Disenchantment or: Where Self-Promotion Can Lead.

I know, I know—sounds like a really depressing blog post, based on the title, doesn’t it? And, I suppose, at another time, the realisation that has recently come to me might indeed have been depressing. However, the truth is, while I have become disenchanted with the whole business of struggling to sell books, it has also been a liberating experience.

It can become something of a treadmill. This isn’t a whinge, of course. I have enjoyed the whole publishing process since the launch of my first novel If I Never. Over the past twelve months or so, however, it has seemed increasingly futile. With the huge growth in independent authorship, the marketplace has become more than crowded—it has become glutted and exhausted and, to my mind, a further expression of vanity publishing at its worst (in many, though not all, cases). To be heard above the promotional hubbub requires something beyond persistence, something I’m not entirely sure I any longer want any part of.

I’ve always known that promotion was a part of the publishing business, naturally. And I have no problem with that. But when it starts to predominate, impact on the writing, and steer one’s creative course … well, something has to be done, right?

So this is how it’s going to be for at least the next twelve months: I’m going to focus almost exclusively on my writing (well, at least as far as my work is concerned; if you’ve been paying attention, you may have spotted that I have other wonderful things going on in my life at the moment—which take precedence over everything else). Promotion will be set completely aside. When my latest project, The Architect, is complete, it will be submitted to mainstream publishers and I will set to work on the next project. More work will be brought out through GWM Publications, but not until 2015. This work will be promoted, naturally, but I will not be spending every last minute on Twitter trying to schmooze people into taking a look at it.

Instead, I’m going to ask my small but faithful band of merry readers to do what they have always been kind enough to do for me and continue spreading the word. Word of mouth is something that I have always acknowledged as the number one promotional method. So, while I get my head down and write the books I hope you will continue to enjoy, please whisper to your friends about me, tell them titbits from my stories, share this blog with them or point them to the free samples on the GWM Publications website … and know that somewhere there is one grateful writer, putting words down, happy in the knowledge that the readers that truly understand what he is trying to do are doing their level best to bring other people on board.

© 2013 Gary William Murning

Christmas—or: Even Atheists Have To Make a Living.

Well, that time of year is fast approaching and I’m battling with that whole “but you’re an atheist, you don’t do Christmas” part of me again …

… okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration—for, in truth, I do indeed do Christmas (in my own ungodly way) and love, among other things, the opportunity it provides to shamelessly flog a few more books.

And, so, this post is by way of a quick introduction to my work, for those of you who haven’t yet had chance to check it out, in the hope that you might see something you like and take pity on a poor, starving wordsmith (that’s me, just in case there’s any doubt).

All products available in paperback and for Kindle. Click through to Amazon to check out the samples. And thanks in advance for your generosity. If you like what you see, please tell all your friends.

For Sonny Moore, writer and family man, chance discovery and the force of untethered past are about to impact on his life in ways both unimaginable and profound. Faced with events he cannot explain, and those he does not even wish to contemplate, his world and the worlds of those closest to him spiral down into a realm of need and hurt, where ghosts walk – and occasionally resemble those closest to him.

Buy or read samples on Amazon.

 

 

It was a time of change and new ideologies, a vision of a more inclusive, fairer future… a time that was destined to shape the lives of many, and fail more than a mere handful.

Viewed retrospectively through the eyes of the now adult Carl Grantham, Children of the Resolution

is a story of a child poised between two worlds. Thrown into the revolutionary world of integrated education in 1970s England, the physically disabled Carl finds himself torn between what he expects of himself and what his changing environment will allow.

At heart, a coming-of-age story — Children of the Resolution explores the intricacies of friendship and loss, the subtle fears of childhood and the far less subtle fears of adulthoods possibly never realised.

Buy or read samples on Amazon.

If I Never centres on the growing love between two “social misfits”. Clearly “meant for each other” in a most unusual way, the world and those around them threaten to pull them apart… the two drawn into the complicated lives of friends, consumed by unfolding mysteries and dangers.

Buy or read samples on Amazon;

 

 

 

 

© 2012 Gary William Murning

A Festive Thank You and Something of a Review.

A dark, somewhat spooky Christmas Eve Eve morning in my little corner of the world – grey mist rolling in across the hills like a sfumato smudge – and I’m doing that Christmassy looking back and looking forward thing again again, listening to Brahms’ Ballades and wondering just where the hell the year has gone.

Like any year worth a damn, it’s been a busy and, blessedly, healthy twelve months that saw me finish the manuscript for The Legacy of Lorna Lovelost, set up my own micropublishing company (GWM Publications), prepare The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts for publication, start outlining what looks like being my next project, Recalling Calloway Vaughan – oh, and I also managed to sell a few books (as we speak, the Kindle edition of If I Never is breaking all of its previous records). This in itself is an achievement, I suppose, but more than that I managed to enjoy every part of the process. Yes, there were difficulties along the way, but I think it’s fair to say that it’s been a good year.

Work highlights included:

1. The Legacy of Lorna Lovelost. Every part of this project was a joy. Its characters led me to a world that entertained in the writing and, yes, probably taught me a thing or two along the way. Looking forward to sharing that with you around March 2013 – all being well.
2. Setting up GWM Publications in preparation for publishing The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts. I’d expected this process, quite different to the method I used when publishing Children of the Resolution, to be problematic. Yes, it demanded a little knowledge of the industry, but, with a little help from my Client Services Representative at Lightning Source, it was all plain sailing. I now have my initial batch of review copies and, I have to say, the final product looks pretty bloody stunning.
3. Working with the very talented Gudrun Jobst on the cover design for The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts. Gudrun designed the cover for my first Legend Press novel, If I Never, and I was very excited at the prospect of working directly with her on this particular project. Her initial designs based on my rather extensive brief were all incredible – the final cover, however, exceeded all my expectations.

So what does 2012 hold in store? Well, apart from the end of the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar and the ensuing end of the world (!), the forthcoming year will see the publication on March 31 of The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts (available for pre-order now, with free samples available here). In many regards, this particular novel is a return to the stylistic approach I used with If I Never (it was, in fact, written before If I Never) – using genre motifs (this time supernatural thriller/horror) to explore in a hopefully gripping and entertaining way themes we all grapple with almost every day.

I will also, no doubt, be spending much of the time working on Recalling Calloway Vaughan and preparing The Legacy of Lorna Lovelost for publication (I’m almost certain at this point that I will also be bringing out this particular novel through GWM Publications; whilst I could probably place it with a traditional publisher, the megalomaniac in me wants complete control over this one!)

Well, the mist has lifted and the day is brightening. And so it only remains for me to thank you for all the varying forms of support over the past year and to wish you a safe and happy holiday period and fantastic New Year!

© 2011 Gary William Murning

The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts – Final Cover Unveiling.

I am delighted to reveal the cover for my next novel (to be published on 31 March 2012) The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts. The first novel to be brought out under my own micropublishing imprint, GWM Publications.

Designed by the very talented Gudrun Jobst, who also designed the cover for my first Legend Press novel, If I Never, I think you will agree that the end result is pretty striking.

Front cover (click on image to enlarge):

Full cover (click on image to enlarge):

© 2011 Gary William Murning

Northern Echo Feature.

Today I was featured in the Northern Echo… click on the image to enlarge…

Read your free sample of Children of the Resolution, please click here.

To buy from the UK, click here – and American customers can buy here. (Also available on Kindle. UK. US.)

© 2011 Gary William Murning

Looking Forward, Looking Back.

I haven’t written a great deal about my latest project, The Legacy of Lorna Lovelost, here (though I have tweeted about it considerably). This is, of course, the result of my generally blogging less these days rather than any conscious decision to deny my blog-readers, and, rather ironically, I’m now mentioning it only in passing as I look forward and look back—contemplating my next project and the recently published Children of the Resolution.

As is so often the way, common threads tend to run through some of the projects I write. Lorna Lovelost, for example, has certain connections to my first published novel, If I Never. Similarly, it’s beginning to look as though my next project—tentatively titled The Wisdom of Closed Worlds, is going to have thematic links with Children of the Resolution. (More of this at a later date.) Consequently, today has found me revisiting some of my blog posts from the period during which I was working on Children. And it occurred to me that said posts might be of interest to old and new readers alike.

So, a brief selection of those I still find interesting:

Good to Be Writing Again—my first post upon starting work on the novel itself.
On Writing Child Characters for Adults—addressing some of my concerns; a half decent insight into how I work.
Death Off-Stage—how the most difficult scenes can often be far easier to write than we expect.
The Final Curtain—on leaving behind “old friends”.
The Difficult Questions—looking at how I deal with “bullying” in Children of the Resolution.
Burning Love—a brief, light post on one of Carl Grantham’s childhood heroes (and my own).

Read your free sample of Children of the Resolution, please click here.

To buy from the UK, click here – and American customers can buy here. (Also available on Kindle. UK. US.)

© 2011 Gary William Murning

Newcastle Libraries Interview.

My latest interview with the fantastic people at Newcastle libraries has just gone live. Snippet follows below—but don’t forget to click through; there’s still much, much more to read over there.

What inspired you to write ‘Children of the Resolution?

Children of the Resolution is an unusual novel, for me. Normally, my work is quite removed from my own, personal “story”. The novelist William Boyd once posited the idea that there are, essentially, two kinds of novelists – those who draw heavily from their own experiences, and those who write novels about things they, before researching, know little about. I’d always considered myself to be the latter, even though I do, naturally, use my own emotional experiences etc to breathe life into the characters and stories.

But there had been one particular story – heavily autobiographical – that I’d been trying to write for a number of years that contradicted this. That story, after three attempts, was to become ‘Children of the Resolution’.

The main inspiration was, simply, that there was a story here – more an anthology of experiences, I guess – that needed to be told. In the 1970s, as a child, I’d been among the first disabled children to be integrated into mainstream education in the north-east of England. It had been an exciting time. It had had that revolutionary feel about it. Even as a child, I got a real sense of that. Something new was being tried and, everyone seemed to think, it could only ever end well. Naturally, the initial enthusiasm – somewhat naïve, in many respects – of those implementing the new ideas was, to say the least, challenged.

For a while, I looked around for a written experience of the implementation of integrated education and I wasn’t really surprised to find that there were none. I felt it was a rich and important period. There were many lessons to be learned from those of us who had gone through the system (lessons, sadly, that simply haven’t been learned, in many areas) and, without wishing to sound too grand about it, I felt obliged to write it. Apart from the issues – which, I hasten to add, are not the driving force behind the novel – I very much wanted to give a sense of what it was like, the friends I made, the lessons I learned about life in general. It’s very much a coming-of-age story – rather sad in places but also, I’ve been told, laugh out loud funny.

Read More…

Read your free sample of Children of the Resolution, please click here.

To buy from the UK, click here – and American customers can buy here. (Also available on Kindle. UK. US.)

© 2011 Gary William Murning

Local “Children of the Resolution” Press Coverage.

Today I was featured in the Middlesbrough Evening Gazette. The full article can be read by following the link below.

Gary, 44, said: “My first concern was to entertain, to write a semi-autobiographical novel that wasn’t overly-political and didn’t proselytise. But, more than anything, I think it was about ensuring some of those experiences were on the record. I felt obliged to write it because, to my knowledge, no one else has addressed it in this way.”

Read More

(Please note: the paper version of this article has a caption referring to my childhood in Guisborough. Whilst I was indeed born in Guisborough, I did not actually grow up there—and the novel itself does not reference Guisborough in any meaningful way.)

To read your free sample of Children of the Resolution, please click here.

To buy from the UK, click here – and American customers can buy here. (Also available on Kindle. UK. US.)

© 2011 Gary William Murning

The Author As Enemy – or The Goodreads Rant.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been using the reader networking site Goodreads, and, by and large, I’ve found it to be an excellent way to share information on the books I read and, also, the books I write. It has a number of features that – whilst I haven’t used them excessively – have proved useful a number of times.

One such feature is the option to create a book giveaway. I did this with If I Never and I recently did it with my new novel Children of the Resolution. Both giveaways attracted a great deal of attention and, as a result, many people added the books to their “to read” lists who otherwise may not have.

Upon receiving the names of winners of the latest giveaway, however, I was rather annoyed to discover that, in total, the people concerned had something like five or six friends listed in their networks. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, the idea of the book giveaway is that free books go out to people who then read and review on Goodreads. Goodreads claims to, where possible, target people who would normally read the kind of book you have written – and, one would hope, people who actually have friends on their network. With a little further investigation, I discovered that some of the winners had in fact only recently joined, didn’t appear to be in the least bit active, and looked suspiciously as if they may have joined simply to apply for the chance of receiving free books. Naturally, this galled me somewhat – so I got in touch with Goodreads.

I suggested a number of things that might make this process work more fairly for all those concerned. This, in part, was the response I got:

It is frequently suggested that we limit giveaways to those who are active on the site, those have a minimum number of books rated or friends added, and while we understand where these concerns come from, we are not planning to change the algorithm. If a user comes to the site specifically to enter your giveaway, they should be as eligible as the next person.

In other words, the people who make the community work – who visit daily, interact, discuss, argue, laugh and cry about books (oh, yes, and read and occasionally click on all those ads that I’m sure the people at Goodreads depend upon) – have as much value to those running the site as those who may have just dropped by because someone told them you can sometimes get a few free books there.

Also, authors themselves (and, let’s face it, sites like this would not exist without authors) are treated pretty poorly in this and other ways. A fellow author and friend, for example, recently replied to a message I sent her through the Goodreads system. When I went to my inbox to read the message, to my surprise I spotted the warning below:

If this author is harassing you about a negative review, please flag this message to report him. Do not reply, it usually doesn’t end well.

This bothers me on so many levels. Firstly, there seems to be a prima facie assumption that authors are, somehow, by default, going to harass readers. I have absolutely no doubt that some out there respond to negative reviews – and possibly quite vociferously. I, personally, generally don’t. I may at some time in the future feel the need to correct certain points, politely, but thus far I’ve been pretty fortunate with reviews.

But what if I were to receive an especially bad review? This is something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot, recently, because it’s something that’s happened to a fellow author and friend. The reviews in question have been unexpectedly bad. I read the book in manuscript, supplied promotional quotations and I was flabbergasted when I saw the prepublication customer reviews (through Amazon Vine).

The problem we as authors must now address, I believe, is that we are faced with an environment that – quite rightly – allows everyone express an opinion. An opinion that they no longer simply share with a couple friends down the pub, but now have the opportunity to share with hundreds, if not thousands of people. The customer buys our books and can immediately let other prospective customers know what they thought of it. This is a good thing. This is something of which I approve.

Except for one thing. This is a new world. We no longer live in that quaint little village that has one shop where the customer is always right. Sometimes the customer, the book reader, can be wrong – and, you know what, in today’s environment we as authors have the right to respond. We have careers to consider. And if we don’t look after them, politely, no one else will. Goodreads, to one degree or another, seems to be developing an “author as enemy” mentality. The reader must must take precedence over those nasty, nasty money-grubbing, argumentative writers. But this isn’t the case. The vast majority of us enjoy interacting with our readers, even when we don’t agree. And, shock horror, our readers seem to enjoy it, too!

I’m going to finish by addressing one more quote from Goodreads:

[…] we have many thousands of times more readers on the site than authors, so we must provide them with the best experience possible.

And what would this experience be like without authors? If, as unlikely as it is, we all decided to wave Goodreads goodbye and take our book giveaways elsewhere – what then?

In my reply to the above letter, I suggested certain compromises regarding the book giveaway process. This was a few weeks ago. I have still had no reply.

Are you a reader and/or writer? Please share your views.

To read your free sample of Children of the Resolution, please click here.

To buy from the UK, click here – and American customers can buy here. (Also available on Kindle. UK. US.)

© 2011 Gary William Murning ©

World Book Day.

To celebrate World Book Day, Wanda Shapiro – a very talented literary novelist from California – kindly invited me to write a guest piece for her One Girl, One Novel blog.

The piece is now online. Please click through to read “Just One Day?” – and while you’re there, don’t forget to check out Wanda’s work. You really won’t regret it.

To read your free sample of Children of the Resolution, please click here.

To buy from the UK, click here – and American customers can buy here. (Also available on Kindle. UK. US.)

© 2011 Gary William Murning ©