It's been a long time

Despite regularly tweeting photos of my dogs/cats/chickens, I don’t tend to write about personal stuff and I don’t plan to start now. However, my lack of blogging for an entire year needs to be explained, in case you all think I’m being opportunistic, putting up a new post in the same week as I publish a new book.

The past year has been horrible. My husband and I have experienced ill-health, sudden deaths of a friend and a relative, and business problems mainly brought about by an unscrupulous third party. We’ve even, reluctantly, put our house on the market. Something had to give, and I decided blogging was that thing.

Throughout all this, I’ve surprised myself by continuing to write my second book. I used to think I couldn’t write if I was troubled, but it turned out I was wrong. Some days I managed just a few words, others a lot more. I increased my daily word-count target from 500 to 1,000 and began to exceed that more often than I failed to meet it. Those words didn’t pour out, or even flow. It was more like a trickle, but it was a regular trickle. And Too Soon a Death gradually became more than the image of a body on the banks of the River Tweed I had started with.

Time passes, and things are looking a lot brighter on several fronts than they did at the end of 2014. I have not one but two books out. No Stranger to Death has a brand new cover to match its sequel, and as I write, both are in the Kindle Top 100 for Scottish crime fiction. And I’m already planning future blog posts.

I’m still looking forward to waving goodbye to 2015, though.

You can buy Too Soon a Death here.
(2015 pic courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net)

Doesn't time fly when you're having fun?

A year ago tonight I stood in the Reivers Fish Bar in Duns, waiting for our fish suppers and scrolling through Twitter on my mobile. Suddenly a tweet came in that mentioned me. It was from my good friend and fellow Borders writer Peter Flannery saying he'd just bought a copy of my first novel, No Stranger to Death. 

I paid for the takeaway and wandered out in a bit of a daze. I was a published author!

The last 12 months have been great. I've not made a fortune (I didn't expect to) but I’ve earned more than what I spent on the book’s cover design, editing and formatting. There have been more thrills than spills, far more highs than lows, and I feel optimistic about my future. So here’s a whistle-stop tour of what has happened and what I've learned.

A few things that have happened to No Stranger to Death

• Has 35 reviews on Amazon UK, 32 of them 5 stars, and an average of 4.17 from 24 ratings on Goodreads.
• Highest UK Kindle ranking at full price was 17 in Scottish crime fiction on 26^th December 2013
• Highest UK Kindle rankings on 99p Kindle Countdown Deals were 2 in Noir crime fiction, 5 in Scottish crime fiction, 7 in British crime fiction and 902 in the entire Kindle store on 27^th July 2014.
• Has sold enough copies for me to join the Society of Authors.
• Has been awarded an Indie B.R.A.G. Medallion.
• Has been reviewed on numerous websites and blogs, even being made Book of the Month by Crime Book Club.
• Was the 14^th most borrowed title in Scottish Borders libraries in May/June 2014.
• Has gained me four appearances in my local paper, the Berwickshire News.
• Has been read by a local book group who invited me to attend their discussion about it (they liked it ­– phew!).
• Its wonderful cover, designed by Kim McGillivray, received a gold star and high praise in a prestigious ebook cover competition.
• It has been read by my 80-year-old Dad, who never reads fiction and was a bit shocked.

A few things I’ve learned

• Once the actual writing is done, self-publishing is about decisions on countless issues such as pricing, layout, cover design. And only you can make them. This is both empowering and terrifying. 
  
• As with many things in life, publishing a book takes far longer than you expect, if you want to stand any chance of getting it right.
• Amazon moves in a mysterious way, its wonders to perform. Trust no one who claims to fully understand it.
• Small details are important. For example, ebooks are subject to VAT in the UK. If you input your price at £1.92, the price the customer pays is actually £1.98, whereas to achieve £1.99 you have to input £1.93. What difference does a penny make, I hear you ask. Well, a book can’t be on a Kindle Countdown offer if it’s priced at less than £1.99, so some authors (cough) have had to delay promotions because of that penny.
• Self-promotion is hard. I do it with what a friend calls ‘a very light touch’ because I don’t want to annoy people, and as a result probably don’t promote my book enough. But I can live with that.
• We all know not everyone will like our books. But knowing this and experiencing it are entirely different. I’ve not had a 1-star review yet but even that 3-star one, describing my baby as ‘pretty average’, hurt at first.
• I’m already developing a thicker skin, or maybe I’ve gained confidence now that readers are telling me they’ve enjoyed my book. Not long after No Stranger to Death came out, I was kindly offered the chance to have it reviewed by an online book group, but turned this opportunity down. I wouldn’t now!
• There’s a tremendous camaraderie between authors which transcends the published/unpublished and indie/traditional divides. I’ve been touched by the generosity of other writers who have supported me.
• You can’t force people who’ve enjoyed your book to leave a review. However, I’ve found that giving readers other ways to show their appreciation, like putting my Facebook page and Twitter handle at the back of No Stranger to Death, has paid dividends. I’m thrilled every time I receive a message saying someone has read my book and enjoyed it. Sometimes they even use the word 'loved'.
• I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how many men have told me they enjoyed No Stranger to Death, including Nigel Adams who wrote a lovely review on his blog.
• I don’t sell many paperbacks but I’m glad I went the extra mile to make them available. They are invaluable for signings, giveaways, thank you gifts and review copies. And I'm hoping a few people who've enjoyed the ebook may buy paperbacks for their crime-fiction-loving friends and relatives at Christmas. 

A few things I’d like to say

• If you’re one of the many, many people who have supported me over the past year by buying my book, reviewing it, spreading the word about it or by any other means, I'd like to say ...  

  

  
  

• If you’re thinking of self-publishing, go for it! It’s not easy and the results are unpredictable, but it is tremendously satisfying.  
• And finally, if you’re wondering what’s next, I’ll be publishing my second book, working title Too Soon a Death, in June 2015. 

(All pics courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net)

Catching up

It's been a longish, hottish summer in Scotland, and lots has happened. I won't bore you with my holiday photos but here is some news I'd like to share.

READING NEWS
I've declared October 2014 my personal Scandi-crime month, because this pile has looked accusingly down at me from my to-be-read shelf for long enough. And because I couldn't wait, I've started already, with Mankell's Faceless Killers. I've heard varying opinions on Twitter and Facebook about several novels in this pile. I'll let you know what I think at the end of next month.

WRITING NEWS
No Stranger to Death has received two very different plaudits recently. Firstly, it has been awarded a B.R.A.G. Medallion, an award for quality self-published books. 

B.R.A.G. is an acronym for Book Readers' Appreciation Group, and books which are chosen for the Medallion go through a rigorous selection process. This involves an initial screening then reading by members of a global reader group who judge them on creative criteria like plot, writing style, characters and dialogue, as well as the professional aspects of copy editing, cover and interior layout. The required standards are very high: only 10% of the books considered are awarded a B.R.A.G. Medallion.

One of the criticisms of self-publishing is that it's hard for readers to find quality books among all the titles being put out there. The B.R.A.G. Medallion scheme is helping address that.

Find out more at this link.

SELF-PUBLISHING NEWS

I've written here and here about the process which led to No Stranger to Death having a cover design by Kim McGillivray that I'm truly proud of. While researching cover designs which work (and ones that don't!) I spent a lot of time on Joel Friedlander's website The Book Designer. As well as offering invaluable advice on many aspects of self-publishing, Joel runs a monthly e-book cover design award. Competition is fierce and some of Joel's verdicts can be even fiercer, so I held off from entering for months. But I did finally pluck up the courage, and here's what he thought: 

"I love the way the designer has used a minimum number of elements, colors and fonts to create this high-impact, moody cover. "

He also awarded Kim's design a coveted gold star, which gives us the right to display this image: 

NEW WRITING NEWS

All this excitement hasn't let me forget the most important task in hand: writing the sequel to No Stranger to Death. I'm about a third of the way through now, and once the first draft is complete, I'll share a little about it. All I can say to those of you who have read the book and are anxious to know if a certain character comes back is . . . probably, though not how you might expect.

Thanks for reading!

Who sold the most books?

And the winner is ...

The last time I blogged, I wrote about my decision to promote No Stranger to Death at 99p/99c as a Kindle Countdown Deal for a week in late July. I also mentioned that my friend Peter Flannery was doing the same with his already successful thriller First and Only. To make things really interesting, we wagered a bottle of champagne on which book would sell the most. We stayed in touch while the promotion was on, swapping emails and captured images of Kindle chart rankings, and met up recently to discuss what happened and share sales figures. Peter plans to blog about what he learnt from the exercise, and here are some of my observations.

So, who won?

Cutting to the chase, Peter sold the most ebooks overall. In fact, his unit sales were more than twice mine. However, I sold more in the UK while the majority of Peter’s sales were on Amazon.com, and although his daily sales peaked on Day 2 of his promotion, mine kept on rising until my book went back up to £1.99.  I can’t help wondering what would have happened if I could have held the price at 99p for, say, a further week.

What about Amazon rankings?

I checked No Stranger to Death’s Kindle store rankings twice daily (well, possibly more often than that – it did get addictive!).  Here are some of the book’s rankings landmarks on Amazon UK:

	21st July (day 1)	24/7	27/7 (final day)	28/7 (promo ended)
Kindle store (paid)	17,392	2,157	902	1285
Noir crime	23	6	2	3
Scottish crime	97	15	5	8
British crime	-	36	7	10

The changes in No Stranger to Death’s rankings on Amazon.com were pleasing too, despite the lower sales rate. From starting off just outside the top 100,000 Kindle books, on 25^th July it peaked at an overall ranking of 9,298 and was at no. 5 in Noir crime, no. 57 in British crime and no. 50 in Murder. 

Other observations

During and immediately after the promotion I had a few Kindle Unlimited (KU) and Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (KOLL) borrowings, so my book’s profile had been raised enough to generate these.  In addition, I notched up more sales in Germany, Canada and Australia than I ever had before (even though the Countdown Deal was only on the UK and USA sites).

What does all this mean?

This was a learning exercise for both Peter and me. Because it’s impossible to track every book sale back to what motivated the buyer (I wish!) we can only make educated guesses at what the data we’ve collected is telling us. Alas, as someone once said, ‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half’.  However, here’s how I have interpreted the results of my Countdown Deal.

BOOK PROMOTION SITES

Peter invested in a BookBub promotion which took place on Day 2. As this was the day his sales peaked, it seems like the market leader in book promotions does deliver increased sales, although with a heavy bias towards the US market. My book is still hampered by a lack of reviews on Amazon.com. It was hard to get many promotional sites to even consider listing it (I didn’t try BookBub for this reason) and this has probably put off potential buyers too. 

I spent far less than BookBub would have cost on free/cheap ($10) book promotion sites like The Daily Bookworm, 99 Cent Mysteries and Awesome Gang, and more than made back my money. Although most of them carried through on their promises, I’m not convinced they generated a lot of sales for all the effort it took to register with them. However, given Peter’s experience, if I could get my book accepted, I would give BookBub a go in the future.

TWITTER

I value the friends I’ve made on Twitter and have such a fear of becoming an annoying ‘Buy my book!’ person there that instead of blitzing social media I paced myself with just a couple of promotional tweets each day. This seems to have paid off as friends on Twitter helped tremendously in spreading the word in the UK. (My thanks to everyone who retweeted on my behalf.) 

Even though I scheduled promotional tweets during the UK night in order to catch some Americans while they were online, I don’t have sufficient USA followers to make this work for me.

FACEBOOK

Despite my Facebook author page having 143 likes (not a lot, I know, but I’ve put little effort into promoting it), none of my promotional posts reached anything like that number of people, even when I liked and shared them with friends on my personal FB page. I didn’t pay to increase their reach because I’ve tried that once before and it was a total waste of money. However, all was not lost on the FB front, as I also posted details of my Countdown Deal on several crime/mystery fiction FB groups which allow promotional postings. I know these garnered at least a few sales, because I got comments from people who liked the sound of my book and bought it. That is one of the strengths of FB: it enables immediate feedback.

AMAZON SITES

I’m not convinced that promoting my book as a Countdown Deal gave it much visibility on either of the Amazon websites. You have to go searching for the page featuring these books, unlike Daily Deals, books in the Summer Sale, etc which are boldly presented to everyone visiting the Kindle store and included in targeted emails. Does the counting-down element (‘Price goes up to £x in 5 days’) really motivate readers to buy? That said, books in Countdown retain the higher 70% royalty rate. If I promoted outside this, my royalty rate would halve.

What next?

Running the first price promotion for No Stranger to Death was informative and fun, although it involved a lot of work to maximise its effect. I’ve benefited financially, but not to a huge degree, and I’m hopeful that as people who downloaded my book get round to reading it, the number of Amazon reviews it has will steadily increase. I can now refer to its Kindle chart success, e.g. ‘A Kindle top 5 Scottish crime novel’, in other marketing I do.

Here are some plans I have for the future:

• No Stranger to Death’s lack of reviews by American readers is holding it back, and I need to address this. Ideas I have include contacting US book bloggers (although many refuse to review self-published books) and using GoodReads to distribute review copies. I may even look at doing a short ‘free’ promotion solely on Amazon.com. If anyone has any other suggestions, please let me know.
• The temptation to throw everything at a promotion is huge, but maybe next time I’ll experiment with fewer marketing components to help identify what really works.
• I must weigh up the pros and cons of simply reducing the price of No Stranger to Death rather than making it a Countdown Deal. I could then decide when to put the book’s price back up. If it was doing well at the lower price, I could hold it there for longer.
• I have now gone way beyond the sales threshold required of self-published authors to join the Society of Authors. My application is going in this week.
• By far the best thing I can do to sell more books is write more! So in tandem with my ongoing promotion of No Stranger to Death, I’m hard at work on its sequel, working title Too Soon a Death.

By the way, Peter declared our competition a draw (because of my UK sales success) and told me I don’t need to buy him a bottle of champagne. But of course I will. 

Throwing down the gauntlet

“Let’s see who can sell the most books.”

As soon as those words were out of my mouth, I couldn’t believe I’d said them. Least of all to my mate Peter Flannery, whose first novel, First and Only, has had over 60,000 downloads since 2011, received ecstatic reviews worldwide and is now in the process of being turned into a film. But when I discovered we were both planning a Kindle Countdown Deal at the same time, a bit of healthy competition – as if there isn’t enough from all the other books out there – seemed like a good idea. And so, from 21^st to 27^th July, Peter’s novel and No Stranger to Death will be slugging it out to see which can sell the most copies at 99c on Amazon USA and 99p on Amazon UK. The loser will buy the winner a decent bottle of champagne.

Why are we doing this? Peter has nothing to prove with First and Only, but he’s just given it a lovely new cover and there are still plenty of people out there who haven’t read his novel, although it did hold the Number 1 position in Kindle Psychological Thrillers for nearly two months during 2012. I’m very pleased with how well No Stranger to Death has been received in the UK, but it has yet to get off the ground in the USA. I’m also curious to test the theory which is now being bandied about that “99p is the new free”.

Unlike most of my writer friends, Peter lives in the Scottish Borders as I do, so we regularly meet up in real life. He was very generous with his time and advice when I decided to self-publish, and we have pooled our knowledge when planning our Countdown Deals. However, our starting points and approaches are very different, and this is where the results will be interesting. Will Peter’s investment in book promotion sites like BookBub trump my heavy reliance on Twitter and Facebook to publicise my book’s temporary reduction in price? Will more readers be willing to risk 99c or 99p on a relatively new and unproven novel which is clearly in the mystery genre than on one that has lots of reviews yet is harder to classify?

Like the entire self-publishing experience, the next week is going to be exciting and a bit scary as Peter and I try not to look at our sales and Amazon rankings too often. We’ll let you know how we get on. Peter is blogging about the experience over on his website too. You'll notice that the bubbly he's pictured there is Bollinger*. I look forward to holding him to that!

In the meantime, if you’d like to find out more about our books, here are the links.

No Stranger to Death: Amazon UK or Amazon USA 

First and Only: Amazon UK or Amazon USA 

*My champagne photo is courtesy of www.freedigitalphotos.net

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

By any other name . . .

Shakespeare: A godsend for authors in search of a title

For a long time my first novel was going to be called The Shilling Rope. This had absolutely nothing to do with the plot, but popped into my head when I visited the archives at Berwick-upon-Tweed and was shown an 18^th‑century hangman's bill. Among his charges was a shilling for the rope, which apparently did not change however much rope was required. 

The sequel, when I decided to write one, was to be called The Bastardy Bond. This was a term I came across when researching genealogy, the business of one of my main characters. But as I learnt more about publishing, I realised (duh!) that neither of these titles works for modern-day crime fiction. That said, I still think they're good titles and in the unlikely event that I ever turn my hand to historical fiction, I may use them.

A book's title has the same job as its cover design: it should entice the reader and suggest a little of what they can expect to find inside. Once I had taken this on board, I set about finding a proper title for Book One. The received wisdom (don't ask me where I heard this) is that crime novels sell particularly well if they have the word ‘death’ in their titles. Recognising that as a first-time, self-publishing author I need all the help I can get, I decided to come up with a title which included the word ‘death’.

First of all I turned to my dictionary of idioms. Among the many sayings using ‘death’ are:

• In at the death
• Catch one's death
• Death trap
• Kiss of death

They all sound horribly familiar, clichéd even, don't they? 

So my next step was to bring out my dictionary of quotations and look up ‘death’ in the index. Shakespeare, Tennyson and the Bible used this word a great deal! 

However, when I started reading the quotations in detail, I got a surprise. It became apparent that some of the best known and most effective crime fiction titles, although based on literary works and quotations about death, do not necessarily feature the word itself.

Agatha Christie did use ‘death’ and ‘murder’ in many of her titles: for example, Murder at the Vicarage, Death in the Clouds. The inspiration for titles like One Two Buckle My Shoe and A Pocket Full of Rye is obvious: nursery rhymes. (As an aside, my friend Bea Davenport’s next crime novel, out in October, is called This Little Piggy, demonstrating this can still be an inspired source.) But Christie also found her titles in more serious literature.

• Pale Horse has its origins in the Bible. In Revelations you’ll find this: ‘And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat upon him was Death.’
• By the Pricking of My Thumbs is from a speech by the second witch in the play Macbeth. The full quotation is ‘By the pricking of my thumbs / Something wicked this way comes’
• The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side is from Tennyson’s ‘The Lady from Shalott’. The full quotation is ‘The mirror crack’d from side to side / “The curse is come upon me” cried / The Lady of Shalott’

The work of playwright John Webster, a contemporary of Shakespeare best known for his tragedy The Duchess of Malfi, has also provided several book titles, not all crime fiction:

·         Conference with the Dead (Terry Lansley)

·         Blood Flies Upwards (Elizabeth Ferrars)

·         Cover Her Face (PD James)

·         I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou, who doesn’t directly quote Webster but references the line ‘We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry’.)

PD James takes this literary referencing even further. The title of her novel The Skull beneath the Skin is a quotation from TS Eliot about Webster in ‘Whispers of Immortality’: ‘Webster was much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin’. And in researching this post I found a book, now out of print, called By Death Possessed by the late Roger Ormorod.

So, did the title No Stranger to Death originate come from my wandering through The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations? Not directly, no. In fact, I had slammed the book shut in disappointment and gone to make a cup of tea. And then it came to me. Writing – in common with many other undertakings – can be like that. It’s only when you stop trying so hard that a solution to a problem shows itself. Which is perhaps why the title for Book Two came so easily: Too Soon a Death.

If you're a writer, how do you come up with titles? If you're a reader, do titles actually matter much when you're choosing what to read next? Do get in touch and let me know. I can be reached by leaving a comment below or clicking one of those buttons at the top of this page.

Shakespeare collection photo courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net

My writing process

My Writing Process is a series of blog posts in which authors ‘tag’ each other to answer some questions about their work. Thanks to my good friend Bea Davenport, who writes both adult crime/suspense and children's fiction, for inviting me to take part.

What am I working on?

I’m in the very early stages of writing the sequel to my first novel, No Stranger to Death. It’s six months on and my main character, Doctor Zoe Moreland, is still living with the repercussions from events triggered by her discovery of a body in a Guy Fawkes bonfire. The second book opens with Zoe being called out by the police to identify a young Asian man who has apparently been thrown into the River Tweed from the historic chain bridge linking Scotland and England.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

Although my books are crime fiction, at their core they’re about relationships, though not simply romantic ones. Friendships are important in real life, especially to women, and I try to reflect that. I loathe the expression ‘amateur sleuth’ but after working in a GP surgery I decided to make my main character a doctor rather than a police officer. GPs deal with people in extremis and hear their innermost secrets. They are also well-placed to interact with the police and other authorities. Perhaps most interestingly, they are bound by confidentiality, which can lead to moral dilemmas and conflict.

Why do I write what I do?

Wearing my other hat, as a professional copywriter I’ve written on subjects I started off knowing nothing about, like care homes for the elderly and school federations. However, when it comes to fiction I can’t imagine writing in genres I don’t read, such as romance. Judging one’s own work is hard enough; I wouldn’t know if it was any good if I had no idea what readers’ expectations are. And having readers enjoy what I write is my primary aim.

How does my writing process work?

I’m a slow and reluctant pantser who starts off with a corpse and wings it from there. I dread being asked that perennial question, ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ because I simply don’t know. I’ve even coined a term to describe the process: imagication.

Thanks for reading about My Writing Process. I’m now passing the baton on to Vivienne Tuffnell, who will blog about her own process next week. Our writing could not be more different, but we’ve got to know each other on Twitter, where her bio describes her as writer, poet, explorer and mystic. Vivienne has written stories her whole life, even before she could actually read, as she explains.

“My father mistakenly allowed me to use his typewriter from an early age and I was hooked. I'm not sure the typewriter survived very long having me bash out strings of letters in the belief that what I had in my head would magically transform into words others can read. I've got better at that.”

Vivienne writes novels, short stories and poetry, and her wonderfully named blog is Zen and the Art of Tightrope Walking.

Photo courtesy of www.freedigitalphotos.net