So I have this book, A Time For Silence, which is published
by Honno as a paperback and as an e-book, on Kindle, Kobo etc. I think I may
have sold one through Kobo, and perhaps a couple through etc, but really I mean
Kindle. People use Kindle. This still surprises me. A book is a paper thing,
with pages you can turn, flip through, mark and scribble on, and why would
anyone want an electronic device instead?
I discovered why they might, when I started reading Hilary
Mantel’s Cromwell books and found my wrists snapping under the strain of wrestling
with 24 kilos of paper. So I bought a Kindle. I still thought of it as a minor
addition to the library and surely people didn’t them on a regular basis.
Having featured on the Kindle monthly deal, in June, I have concluded
that people do use Kindle. Lots of people use Kindle, and even actively look
for books to load on them. Better still, they keep an eye on such things as
Kindle deals and buy accordingly. Not just dozens of them, but hundreds of
them. Thousands, even. I hadn’t realised there were a thousand people with
Kindles. We live a sheltered life in West Wales.
When you feature in an Amazon deal, you can pretend to be as
blasé or dismissive as you like, but it is impossible not to become hooked on
checking your rankings. There’s the general ranking of hourly Kindle sales, but
there are also the genre rankings. It was hugely gratifying to find myself #1
in literary fiction. I would never have presumed to define my book as literary
fiction, which is surely reserved for writers like Iris Murdoch or A.S.Byatt,
but then I found it also contained Jeffrey Archer, which pricked the bubble a
little. And I also did well as popular fiction, which is, presumably, the
opposite of literary fiction, all with the same book.
I was listed too in Crime/thriller/mystery. This worried me.
I never considered my novel to be a thriller, or even really a mystery. Would
readers be disappointed at the lack of police procedure and car chases? But at
least it does contain a crime. How I found myself as #1 in contemporary romance
I can’t imagine. My book deals with domestic abuse, depression, suicide,
murder, but not a trace of romance. Still, who’s complaining? Now that the
monthly deal is well past, I have settled down to being #1, on and off, in
Welsh Crime, which is almost as good as being the No.1 Ladies’ Detective
Agency.
What I gained most from the monthly deal, apart from sales
of course, was an astonishing harvest of reviews. There was one who denounced
it as rubbish suitable for women, and another dismissed it as cheap and
cheerful (cheerful?), but mostly they were written by people who liked it. Genuinely
liked it, thought deeply about it and would like to read more. People who don’t even know me. Which made me
feel for the first time that I’m truly an author. Published. Promoted. Approved.
Very reassuring.
Now I can just concentrate on the next one.Motherlove, out in February. Thought I'd just drop that in.