Sunday, 18 December 2022

Progress with those crime novels


 I've been banging on for a long time now about these crime novels I was going to write. Ever since Tony Lee gave me The Talk back in September 2021, about how much money these was to be made if you write a series of crime novels and release them on Amazon KDP. At that stage he looked like he was about to make £20,000 in a month. 

So I stared, first by plotting a novel about an insurance claims adjuster who goes around stumbling upon crimes, Underwriter Hogg. In my imagination I cast David Mitchell in the lead, and I wrote quite a detailed plot for it. Then I got distracted, most likely by producing colouring books, which were easier to make, and started selling instantly. By November 2022 I'd sold over a thousand quid's worth of them on Amazon, as detailed here.

Sadly, what happened about a week after I wrote that blog, on Nov 9 2022, was that Amazon closed my KDP account, and banned me from opening another, which didn't bode well for the crime novels. Which was a shame, because I was well into writing them.

Following the first attempted plotted novel, which I did in October 2021 then went cold on, I had another stab in Feb 2022, doing what they called Pantstering. That is making it up as you go along. And I was doing pretty well, with a thing called Dead Sitting Room, which starred Detective Inspector Macduff (modelled on the version of Macduff who appears in my adaptation of Macbeth). I got up to 24,000 words when, after a long wait and at short notice, we moved house. 

We moved on March 3rd and, what with one thing and another (the house, school visits, and Socks gigs culminating in the Edinburgh Fringe in August) I didn't manage to even look at any crime writing again until September.

At the start of September, Hev and I started comparing notes, and we came up with the premise for a cosy historical detective series based partly on her research on the Victorian theatre. We devised some characters together, brainstormed some ideas, then I got stuck into the grunt work of writing the damn things.

We started busking ideas on September 13th, and by September 21st I'd completed a first draft of a thing I was calling Murder At Her Majesty's, though a draft that was only 20,000 words long. I pressed on, and by November 1st had completed a second draft that was now up to 48,734 words.

I left it there to settle and come back to, and embarked upon a second book in the series, Dead Man's Jest. This time I used NaNoWriMo as inspiration. In two days I'd written 8000 words. By 8th December I'd completed a first draft, which stands at 53,000 words. 

Now I have two books, each about 50,000 words long, that I'm going to go back to and turn both into 70,000 word complete stories. I'd like to launch the first in January if I can. Of course launching is the big deal, and I've spent a long time down the rabbit hole that is 20BooksTo50K, the Facebook group of people who are making the big money doing this. (I checked in with Tony Lee, by the way, who seems to have earned half a million quid in a year by doing this. Now to see how difficult that is to emulate).

The first part I want to get right, publicity wise, is the front cover. At the top of this blog you can see my first draft version. I set a house style which I was quite happy with, and drafted covers for all six of the books I'd loosely dreamed up...


But I wasn't sure about these covers. Firstly I didn't think the titles and lettering style were clear enough. Also, I was unsure they chimed with the expected style that tells a reader it's a "cosy" crime novel, in the mould of Richard Osman or Agatha Raisin (or whoever we choose to be our "comp authors", just one of those many 20Books bits of jargon, meaning writers to whom you compare your work). Thirdly I was unhappy about these covers because I'd used an AI programme to create the images. And, in the last month or so, AI has become the bete noire of the comic art community, and its use is frowned upon. So I had another go at a design...


The type was clearer and more readable, it includes an image of Hev herself. But was it the right tone? Further research suggested we really needed to be looking at a white background and a simpler, starker colour palette, which led me to the latest design...


Work in progress, but I think we're getting there. Now, two novels need completing, shaping into 70,000 words each, of the most riveting crime fiction you ever read, and I have to get my head around how you market this stuff. Let us see how 2023 goes, shall we?

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