Mike Murphy's writing diary: Sales pass printing costs

Sunday, 9 September 2018

Sales pass printing costs

The sales of The Man Who Didn't Like People have exceeded the cost of printing, which is more than satisfactory. The launch at the Petrichor Gallery was a big success and generated the bulk of the early sales including copies of A New Era For Manny Youngman as well as the new novel. Feedback from readers has all been positive.
I have received the MS assessment from a professional editor on Murder For A Grandmother and will be working through that in more detail when I get back into a writing routine this week. My initial reaction is that I don't agree with some of her comments, but I will think about them some more before making any decisions.
I am going to make the attempt to work on two books at once. The first of the Grey Nomad Detectives series is mainly revision whereas Voting For Australia is only partially written and will need a different approach.
For the moment I have filed away my notes on a possible Broome novel but I will be reading David Warner's Before The Break which is a crime story set in Broome, to see how he deals with the culture of the town, which I found very different and challenging for a writer. I can see the town and its culture playing an important part in the story, but if it is not done correctly, the locals up there could be very unhappy.

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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.