‘Burke in the Land of Silver’ is officially published today. What can I say about it that I haven’t said already? It’s really good and a snip at £2.99. Just buy it. (Unless you’re waiting for the paperback of course. That will be along shortly.)
Why the relaunch?
Like a lot of other writers these days, I’ve been feeling that my books don’t get the love and attention from their publishers that some of the people who love them (not just me – check the reviews) think they deserve. So I decided that the next two Burke books (one set in Spain and one in Ireland) would be published by me. I can devote more time and effort to my own titles than a publisher can. (I’m not blaming the publishers: the economics of publishing make no sense at all and most publishers are scurrying around desperately trying to survive the apocalypse – or Amazon as it’s often called.) And because a book series sells better if the books all look like each other and are promoted together, it made sense to republish the first three under the exciting new ‘Big Red’ imprint. (If anyone is interested, it’s called ‘Big Red’ because ‘Little Brown’ was already taken, which tells you all you need to know about my sense of humour.)
Buttons (they’re in front of you!)
It’s one thing to devote time and effort to my marketing, but having any idea what I’m doing (or the advertising budget to support it) is another. But I have been trying to smarten up my marketing effort. I wonder if you’ve noticed?
On Twitter (https://twitter.com/TomCW99) and Facebook I’ve changed my banner and my profile pic. Here on my blog, the changes are more functional. Somewhere (down at the bottom left if you’re reading this on a laptop, bottom of the screen on a mobile) there are buttons enabling you to post about my blogs directly onto Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest. I think the most interesting button, though, is the green one. If you click on this, you will get an e-mail every time there is a new blog post so you need never miss one again!
(I wonder if any Americans picked up the panto reference in the heading there.)
Newsletter
I did experiment with having these buttons is a pop-up, but they just got in the way and irritated people, so that experiment was short lived. (Don’t say I don’t respond to what my followers want.) The problem is that without pop-ups people often miss things like that, which is why you find pop-ups on so many sites. I have very few people who subscribe to my newsletter – so few (barely double figures) that I hardly ever send newsletters out, which I suppose is more or less the definition of the vicious cycle. Still, the books I’m now desperately devouring on ‘How to sell your book on Kindle’ all say that e-mail newsletters are a crucial way of generating sales, so I’m trying again with a bigger, clearer description box. Again, if you are reading this on a laptop it should be somewhere around the top right of the page. Do feel free to fill out your e-mail address. I’ve yet to master automated newsletters, so I have to write them all myself. There is absolutely no danger of you being inundated with spam, because that rather assumes that I want to add excessive newsletter writing to all the blogging, tweeting, Facebook posting and other efforts to communicate which have completely taken over from producing any new books lately.
Of course, if you all just bought a book, even without a newsletter, we could keep empty inboxes and I would produce another novel that much quicker. Actually, if you’re reading this, there is a very good chance you already have bought the book in one of its earlier incarnations, in which case, thank you very much. If you haven’t, but you enjoy my blog (thousands of people read it and presumably some of them enjoy it) then you could buy a copy just as a gesture of support. With adding social media buttons on, I’ve taken the opportunity to remove the ‘Buy Me a Coffee’ widget with which you could make a small donation to show you appreciated my efforts. My tip jar was easily missed and, frankly, embarrassing, so now the only way you can express your gratitude is a heart-felt expression of thanks in my comment box (at the foot of the page) or by spending £2.99 on the book. Honestly, I’ll settle for either and you don’t even have to read the book, though if you do, you’ll probably enjoy it.
Author talks
I may not be big on newsletters, but I do love talking about my books and the history behind them. If you have a book group meeting socially distantly or on-line, I’m happy to talk to you. Once life returns to anything approaching normal, I’m happy to turn up in person, provided it’s in the London area. There’s some stuff about talks on my website at http://tomwilliamsauthor.co.uk/lets-talk/.
Me and the wonderful Lynn Bryant on the panel at Malvern
If any of you have any brilliant ideas for how I can get the word out about James Burke, do let me know. Or, of course, you can do it for me – just by reviewing the books on Amazon. It doesn’t need an essay – a few positive words is more than enough. Amazon reviews are probably the most effective marketing a book and have and they don’t even cost anything. If you review any of my books you will have my undying gratitude.
Enough of all this chatter. You’ll be having books to read.
Part of the reason for taking back the rights to the books about James Burke is because I feel that they should sell better when they are marketed by somebody who understands and loves them as only their writer will. Perhaps that’s stupid. Doctors, they say, make the worst patients. Cobblers’ children are always ill-shod. And certainly, though in a previous life I did work in marketing, I find the whole idea of marketing my books utterly baffling.
The first thing people say is that you should know your market, but I honestly have no idea who my market is. Obviously the James Burke books appeal mostly to people who enjoy reading stories about the Napoleonic wars, but James Burke isn’t Richard Sharpe. He is a spy more than he is soldier, so perhaps he should appeal more to people who enjoy James Bond? But whether they are fans of Richard Sharpe or James Bond they are men, right? Probably not: most readers of light fiction are women and I suspect that most of my readers are women too, but older women? Younger women?
And where do they come from? My blog (yes, this one you’re reading) gets almost four times as many visitors from the US as from the UK, but I’ve had very few sales in North America. In fact, the failure of a previous publisher to make any significant marketing effort in the US was a major part of the reason for getting my rights back. But do I have bashful fans in the US, perhaps all passing round the same tatty paperback copies of my old titles?
I just don’t know. I know a few of you who keep up lively conversations on Twitter (feel free to join in: I’m @TomCW99) and there are even some brave souls who write comments on this blog. If you would like to tell me something about yourself in the ‘Comments’ here that would be really appreciated. But if you are shy and would prefer something more anonymous, I’ve put some basic questions (really basic – age sex and where you live in the world) over on Twitter at https://twitter.com/TomCW99/status/1272848013719932930. Can you let me know who you are? (I’m happy to reciprocate: have a look at http://tomwilliamsauthor.co.uk/about-me/.)
It’s a bit strange, this writing business. You sit at your keyboard, typing out words and never quite sure who (if anyone) is reading them. Help an old man out. Say ‘Hello’ and introduce yourself.
This week’s blog is going up a little late in the day. I’ve been having problems convincing Amazon that I really do have the rights to Burke in the Land of Silver back, which is why it was not available on sale when the cover reveal came out last Friday.
At five minutes to midnight last night I got another e-mail saying that Amazon still weren’t convinced that I had the publishing rights. After sobbing pathetically for much of the morning, I sat down to write a post about how terrible the world was and, about three paragraphs in, my e-mail pinged and it turns out that Amazon has a heart after all: Burke in the Land of Silver is now available for pre-order.
If you pre-order, it will wing its way into your Kindle a week today on 19 June.
It costs £2.99, which is more than it did before – surely justified by the beautiful new cover! Seriously, I don’t think publishers and authors do themselves any favours with these very, very cheap books. It takes most writers about a year to produce a properly researched historical novel and the 100,000+ words of entertainment it provides you with is surely worth the price of a cup of coffee or, if you live in London, half a cup of coffee.
Burke in the Land of Silver takes you from Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti) to Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina, via London, Madrid and Ireland. It follows the adventures of real-life spy James Burke as he schemes and fights his way through bedrooms, throne rooms and bar-rooms on two continents. You’ll learn about the British invasion of Buenos Aires (yes, it really happened), how Napoleon stole the throne of Spain and how the Spaniards rose up against the French, and how the Spanish grip on South America began to slip as the old order collapsed under the pressure of the wars in Europe. There’s real history and lots of fun-stuff featuring imaginary whores and historically authentic princesses with predatory sexual enthusiasm. There’s funny hats and cowboys and battles and love and death. There’s even a tiny bit of voodoo magic.
It’s history, but not the stuff you learned at school.
I think you’ll love it. Let me know how it goes.
The paperback will be out shortly. Given the problems with the date for this, I’m reluctant to promise a particular day but really, really soon. I’ll let you know when I know.
EDIT: I’m leaving this up to explain the delay, but as of today, 12 June, Burke in the Land of Silver is available on pre-order at https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08B3S36X6. Publication date is next Friday 19 June.
Just a very quick post on why you can’t pre-order Burke in the Land of Silver today.
Burke in the Land of Silver was published last year by Endeavour Press (now Lume Books). Endeavour published my three Burke books and the John Williamson Chronicles. They are still publishing the John Williamson Chronicles (indeed, they’ve suggested they’ll be pushing them more this year) but they decided that they were not making enough money out of Burke to justify publishing the next two. They generously agreed to give me the rights back so that I could re-publish the three existing books ahead of putting out two new ones later this year.
There is one word being changed in Burke in the Land of Silver (kudos to the reader who spotted it and told me so I could fix it), so I was able to move very quickly on this one. I got a wonderful new cover designed by Dave Slaney (who is a fabulous cover designer) and got advice on sprucing up keywords and descriptions on Amazon so it would feature more in reader searches. I also decided to put up the price. (Sorry about that, but £2.99 for over 100,000 words of carefully researched historical novel is more than reasonable.) And, only a few weeks after Endeavour had handed back the rights and the book was no longer available on Kindle, I was all set to re-launch Burke in the Land of Silver on the world. I scheduled the cover reveal and supportive friends (thank you all) agreed to write about it and I pressed the button to send my typescript off to Amazon with two weeks allocated to pre-order so that I could tweak anything that didn’t look right once the whole thing was live.
And that’s when it all went wrong.
Amazon’s robots read my text and said it was the same as an existing Kindle text. (The one that has been taken down but which is presumably still available in their computer memory.) Amazon wrote to me requesting that I prove I had the right to publish it and I replied immediately with a copy of my letter from Endeavour/Lume. But while computers work 24/7 (I got the note from Amazon on Friday evening), the humans that deal with this sort of thing don’t. So here we are, on Tuesday morning, and my book still isn’t available and I’m waiting on Amazon to sort it out.
So you are all (I hope) admiring my cover and people are reading about how they should be rushing out and buying (or at least ordering) Burke in the Land of Silver and the book isn’t on Amazon at all.
Sorry.
Hopefully this will be sorted out very soon. Meanwhile, please be patient. It’s a good book and worth waiting a few more days for.
It’s here! The beautiful new cover for Burke in the Land of Silver.
Ahead of the publication of two new James Burke stories later this year, I’m republishing the existing three. First out of the blocks is Burke in the Land of Silver which is publishing on 19 June and is open for pre-order now.
Covers of historical novels are always a sore point with writers. The traditional publishing model means that authors have little, if any, control over the covers, which often have historically inappropriate images. (Accent Press was a brilliant exception to this rule.) Self-publishing means that I have control over the cover design and I love the job David Slaney has done here.
The story is set in Argentina and the knife shown is a typical gaucho knife which I bought in Buenos Aires. The beautiful hilt is rather more decorative than most working gauchos (cowboys) would carry, but the weapon is pretty much what Burke would have met in his adventures. Gauchos typically carried knives and were prepared to use them. It was a culture of machismo and knife fights were not unusual.
The map of South America dates from 1797.
The musket is French and from an image sourced by Paul Bennett.
I know a lot of people who read this blog are also writers. If any of them want to commission covers from Dave Slaney (who also did the cover for Dark Magic) you can contact him at daveslaney8@hotmail.com.
I had hoped to give you a link to pre-order the book, but (after about a year getting the world-wide rights back) Amazon have just given me another hoop to jump through. Burke in the Land of Silver should, despite this, be available to pre-order in the next few days. Check back here for details.
Conveniently, I’ve just installed an exciting new button on this page. If you click the green button at the bottom left of the screen (or on the pop-up) you should get automatically notified of new posts, so you’ll get news of how to buy Burke in the Land of Silver just as soon as I publish the details.
