Blog | Alison Morton's Thrillers

Women writing books

Today starts a very special month when I’m featured in the online literary magazine Women Writers, Women’s Books. And I’m very excited to be in the company of Isabel Allende, Nicola Morgan, Roz Morris, Joanne Harris, Claire King and Judith Kinghorn, to mention a few.

It started with a tweet. My critique partner, Denise Barnes, whose recent business book, Seller Beware is being grabbed by the business community, especially the female part of it, included me in a reply to something called @womenwriters. She said they should get me to write a piece for them. Ever keen to tell people about Roma Nova and my heroine’s adventures, I contacted them and my piece appeared on 5 September.

I hadn’t quite grasped the range and depth of the site and its contributions. Launched only in 2011 to be a platform for contemporary women writers around the world writing in English, it has fast gained a reputation and status as the place to be for insights, knowledge and sharp articles about women and their writing across genres, nationalities and cultures.

Women Writers say, “The only criteria [for a contributor] is that she be a woman who writes, and that her post be written for our audience specifically, that it be well-written and interesting to read.”

Their social media reach is impressive and growing; apart from a clear, user-friendly website, they have 15,800 Twitter followers at last count.

Reading their site is a pleasure and I dare you not to enjoy as well as learn some invaluable aspects about writing, writers’ lives, work and motivations.

I’m delighted to be a supporting sponsor for this month

http://booksbywomen.org/

Struggling to write in the promo sea

Those Who Know say the best way to keep your work in front of readers is to write another book. As I’m in the middle of letting everybody know about (let’s be honest, marketing) my new book and trying to reach as many potential readers as possible, I’ve snatched a few minutes out to think about this.

At the risk of repeating many other people, you need a damn’ fine, well-formatted and produced book that has a great cover, is tightly edited and contains a story bursting with page-turning quality. If it doesn’t meet all these criteria, don’t go a step further. Get your offering into top shape first.

You cannot just publish a book and hope people will ‘discover’ it, especially if you are self or indie published, so you have to set aside marketing and PR (collectively known as ‘promo’) time from your writing time.

You need to enlist your friends and colleagues of all kinds to help spread the word – you cannot do it all alone. Additionally, you need to develop a firm online base of friends, fan and followers by talking and engaging with people, preferably about books. But what else would you talk about as a writer? 😉

The best publicity is word of mouth, third party endorsement/ an authoritative book review (several preferably!) and you won’t get these by sitting in your bat-cave all day, tapping on the keyboard, turning out your next masterwork.

But you’re a writer. Isn’t tapping on the keyboard your job? Yes and no – see above.

So you find yourself caught in a self-perpetuating circle of writing and promo conflict. The solution? Be absolutely grim in your determination to write even a couple of pages in your current work every day, whatever the urgent needs of promo. A blogpost doesn’t count – sorry.

Look at the counter at the top left of this page.* That’s how close I am to publication of PERFIDITAS and it’s desperately difficult to resist doing a few tweets or FB posts. But my fingertip is heading for the ‘Publish’ button now, then I’m gone, writing.

* Editor’s note: Deactivated: showed 4 days to go to publication when this article was posted

PERFIDITAS arrives!

PERFIDITAS was on track to arrive tomorrow, but at 4.30 this afternoon, the doorbell rang.

‘Bonjour, madame j’ai un colis pour vous,’ a cheery voice said. She set down a cardboard carton covered in address and barcode stickers on the tile floor.

I signed the LCD screen, hand not trembling too much. Somehow, I managed to shut the door without dancing. I ran for a pair of scissors…