Good News

A quick post this one because it’s good news, which, as you know, travels fast.

I’m delighted to say I have a new publisher for my next novel A Quiet Life. I’m now signed with City Stone Publishing, a great little publisher based in the UK who plan to put out my book towards the end of the year.

Below is a link to my page on their website including a biog and a Q and A wherein you can learn such fascinating facts as what I would do if I was invisible for a day – I will leave you to insert your own joke here on that one.

Chris Hill

It’s taken me a few months to find a new home for my book after my last publisher unceremoniously collapsed just before it was supposed to put mine out. My main take-away from that experience is how great the writing community is. Not only did the wider community help with useful advice for me on social media but my fellow authors who had been signed to the collapsed publisher, who were all in the same boat as me, banded together in a Facebook group and we were able to offer each other support and tips on finding a new home for our work. I think I am right in saying that pretty much everyone from that group is sorted out now, either with a new publisher or setting off down the road to self publishing, whichever suits their own temperament and circumstances.

So all’s well that ends well hopefully – though of course I will only really be saying that once my book is out – but I have confidence in my new partners and, as always, I travel in hope.

Advertisement

A new chapter

I’m delighted to say I recently signed a two-book deal with publisher Dark Edge Press where my next couple of novels will appear.

Click here for a piece on their website about what we are up to

• 

The road is long, with many a winding turn, as either Simon or Garfunkel once said, but I am once more on the road to publication and have handed in the first of my two contracted novels.

What’s going on?

Not done a blog for a while. No reason really other than that I got out of the habit, other things intervened, life happened, you know how it is.

I thought I’d like to do an update though, just record recent developments in my writing life.

The key one is that I have another book finished. I started it ages ago then it sat untouched as scribbles in a notebook tucked away in a drawer for a while until along came lockdown, that huge pause in everyone’s busy lives, and suddenly I had the time and the head space to finish it.

Farewell Facebook page

I’ve always been a fan of Facebook and always used it as a writer – to meet readers and other writers, to talk about things which interest us.

I’ve never had a Facebook page though, only my profile, and recent changes to the way Facebook works have just underlined why I made that decision.

Pages, it seems to me, are for business users, I use them in my day job in PR. But I am an individual, not a business, not even a small trader. I’m not one of these people who styles themselves an ‘authorpreneur’ what an awful word. I write the books I want to write, find a publisher willing to take them on and they sell to those who are interested in reading them.

At the book festival

A drive through the bright winter morning to sell my books at a book fair in the lovely Cotswold town of Evesham. Unfortunately when I got there I found no punters – plenty of other authors but nobody actually wanting to buy books.

This isn’t unusual for small press authors, events like this are often hit and miss. It’s in no way the organisers’ fault – they had made sure there was plenty of publicity both in the local media and by word of mouth, but sometimes, people just don’t come. Perhaps because of the location or the timing or whatever. So instead of talking to readers the authors talk to each other.

Reviews for sale

Sigh – I came across a new low recently in the rapidly evolving book world – reviews for sale.

A random Twitter follower sent me a direct message asking if she might review one of my books on her blog. I didn’t know her, but then I have close to 27,000 Twitter followers so that’s not unusual. I checked out her book blog, it seemed superficially legit – there were reviews on there, it seemed to be regularly updated.

She didn’t use her name, just a pseudonym concerning her hair colour, but that didn’t seem too fishy – not everyone wants to be a public face. She described herself as a military wife, living somewhere in the USA, with a young family.

Did you really mean that?

One of the hardest things to spot in your writing I think is when something hasn’t come out on the page the way you intended when you wrote it.

So you imply one thing, the reader infers another. It can happen in small subtle ways, or great big clunking ones – the character you intend as a noble hero can seem more of a villain for example. Why is it hard for the writer to spot? Because it’s still you doing the rewrites, and you still have your initial perception colouring your view.

Here’s an example, not from art but from life, of this effect in motion.

Why Bob Dylan shouldn’t have won the Nobel Prize for Literature

First thing I want to say is I’m a big fan of Bob Dylan, have been for years, nobody enjoys a bit of Blonde and Blonde or Blood on the Tracks more than me. But I don’t believe he should have won the Nobel Prize for Literature – it’s not the right award for him.

Fans supporting his win are talking about what a wonderful poet he is and what fantastic lyrics he writes, and I couldn’t agree more. He writes and performs wonderful work.

And he has received countless relevant awards for that, endless Grammys, an Oscar, you name it, probably had to build a new wing on his mansion to keep them in. Plus he’s had his mouth stuffed with gold, and he’s been feted for all kinds of stuff he’s not much good at, he’s been lauded as an actor when he can’t act, as a painter when he can’t paint worth a damn.

Why give him this as well?

Bookshop shenanigans

I was in a branch of Waterstones the other day, which is the big bookshop chain in the UK, and I noticed that, where the face-out copy of J.K Rowling’s A Casual Vacancy should have been something else had appeared.

Another book was sitting there, taking the glory, and, to make things worse, it was a pretty shoddy looking book. It was skinny, barely more than a pamphlet, and it had a dull maroon cover with a white line drawing on the front. It reminded me of school text books from the 1970s. How could this cuckoo in the nest have got there? Well, I’m not Raymond Chandler, I wasn’t even in the detective fiction aisle, but I’m guessing we need look no further than the author of the ‘misplaced’ book.

Should we be sexy in print or not?

Steady on! How raunchy should you be in print?

I was chatting to a fellow writer on Facebook recently who asked my advice on her work. She’s writing a few different things on the way to her first published novel but one project is a type of romance novel and essentially, she wanted my view on how spicy she should make it.

She said: “I’m not sure how far to go with it because I could get a little graphic in that one if I wanted to. I just don’t know if I should keep it PG or not?”

Well my view is basically this – nobody can tell you as a writer what you are comfortable with when it comes to sexual content – it really is up to you.

But one or two things did come to mind: