Mike Murphy's writing diary: March 2016

Tuesday 29 March 2016

Successful outing

I conducted an enjoyable workshop with the Melville Writers Group yesterday. The members were all keen and had plenty of questions and input which always makes things go smoothly. The topic was the realities of publishing and marketing and my message was to be realistic. Spend 20% of your time marketing and 80% writing (not 80/20 as the marketers suggest) and be content with a modest number of sales. Most of my audiences are aged 50+ so expecting them to work 12 hours a day on writing and marketing like some young writers I know is not at all realistic. I sold and signed some copies of A New Era For Manny Youngman and I've been invited back to do more workshops later in the year so it was a successful outing.

Thursday 24 March 2016

Thinking goes on

A domestic upheaval has distracted me from writing for the past week but it is amazing how my mind keeps thinking. While I've been driving around looking for a new place to live this subconscious process has thrown up several new ideas for the novel I am working on. It raises an interesting question: at what point should I stop listening to my subconscious and stick with what I've got? Are these new thoughts improving my story or changing it into a different but not necessarily better story?
I could go on for ever making changes and some of them may be an improvement, but at some point I need to get at least one of these potential versions of the story into a publishable form. I'm looking forward now to moving into a new place where I can settle down and focus on doing just that. I want to get this novel written.

Wednesday 2 March 2016

Laughs don't equal sales

Author talk audiences are very different. Last night it was mostly men who laughed at my comments on some of the characters in A New Era For Manny Youngman, especially the domineering mother and the lesbian couple. Made for a pleasant evening but I didn't sell many books so maybe I should target women audiences in future. They may not laugh as much but they seem more likely to be readers and therefor potential buyers. My next author talk will be a writers group which will probably be mainly women but then writers are not always good buyers. Still, I console myself by saying the more I get myself and my book talked about the bigger the e-book sales could become. It's all good fun, anyway.

Authors I like

Anna Jacobs

A mentor in my early writing days and still one of my favourite authors. Her sagas about family life in Lancashire are among my favourites but she is a prolific writer and it's all good.

Michael Robotham

Michael urged me to keep writing when I was in a depressed period after another publisher's knock-back. He is basically why I kept writing and turned to self-publishing. I've read all his books and I'm always waiting eagerly for the next one.

Dave Warner

I only recently discovered Dave as a writer after having had his Dave Warner and The Suburbs album since it was on vinyl. It's interesting having another writer who sets his stories in Western Australia.

Dick Francis

I've read all his books at least twice and sometime more often. He's the writer I always return to when I need to feel totally in my comfort zone. Good stories, tight plots, easy writing style. I'd love to know if it really was his wife Mary who wrote them. His son Felix is doing a great job of keeping the family business going.

Leslie Thomas

Ever since Virgin Soldiers I've been hooked on Leslie Thomas and his Dangerous Davies series are among my all-time favourites.

I am because I write

I come across a lot of people who would like to be writers and I often wonder why. For me there has been no question. Since a very young age I have been a writer. Certainly not a famous or even successful one but while other people were doctors or teachers or sportspeople, the thing I did best and was most comfortable doing was writing. For some reason I had a natural flair for it and that raw talent was honed when I became a journalist and learned that what bubbled out of my head was not what was needed. I had to to be able to write to order. One of my earliest lessons came from Bob Duffield, a reporter who took the story of the closure of Perth's Roe Street brothels and wrote different versions of it for convervative, sensationalist, religious and sociological publications. I learned that writing was a craft to be learned, and I have spent many years learning not only the craft of writing, but of story-telling, which is an art in itself. Whether it's a poem, a short story, a novel, my family history, one of my blogs or web sites, I will always be writing something. It's simply who I am and what I do.