amwriting – Page 6 – A. L. Lester

Publishing Delays

wood desk laptop office — Photo by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels.com

As those of you who follow my newsletter know, the last couple of weeks have been a real nightmare here at Lester Towers.

Littlest had an accident at school and broke her nose, which has caused all the fuss you’d expect, plus worry that she’d have to have it re-broken and re-set to ensure it’s still possible to naso-gastric tube her in the future if necessary. This has, thankfully, turned out not to be the case, but it’s taken ages for ENT to decide. I’ve had a visit to hospital for a minor procedure which was more tedious than worrying, Talking Child has been stressed about school and her sister and me. And finally Mr AL has put his back out lifting Littlest, which has caused our whole family raft to list alarmingly to one side.

So, we’re struggling, basically. Writing itself and my somewhat intermittent early morning writing sprints with my Office Colleagues, Ofelia Grand, Nell Iris and J. M. Snyder have been what’s keeping me going.

The cherry on the top of the disaster-Bakewell tart however, has been that my dear friend and editor has been hospitalised with covid. She is home and recovering now, which is an enormous relief, but as everyone knows, it’s a long haul.

The result of all this non-writing stress is that we are pushing the release of The Fog of War back until 16th August. I’m very sorry about it, but there it is, people are more important than stories when it comes down to it. The Starling story (which still doesn’t have a name, this is clearly my brand) is puttering along but again it’s all a bit up in the air.

School breaks up for summer in the last week of July, so I have no idea what my writing schedule will be over the weeks after that–last year I did quite well getting up before everyone else and getting on with it. The plan is to release the Sylvia trilogy three months apart, and I’m still hoping that will work, although I’m starting to wonder whether I’ve over-faced myself. Time will tell!

Anyway, that’s it. We’re all okay, but it’s been a tough few weeks. I hope you’re all doing all right too in these uncertain times.

Taking Stock: Deleted Scene

Here’s a deleted scene I found from Taking Stock. It’s Patsy Walker, who runs the Post Office, talking to HER friend Sally, who’s Laurie’s housekeeper. It’s whilst he’s in hospital recovering from his stroke. I took it out because it didn’t move the story along at all.

Book cover of Taking Stock — Taking Stock

“He’s going to be a handful,” Patsy Walker said to her friend Sally Beelock as she filled the tea-pot. “You’ll have trouble with him.”

Sally pulled a face. “You don’t need to tell me that,” she said. “He’s already talking about coming home and the stupid idiot can’t even stand up without help yet.”

“He’s improving though, yes?” Patsy asked.

“Yes, definitely. And it’s only been a week. They say that he needs to keep trying to move everything, his arm, his fingers, his leg, and the more he does that the more it’ll help.” She sighed. “They don’t know if it’ll all come back properly, but they say there’s a good chance.”

Patsy passed her a mug of tea and sat down opposite her at the kitchen table where she could see in to the shop. There weren’t any customers at the moment, but the early autumn day was warm and she had the outside door propped open as usual, which meant the bell wouldn’t ring if anyone came in.

“How are you managing?” she asked Sally. “It must have been a shock. He’s only what, thirty?”

“Thirty-three,” Sally said absently. “Yes. I thought it was curtains for him to be honest, Pat. Jimmy came down to get me at Carsters once the ambulance had gone. He didn’t tell me much, just said I should get into the hospital. Apparently he was unconscious, pretty much.”

Patsy patted her hand. “Well, he’s going to be fine, love. You’ll see. Look at Roger Chedzoy. He had a stroke four years ago and you’d never really know to look at him now.”

“He’s sixty-three though,” Sally said. “I mean, there’s never a good age, is there? But Laurie’s so young.”

Patsy nodded. “And that means he’s got more fight in him and he’ll get over it quickly. You’ll see.”

Some different audiobook options

It will quickly become clear that this is a blatant promo post about my new audiobook set-up, but I’m combining it with some info about the different listening platforms out there too, as I know a growing number of listeners are looking to move away from Audible. I hope it’s useful from that point of view.

I’ve recently moved the three books I have with Callum away from Audible and they should now be available via local library services as well as other places like Chirp and Kobo. I get as much money from borrows from your local library as I do from Audible credit sales, so knock yourselves out with that and don’t think you’re ever doing any author down by legitimate borrowing rather than buying!

Because of /technical reasons I don’t understand/ I don’t seem to be able to ALSO distribute them via Audible at the moment, but I’m hoping that when I have a free weekend and a bottle of gin handy I can plough through what I need to do to make that happen, as a matter of fairness to people who may have bought the first ones with Audible credits but perhaps haven’t yet got to the rest in the series. For the same reason, I think I will put The Hunted and the Hind up with Audible as well as everywhere else when it comes out in the summer.

HOWEVER, having said that, Audible set their own, quite high, prices for all the audiobooks they sell to people who don’t subscribe in some way. On the non-Audible platforms I have been able to set the price of Lost in Time and Shadows on the Border to $9.99 and the stand-alone, Inheritance of Shadows, to $5.50. A lot of places like Kobo and Google Play will add sales and reductions of their own to those prices and on Authors Direct I am able to directly control pricing without negotiating with anyone else, so I have made the prices $7.99 and $4.40, respectively. The Flowers of Time is still available from Audible and I won’t be moving that away from the platform.

These are some of the different audio platforms out there:

Alternative audiobook platforms are all gradually growing. It’s definitely worth checking the different platforms for your favourite authors.

Plus: Binge Books

And then we have Authors Direct:

Authors Direct is part of Findaway Voices, the audio arm of Draft2Digital, which is the service I use to distribute my self-published books. Each author can set up a little shop of their own for their audiobooks and direct readers/listeners to it. It’s quite new I think, but so far it seems really sensible and flexible. I load up the audio files Callum sends me, they check them for quality and then they send them out to all the different platforms I’ve selected as retailers. And at that point I can also add them to my own shop. Listeners download the app onto their phone and bosh, off they go.

It has an easy-to-use app (as do a lot of the other options) and it’s ad free. And apparently it has a safe-for-work mode where you can blank out your screen so no-one can see what you’re listening to :).

They have a handy infographic to explain how simple it is!

The downside as far as I can see is that there’s no main storefront where you can search for eg LGBTQ books or cook books or books about llamas. Listeners find each author’s books via a direct link to the author’s ‘shop’.

Anyway. I hope that makes sense…speaking as a creator this is much more transparent—the sales information is laid out clearly with a straightforward relationship between units sold, what platform they have been sold via and the sale price. Plus we get seventy percent of the list price of sale rather than roughly forty at the other platforms and twenty-five of whatever price they decided to set themselves at Audible, which is obviously very attractive.

So there we are. I really hope some of these non-Audible alternatives suit some of you, too. As a consumer I find the Amazon machine very convenient; and as a seller it is to some extent too. I just think that there should be alternatives should people choose to use them and this is my little effort to bring notice to the audio options. And sell more books!

Happy listening, whichever platform you choose!

Coming Soon: Sylvia Marks!

Sylvia Marks is a minor character in Inheritance of Shadows. She’s a doctor, who was part of the Scottish Women’s Hospital at Royaumont, France, during the First World War. Down entirely to the encouragement of my lovely editor Lourenza Adlem, she is now about to have her own trilogy set in the little English village of Bradfield in the early 1920s.

Cover: An Irregular Arrangement, four people in 1920s dress.

I don’t have a title for any of the books yet, but I’m sure something will spring to mind before too long!

You can read about other inhabitants of Bradfield if you are a subscriber to my newsletter, in An Irregular Arrangement, a 10,500 word free story.

Read on to find out a bit about Sylvia and her friend Lucy.

Excerpt

“Sylvia! Are you coming?” Lucy called up the stairs.

Sylvia Marks is coming in July! 1920s England! Lesbian Romance! Mystery! Paranormal Shenanigans!

“Nearly ready, just a moment,” Sylvia’s voice was muffled. “My hair isn’t behaving.”

Lucy trotted up the stairs to her bedroom. They were going to be late for the beginning of the film at this rate.

“Let me help,” she said.

Sylvia sat in front of her mirror, mouth full of hairpins and arms cocked up behind her head, shoving them into her coiled hair.

“It’s got to look half-way neat if I’m going to take my hat off,” she said.

“You can keep your hat on,” Lucy said.

“It always seems rude to the people sat behind me,” Sylvia said. “The seats aren’t very well laid out.”

“Hang on, then,” Lucy said.

She stood behind Sylvia and wrested her hands away from her head. “Give me the brush,” she said.

Sylvia’s hair fell in a curtain to below her waist and was thick and wavy. It was brown, a delightful range of shades from light to dark. Some of the women at Royaumont had cut their hair—bathing facilities had been rudimentary—but Sylvia had kept hers long, wound up in a chignon every day.

She handed the brush from the dressing table back to Lucy and Lucy began to run it through from crown to ends. It didn’t really need much brushing, Sylvia had already done that, but she used the brush to gather in all up into one hand, a heavy tail of soft raw silk in her palm. The faint scent of rosemary that she had always associated with Sylvia was from her hair, Lucy realised.

Sylvia removed the hairpins from her mouth and watched Lucy in the mirror. Her eyes were soft. “No-one’s brushed my hair for years,” she said quietly.

“It’s beautiful,” Lucy said.

She began to wind it into a rope around her hand, twisting it up onto Sylvia’s head as she went. She pinned as she twisted, making a flattish coil that would sit easily under Sylvia’s beret. She focused on what she was doing, getting it right. The hair was fine and thick against her palms and she could hear Sylvia’s breathing slow and soften.

As she tucked the last pin in, securing the ends, she said “All right?” and dropped her hands to Sylvia’s shoulders.

Sylvia met her eyes in the mirror and nodded. She was relaxed and pliant under Lucy palms.

The moment hung in time.

Sylvia arrives on 10th July from JMS Books!

New Release: Eight Acts!

Right then, here we go! Eight Acts is out today!

I finished writing Taking Stock last summer and immediately wanted to find out more about how Percy and Adrian, who are secondary characters with quite large parts, got together. This is the result. It’s only a little novella, but I hope you enjoy it!

Eight Acts

London in 1967 is swinging. It’s the summer of love and consensual gay sex in private has just been decriminalized. Percy and Adrian meet through friends and over the summer their relationship deepens and grows. What will happen in September when it’s time for Percy to go back to his every-day life as a boarding school teacher?

A 20k word stand-alone novella with cross-over characters from Taking Stock.

Buy Eight Acts

I’ve been bobbing around the internet with guest posts to talk about the story. You can read a bit more about the history of the criminalisation and decriminalisation in this blog post I wrote for my friend Nell Iris and I have more info and some references about the time period here, on my own website. I spoke to Ofelia Grand about how difficult writing guest posts is and Dani at LoveBytes has an exclusive excerpt. Finally there’s a ramble on the JMS blog about how the title came about.