All you need is love?



The romantic scent of Philadelphus plays a part in helping two characters find love in Severe Discomfort

'Sex sells', they say.  Well, it seems that whoever figured that out was definitely on to something...

As regular readers will know, in between the odd gardening project and my 'proper' job back at the CAB, I write fiction.  If you haven't already read 'Severe Discomfort' and its sequel, 'Continual Supervision', and haven't met the Walker family and the Solent Welfare Rights Project advisers who help them cope with a nightmare Social Security appeal, I hope you will; both are available as real paperbacks from real bookshops as well as virtual ones with any profits from sales earmarked for the Stoke-on-Trent Citizens Advice Bureau. 

Kindle owners can pick up both as ebooks on Amazon, along with weekly instalments of 'Limited Capability', a new story concerning the same characters, with at least a couple of episodes free to download every Friday.  It's the download stats for these that prove the old marketing maxim correct.

Logically, if you start a story at Episode One, state clearly in the blurb when it can be downloaded free, publish Episode Two the following week with similar guidance and so on, you might expect similar numbers to be downloaded week by week, unless you do a major marketing blitz to disrupt the pattern.  I don't have the resources for a major marketing blitz, but have popped the odd link on Facebook sites sympathetic to the cause of Social Security claimants around the first Friday of the month, when Episode One is always free. 

On that basis, you might expect the highest sales for the first instalment, with fewer for no.2 as the story won't appeal to all, a few less for no 3 (especially if folk enjoying the story haven't finished the previous episode yet, but know they can come back for a freebie in a month's time or spend 77p for it when they want it) and so on.  But this is not the pattern. 

While Episode One has reasonably good 'sales' (including freebies), it is currently being outpaced by Episodes Four, Six and Eight which, I'm sure you'll agree, is illogical.  Or it would be, if all the instalments were classified in the same way, but because there is no genre 'Social Security Benefit themed, left-leaning chick lit' to select from Amazon's menu (an unforgivable oversight, I'm sure you'll agree), I've varied the two options for genre available per episode.  No 1 therefore went out as 'Legal' and 'Family Saga' which is probably the closest match for the story as a whole.  Depending on the primary themes in each of them, other episodes have also been tagged as 'Contemporary Women', 'Political' and 'Romance'.

It's no coincidence that Episodes Four, Six and Eight have the 'Romance' tag!

But now I have a dilemma.  I want my story to be read.  I want people who wouldn't otherwise think sympathetically about benefit claimants to meet the Walkers and get to like them, and to empathise with their troubles.  I want them to share the frustrations of the advice workers battling with funding cuts and legal challenges.  I want them to stop believing the 'Daily Mail' and see Iain Duncan Smith for the vile little turd that he unquestionably is. 

And I now know that the best way to get readers is to classify my stories as 'romance'.  There is clearly a large audience for romantic fiction looking for a free read - I'm sure it's the mildly racy scene available early on in the preview pages of 'Continual Supervision' that keeps it outpacing its prequel when they're both on a free promotion!  I have a sneaking suspicion that classifying an episode or two as 'erotica' would be even more effective in drumming up downloads, but even the naughtiest of the 'naughty bits' aren't really naughty enough to get away with that without risking disappointment to frustrated readers, and we don't want bad reviews!

At which point, may I make a gentle plea for kind but honest reviews on the 'Amazon' site if you've read either of the original books or any of the new serial so far.

So I suppose I had better not cheat and stick the 'romance' label where it doesn't belong.  On the other hand, if 'sex sells' perhaps the trick is actually to write a few extra 'naughty bits'?

Battening down the hatches

There's a storm coming.

Looking out of the window next to the computer desk, the sun of our last light evening of the year is setting into a sullen mass of slate-grey cloud building over Snowdonia and spreading east towards us.  This isn't the 'St Jude Storm' promised for Sunday night and the early hours of Monday, but a warm-up act rattling in tonight with the promise of heavy rain and high winds.

Neither used to worry me a great deal, and I'm still fairly relaxed about the rain, but living on top of a hill makes high winds much more of a worry.  During the 1987 hurricane, I was living in Southampton and, despite the fact that the South Coast bore the brunt of it, I managed to sleep right through the storm, even with my father and our next-door neighbour making emergency repairs to the flat roof above my bedroom at one point, only becoming aware that something had happened when I switched the radio on and heard a list of school closures being read out.  'Funny,' I thought, 'I don't remember anything about a teachers' strike on the news.'  And then I drew the curtains and realised I could see a great deal more of the Solent than I used to be able to from my window, because there was a bloody great oaktree missing between our house and the waterfront. 

There was another mighty storm in 1990, but I dozed through that as well, being mildly sedated still after having my wisdom teeth removed.

Since moving north, high winds have been more worrying.  We had a pretty hefty storm during our first winter up here, and consequently found ourselves scurrying round the garden in the wee small hours, wellies and water-proofs on over pyjamas, rounding up the panels from our recently-erected polycarbonate greenhouse.  One of them was never found, in fact, despite house-to-house enquiries along the street, so there are a couple of panes of horticultural glass in a section of the roof instead.  After this episode, Jon re-engineered the original structure to include additional bracing to an impressive level of over-engineering, and with the hedgerow behind it now mature, the 'polycarb' should now be safe.

I'm more concerned about the lean-to greenhouse on the back of the house this year, having pruned out a section of the shrubbery along the west side of the garden to restore our view of the Long Mynd during the summer.  While the tall Philadelphus may have looked scraggy during the winter, the bare stems still offered a bit of a windbreak, and although the extra light has enabled the herb garden to flourish, a trashed lean-to will be a high price to pay for that.  So it's fingers crossed that after all the build-up and the hype, it all turns out to be a storm in a teacup after all.