiction fans at events like CrimeFest and through social networking sites like Twitter. So the answer to my challenge is the older lady in turquoise (it’s not just crime fiction we have in common).

Now I know who my target audience is, but guess what? Turns out that’s the easy part. I need to decide how I’m going to reach them. That’s another challenge. And material for another blog post, as this one has gone on long enough.

Do you recognise this ‘typical’ crime reader? I’d like to know what you think. Please leave a comment below, or tweet me: @janetokane.

All pictures this week are courtesy of www.freedigitalphotos.net, and the quotation is attributed to John Wanamaker, a 19th-century pioneer in marketing.

I ♥ books

1992: Reading with a cat. What could be nicer?

When I set out to do the Eclectic Reader Challenge last January, reading 12 books in 11 different genres in a year seemed achievable. However, I hadn’t then decided to embark on the final year of my Open University degree. When I signed up in early September to study Course A300: 20^th Century Texts, it became obvious I wouldn’t only be sacrificing writing time. The course has 16 set books, ranging from 1930s poetry to 1960s science fiction, and an infinite number of reference books. The amount of reading this requires reminds me of what a tutor said when I studied for a year at Edinburgh University as a mature student: “Reading for pleasure? We’ll soon knock that out of you.”

I hoped then, and still do, that he meant we would have so much course reading we’d have no time to read anything else. Because I can’t imagine ever not wanting to read. How dreadful it would be not to relish choosing the next book to take down from my shelf or select from the list on my Kindle, to no longer feel the thrill of starting that first page. Even if a book disappoints, I still get a sense of achievement at finishing it, and as a writer, it’s instructive working out what went wrong. And if it has been a satisfying read – what joy!  

Reading is a way of life for me, and when I look back to my childhood I can see why. So many memories connected with reading stand out in my mind.

This was c. 1967, so pardon the decor

My parents were (and still are) avid readers themselves, so they knew that with the right groundwork I could develop into one too. Admittedly, growing up as an only child in rural Dorset at a time when there were only three TV channels, I had little choice in the matter. I had to read or take up a sport (I’ll pause briefly for those of you who know me stop laughing at that idea.)

Mum worked as a hairdresser from home in those days, her ‘salon’ a room at the end of the house kitted out with a sink and two hairdryers on wheels. This being the 1960s, she mostly did shampoo-and-sets and the occasional perm, and when each customer’s hair had been put into rollers they sat under a dryer. When I was very young I would persuade some of them to forgo the pleasures offered by the magazines provided and instead read my storybooks to me. As I grew older I got pushier and insisted on reading out loud to a favoured few, the word ‘loud’ being apt – those hairdryers were very noisy.

The books in my primary school’s library – a large cupboard, really – were augmented by fortnightly visits from Dorset County Council’s mobile library or, as it was known then, the Library Van. I’d feel very grown-up climbing up the steps unaided, making my own choices, then cycling home with a basketful of books. Enid Blyton’s Famous Five were my heroes for a long time. I once announced to my parents that I wanted to be called George, though I don’t remember their response. 

Then I progressed to Blyton’s Malory Towers series. This resigned me to having a girl’s name but left me hankering after a boarding-school education with all the lacrosse and midnight feasts that came with it. Mum and Dad took me every Saturday to Beeches Bookshop in Salisbury. The lovely building is still there but Beeches closed down long ago. In the early ‘70s, though, it was stuffed to the rafters with books old and new, most in rows on open shelves, some so precious they were kept in locked glass-fronted cabinets. You could buy four hardback children’s books for £1, and they’d take them back later in part-exchange for yet more. Angela Brazil’s schoolgirl adventures, with titles like The Nicest Girl in the School and A Fourth Form Friendship, were already past their heyday by then but I didn’t care.

1969: I was a swot

When I was a teenager, there being no such thing as young adult fiction back then, I started reading what Mum read: crime fiction. The rest, as they say, is history.

I started this blog post intending to examine the difference between reading for pleasure and reading for study. It’s been hijacked by my childhood recollections, which probably means I’m older than I like to think. Anyway, I have a subject for another post now. In the meantime, what memories of childhood reading do you have?

Speaking in tongues

Doris the Editor: Blissfully unaware

I’ve been talking to myself a lot lately. Or rather, reading out loud parts of my first novel. The dogs don’t care, the cat’s stone-deaf and my husband is used to it. However, I find it disconcerting. You see, in my mind I have a perfect Scottish accent and can sound convincingly like any man, woman, child or barking dog. But reading aloud I’m just a middle-aged woman with a received pronunciation (RP) English accent.

Did I say ‘accent’? Like everyone else, my way of speaking sounds to me as if it’s the norm. But now I’m living in Scotland, albeit the part which probably has the highest percentage of English people in its population, so that illusion has been shattered. Two incidents also brought this home to me.

Boots opened its first chemist shop in 1877. I wasn't there.

My early adult life was spent in London, working in the buying offices of Boots the Chemists. In the late 1980s, Boots decided it was too costly to maintain a London base when it owned a huge amount of real estate in Nottingham. Many of us relocated to the Midlands, generously rewarded for agreeing to live and work alongside people we had previously only known on the telephone. Up there, I made a very good friend who shared my enthusiasm for cats and crime fiction. She said to me one day, ‘We thought you were dead posh at first, talking like you do. But you’re quite normal really.’ Thanks, Barbara, wherever you are now.

At the age of forty I became a mature student at Edinburgh University, studying English and Scottish literature. For the first year we were required to study English Language, including phonetics. I can’t say I particularly enjoyed this, but I found the work on regional accents fascinating. Etched on my memory, though, is the occasion when I was instructed to stand up in the lecture theatre and repeat several phrases as a living example of RP. I was mortified.

The reason why I’m doing a lot of reading out loud is not just for editing purposes, although that is part of the polishing process which everything I write goes through. This week I’ve recorded a YouTube video! I read the opening of No Stranger to Death for the Pulp Idol competition being run by Liverpool’s Writing on the Wall project. And although that chapter reads well on paper and Kindle, did my voice do justice to it? Only the judges can decide that, but luckily the portion I read has only my main character, Dr Zoe Moreland, in it and she’s English. My three minutes were up before the young, male and Scottish policeman makes an appearance.

Beautiful Hexham library

I was lucky enough to attend recently the launch of Mari Hannah’s The Murder Wall as part of Hexham Book Festival. Mari chose to have an actress, Phillippa Wilson, read excerpts from her book, and I thought this was such a great idea (not that Mari couldn’t have done it herself). Phillippa had just the right accent and added so much to the words she was reading.

Robert Burns wrote in his poem To a Louse about our inability “To see oursels as ithers see us”. I would add “To hear oursels”. In a perfect Scots accent, of course.



Robert Burns by the wonderful Peter Howson



A Real Character: Me

After my last blog post exploring whether we consciously manufacture personalities for social media like Twitter, I was interested to read Isabel Costello’s piece about creating characters for fiction. She then (very bravely) set out to bring herself to life on the page by writing about various aspects of her own character and experiences. Susan Elliot Wright followed suit, and #realcharacter was born.

Here is my rendition of myself. If you’d like to take part in #realcharacter, just blog about yourself as we have, then tweet a link, using the #realcharacter hashtag. You’ll be found and retweeted.

Genes/inheritance



Recommended reading for onlies

I’m an only child, born to parents who had experienced the agony of a stillbirth son a few years earlier. So feel free to throw all those usual adjectives – spoilt, over-protected, selfish – at me. I’m old enough now to acknowledge the (relative) truth of them, although this upbringing also means I’m a loyal friend, honest to a fault, and can spell really well.

My Mum’s family were well-off Dorset farmers whom she defied to marry a young army chef from Walsall. They relented the day before the wedding, and Dad was accepted, with reservations, into the fold. The upside was he could fuel his car from the farm's petrol pump. But in return he was expected to help out occasionally with the harvest and other tasks. I remember him coming home later than expected one evening from visiting an aged uncle. He was a little pale and dishevelled: he’d had to assist in a calf’s breech birth.

I have 21 cousins on my Dorset side, all but two female. Our last get-together was when our grandmother reached 90; the Reads are a gratifyingly long-lived bunch. This was some years ago, but it was obvious we had all inherited the pear-shape gene.

Environment

I escaped from the country as soon as I could, moving to London at 18 to work in Harrods and live in a hostel run by The Girls’ Friendly Society (yes, really). Back then London was fun, as long you had a job to pay for going out. I loved the theatre, the cinema, the shopping. In my twenties I was, I admit it, a Yuppie who (whisper it) did pretty well under Mrs Thatcher, buying and selling several flats for profit. But at 30, given the chance to move to Nottinghamshire with my job at Boots, I ended up living in a tiny village. My rural roots were dragging me back. Which is probably why I now live in the Scottish Borders, sharing my life with 19 chickens, 3 dogs and a geriatric cat. I’m also on my second husband, and as he’s Scottish we won’t be moving south any time soon.

Habits

As a typical only child I’m rubbish at team games and until a few years ago never found physical exercise at all tempting, except for walking and then only with a dog. But at 50 I joined a gym and discovered weight-training. I go two or three times a week, and although I’m not muscled up a la Madonna, my core fitness has improved to the extent that I now feel worse if I don’t work out. I can’t see the point of cigarettes, excessive alcohol or drugs, and have a pretty low tolerance of those who do. However, I love chocolate, smoked salmon and the occasional glass of champagne.



Monument Valley, Arizona



Despite hating to fly (it’s that rare combination of scary and boring) I love visiting America, especially the wide-open bits like Montana and Arizona. I also adore travelling by train and hope to take my husband to Paris one day.

Do I need to say that my favourite habit is reading?

Personality

Despite, or perhaps because of, my father suffering from depression all his adult life, I am infuriatingly cheerful most of the time. I enjoy my life and appreciate how lucky I am to be able to write every day. I’ve also realised I am an autodidact: I revel in teaching myself new things. Hence starting a degree course at Edinburgh when I was 40 and now completing it via the Open University. And of course writing is one long lesson . . .

I consider myself sociable but am sometimes intimidated by large groups of people and prefer to chat one-to-one. At a recent dinner party I was told by someone I had only just met that I am ‘aggressively nice’. She meant it as a compliment, so I have taken it as such.

Being childless, I am probably living proof of the alleged need we all have to ‘mother’ something. At one point I had 6 cats, now I indulge myself with chickens.

Skills (or otherwise)

Aside from the word-manipulation abilities I possess, I don’t shine at much, especially not physical skills. However, when my husband started working for himself as a stonemason, before he could afford an employee I used to restore the outside walls of houses with him. I was hardly gazelle-like climbing up the scaffold, but once there I showed a talent for chipping out the old mortar and repointing the joints. We both look back fondly on those days.



One of the walls I worked on, waiting to be repointed



And one more thing . . .

About ten years ago I met someone who had a profound influence on my ambition to be a professional writer. Her name was Sylvian Hamilton and she had three books, the Chronicles of the Bone Pedlar, published when she was in her 60s. She lived in a tiny cottage not far from here, with her husband and two Siamese cats.

We met when my husband did some work for her and mentioned I wanted to be a writer. ‘She must come for tea,’ Sylvian said, and I subsequently spent many happy visits talking about books and writing. She taught me that you can write at any age, and that dreams can come true even to those of us who lead humdrum lives in rural Scotland. Sadly, Sylvian died from breast cancer in 2005. She didn’t want a funeral so I planted a tree on our front lawn in her memory. She was in my life for far too short a time, but she inspired me so much I’ll always be grateful to her.

How do you decide what to read next?

The picture above was taken in January 2011. It’s of (most of) the unread books I owned then. I’ve read solidly since, but weirdly the shelves’ contents haven’t diminished. And now I have my Kindle too, which holds a further 20 or so novels as well as numerous short stories and ‘tasters’.

Every month I buy and immediately read the Berwick Book Group choice. Then I’m on my own, faced with the impossible task of deciding what book’s next. On some occasions I’ve resorted to closing my eyes and sticking a hand out blindly to grasp one. Other times I choose work by a particular author who may be new to me and I’m going to see him or her soon at a book festival.

So why on earth have I signed up to do the Eclectic Reader Challenge? To read a dozen books this year in 11 different genres?

About 98% of my TBR books are in my favourite reading genre: crime fiction. Which is also the genre I hope to be published in (so all that reading’s research, right?) However, when I read Pete Denton’s blog about the Eclectic Reader Challenge I couldn’t resist the idea of being forced out of my comfort zone, but in a structured way. So here are the genres I have to read in and the books I've chosen so far:

Genre	Title
Literary
Crime/mystery	The Murder Wall (Mari Hannah)
Romantic
Historical
YA	Deathwatch (Nicola Morgan)
Fantasy	A Game of Thrones (George RR Martin)
Science Fiction	Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (Philip K Dick)
Non-fiction
Horror
Thriller/suspense
Classic	Great Expectations (Dickens)
My favourite genre

I’m pretty sure I can rely on my book group to furnish me with a book that fits into the ‘literary fiction’ category later in the year. My other choices will be made arbitrarily, as I happen upon writers and books which sound interesting but in the past I would have been deterred from getting by my heaving TBR shelves.

So what if I still have 100+ books left unread this time next year? As my Mum says, ‘They don’t eat anything’.

Do you have trouble choosing the next book to read off your bookshelf? Or are you one of those really organised people who only buy books when they need them? I'd love to know!