I am British and grew up in an age when telling people about your achievements was regarded as bragging and rather looked down on. Nowadays, attitudes have shifted. If you want to get on in the world, we are told you should adopt the American approach of making sure people know just how brilliant you are.
This doesn’t always work. Recently, I had a new follower on Twitter and, before I followed them back, I had a look at their feed. Basically, it consisted of adverts for their book. Literally. The same advert just repeated over and over again. That is not going to encourage anyone to buy the book.
On the other hand, last weekend I was at a party and my hostess thrust a microphone into my hand and asked me to read a paragraph or two from one of my books. It was a lovely gesture, particularly as many of the people there didn’t know me well and had no idea that I wrote. So I read my extract and everybody applauded and the party moved on. Only afterwards did I realise that I hadn’t mentioned the name of the book or where you could get it. It’s fair to say that when it comes to selling my work, I am not a marketing genius. It’s ironic, really, because my day job used to be in print marketing – and, in fairness, I was quite good at it.
I think it’s reasonable to suggest that I could promote my books quite a lot more before I move into the territory of Twitter bores who talk about nothing else. In fact I noticed when I last looked that I had managed more than twenty tweets and four days without mentioning my own books once, which is not good marketing.
So how do I promote my books?
My main vehicle for promoting my books is social media. Once upon a time, this used to mean Facebook. I have a Facebook author page (Tom Williams | Facebook) but Facebook have changed the way things work to the point where not that many people will see posts on your author page unless you cross Mr Zuckerberg’s palm with silver. If you want to use Facebook for promotion, you are really going to have to buy Facebook advertising. With the sort of budget I have available, I’ve not had any luck with Facebook adverts and I don’t think this is how I want to spend my money.
As Facebook became an increasingly ineffective way of talking to readers and potential readers, I moved to Twitter. (I’m @TomCW99.) It takes a long time to build up a useful presence on Twitter, but, once I had, I found Twitter a brilliant place to be. I was able to engage with other Twitter users and, whether coincidentally or not, sales of my books began to climb. Then came Elon Musk. Like most people I have seen a dramatic drop in engagement. Twitter has become vastly less useful as a way to promote my books.
As Twitter users increasingly abandon the platform, there has been a move to Mastodon. I’ve played with this myself. (I’m at @TCW@toot.community.) Mastodon doesn’t really seem to work as a place to promote your books, though.
Some authors are rushing off to TikTok, but I’ve never really believed that a 30 second video that will be viewed mostly by very young people is the best way to promote novels that will be read by people who are quite a lot older. Perhaps I should look harder at Instagram, but I’m getting to the limit of the number of social media I can learn.
What about just paying for ads on Amazon? I have tried this, with mixed results. It’s hard work, though. You need to be very careful how you set each campaign up and then monitor it to see if it is effective or if you have made a slip up. If you haven’t set it up quite correctly, you can find it costing much more than you had expected.
So where now? Well, if anyone asks me to read from my books in future, I’ll try to remember to mention the titles. And, until then, I’m going to be a bit more aggressive (or less ridiculously modest) in talking about my books in newsletters and on social media generally. And, when all else fails, I’m going to beg.
This is 5-star reading for those enjoying military history, and readers should be aware of other works by author Tom Williams who uses Burke’s career as settings both before and after the Peninsular War when there was turmoil in Europe.
Amazon Vine Review
‘Burke in the Peninsula’ is the best selling of the Burke books, apart from the series starter, ‘Burke in the Land of Silver’. There’s little doubt that it does well in part because of Sharpe fans and others who like nothing better than a Napoleonic Wars campaign that they know well. (‘Burke at Waterloo’ does well too.)
I’m happy to get such generous praise for any of my books, but it’s another reminder of why writers write series books. There’s another Burke book on the way. ‘Burke and the Lines of Torres Vedras’ is also set in the Peninsular Wars and I hope will sell well, but it would be ever so nice if people would take a look at the books I write that aren’t about Burke.
The first book I wrote was ‘The White Rajah’, based on the life of James Brooke, the first White Rajah of Sarawak. It’s set in mid-19th century Borneo and although it has drama and battles, it also a book about the complexities and contradictions of colonial rule. It’s not helped, commercially, by being written in the first person by a mid-19th century writer, so the language is more Dickens than Dan Brown. It’s a bloody good book though, and, commercial or not, it got positive opinions from some major publishers. Unfortunately, the consensus was that it was too “difficult” for a first novel from an unknown author and I should write something less demanding first. Hence ‘Burke in the Land of Silver’.
Since then, I have written two sequels to ‘The White Rajah’, including ‘Cawnpore’, which is the book I’m most proud of (and readers have said lovely things about it). But mainly I write about James Burke because it’s always nice to have readers and Burke is obviously what people want to read.
Lately, I’ve branched out into Urban Fantasy. I can see that many military history fans aren’t going to touch my stories featuring a vampire policeman or a werewolf MP, but people who like that sort of thing seem to enjoy them. I’ve had people who say they generally don’t like that sort of thing enjoy them too. They’re funny, for a start. They get nice comments when they come out but then they quietly vanish away. I’ve only written two novels and a novella, so mine is not a name that is much recognised in that genre. They’re huge fun to write and I want to write another one but the reality is that, if I want more readers, I have to produce more books about James Burke.
Of course, the amount that I (and most other writers) make from our books is so insignificant that it would make perfect sense to ignore sales and just write whatever I want to – which is sometimes James Burke, but often not. In the end, though, I am not one of those people who sits down at a keyboard and gets up having produced 2,000 brilliant words. I find writing quite hard work and what motivates me is knowing that people read and enjoy my books. So it looks as if I’m going to be writing about James Burke until the end of time unless, of course, some of you lovely people would like to give the other books are try and then post reviews on Amazon to let everybody know that there is more to life than the Peninsular Wars.
Last week somebody asked me what it was about Cawnpore that made me want to write about it. Cawnpore was originally published over ten years ago so that’s a long time to think back.
I remember quite vividly what it was that first triggered my interest in the events of 1857 in India. I was spending a long weekend in an isolated cottage in Wales with no TV, Internet, or phone. It was raining. There were bookcases full of books (the place was owned by an English teacher). With nothing better to do, I picked one out more or less at random: Red Year by Michael Edwardes, which describes the events of what he calls ‘the Indian Rebellion’.
I am old enough to have covered what we were taught to call the Indian Mutiny when I was at school. But Red Year described a history I was completely unfamiliar with. There were more books about 1857 on the shelves and as the rain continued (it so often does in Wales) I read several of them.
What happened in 1857 was the culmination of a century of colonialist policies in India. A Marxist could hold it up as a clear example of how the tide of history is determined by economic forces. There was a sort of inevitability to the conflict. There was no inevitability to the outcome, though. The British came a great deal closer to losing India than people nowadays seem to realise.
Although the overall conflict represented a clash of civilisations and economic forces, within this wider conflict individuals and personal loyalties played an enormously important role. The story of 1857 is often a very human story.
There were heroes and villains on both sides, and the people of India often chose the side they would fight for based on personal or family loyalty to local leaders. It was a time of larger than life figures, whose personal strengths and weaknesses shaped the course of history in India for the next hundred years.
I had written the first of the John Williamson stories, The White Rajah, as a single novel, with no idea of producing a sequel. But when the tiny American publisher who had taken a chance on the book, suggested that they would like to publish another one, I realised that the events of the first novel had left my narrator, John Williamson, in Singapore with just time to take a ship to India ready to plunge into the events that led to what he would definitely have called the Indian Mutiny.
Of all the incidents in 1857, the massacre at Cawnpore was one of the most dramatic. Its horror became a byword for savagery across the world. More interestingly, from the point of view of a writer, it highlighted the confusions and mixed loyalties that had led to the Mutiny in the first place.
It was also particularly well documented. One of the few survivors, Mowbray Thomson, published an account (The Story of Cawnpore) which gives a strong feeling of what it was like to be there. There are also first person accounts from two of the less well known survivors, Jonah Shepherd and Amy Horne. Reading the experiences of people like that is invaluable for a novelist who wants to get into the mindset of his characters.
Working out the details of the plot took some time. They had to fit what we know happened at Cawnpore and what we understand about the leading actors in that tragedy. At the same time, they had to allow the narrator to travel between the British and Indian lines and communicate with both sides. Fortunately there is a wonderful modern book detailing all the events of Cawnpore, Our Bones are Scattered by Andrew Ward. That proved invaluable in allowing me to put together a story that stitches fact and fiction. Most of the detail in the story is accurate and, unlikely as it is, John Williamson’s tale is not at all impossible.
John Williamson is the ideal person to tell this story. As a homosexual, in the days when sodomy was “the sin that dare not speak its name,” he was always an outsider to the rigid English society that characterised the stations of the East India Company. His experiences in Borneo meant he had a natural sympathy with the natives and had become adept at learning their languages. Thus, Williamson allows us to see the events at Cawnpore from both sides of the conflict.
Once I had the plot, I found the writing much easier than in The White Rajah. By now, Williamson was a well-established and fully rounded character in my head and this time his lover was another fictional character, so that I was not continually constrained by what history tells us about him. I found myself carried along with Williamson’s enthusiasm for the country he was working in and then caught up in his horror as he realised how badly things were going to end.
Cawnpore is not a cheerful book, nor does it end with simple rights and wrongs. The story of colonialism, whether that of the British in the 19th century or the new Great Powers of the 21st is neither pretty nor straightforward. The joy of fiction is that it allows us to look at these issues from a different angle, free of the prejudices that we have about the world we are in today.
I can more or less guarantee that Cawnpore will, at some point or other, make you cry. But it’s also a love story which, like every love story, has moments of humour and beauty. And it takes you back to an impossibly romantic world of rajahs and holy men and beggars; a world where a general could still lead his army into war on an elephant, where cavalrymen were dashing and heroic figures, and where a few hundred men, women and children held out against thousands of enemy troops in one of history’s most desperate sieges.
Usually these days, I write my Friday blogs on Thursdays or, at very least, have a good idea by then of what I’m going to talk about. This week, though, I’m sitting here in the middle of the morning with very little idea of what I’m going to say.
Part of the reason for this is that I am in the throes of tidying up the latest Burke book, Burke and the Lines of Torres Vedras, ahead of sending it out to beta readers. (If you are interested in beta reading the book, do let me know.) The book sees Burke back in the Peninsula. I wrote it because, having visited the Lines of Torres Vedras, I was so fascinated by them that I wanted to base a novel there. It’s likely to do me no harm commercially, because I’ve been looking at sales and it’s clear that books that are most obviously related to Napoleonic campaigns that people know are the ones that they want to read. That’s Burke in the Peninsula and Burke at Waterloo.
The lines of Torres Vedras are interesting in terms of military historical fiction, because any stories set there are unlikely to feature any serious fighting. The lines were such a strong defensive position that, after one initial probing attack, the French hunkered down to wait Wellington out. A mistake, as it turns out, as Wellington had prepared for this and was in a much better position to wait than they were. So what am I writing about? Well, we know that there was a spy ring broken in Portugal in 1810 and spying is Burke’s job, so expect evil plots amidst the fortifications.
Anyway, while I’ve been removing redundant paragraphs and hacking away at cliches, I haven’t been preparing my blog. What I have found time to do was to read Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare. Love him or loathe him, it’s a fascinating book and I would have quite liked to review it, but it seems to rouse such strong feelings that I fear my blog might just turn into a battlefield of Napoleonic proportions. If people would like to see a review, do let me know. Just be aware that I approve comments before they show on my site and, though I have never blocked one so far, I’m very happy to block anybody who posts with some of the more virulent views I’ve seen expressed for and against Harry and Meghan.
I’ve also been giving a bit of thought to a possible third book in the Galbraith and Pole series. The first two seem quite popular, but while I can reasonably expect that fans of James Burke will look at Burke and the Lines of Torres Vedras, people who read my historical fiction do not necessarily have any interest in my Urban Fantasy. What about you? Are you reading this because you are interested in historical fiction or because you have read my urban fantasy books? Or maybe you just like reading my more random stuff here.
I mainly post history related stuff on my blog, but occasionally I’ll write something about fantasy. Which would you rather see? Or do you enjoy both?
One of the reasons that it can sometimes be difficult to work out what to write about it is that I do post largely into a void. I get the odd comment and sometimes people take up some of the things I’ve talked about on Twitter (I’m @TomCW99), but mostly I just put stuff out there and hope that somebody enjoys it. WordPress assures me that quite a lot of people read my stuff and they can’t all be bots. Why not let me know who you are and what you want in Comments (below) or get in touch through my ‘Contact’ page? And if you do want to read a book review of Spare, let me know that too.
This blog post is definitely one for fellow writers, although if readers want to drop in a comment I’d be interested in what they have to say.
I’ve now published twelve books with a thirteenth due quite soon. Most of these are historical novels. That’s six Napoleonic era books about James Burke, and my three books on issues around colonialism and the British Empire in the mid-19th century. Unsurprisingly, the swashbuckling adventures of a British spy in the Napoleonic wars are massively more popular than the heavier books about Empire. That, after all, is why, following advice from my then agent and publishers, I wrote them.
The three books that aren’t historical are all Urban Fantasies. That’s about as far from historical novels as you can get. I love writing them because they are huge fun. There’s a large and enthusiastic audience for Urban Fantasy, so when they first come out they tend to sell quite well, but because there are only three of them (one standalone novella and two short novels which have, as they say, series potential) sales soon fall off.
After doing this for years, I’ve got to the stage where there is a decent readership for the books about James Burke. It means I now have to look more seriously at things like marketing, in the hope that I can keep the ball rolling and continue to attract new readers.
I find myself spending more of my time reading about how to sell books. Sadly, I can end up spending longer trying to find ways to sell the books I’ve already written than writing new ones.
There are lots of ways to promote your books – too many to list. Many people who write about this area, though, say that one of the most effective is newsletters. Newsletters let you build a relationship with your readers, providing a ready market as you produce new books. Newsletters have the advantage that they are cheap and that, although the administration can be a nuisance, actually writing them should come fairly easily.
Newsletters are therefore the first thing that I would like to explore.
I have put a toe in the water of producing a newsletter. There’s a signup form at the bottom of every page on my blog if you fancy a look at it. I’m happy to admit, though, that it doesn’t have many readers. In fact, I seem to reach far more readers through this website (around 3,000 visitors a month) or Twitter (over 2,000 followers) than I am ever going to reach through the newsletter.
An obvious first step in addressing this it is to try to increase the subscriber base. I’ve read that the best way to do this is to give something away to new subscribers.
During lockdown I recorded an audiobook of my Urban Fantasy, Dark Magic. It’s not the most sophisticated recording you are ever going to hear, but it’s fun and, even without my promoting it, it’s sold a handful of copies. Now Spotify have given me codes to give 100 copies away. So there we are: a free audiobook for anyone who signs up to my list.
I decided to trial it first by offering a copy to anyone on my existing list who asked for it. What it showed was a remarkable lack of interest, even amongst those who, according to my list handler, had opened the email offering it.
Thinking about it, the problem might be that most of the people on my list are there because they are interested in my historical fiction and they have no interest in Urban Fantasy. I read some more about how to make a success out of newsletters and was very firmly told by an expert that it was important to have different newsletters for different genres. So should I have one newsletter for historical fiction and a separate one for Urban Fantasy? That’s twice the work and loses the possibility of cross selling from the books of mine that people already know to the much less well known ones. And if I do have a separate list for Urban Fantasy, should I have a separate list for the mid-19th century Empire stories, which also seem to languish unloved by James Burke fans?
And if I do have a newsletter for just one genre, what do I put in it? I produce a blog post every week. Quite a lot of these are about things that might interest readers of historical fiction. Do I have to produce twice as much such material?
Which brings me to another problem I have with author newsletters. I subscribe to a few of these and, say it soft, I usually don’t read them. Even the ones I know are full of good stuff. What can I say? Life is short. But, friend, assuming you are reading this, can you tell me honestly that you read the author newsletters that you are subscribed to? And, if you do read some, but not others, what is it that makes you open them?
I really, really want to run a successful newsletter. To have an army of devoted fans just waiting for the next book to drop. But the more I think of the practical issues (What do I give to get them to sign up? What books do I talk about? What do I actually say in the letter?) the more I find myself recoiling from the idea. But what does that leave me with? Amazon ads? (Expensive, uncertain and involving a lot of effort to get right.)
Come on fellow authors (and readers if there are any still with me): what do you think?
I’m very gently easing myself back into writing. A fellow writer has just been boasting of sitting down to start a new book and bashing out 2,000 words “just like that”. That is so not happening here. I’m always happy to admit that I am a lazy writer, but even when I roll up my sleeves and get to work, I write slowly. I used to write commercial non-fiction (often anonymously) and the ability to turn out large numbers of words to a timetable was crucial. Nowadays, I write fiction and I like to take my time over it.
I keep reading stuff on social media about setting my writing goals. Really? If I were going to set goals and work hard to achieve them, I might as well go back to having a proper job. My writing is now beginning to sell enough to generate a pleasant side income, but it’s never going to produced the sort of money that I got when I was working. In fact, it doesn’t produce the sort of money that I get from teaching the occasional tango lesson. (Feel free to ask me to teach you!) So my writing goal is to finish the third draft of Burke and the Lines of Torres Vedras and produce something that can see the light of day in the first half of the year. After that, I’d quite like to write another Galbraith & Pole book, but first I’ll have to have an idea for a plot and, so far, I just don’t.
I am going to try to do more about selling the books I’ve written already, particularly the John Williamson Papers. People who read them generally like them, but the never took off the way the Burke series did. It would be nice to see more people reading and enjoying them. I keep being told that the answer is a newsletter. I dohave a newsletter (you can sign up at the bottom of the page) and I’m going to try to give people more good stuff if they sign up. Keep your eyes peeled!
What else? I’ve no idea really. Outside of writing I’ll be doing a lot of dancing and I’ve already booked to watch other people dancing right through to August. Once it gets warmer I’ll be putting on my skates again. (I haven’t been skating since a madcap run round Buenos Aires in October.). Mostly, like a lot of people right now, I’ll be concentrating on not needing to go to hospital and not making any plans that involve railways.
