Things are looking bright at the moment — and not just the weather. People seem to be buying Burke and the War of 1812 and some have even been in touch to say how much they are enjoying it. Right now, being an author, even a not-particularly-well-known one, feels pretty good. And that’s important, because warm fuzzies are what writing brings, rather than any great material rewards. So now, warm fuzzies notwithstanding, is a good time to look at the realities of life for the overwhelming majority of writers.
Why you can’t find an audio version of my Burke books
Recently somebody asked me to recommend them an Audible book written by an indie author. They drive a lot in the course of their work, so most of their ‘reading’ is on audiobooks in the car. They said that I’m always encouraging them to try indie authors instead of just going for bestsellers, so they were going to give it a try.
I duly checked out some of my favourite indie authors and soon realised that hardly any have audiobook versions of their work.
There’s a simple reason for this. Paying a narrator is expensive and indie authors simply don’t generate the levels of sales that are needed to meet the narrator’s fees.
Narrating is hard work and narrators bring a lot of skills their job. I know, because I tried to narrate my novella, Dark Magic, myself and I don’t think that the result is nearly as good as if a professional had done it. (You can buy a copy for just 99p if you want to hear for yourself.) Recording a full length novel will take three or four days and the voice artist will reasonably expect a substantial amount of money. This is completely fair enough, but does rather beg the question of why a voice artist expects to be paid properly for the days of work that they put in while the author cannot generate enough money to pay their narrator, even though they will have spent months writing the book.
Please feed the authors
Underlying the problem with paying for narration, as with so many book-related issues, is that our culture does not believe in paying for books. In the recent scandal of Meta illegally copying millions of books to train their AI, Meta has claimed that the books have no “economic value”. In one of the lawsuits currently underway, Meta is quoted as claiming “none of Plaintiffs works has economic value, individually, as training data.” It’s a view presumably shared by those who download pirated copies of my books. (I’ve given up filing “cease and desist” claims against sites offering illegal copies of my books because as quickly as one site is shut down another opens.)
Writers contribute to this idea. Many regularly make their work available for free from time to time as a promotional ploy. I offer the occasional book for sale at 99p. A more fundamental problem is that the product of our labour is regularly sold ridiculously cheaply. All my books are available on Kindle for £3.99 or less. Perhaps I should put the prices up. Do feel free to respond, letting me know.
Writing isn’t cheap
Although the book is available in paperback, most sales of Burke and the War of 1812 will be on Kindle. Of the £3.99 cover price, I get around £2.76.
I’m lucky, because my family are spectacularly supportive and between them and some very good friends, I can get by without paying for professional editing and proof-reading, both of which are expensive. I prepare my typescript for publication by Amazon myself and by now I can do a decent job without wasting too much time, though many authors pay someone else to handle this.
All this means that the only cost I have to carry myself is the cover design. Mine cost £100 each. Authors who pay for editing, proofreading and preparation for publishing can easily spend thousands of pounds getting their book ready for market.
Because I write historical fiction, I can spend quite a lot on research costs. Some of the research is definitely fun. For Burke in the Land of Silver, I rode a horse high into the Andes until we were turned back by snow. For Burke and the Lines of Torres Vedras, I travelled to Portugal to see the remains of the fortifications. I enjoyed both trips, which is just as well as neither book generated enough money to pay for them. Fortunately, I enjoy historical conferences too, as these don’t come cheap. Less obviously enjoyable is the pile of reading matter that has to be worked through before writing can start. Many of the books I use were written in the periods I write about and are therefore out of copyright, but many are not and they have to be bought and paid for before any writing takes place.
Research trip for Burke in the Land of Silver
I’m not even going to think about the incidental costs, like hosting and other fees on my website (where you’re reading this blog) or membership of writers’ associations.
Any author who expects to make their fortune out of writing is unwise. Some may, but most won’t. Many will end up well out of pocket for their efforts.
Why we write
I think that writing could well be regarded as the sort of compulsive behaviour which, in other areas of life, could be regarded as a form of mental illness. Speaking for myself, it is something I’ve always wanted to do and which I’m glad to have been doing for the last fifteen or so years. I’m lucky. I’m retired and I can afford what is a (more or less) paying hobby. But most people – including many whose books you might enjoy – can’t put in the years of work that build their skills without seeing any tangible reward for their efforts. And even people like me, who can afford it, find themselves asking, increasingly often: what is the point?
Does it matter?
That rather depends on whether or not you enjoy reading decently written books by people who have the time and resources they need to keep writing them. Already, most books are being written by older, middle-class white people. The economic model of writing hardly encourages diversity and things are likely to get much worse.
Perhaps, in a world of digital entertainment, reading has just had its day. Perhaps Meta is correct: books have no economic value. Maybe we don’t pay our authors, because we do not really care about the books they write.
It might be time for authors, including me, to call it a day.
What can you do?
You might well agree that a world with a great deal fewer books is a better world and people like me should just stop adding to the pile of unread literature. (Ironically, as people spend less time reading, technological changes mean that ever more books are being published.) If you agree, do comment to say so. It’s a point of view that deserves to be heard and explored.
If you think books are important, there are things you can do.
Buy more books, obviously. It especially helpful if you buy books from the great pool of unknown writers, rather than the handful of established bestsellers – or singers/film stars/whatever whose names have been attached to someone else’s writing.
Please don’t steal books. Pirated copies are common. I used to take the view that I’d rather people stole my books than that they didn’t read them at all but the scale of theft has got to the point that some authors and publishers are giving up on sequels because recorded sales of early books in a series are too low to justify continuing. It isn’t just about the money: if a book is pirated there is no record that it was read at all. Plus stealing is, you know, Wrong.
If you can’t afford books (and, at the prices they sell at nowadays, that seems unlikely) use libraries. In the UK, authors get paid when you borrow books from the library. And a good chunk of what little I make from writing comes from people who read my books on Kindle Unlimited.
Tell people about the books you enjoy. Better yet, write a review on Amazon or other review sites. It doesn’t have to be an essay. Twenty words, sharing the pleasure a book has given you, are better than the 500 words you never actually get round to writing.
Let writers know that you enjoyed their books. The main reason Burke and the War of 1812 got written was because people I have never met let me know they wanted to read it. (True story.)
If you are a parent, read with your children.
If reading matters, writers matter. Please support your local writers. Or any writers. Without writers there will be no books and I think that will make the world a poorer place.
The joy of writing historical fiction is that much of the story is given to you by history. When I was writing my latest,Burke and the War of 1812, I didn’t have to invent reasons why Burke might be fighting in Canada: the War of 1812 was a real thing and British troops were fighting there.
The Battle of Queenston Heights by eyewitness James B. Dennis
I wanted to tell the story of how the Native American tribes were drawn into the war and that was easy too. The British were heavily involved with some Native American leaders, so I have James Burke building links with the Shawnee people, who were amongst the first to fight alongside the British against the invading Americans. I would have had Burke working with the Shawnee in any case, but I was delighted to discover that there were rumours at the time of two British soldiers (and who’s to say it wasn’t James Burke and his regular sidekick, William Brown) who were advising the Shawnee before the Battle of Tippecanoe, which features in the story.
I also had to explain some of the political background and give an idea of what life was like in Washington in 1812. Again, the facts are readily available and there is some wonderful gossipy detail thanks to memoirs of the time, so I have James Burke in Washington, doing what he does best, which is spying on the enemies of Britain. And it would be helpful to get the political background to the Native American alliances as well, so it would be handy to have Burke at a famous tribal meeting near modern Tallassee, Alabama.
Fun as all this background detail is, you can’t really write about the War of 1812 without covering the American army’s march north to Canada, so William Brown is doing his own spying in the American force, while Burke is planning the defence of Canada alongside the British General Brock in York (now Toronto).
So there’s the outlines of the story already written for me. Now all I have to do is to get James Burke and William Brown to Indiana to meet the Shawnee, before packing Burke off to Tallassee. Then William has to be marching from Dayton, Ohio, up to Detroit, while Burke is in Washington. Burke then has to get from Washington to Toronto, to meet with Brock before heading west to Windsor. By then I need William to have slipped away from the Americans so that he can gather the latest intelligence from the Shawnee before he meets up with Burke so that they can both witness the American defeat at Detroit.
All this has to be done using riverboats and horses and communications can’t include radios or telephones. And you have to be aware of any limitations on travel. (In an early draft I had Burke sailing up a river before I realised I had just sailed him over the Niagara Falls.)
So, yes, I don’t need nearly as much imagination to outline a historical novel as I do when I’m inventing a whole vampire sub-culture around Brampton Cemetery (in Something Wicked). But the mechanics of making all the moving parts work together brings its own problems. Sometimes you can even come up with solutions for mysteries history can’t explain. For example, Nelson was able to destroy the French fleet in Egypt because it remained vulnerable at anchor long after it should have put out to sea. Historians often wonder why but in Burke and the Bedouin we learn about the British agent who killed the courier carrying orders from Napoleon for the fleet to set sail.
Historical fiction: where history writes the plots and plots may write the history.
It’s Friday morning and time for me to write my weekly blog.
It’s been a good week. Saturday was publication day for the latest of my James Burke books, Burke and the War of 1812. We had a party. There was a cake.
It was quite a night and, frankly, not a lot got done on Sunday. And, after that, the weather was so nice that not a lot got done for the rest of the week either.
I suppose I should buckle down and get on with promoting the book. Unfortunately, books don’t sell themselves. If people don’t hear about them, they won’t get read. So marketing, not writing, is my priority now. If you read Burke and the War of 1812, you can help by writing a short review on Amazon.
I’m getting very excited here with the official launch of Burke and the War of 1812 coming up tomorrow. I quietly made the paperback available earlier, so if you want it on paper for launch day, you can order it today and it should arrive at the same time as the e-book is released.
I’m having a party at home with a few friends, which will, inevitably, feature tango dancing. We’ve also got a White House cake made with flames bursting from the centre to reflect the burning of the White House in 1814. That’s after the events in the book, but it’s the only thing most people know about the War of 1812, so we couldn’t resist having a White House fire as our centrepiece. I hope to have photos to share next week, although whenever we do have a party taking photos seems to be the last thing on anybody’s mind. Fingers crossed we remember this time.
There’s always a degree of excitement with any new book, even though this will be the eighth in the James Burke series, alongside the other seven novels I’ve written on other subjects. I’m particularly enthusiastic about this one, though, because the political situation between America and Canada has led to a revival of interest in what was, until a couple of months ago, a very little-known war in the UK. It’s better known in the US, but comments on social media suggest that many Americans have a very limited understanding of what actually happened. I’m guessing that Canadians will be better informed and I’m hoping that they’ll buy the book anyway because they do like to remember how they saw off the United States then, as they’re hoping to do again now.
Anyway, I have a party to prepare for, so this is all for this week’s blog. I’ll see you next week and let you know how it went.
It’s just a week until Burke and the War of 1812is published and I’m concentrating on trying to publicise that and organising a party to celebrate, so I don’t have a lot of energy to write a blog post this week.
Burke and the War of 1812 involved more research than anything I’ve written for a while. The war in North America is new territory for me and the history is not as well-known as it probably should be. It’s also, since I started writing, become suddenly and improbably contentious (and a big shout-out to Donald Trump for all his help in promoting the book).
I’ve put a lot of work into trying to make the story of the run-up to war and the opening battles accurately reflect the history of the conflict. It’s made me think again about the importance of research in writing historical fiction so I’ve dug out something I wrote on this subject years ago. It’s still relevant now and I hope you enjoy reading it.
Research in historical fiction
I’m going to a meeting of the London Chapter of the Historical Novel Society this weekend. The topic for discussion is historical research.
This is a subject dear to my heart. I’ve blogged about it once or twice before, and Jenny Kane has chipped in with her own perspective as an archaeologist turned novelist. So why am I struggling so hard to think of anything that I might say on Saturday?
I think part of the reason is that research is always, in the end, a matter of judgement and, indeed, personal preference. There are some purists out there who seem uncomfortable with any fiction at all in their historical fiction. An author who dares to admit that sometimes they just make stuff up can infuriate this kind of reader/writer. At the other extreme, there are authors who will cheerfully ignore any historical details that get in the way of their stories which can often seem hardly “historical” at all.
We all have different amounts of knowledge and different ideas of what is important. I have just been reading a discussion about historical inaccuracy in which one contributor is furious about the misrepresentation of Finns during World War II. She ridicules an author’s ignorance and points out what she sees as blatantly obvious errors. However, it turns out that she is a Finn herself. Her irritation is perfectly genuine and justified, but it is unlikely that any of the English readers that this story is clearly aimed at will be aware of many (if any) of the mistakes. They are still mistakes, of course, and anyone who relies on the story to inform them about the historical facts will end up feeling foolish. But, in fairness, this isn’t what the author was doing. Non-fiction accounts of the Eastern Front are available. The novelist is using this as a setting for a work of fiction. If the period detail is accurate enough to carry along the reader, does it matter that it is not exactly right?
The problem here is that what worries one reader will not necessarily worry another. Moving away from historical fiction for a moment, I once read a thriller in which a key element was that a computer memory stick that held a lot of data would be larger than one which contained very little. This is an error so egregious that it is difficult to understand how someone whose novels seem generally well based in the 21st-century could possibly have made such a mistake. However, I was able to overlook this and enjoy the book. My son, on the other hand, found this impossible to ignore and considers this book one of the worst he has read by that author. Returning to history, I recently read a book in which a sharpshooter in a British Napoleonic regiment wore a green jacket. Because this is something that I am writing about (in Burke at Waterloo), I am all too aware that the green jackets were not awarded to individuals within regular regiments but were worn by specialist rifle regiments. This was one of several details in this novel that left me feeling that the writer did not understand his period and that much of what he said had to be viewed with considerable suspicion. When, in the same story, someone threw fivepence (not five pennies) to a beggar, I decided he had pre-empted decimalisation by a century and a half and I almost gave up reading. Others, though, have praised the same book.
Personally, I like history in my books to be accurate. But I’m not a professional historian and, even if I were, I would not necessarily be writing about the period that I’m an expert on. I was very conscious when writing Burke in the Land of Silver that, as an English writer, I was likely to make mistakes with Argentinian history. In fact, Argentinian friends who have read the book have been perfectly comfortable with my interpretation of their history and I am delighted by that. I suspect, though, that they are being generous and that there are errors that they are not pointing out to me.
Getting caught out in straightforward mistakes is something that I think most historical fiction authors do worry about. Fortunately I have an excellent editor who is very good at catching this sort of thing. For example, I had somebody using a Bowie knife in around 1807 which seemed perfectly uncontroversial. She pointed out that the Bowie knife refers specifically to a design by popularised by Jim Bowie who was not born until around 1796. That kind of thing can always catch a writer out and having a second pair of eyes, especially eyes that are familiar with the period, is really useful. Mistakes will still creep in, though. When I was researching the story of James Brooke for The White Rajah, I rather overdid my reading of contemporary source material and, as a result, I was able to pick up small but real mistakes in one of the definitive biographies of his life. Given that the biography was a detailed and well footnoted academic tome, I am sure that the writer would have been embarrassed at the error, but to suggest that anyone can write about historical figures in depth without having a single mistake is, frankly, unrealistic. To insist that my novels (or anybody else’s historical fiction) have no mistakes is just silly. Apart from anything else, if I checked every single “fact” in my stories, the stories themselves would never get written. In Cawnpore there is a reference to a regimental colonel. I searched for an online history of the regiment; I looked through the (very long) list of the names of the dead at Cawnpore; I read contemporary accounts; and I checked the definitive modern account. Hours later I still didn’t have the name. So you know what? I made one up.
I’m a novelist. I tell lies for a living. The best I can hope for is that the lies aren’t too obvious.
