Lessons Learned: Not in My Name

In an alternate 2003, the UK holds a referendum to go to war with Iraq and splits the nation with a 52% to 48% yes vote. A young activist is beaten to death after a demonstration. The police say her murder was random.

It wasn’t. More activists will be murdered. The activists only trust each other. Maybe that trust has already been betrayed.

Witty, political, and provocative, this New Adult mystery is based on real events, and keeps the reader guessing to the very end.

Genre: New Adult Cosy Mystery

How good do I think this book is, looking back on it?      8/10

This book is good. It does what I intended it to do, and the improvements I made as a writer really started to show in this book, but it never feels as alive to me as Drown the Witch or An Angel Named Susan. Fantasy is my comfort zone.

How obviously depressed was I during the writing?        5/10

I gave the protag an anxiety disorder, for reasons I can’t quite remember. Not quite depression, but linked.

Background

In May 2018, I wasn’t feeling particularly good about writing novels. My wife said I should try entering some short story competitions. This didn’t turn out to be great advice – I’d spent years at that point honing my skills in writing novels. Switching over to other types of writing required a completely different skillset which I didn’t necessarily have. Still, of the clutch of short stories I wrote, one gained some traction. It was called Depression and the Denouement and it placed in a collection released by Claret Press in 2019.

My experience with Indie Presses up to this point had ranged from disappointment to despair. The Suicide Machines hadn’t been edited at all, and whilst Confessions had fared better, the publisher hadn’t been able to publicise it massively, due to being a small outfit.

The event Claret Press put on to launch the Insights collection, which my story placed in, impressed me no end. Hundreds of people all collected together to raise money to fight motor neuron disease. I knew this was a publisher I wanted to work with. The event had included a charity auction. I won two prizes – breakfast with the publisher and having my work edited by the Claret Press interns. These opportunities allowed me to cement a relationship with Katie, Claret Press’ owner.

I submitted The Whispering of Black Anis to them, which they turned down (a very wise decision which I’m very grateful for, now). Katie, called me and explained that she was only really looking for political novels and, tactfully, didn’t mention how bad the book was.

Political, eh?

I’d had this idea bouncing around in my head – a way to explain Brexit to those who didn’t understand our resistance to it: Imagine a referendum had been called in 2001 to decide whether the UK should go to war with Iraq. Would the fact that there had been a referendum have made it any less of a terrible decision?

I pitched this idea to Katie and she told me to write it. I’d never had a publisher ask me to write something before. It flattered my ego. She asked me to write a 50,000-word novel, nothing too long. An Angel Named Susan had been 84,000 words. Sweet, I thought, I can do 50,000 words in my sleep.

The only problem was… what I’d pitched as an idea for a setting, not a story. I didn’t want to write something set in Westminster where different political factions were wrangling over the Iraq war. That very much wasn’t my jam, but a murder mystery…

I worked out a plan with my wife, bashed out a first draft in two weeks and sent it over to a developmental editor. That’s right! May 2019 and I’d finally started getting professional editors on board at the correct stages.

The editor commented that I didn’t have enough people getting murdered. In version 1, only one person died in the book. I was a little annoyed by this as, in a 50,000-word book, it felt that having three bodies (one every 16,000 words) would be a little silly. I had a chat with Katie about this problem, and this led to the following conversation:

Me:        I don’t have room in a 50,000-word novel to have bodies dropping from the ceiling.

Katie:    Why are you only writing 50,000 words?

Me:        …because you told me to.

Katie:    What?

Me:        You told me you wanted the book to be 50,000 words long.

Katie:    Ah. Sorry, that’s my fault. When I tell writers I want something 50,000 words, that’s because I know they’ll go massively over the word count.

It turned out Katie wasn’t used to having writers actually listen to her instructions and stick to them. This same scenario re-occurred a couple of times during the production of the novel, but we got there in the end.

The Release

Katie had some interns who sent NIMN out to traditional review sites, all of which ignored it. They also sent the book out to reviewers on Instagram, which meant I have a bunch of lovely reviews from Zoomers on Instagram.

Post Release

Initial sales were promising but dropped off fast, as these things go. As prep for this I asked the publisher how sales had gone and the result was less than entheusiastic. It sounded a lot like we’d had an initial flurry of interest thanks to the zoomers and then the book had immediately sunk, as has happened for basically every book I’ve ever written.

Lessons Learned

1)      Working contacts is hugely important

This one wasn’t in any way a surprise. The phrase ‘it’s not what you know, it’s who you know’ is a truism for a reason. Not in My Name only exists because I got to know Katie. I wouldn’t have been able to do this if Claret had been a larger operation. NIMN only exists because Katie decided to call me to explain why she didn’t want to take on the book I’d submitted to her. If she’d emailed me a form rejection, I’d never have written it. Funny how life turns out, sometimes, isn’t it?

2)      Working with editors at the correct times is hugely important

Without a developmental edit, NIMN would probably have never worked. Getting the edit done after the first draft really focussed me on the Cosy Mystery genre. It meant that Katie and I could work out what we both wanted from the project. If I’d spent two years working on the 50,000-word version of NIMN only to submit it to Katie and have her go ‘where’s the rest of it?’ I’d have felt rather annoyed.

3)      It’s nice to work in different genres occasionally

A murder mystery set in the real world isn’t my usual jam. I found it much easier to write because I wasn’t constantly having to come up with strange locations and magical artefacts. This led to writing the first draft in two weeks and the second draft in ten days. I did a lot more work on the book (a lot more), but the fact that I was able to bash out a draft that quickly says a lot about how into the zone I got. Still, I don’t love NIMN. I like it, I think it’s an important book – probably the most important book I’ve written. It talks about subjects I care about deeply, from police violence to the importance of community activism. Still, I’d love it a whole lot more if it included lasers, vicious seraphim or magical creatures. I did try to put some in during a dream sequence but Katie asked me to take them out.

4) Publicity needs to be long term

I was recently watching an interview with a succesful self-published author and they talked about how they spent the entire first 100 days post-release actively publicising the thing using targeted advertising. To say nothing of the pre-release ARCs (advance review copies), blog tours and such. Without that sort of thing, books just… sink. Money is a massive factor here - without the money to spend on advertising, your book will get lost amongst everything else released. Yay, capitalism.