An obvious (and slightly inconvenient) truth - Nicola Morgan

You know that thing when you realise something and then you realise it was incredibly obvious and you feel embarrassed for not having realised it before? Well, that. But, just in case there's anyone else out there who hadn't thought about this, I will share it with you. Please tell me I am not alone in my foolishness.

Non-fiction is much easier to sell than fiction. And now I realise why.

First, let me tell you how I realised that this was even the case. In August I published my book on Twitter - Tweet Right - The Sensible Person's Guide to Twitter. And in November I re-published Mondays are Red, which was my debut novel back in 2002. I published both books as ebooks only.

Now, Mondays are Red should have had an advantage because it has been published before and has a raft of lovely reviews from newspapers as well as readers; also, it's been out of print for a couple of years and people are still asking for it. But it's selling about a quarter of the number that Tweet Right sells on a weekly basis. (Which is not a vast number, let me tell you, but it's very respectable.)

And this is despite the fact that I did more to push Mondays. A blog tour, for example, which I didn't do for Tweet Right. And TR is more expensive. And shorter. It is, by word count, much less good value. With Mondays are Red, I pleaded with my blog readers and employed blatant emotional blackmail. I never did that with Tweet Right.

However, none of that really worked. (I'm actually a bit relieved - I don't like pleading or blackmail! And btw, let me be clear: I do NOT expect people to buy out of duty.) So, TR continues to outsell Mondays by about four times.

And it seems to me the reason is obvious.

When you try to persuade a reader to buy your novel, you're trying to persuade them to want this one more than thousands - hundreds of thousands - of others. Even if yours is the genre they like to buy, you're still competing in a crowded, often poorly differentiated market. It's easy to be invisible. (Especially since there are some things I won't do to get myself or my book seen.)

But if they are looking for a book about something - Twitter, or my next topic, writing synopses (Write a Great Synopsis - An Expert Guide, coming in January!) - there are very few books that I'm competing against. Very few indeed. It's easier to be seen. Also, it's relatively easy to find the audience, because you know where they hang out. But readers of novels are everywhere, everywhere, I tell you. And they are slippery. God, they are.

So, it's obvious when you think about it, isn't it? It's much more a numbers game than we'd like to think.


In view of this, I will not bother to plead with you to buy Mondays are Red. Honestly. Don't. There are hundreds of thousands of other novels you might like almost as much. But, on the other hand, there's only one at the other end of this link. :)

EDITED TO ADD: I have a suggestion: if any published* UK authors with YA titles which are also in ebook format for Kindle would like to get in touch, I'll do a blog post (on my blog) after Christmas which will list them, with links. SO, if your book is YA, published and in ebook format, email me, in this order: title, author, publisher, 25 words to describe including genre, and Amazon link (UK or US, just one). By Christmas Eve. n@nicolamorgan.co.uk 


(* I'm really sorry but I have to offer this only for authors who have had novels published by a trade publisher. This is purely so that I don't end up having to put eleventy million books in a blog post when I could be eating mince pies.)

Failure is so-o-o-o good for you

by Yvonne Coppard
(with absolutely no pics, 'cos I'm still learning and completely failed in my attempts to include them, sorry...will procure the Idiot Guide to Blogging before next attempt...)

I am not by any means a scientist. I failed almost every Science exam I ever took (and I went to the sort of school where you took a shed load of them every year). I couldn’t understand what Doctor Kornfeld was going on about as she chalked up diagrams and chemical formulae on a rolling blackboard (no Internet, no power point, in those days). I argued frequently with her (she was my form tutor, poor woman) about whether or not surface tension, the different qualities of gases and so on, were things that mattered to me. In Physics, I sat in the darkness with my classmates around a ripple tank watching tiny waves begin to form – very pretty, very soothing, but WHY? I still don’t know.

And I was often in detention with my Biology teacher, who firmly believed that I could keep up and do well, if I would only TRY to be interested in the life cycle of a locust or the dissection of a crayfish. (Tip for budding teachers – nagging and imprisoning your pupils will never endear them to your subject. D-uh.)

Five years ago I made a deliberate decision to step away from being a children’s author for a while, and try new things. I went travelling, filling my notebooks with the sights and sounds of nine different countries and cultures. I read books that I would never normally pick up – romance, science fiction, horror. I didn’t stop writing; I wrote articles, a travelogue, book reviews, non-fiction of many sorts, and half a novel for adults (still in progress). It was a great experience, and I am now ready to return to my first and proper love – fiction for children and teenagers – with the kind of enthusiasm I had twenty five years ago when my first book (Copper’s Kid) was published.


Somewhere along the way, I discovered Science.
It came as a huge surprise to me that suddenly, nearly forty years after I jubilantly left school and Science lessons behind, I have begun to devour articles, books and TV programmes on Astronomy, Engineering, Geology – even Chemistry, once – in the quest to answer questions that I belatedly have about the world. How do you make lipstick? How does thermal heating work? Could I really predict when and how I am likely to die by analysing my DNA ? (Would I want to know? The way that traditional science links up with religion, psychology and philosophy was NEVER explained to me at school). Is the truth really out there?

I blame fellow author Anne Rooney, in part. Last year, as a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the University of Essex, I shared an office with Anne Rooney. Her knowledge of all things vaguely scientific or mathematical astounds me. I read the books she put on our office shelves, books designed for children and therefore pitched at just the right level for me. I loved 1001 Shocking Science Facts

I sort-of understand what a light year is now (title?) And thanks to her ‘Technology All Around Us’ (Franklin Watts, 2005) I’ve almost grasped how it’s possible to communicate with Mars (still a way to go, on that one).
So, these days, I’m devouring a stack of children’s science books and pop TV programmes, hoping to move on to the more complicated stuff once I’ve grasped the basics. It may show up in my writing in the future, it may not. They say education is a lifelong process; they say it’s never too late to learn. I hope that’s true. My Science teachers said their stuff was relevant to my life, whatever I was planning to do with it. I wouldn’t listen, and I fought any attempt to engage me with their world. If you are still out there somewhere, Dr Kornfeld, Mrs Trevass, Mr Cole, Dr Jones...I’m sorry. You were right, and I was wrong.

Is there anyone else out there who wishes they could go back to primary School and learn stuff they missed first time around?

*****************
I am currently working on The Arvon Book of Children’s Fiction, with co-writer Linda Newbery, to be published by Bloomsbury (UK and USA) early in 2013. Also in the pipeline are two novels: ‘Amelie’s Secret’, and ‘In the Kingdom of Abbadon’, but no publication details yet. Finally, I am working on my website, to be re-launched in a couple of months with a new look and contributions from young readers, joke tellers, rant-and-ravers and fellow authors. Hopefully it will be finished sometime in November: in the meantime, if you want to know more, there’s still :
http://www.yvonnecoppard.co.uk/

Fiction or Faction - which do we value most? - Meg Harper

I’m writing a short biography of Elizabeth 1st for KS2 in story form – and I’m loving it. I’m panicking about the deadline looming but apart from that, I’m having a ball! I applied for the job, so to speak, because I’m vaguely interested in the Tudors. From time to time I don my Tudor togs and go off to Kentwell Hall in Suffolk to enjoy that merry jape called re-enactment. I generally arrive and have to ask my fellow lunatics, ‘What year is this? Who’s on the throne? What’s just happened?’ and then bluff my way through however many days it is of pretending I’m totally au fait with a period about which I know very little but which certainly intrigues me. These days I try to hang out in the Tudor kitchen where at least I know a little about Tudor cookery and it has the advantage of usually being warm. Gone are the days when I pretended I was the widow of a basket maker who had sadly met his demise under a cart, his brains all spilled in the mire, God rest him. (Basket makers were neither female nor as cack-handed as I and I had to have some excuse for my want of skill. On the bright side, I do now have two lop-sided quivers, one holding loo rolls and the other kitchen utensils, but any self-respecting Tudor basket maker would fall about laughing at the sight of them.)

Anyway, I digress. The other reason I applied was that I have a dear friend who is an Emeritus Professor of Tudor History and is the leading expert on Anne Boleyn – so he has a vast library and could direct me to the right books. He also has an incredibly low opinion of Philippa Gregory’s fiction and I am beginning to dread the day when he reads my feeble efforts! Although he says he doesn’t mind historical fiction he can’t stand it when writers suggest things that ‘couldn’t possibly have happened or been said.’ So no suggesting young Liz had a baby by Robert Dudley and had it adopted/suffocated/thrown on the fire or, God forbid, that she was actually a man! Well, I haven’t done any of that – but I’m still very nervous...
However, my point today is how much I’m enjoying the process. I’ll hardly make any money, I’m risking a huge telling off from my friend, I nearly had heart failure when I saw the book advertised on Amazon when I hadn’t actually started it and I’m certainly not going to win any prizes. But I am learning so much - far more than I’ve ever learnt from writing fiction (though I did have a jolly fun day out at Crufts doing research about Irish Wolfhounds once!). And I am really enjoying the process of fictionalizing facts and of deciding what to include and what to throw out. The same was all true when I was writing ‘Wha’ever – the teenager’s guide to spinal cord injury’.

Why, then, do I still have the drive to write complete fiction? I have discovered that I love writing both fiction and faction – I even quite enjoyed writing an activity book for teachers – but I have this inexplicable feeling that fiction is the big thing and everything else is somehow lesser (except perhaps poetry). I have no idea if this is born out in sales – obviously Harry Potter has swept the board – but lower down the league tables I’m wondering. Does David Starkey outsell Philippa Gregory or vice versa? How do popular non-fiction writers do? Richard Dawkins, for example or Richard Nelson Bolles (‘What colour is your parachute?’)

We see so few awards for non-fiction and faction. Is there really a hierarchy here in the public mind (as well as buried in mine) or am I imagining it? And if there is, why? I am having to be creative and imaginative as I write my little history book – the difference is that instead of providing story I have to provide knowledge. Is the one seen to be more valuable than the other?

www.megharper.co.uk