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

Trust me, I’m a creative

The Scottish Borders, where I live, is full to bursting with creative people, not just writers, but visual artists working in a wide range of media. And in talking to some of them, I’ve discovered an interesting thing: the creative processes of those of us who work with words have a lot in common with those of artists who create images. So, as a change from blogging about myself and my writing, I shall occasionally invite an artist on here to answer questions (based on ones I’ve been asked myself) about how they work. I hope you’ll find this an interesting departure.

My first volunteer is Kim McGillivray, an illustrator and educator based in Edinburgh. I met Kim last year when he designed the wonderful cover for No Stranger to Death. Since 1993, he has been providing imagery for book covers and editorial features, created weekly satirical spots for newspapers plus illustrations for commercial graphics/advertising and the odd poster along the way. He also teaches part-time at Art College.

At what age did you realise you were creative, and what form did your creativity take?

I’ve always been keen on drawing, and was receptive to the feedback that my drawings received when I was 5-6 years old. I liked making images and I was a mostly visual child. My writing and academic progress elsewhere was perfectly fine but, in my leisure, I predominantly looked at picture books and enjoyed concentrating on my own pictures. This might sound bizarre, but finding paper wasn’t always easy and I would draw on the backs of envelopes and boxes.

Did you have any formal training?

I went to Edinburgh College of Art to study a degree in Visual Communication, which included Graphics, Film & TV, Animation, Photography and Illustration. I specialised in the latter two. I have mixed feelings about the experience. The institution was imperfect and the learning experience was full of flaws. I was also quite young, inexperienced, from an unsophisticated background and was learning a lot about city living. In retrospect, despite my appetite for new experiences, I was probably affected by culture shock. The good and the bad things were ultimately learning experiences and have been influential in my own teaching.

When did you decide that was how you wanted to make a living? How soon were you able to make this a reality?

Due to leaving art college with a bad taste in my mouth, I was motivated to make things happen on my own terms - I think I had something to prove. My first six months were spent working in a record shop re-finding some equilibrium after the intense conclusion to my studies. In January 1993, I started taking my folio around potential clients, I went part-time and gave myself 6 months to see if enough would happen to merit continuing. That was the extent of my business plan.

Do you mostly create what you choose or do you work to commission?

For almost 21 years, my work was always in response to commissions. I’ve been adept at interpreting and translating supplied material into imagery. More recently, though, I’ve worked on side projects where I‘m more central to what’s being developed and expressed. Nowadays, when teaching Communication Design, we’re more mindful of authorship - I think that can encourage young designers/illustrators to be less passive and more ambitious.

Where do you get your ideas from?

My work is about the act of translation. I love absorbing manuscripts, journalism, poetry, music (whatever form material comes in) and translating it effectively into imagery. The imagery need not be secondary to the text, nor merely replicating it. I feel imagery and text should complement one another in stimulating ways.

What’s your starting point when beginning a new piece of work?

I sketch and brainstorm. I’ll make written notes of what I understand of the material. I attempt to make associations between different elements and I will conduct visual research of particular items, themes, locations, imagery, whatever.

I will make many draft attempts at image ideas. Nothing is pointless. Making these steps is vital even though much of it might get discarded. Getting what’s in your head onto paper will help you organise the mental scramble and help you see the paths worth developing. That can be quite scrappy but it’s all about identifying and developing quality ideas and approaches rather than any appealing artwork style at that early stage.

The notion of inspiration striking is a myth. Startling connections or realizations can happen but they’ll only be delayed understandings of what you’ve already set up. It is about steady graft and persistent development of ideas and technique.

Do you have any rituals while working?

I’m reasonably disciplined at getting round to work. I do a regular working week and keep rather standard hours: Monday-Friday, 9-5. In my younger, free-er days I maybe did 11-7 with plenty of late nights. Conversely, I’m pretty bad at forcing myself to remain seated at the desk, even when it’s not helpful. I’m not very good at allowing myself walks or gallery trips when a mental break is probably what’s needed most. Having said that, I do distract myself a lot (I mean, do research!) on the internet. Rituals? I need a strong coffee and a banana around at about 11am every day.

What are your ideal working conditions, e.g. do you need complete silence or listen to music?

No other people (despite being a sociable person). Lauren Laverne on BBC 6Music is good. Silence when I need to concentrate, if that gets too isolating I sometimes play classical music. If I feel too lonely, then talk on Radio 4. One can absorb a lot of culture in these ways. Podcasts are helpful too.

Other environmental factors? I’m content with the study that I have in the house. I had a shared studio very early in my career that brought both good and bad experiences. All of human life thrives on interaction, but hell does sometimes feel like other people.

Can you remember the first piece of work you sold?

As a student, I got my first live project for a student paper. It was produced by David Shayler, who notoriously went on to become a secret-service-operative-turned-whistle-blower.

Do you ever abandon pieces because they aren’t working?

I don’t think of it that way. There’s no drama in developing avenues that don’t make it to the final outcome. The creative process shouldn’t comprise a single line of approach. I start many ideas, there will be branches, mergers, reflections and consultations.

How long will an average piece of work take to create?

Way too long, my cost-efficiency is akin to the minimum wage.

What are you working on at the moment?

A book cover for a self-publishing author plus some finishing work I did as Graphic Reporter. That’s an intriguing new direction that is opening up for me. I’m ready for new challenges and find that my skills from freelance practice and teaching are applicable in new and interesting settings. In fact, the understanding of illustration and design practice is changing and the necessary skills and mind-set continue to evolve amidst a media landscape that’s radically being affected by new technologies.

What professional hopes and ambitions do you have for the future?

I set myself the task of attempting to adapt and evolve to the changing circumstances I find myself in as an illustrator. It’s good that this challenge has come around, though, as one can’t do the same thing forever. Learning is fun. I’m enjoying finding out about how publishing is changing and seeing what creative and commercial possibilities might be developed from that. This has encouraged me to pursue side projects and the results could be quite rewarding. It’s all about changing models just now - and how (or whether) money can be made in affected industries. If I negotiate this correctly, enough people will, hopefully, continue to want my services in future years.

Thank you so much, Kim, for that insight into your creative process. Much of what you say resonates with me, especially in relation to the need to adapt and evolve, and creativity being a matter of hard work rather than flashes of inspiration.

You can see lots more of Kim’s work on his website: http://www.kimfolio.com/

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

Agatha Christie had it easy

Jonathan Creek recently returned to British TV screens and, being fans, we watched the first episode. It contained one of the worst motives for a character’s actions that I have ever encountered in a work of fiction (if you’ve not watched it but plan to do so, look away now). A terminally ill wife planted fake evidence she had been having an affair, so that when she died her much-loved husband would be less sad at losing her. It was preposterous, not a motive but a mechanism designed with the sole purpose of explaining away a mystery.

Had the rest of the programme been excellent – which it wasn’t – I would still have groaned in disappointment. Readers and audiences allow themselves to go along with fiction, suspending their disbelief at the depiction of all kinds of unlikely events. For example, I’m currently catching up with – and loving – Game of Thrones on Sky Atlantic and am captivated by a girl who can withstand fire and is raising several dragons. But this only works if writers give their characters credible motives for the way they behave.

Modern society is (thankfully!) far more forgiving than when Agatha Christie started writing. Back then, things like illegitimacy, divorce and bankruptcy were considered unacceptable and shameful. Homosexuality was illegal in Britain until 1967. Fictional characters could credibly be depicted going to desperate measures, including murder, to avoid the scandal of their private lives being made public.

Bad day at the office, dear?

These days, however, we are not so bound by convention. If a couple no longer get along, there’s little need for one of them to kill the other. Although still painful, divorce is now rightly regarded as no one’s business bar that of the people involved. And, according to the press, by 2016 the number of children born ‘out of wedlock’ (how quaint that sounds) will be greater than those born in it.

A more tolerant society is a good thing. Except for crime writers like me, who face the challenge of providing their miscreants with plausible motives. This is probably one of the reasons for the rise in popularity of psychopathic serial killers in crime fiction. They are motivated by their own internal logic, which readers still find compelling despite not sharing it.

Luckily, for all writers, while society may change, human nature never does. We’re always going to want what we can’t have and act in ways it would be wiser not to. Universal motives like love, hate, greed and jealousy will endure. A writer's skill lies in persuading an audience to buy into a character and their story so that their actions – and the motivation behind them – are believable. Whereas anyone can create a puzzle then manufacture a witless motive to explain it.

Images courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net