Live From Bangalore: A Book's Journey

It’s no secret that the world is shrinking; globalization, social media, and widespread availability of the internet has made the exchange of information between distant locales easier and faster than ever before. But what effect does this brave new world have on publishing.

Author and Bangalore-based businessman Vasudev Murthy recounts his own publishing experiences and how this global market has allowed his works to take minds, and journies, of their own.

A Book's Journey

By Vasudev Murthy

They say that every book finds its reader. In 2016, that could well mean someone in a tiny town in Brazil or in Seoul in Korea.

I live in Bangalore, a city in southern India. I write on a variety of subjects—Music, Crime, Humour, Management . . . I have a lot to say and I shall keep writing. I’ve been published by Rupa, Sage, Bloomsbury, HarperCollins, Poisoned Pen Press and a few more. I realize that I’ve been very fortunate.

But this is not about my fortune but the interesting experience of suddenly finding my books being read in far-away places. Much happens by serendipity as I shall show.

I wrote Sherlock Holmes in Japan in 2012-13. It was published by HarperCollins India and was then showcased by them at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Robert Rosenwald, the CEO of Poisoned Pen Press bumped into someone at the HarperCollins stall and decided to acquire the US rights. PPP renamed the book Sherlock Holmes, the Missing Years: Japan and did an additional round of editing and launched it in the US in March 2015 with a gorgeous cover.

Things became even more interesting. Shortly thereafter, HarperCollins sold the Portuguese language rights to Editora Vestigio in Brazil. It was translated with a great deal of finesse by Ana Oliviera and appears to have become very popular. The book’s production was quite wonderful and the cover design daring and different. What a pity I can’t read the language!

I developed a positive relationship with PPP (in distant Arizona) and worked with them on planning my next book. And soon, I signed a contract with PPP for Sherlock Holmes, the Missing Years: Timbuktu. The book was published in January 2016.

Meanwhile, a Korean publisher called Gamesman reached out to HarperCollins and acquired the Korean language rights. Their particular speciality is the sale of one e-chapter at a time; Korea has apparently adopted e-Books in a very big way. Along with that has come new business models which allows readers to decide on moving ahead chapter by chapter; that’s pressure on a writer to keep things interesting throughout or lose the reader!

A friend in Japan introduced a major publisher Kokusho-Kankokai to HarperCollins India which resulted in the sale of the Japanese language rights, something that I was hoping for at the back of my mind.

But what has all this taught me?

One: the world is truly shrinking. Deals are made faster than ever before and publishers are unafraid of placing their bets on a relatively unknown writer if the theme is compelling enough.

Two: the book you write has a life of its own. I can no longer control its destination and I have no way of knowing how true the translation is. It’s a risk worth taking. One never knows what may happen. For instance, a reader in Brazil made a video about it!

Three: your neighbour in Bangalore does not know who you are, except as the guy with the barking dogs, but people in tiny towns in Brazil and the US do and often write in. I find it slightly surreal. The books have made me an international citizen in a way.

Four: it’s very exhilarating working with publishers and editors overseas and seeing how they think. It’s enriching for the writing process. For example, Timbuktu needed a great deal of research. The publisher worked with me from concept to completion. That’s a wonderful example of how the writing process need not be solitary in this age, and can call upon well-wishers from across vast distances.

Five: speed and responsiveness is king. The quick exchange of information, photographs and graphics ensures that a book is out faster than ever before. That means both publishers and writers need to have a great sense of urgency. And communication needs to be crisp and clear.

Six: Marketing has changed. Book launches don’t happen for me because it’s not possible to travel vast distances. I have to support my publisher in whichever way they think best, which these days may include video interviews or blog submissions. I am fairly active on twitter and that does help.

Seven: you may write for a certain audience and include unusual cultural references; the reader is liberal and prepared to find out what you mean. However, there is an additional responsibility placed on us to be rigorous in our research or risk criticism. And what about the poor translator who must be so precise in conveying the syntax as well as the nuance?

This is the journey my book has taken. I hope you find it self-explanatory. Who knows how this picture will look after the Timbuktu book gathers steam?

---

Vasudev Murthy has authored books on a variety of subjects including music, crime, management and humor. His publishers include Sage, HarperCollins, Bloomsbury, Poisoned Pen Press, Editora Vestigio, Gamesman, LiFi, Kokusho-Kankokai and Rupa, and his book Sherlock Holmes in Japan (Harper Collins, India) has been translated into Portuguese, Korean and Japanese.

Vasudev lives in Bangalore, India where he runs a consulting firm. When he's not knee deep in researching or writing his next book, he can be found teaching, conducting animal welfare seminars, playing the violin, or twisting his aging body into improbable yoga asanas. He has been rescued by six dogs who highly recommend his books as an excellent source of dietary fiber.

Live From Bangalore: A Book's Journey

It’s no secret that the world is shrinking; globalization, social media, and widespread availability of the internet has made the exchange of information between distant locales easier and faster than ever before. But what effect does this brave new world have on publishing.

Author and Bangalore-based businessman Vasudev Murthy recounts his own publishing experiences and how this global market has allowed his works to take minds, and journies, of their own.

A Book's Journey

By Vasudev Murthy

They say that every book finds its reader. In 2016, that could well mean someone in a tiny town in Brazil or in Seoul in Korea.

I live in Bangalore, a city in southern India. I write on a variety of subjects—Music, Crime, Humour, Management . . . I have a lot to say and I shall keep writing. I’ve been published by Rupa, Sage, Bloomsbury, HarperCollins, Poisoned Pen Press and a few more. I realize that I’ve been very fortunate.

But this is not about my fortune but the interesting experience of suddenly finding my books being read in far-away places. Much happens by serendipity as I shall show.

I wrote Sherlock Holmes in Japan in 2012-13. It was published by HarperCollins India and was then showcased by them at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Robert Rosenwald, the CEO of Poisoned Pen Press bumped into someone at the HarperCollins stall and decided to acquire the US rights. PPP renamed the book Sherlock Holmes, the Missing Years: Japan and did an additional round of editing and launched it in the US in March 2015 with a gorgeous cover.

Things became even more interesting. Shortly thereafter, HarperCollins sold the Portuguese language rights to Editora Vestigio in Brazil. It was translated with a great deal of finesse by Ana Oliviera and appears to have become very popular. The book’s production was quite wonderful and the cover design daring and different. What a pity I can’t read the language!

I developed a positive relationship with PPP (in distant Arizona) and worked with them on planning my next book. And soon, I signed a contract with PPP for Sherlock Holmes, the Missing Years: Timbuktu. The book was published in January 2016.

Meanwhile, a Korean publisher called Gamesman reached out to HarperCollins and acquired the Korean language rights. Their particular speciality is the sale of one e-chapter at a time; Korea has apparently adopted e-Books in a very big way. Along with that has come new business models which allows readers to decide on moving ahead chapter by chapter; that’s pressure on a writer to keep things interesting throughout or lose the reader!

A friend in Japan introduced a major publisher Kokusho-Kankokai to HarperCollins India which resulted in the sale of the Japanese language rights, something that I was hoping for at the back of my mind.

But what has all this taught me?

One: the world is truly shrinking. Deals are made faster than ever before and publishers are unafraid of placing their bets on a relatively unknown writer if the theme is compelling enough.

Two: the book you write has a life of its own. I can no longer control its destination and I have no way of knowing how true the translation is. It’s a risk worth taking. One never knows what may happen. For instance, a reader in Brazil made a video about it!

Three: your neighbour in Bangalore does not know who you are, except as the guy with the barking dogs, but people in tiny towns in Brazil and the US do and often write in. I find it slightly surreal. The books have made me an international citizen in a way.

Four: it’s very exhilarating working with publishers and editors overseas and seeing how they think. It’s enriching for the writing process. For example, Timbuktu needed a great deal of research. The publisher worked with me from concept to completion. That’s a wonderful example of how the writing process need not be solitary in this age, and can call upon well-wishers from across vast distances.

Five: speed and responsiveness is king. The quick exchange of information, photographs and graphics ensures that a book is out faster than ever before. That means both publishers and writers need to have a great sense of urgency. And communication needs to be crisp and clear.

Six: Marketing has changed. Book launches don’t happen for me because it’s not possible to travel vast distances. I have to support my publisher in whichever way they think best, which these days may include video interviews or blog submissions. I am fairly active on twitter and that does help.

Seven: you may write for a certain audience and include unusual cultural references; the reader is liberal and prepared to find out what you mean. However, there is an additional responsibility placed on us to be rigorous in our research or risk criticism. And what about the poor translator who must be so precise in conveying the syntax as well as the nuance?

This is the journey my book has taken. I hope you find it self-explanatory. Who knows how this picture will look after the Timbuktu book gathers steam?

Vasudev Murthy has authored books on a variety of subjects including music, crime, management and humor. His publishers include Sage, HarperCollins, Bloomsbury, Poisoned Pen Press, Editora Vestigio, Gamesman, LiFi, Kokusho-Kankokai and Rupa, and his book Sherlock Holmes in Japan (Harper Collins, India) has been translated into Portuguese, Korean and Japanese.

Vasudev lives in Bangalore, India where he runs a consulting firm. When he's not knee deep in researching or writing his next book, he can be found teaching, conducting animal welfare seminars, playing the violin, or twisting his aging body into improbable yoga asanas. He has been rescued by six dogs who highly recommend his books as an excellent source of dietary fiber.

Live From Bangalore: A Book's Journey

It’s no secret that the world is shrinking; globalization, social media, and widespread availability of the internet has made the exchange of information between distant locales easier and faster than ever before. But what effect does this brave new world have on publishing.

Author and Bangalore-based businessman Vasudev Murthy recounts his own publishing experiences and how this global market has allowed his works to take minds, and journies, of their own.

A Book's Journey

By Vasudev Murthy

They say that every book finds its reader. In 2016, that could well mean someone in a tiny town in Brazil or in Seoul in Korea.

I live in Bangalore, a city in southern India. I write on a variety of subjects—Music, Crime, Humour, Management . . . I have a lot to say and I shall keep writing. I’ve been published by Rupa, Sage, Bloomsbury, HarperCollins, Poisoned Pen Press and a few more. I realize that I’ve been very fortunate.

But this is not about my fortune but the interesting experience of suddenly finding my books being read in far-away places. Much happens by serendipity as I shall show.

I wrote Sherlock Holmes in Japan in 2012-13. It was published by HarperCollins India and was then showcased by them at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Robert Rosenwald, the CEO of Poisoned Pen Press bumped into someone at the HarperCollins stall and decided to acquire the US rights. PPP renamed the book Sherlock Holmes, the Missing Years: Japan and did an additional round of editing and launched it in the US in March 2015 with a gorgeous cover.

Things became even more interesting. Shortly thereafter, HarperCollins sold the Portuguese language rights to Editora Vestigio in Brazil. It was translated with a great deal of finesse by Ana Oliviera and appears to have become very popular. The book’s production was quite wonderful and the cover design daring and different. What a pity I can’t read the language!

I developed a positive relationship with PPP (in distant Arizona) and worked with them on planning my next book. And soon, I signed a contract with PPP for Sherlock Holmes, the Missing Years: Timbuktu. The book was published in January 2016.

Meanwhile, a Korean publisher called Gamesman reached out to HarperCollins and acquired the Korean language rights. Their particular speciality is the sale of one e-chapter at a time; Korea has apparently adopted e-Books in a very big way. Along with that has come new business models which allows readers to decide on moving ahead chapter by chapter; that’s pressure on a writer to keep things interesting throughout or lose the reader!

A friend in Japan introduced a major publisher Kokusho-Kankokai to HarperCollins India which resulted in the sale of the Japanese language rights, something that I was hoping for at the back of my mind.

But what has all this taught me?

One: the world is truly shrinking. Deals are made faster than ever before and publishers are unafraid of placing their bets on a relatively unknown writer if the theme is compelling enough.

Two: the book you write has a life of its own. I can no longer control its destination and I have no way of knowing how true the translation is. It’s a risk worth taking. One never knows what may happen. For instance, a reader in Brazil made a video about it!

Three: your neighbour in Bangalore does not know who you are, except as the guy with the barking dogs, but people in tiny towns in Brazil and the US do and often write in. I find it slightly surreal. The books have made me an international citizen in a way.

Four: it’s very exhilarating working with publishers and editors overseas and seeing how they think. It’s enriching for the writing process. For example, Timbuktu needed a great deal of research. The publisher worked with me from concept to completion. That’s a wonderful example of how the writing process need not be solitary in this age, and can call upon well-wishers from across vast distances.

Five: speed and responsiveness is king. The quick exchange of information, photographs and graphics ensures that a book is out faster than ever before. That means both publishers and writers need to have a great sense of urgency. And communication needs to be crisp and clear.

Six: Marketing has changed. Book launches don’t happen for me because it’s not possible to travel vast distances. I have to support my publisher in whichever way they think best, which these days may include video interviews or blog submissions. I am fairly active on twitter and that does help.

Seven: you may write for a certain audience and include unusual cultural references; the reader is liberal and prepared to find out what you mean. However, there is an additional responsibility placed on us to be rigorous in our research or risk criticism. And what about the poor translator who must be so precise in conveying the syntax as well as the nuance?

This is the journey my book has taken. I hope you find it self-explanatory. Who knows how this picture will look after the Timbuktu book gathers steam?

Vasudev Murthy has authored books on a variety of subjects including music, crime, management and humor. His publishers include Sage, HarperCollins, Bloomsbury, Poisoned Pen Press, Editora Vestigio, Gamesman, LiFi, Kokusho-Kankokai and Rupa, and his book Sherlock Holmes in Japan (Harper Collins, India) has been translated into Portuguese, Korean and Japanese.

Vasudev lives in Bangalore, India where he runs a consulting firm. When he's not knee deep in researching or writing his next book, he can be found teaching, conducting animal welfare seminars, playing the violin, or twisting his aging body into improbable yoga asanas. He has been rescued by six dogs who highly recommend his books as an excellent source of dietary fiber.

Live From Scandinavia: What's Wrong With Scandinavian People?

If you’re like me, when you think of Scandinavia, you envision quiet, picturesque countrysides. Maybe a farmhouse nestled between greenery-covered mountains. Kind, peaceful people who are always happy and eating fancy chocolates. You might be surprised to learn that our friends in the Scandinavian region churn out a large chunk of today’s popular crime literature. What, exactly, makes “Scandi crime” so popular? And why does so much of it come out of this particular region of the world?In this edition’s International Corner, Scandi crime author Anders de la Motte attempts to make sense of Scandinavia’s infatuation with crime lit.

What’s Wrong With Scandinavian People?

By Anders de la Motte

Is it perhaps related to the vast amount of pickled herring the Scandinavians eat at every major holiday? Or has it something to do with the various types of high-quality alcohol we produce and later consume along with the salty little fish? Could it be the influence of our Viking forefathers?

I’ll do my best to answer all those questions, but first, being a Swede, there is a small matter of protocol that I’ve been yearning to correct.

Scandinavia, in its proper meaning, only consists of the countries sharing the Scandian mountain ridge, meaning Sweden and Norway. If we were to include Finland, Denmark and Iceland, the correct name would be the Nordic region, or just the Nordics. Still, the word, “Scandinavia” seems to have stuck with the entire region, and not even the inhabitants know the difference anymore. There, I’ve said it. Now I feel a lot better.

So what is wrong with us Scandinavian (Nordic) people, besides the obvious need to always be right? Why do so many of us write crime fiction and why does the rest of the world never seem to tire of reading it?

Let’s begin with some statistics that may shed some light on the Scandinavians.

Let’s begin with some statistics that may shed some light on the Scandinavians.

• Crime fiction is by far the top selling genre in all the Scandinavian countries.

• Police procedural is the dominating sub-genre.

• The actual crime rate in the Scandinavian countries is very low compared to most other countries, and the combined police forces of the five countries just about exceed that of the NYPD.

• The majority of crime-fiction readers are women aged 35+

• Gender balance within the writing community is more equal in Scandinavia, but still skews toward female dominance.

• The most popular character of Scandi crime is often, but not always, a troubled-yet-gifted cop that solves cases involving a serial killer.

• Serial killers are VERY unusual in real-life Scandinavia.

• So are troubled-yet-gifted cops who go after them alone.

My personal opinion is that many readers look in books for something they don’t encounter in their daily life. A bit of excitement, and even horror, that you can stop just by closing the book you are reading. And because Scandinavia is one of the most peaceful and safe regions in the world, we can’t seem to get enough of reading about violent crime, especially when the setting is somewhere familiar to us, making the suspense even higher.

This attraction to violence probably goes for most readers of crime fiction, not just Scandinavians. But why does the rest of the world take such a huge interest in Scandinavian crime literature?

What is the magic recipe that makes the genre so successful? Here’s my special brew for creating Scandi crime that will kill (pun intended) with readers the world over:

1. Start With the Basics

In the spirit of Swedish equality, it all started with a couple, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, who in the late 60’s and 70’s wrote books about the slightly gloomy detective inspector Martin Beck and his colleagues in the homicide division of the Stockholm police. The books broke away from the previously dominating Anglo-Saxon tradition of storytelling by being both quite realistic regarding police procedure, and by including a large social pathos, criticizing the Swedish welfare system that, at the time, was considered the best in the world.

Sjöwall and Wahlöö wrote ten books altogether, the fourth titled The Laughing Policeman, which won the prestigious Edgar Award and propelled the books to international fame. In 1995, Mystery Writers of America rated The Laughing Policeman the second best police procedural ever written.

All the Sjöwall-Wahlöö books have been filmed numerous times; The Laughing Policeman even became a Hollywood movie in 1973, starring Walter Matthau as Martin Beck, with the setting moved to San Francisco. In Sweden, a series of 34 films will be finalized in 2016, which says something about how the popularity of the characters has transitioned to the modern day.

Recently deceased Henning Mankell and his books about detective lieutenant Kurt Wallander revived the concept of combining a procedural police story with social criticism in the 1990s. These books have also been frequent book-to-film adaptations, most notably by the BBC adaptions starring Kenneth Branagh as Kurt Wallander.

In the 2000s, Stieg Larsson took the concept to an entirely new level with his Dragon Tattoo series, featuring Lisbet Salander and Mikael Blomkvist, starting out with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I’m sure you have missed neither the books nor the film(s).

The series was so popular that a fourth book was recently released, this time written by David Lagercrantz, as Stieg Larsson sadly and unexpectedly passed away in 2004.

Perhaps you can say that it was Sjöwall-Wahlöö who invented Scandi crime, Henning Mankell who updated and refined it, and Stieg Larsson who made it the worldwide phenomenon that it is today. Every Scandinavian writer is in some way influenced by some—or all—of them.

2. A Drop of Dynamics

As I mentioned earlier, Scandinavia is a relatively unknown part of the world that you hear little or nothing from. The countries are known for their generous welfare systems, and they are all ruled or have been ruled for long periods of time by social-democratic parties, emphasizing a large public sector. The Scandinavian countries have a very high standard of living, low levels of corruption, and crime rates are low (in all international comparisons), and are therefore considered safe and very desirable countries to live in. The population in general has a high level of education and is considered civilized, peaceful, and friendly—although perhaps a bit reclusive. If you combine all these factors with dramatic events like murders, power games, and acts of violence, you get an interesting and suspenseful dynamic that works well in crime stories.

3. Lots of Location

The Scandinavian (Nordic. Sorry, last time) countries are located way up in the Northern hemisphere, meaning we have short, beautiful summers where the light never seems to end (some really northern parts even have midnight sun), and long, dark—and sometimes very snowy—winters (where the same northern parts have no daylight at all). Scandinavian nature includes vast forests, deep fjords, high fjells (mountains), tens of thousands of lakes, and beautiful archipelagos—many of these features not far from the major cities. These are all fantastic locations for any kind of story, but especially those with the most counter-dynamic.

4. A Hint of History

The Scandinavian region has lots of exciting history, dating all the way back to 10th century Vikings. Even though we are now very peaceful, the Swedish king Gustaf II Adolf revolutionized 17th century warfare and waged war against half of Europe before being killed in battle. The weapons industry he founded is still world-leading, even though Sweden has not been at war in 200 years.

Before becoming friendly neighbors, Sweden and Denmark were archenemies for half a millennium. Finland, which was a part of Sweden for 700 years, was conquered by Russia in 1809 before declaring independence in 1917, and then suffered through a very bloody civil war. Denmark and Norway were both occupied by Germany during WWII; Sweden declared neutrality and became a playground for spies and smugglers, and Finland had it’s own war against the Soviet Union.

During the Cold War years, both Sweden and Finland were situated right between NATO and the Warsaw-pact, and the Baltic Sea was a zone of constant confrontations.

All of these factors create a very compelling backdrop for any story, not just crime.

5. Serve It In Style

Scandinavians (in general) are efficient, engineering people; some say a more polite version of the Germans. Our trains (mostly) run on time, our roads are good, our cities well-organized, and our tradition of gathering statistics about almost everything dates back hundreds of years. A reader once suggested to me that perhaps this almost manic focus on efficiency and process optimizing also has effect on our language and storytelling.

Perhaps he was right—at least when it comes to crime fiction. Many of our stories are fairly short and to the point, with very little room for excess. In fact, the Sjöwall-Wahlöö novels were only around 150-200 pages long, and most of us Scandinavian writers (except Stieg Larsson) still finish well before the 400-page mark.

Quite a few writers in the region have had other jobs somewhat related to our stories, too. Sjöwall-Wahlöö, Liza Marklund, and Stieg Larsson were journalists. I used to be a policeman; Jo Nesbo was and still is a Norwegian rock star (Ok, bad example.). My point is that many of the Scandi crime stories are stylistically enticing, as they’re written efficiently, in a realistic way (perhaps due to previous job skills).

6. Enjoy In Good Company

I’m sure you’ve heard that success breed success. I’m not sure that is true, but what I do know is that the friendly competition between the Scandinavian writers definitely has something to do with the success of Scandi crime. You have to constantly improve if you are to belong to the top-tier. Every time a Scandinavian writer is successful it increases the interest for Scandi crime as a genre, something that benefits us all. Right now it is Jo Nesbo in the lead, and next year it might be me, but we all help each other sometimes, even practically with blurbs, recommendations or advice. This is one of my favorite things about the book industry.

So that’s it! Now you know everything there is to know about Scandinavian crime literature, what’s wrong with us Scandinavians, and why we (nor the world) never seem to tire of our crime lit. All that is left now is to try (another?) one of our books and see if you agree that the recipe is pretty good for a fantastic read.

I hope you’ll enjoy reading them as much as we enjoy writing them.

---

Anders de la Motte is the author of Game, Buzz, and Bubble. He has worked as a police officer and the director of security at one of the world’s largest IT companies.  He now works as an international security consultant in addition to being Sweden’s most exciting and innovative new thriller writer.

Live From Italy: Reflections from an Italian Streetside

In this month’s “International Corner”, author Timothy Williams takes us to Italy to paint a picture of the political/economic climate in the 1970s. A young man working at an Italian university, Williams faced much fiscal and personal hardship when he chose to speak out against what he felt were unethical, illegal business practices. Here, he tells us how he surmounted those hardships with the help of Piero Trotti—the man who served as the inspiration for the protagonist of Williams’s six novels.

Finding the Hero Through Hardship: Reflections from an Italian Streetside

By Timothy Williams

Walking up Strada Nuova I noticed a naked black woman. Her photograph had pride of place in one of the boutiques where she was sitting, with her back to the passers by and with her face hidden.

I would have recognized the shape of the back and plaited hair anywhere.

It was 1977 and we were poor. My wife had never told me she had posed for the photograph but I knew she was grateful for any money she could bring in. When we were in the south of Italy, she had done some modeling. In the seventies, black mannequins were a novelty and she had even gotten as far as Palazzo Pitti presenting clothes for Max Mara. She had never enjoyed the job. The other girls were catty, she said, and you're old at twenty-seven. She was twenty-seven.

I taught at the university. The pay was paltry and we survived only because we ate cheaply in the college restaurant. No frills: a cappuccino was a luxury and a doughnut was out of the question. Fortunately my wife didn't drink coffee and didn't like doughnuts.

We were poor and then the Italian government, in a hiccup of fiscal rigor, decided to make us even poorer, by imposing income tax.

We'd been married for four years and we got on well. My wife was fun and I could make her smile. Being beautiful, she attracted many glances and once a prelate outside the college where I worked had seen her pedaling an old bicycle while I perched contentedly on the cross bar. Perhaps he thought that I had acquired a lady chauffeur from Africa to ferry me about his flat Lombard city.

We did not want to leave Italy, but with the threat of taxation, financial ruin loomed. We liked this northern city in the summer with its mosquitoes, frogs and rice, and in winter with its fogs and snow. We liked the cobbled streets, Habsburg architecture and dour, hardworking folk. My job gave me free time and my wife made friends—Rosanna who ran a little shop, Pisanelli and Spadano who were students at the university. Despite her origins, my wife had a background Italians could identify with; she had been brought up Catholic in a devout and provincial backwater.

Two people couldn't live on the 145,000 lire the faculty gave me each month, but there were rumblings in the university and I soon learned that other foreigners like me were unhappy about the new taxation. People who were teaching French or Spanish or German found themselves facing penury. They said the university was employing us illegally.

We worked as teachers, they told me, but we were being paid as researchers. Either we were teachers or we researched; we could not do both. No research was ever asked of us so, clearly, we were teachers in everything but name. Imposing tax on us when we were so poorly paid was unjust and, more to the point, illegal.

These were the years of lead. The Partisan War, now over for more than thirty years, was still being re-enacted on the streets of Italy. Young men and women were killing and maiming civilians in the battle between communism and fascism. My immediate employer, the university, was decidedly to the left—a nest of communists, Maoists, Trotskyists, Lotta Continua, etc. Everybody from the Magnificent Rector down to the last bidello or college porter knew our situation was untenable, but the humanist convictions and generosity of our bosses did not stretch as far as to actually doing anything to help us, their exploited collaborators and subordinates.

I was young and naïve: I had yet to learn the ancient Italian law of not raising your head above the parapet. Furious that I was being exploited by a communist university, I withdrew my labour. I ceased to take class or exam, telling myself that my colleagues would follow suit and join me in my strike action. No one did. I merely alienated my colleagues who, with families to feed, could not afford to rise above the parapet. No matter how badly paid, they needed the job that brought prestige and a modicum of security. Not theirs, then, to rock the boat.

My one man's strike served no purpose other than to put me on the front page of the city's newspaper: Bizarre protest at the university. Insufficient pay. On strike alone. Thirty years old, English, without health insurance.

Knowing the university was going to sack me, I started writing letters to America, seeking employment in a distant land of milk, honey, decent pay, and sensible labour laws.

Somebody suggested I should also see the Inspectorate of Labour, an organization set up by Mussolini, to protect the interests of the worker in the corporatist state. They might be able to help me, I was told. My wife had said she would be happy in America, but she was putting on a brave front. She did not want to say goodbye to Rosanna, Pisanelli, Spadano, and all the others.

I found the Inspectorate Building in a nondescript back street of the foggy city, and I was sent to the fourth floor where a thin man with bright eyes, a long nose and dark hair, shook my hand and invited me to sit down. He appeared amused that an Englishman should come to his office.

That is how I met Piero Trotti.

Not the policeman Piero Trotti who was to become the protagonist of my six novels, but the real Piero Trotti: the good Italian on whom I based my honest policeman.

The real Piero Trotti worked as a labor inspector and he took me under his wing. We became friends and, in time, through his doggedness, understanding of labor law and cunning, Piero Trotti forced the university to recognize the folly of its ways. Abbiamo fatto giurisprudenza, Piero Trotti wrote me more than a year later. The law has changed. We have won.

Our victory came too late; by the time Italian law was changed to accommodate foreign collaborators in universities, my wife and I had said goodbye to Rosanna, Pisanelli and Spadano. We had left the foggy city.

The University of New York at Stony Brook came up trumps and offered me decent pay and sensible labour laws on the other side of the Atlantic. Unfortunately, the offer got lost in the Italian postal system and my wife and I were already back and working in Manchester when the letter inviting me to America fell onto a damp doormat.

Nearly forty years on, thanks to Piero Trotti, I now receive a pension from the Italian government. It's not a lot of money, but it pays for the daily cappuccino and an Italian doughnut.

When my wife and I returned to her Caribbean island, I started work on my first book, a novel set in the city on the Lombard plain. Instinctively, I knew my policeman had to be Piero Trotti. In a byzantine world, where conspiracy and chaos vie, I needed a protagonist of integrity, a man whom readers would identify with and through whose eyes they could get a better understanding of the frustrations and, yes, joys of living in Italy during the years of lead.

Converging Parallels was immediately accepted by a London publisher. At about the same time that the book was published in England, my wife left me.

I sometimes wonder whether she ever kept the photo from the boutique in Strada Nuova.

Of course, there is always a black girl in all my books.

---

In 2011, The Guardian of London selected Timothy Williams as one of the ten best modern European Crime Writers. His first novel Converging Parallels, featuring the policeman Commissario Trotti, was published in 1982 and was followed by four more procedurals set in Northern Italy. Soho Press republished the entire series in 2014/15. The Second Day of the Renaissance, the last novel in the Trotti cycle, will be published in 2016. Soho has also published two Caribbean books, featuring the investigative judge, Anne Marie Laveaud. Now retired from teaching in Guadeloupe, Timothy Williams spends his time in France, Italy, and Kenya, and was in Nairobi during the Westgate massacre of 2013. To find out more about Timothy Williams, visit http://timothywilliamsbooks.com.

Live from the United Kingdom: Awaiting the Publicity Tsunami

In a recent Killer Nashville Magazine story, Authors Guild President Roxanna Robinson said writers must be more aware than ever before, and engage in heavy self promotion, particularly those who self-publish. While expat CJ Daugherty is not self-published, she has had to pick up the slack significantly when it came to publicizing her own work. You may be surprised at what worked and what didn’t and how you might be able to use her techniques to boost your own writing career.

Awaiting the Publicity Tsunami

By CJ Daugherty

When my first novel was published in 2012, I sat back and waited for the publicity to wash over me like a soft ocean wave.

It never happened.

I was befuddled. My novel was the lead title for a major publishing imprint in the UK. Surely that meant a publicity tsunami would crash down on me, probably destroying the small coastal village behind me, and creating a fjord of publicity that people would talk of in awed tones for decades.

The reality of modern publishing publicity is less tsunami and more kitchen sink. The average marketing and publicity spend on a debut novel today is around $2,000. That figure includes the postage it costs to send your books to reviewers.

Trust me when I say: this doesn’t buy much attention.

A lucky few books get more. Last year, rumours swirled that a major publisher spent $100,000 publicizing one young adult novel by a debut writer. I have no idea if the rumours were true, but such a spend would be very rare. It usually only happens when a publisher has ponied up a seven-figure advance in a bidding war that got out of hand after too much espresso, or whatever it is that drives a publisher to throw a million bucks at an incomplete manuscript by an untested writer.

The vast majority of writers will experience what I did. I received a mid-level advance for my first book. My publisher sent the book to reviewers and paid for table placement in bookstores (for which I am eternally grateful). They also held a small gathering in their office for book bloggers, to which I was invited along with another author.

That was about it, as far as I can recall.

Welcome to the new normal.

At first I was frustrated—it is so difficult to get noticed in the crowded world of modern publishing. I longed for them to run an ad campaign, send me to book fairs, hold a tickertape parade—something flashy, you know?

When it didn’t happen, I took matters into my own hands. I couldn’t hold a tickertape parade for myself, or run ads on the London underground. But I wasn’t helpless.

Like every other writer, I had a blog from the beginning. Author blogs were all the rage in 2012, but they are largely out of fashion today. Blogs are time-consuming and fiddly, and not hugely interactive.

So my first act was to create a fan page on Facebook. It is a weirdly self-aggrandising concept—creating a “fan page” for yourself. But it’s just badly named. It’s not really a fan page. This is your permanent online billboard. It’s where you announce to the world, I EXIST and I AM WRITING AWESOME THINGS!! HERE THEY ARE!! LOOK!!

No one can stop you from having the world’s best Facebook page. It costs nothing. It can reach an infinite number of potential readers. In a way, it’s kind of amazing.

At the start, I studied the Facebook pages of authors in my genre. I found the ones I liked, and followed in their footsteps. This is the best advice I can give you, actually. See what successful authors do, and learn from them.

I kept that Facebook page busy, updating it at least once a day, regardless of what was going on. I used lots of images and posted lots of links. Kept it active. It grew slowly but steadily.

By the end of 2014 I had 3,000 followers on Facebook. Now I have 8,000.

I also converted my personal Twitter account into a public account, by changing the name to my author pseudonym. Anything you put on Twitter, the world will read. I recommend not keeping secrets there. At 140 characters, there’s only so much you can do with Twitter. I recommend being as charming and interesting as you can be, luring people to your books.

Twitter is where your readers can talk to you directly, and they love that. But this can make it a little overwhelming at times. I limit myself to a few visits to Twitter a day just because it can eat my writing time.

When my fourth novel came out last year, my publisher pushed me hard at Wattpad. Wattpad is an online publishing platform for aspiring authors. Unpublished authors can put their chapters up as they write them. It is unbelievably popular. It has millions of subscribers, drawn by the lure of free fiction. Here’s what I know about Wattpad—every single time you read about someone getting 1 million reads? They put their entire book up there for free.

Really good books get a million reads when they are put up for free in their entirety. So do really terrible books. The nice thing about Wattpad is it doesn’t discriminate. The bad thing about Wattpad is it doesn’t discriminate.

If you just put up a few chapters, expect a few thousand views. Most of them from existing fans.

Wattpad did not help my career. You want to know what did help my career? Youtube.

After the invisible publicity for book one, I decided to make a book trailer. Now, book trailers are usually pretty terrible. Plastic clouds float across the screen, then a still image of a pretty lady appears. ‘She thought she knew who she loved,’ the screen tells you. Then there are more clouds and a picture of a devastatingly handsome man. ‘But her love was a lie.’

Godamighty.

So at first, I didn’t want one. But with little else going for me in terms of publicity, I decided I had to have one. My husband is an aspiring filmmaker, so he made me a trailer, using free-to-use stock footage off websites that provide that sort of thing, and free-to-use music to go with it.

He is embarrassed by this book trailer now, but I quite like it. There’s lots of running around and odd, cheap music.

I put it up on YouTube and created a CJ Daugherty YouTube channel where it could live. It got tens of thousands of views.

That made me sit up and take notice. For my second book, we invested a little cash in the book trailer—around $1,200. We hired an actress and a local camera operator. We got permission to film at a local castle (this is England after all).

The second trailer did better than the first. Lots of book bloggers shared it. The actress received fan mail from around the world.

No TV stations wanted to interview me (not famous enough), so I got my husband to interview me (we just put his iPhone on a tripod in the living room), and I put that video up on the YouTube channel, too. Thousands of people ‘liked’ it.

After that, we began making more videos. We’ve made book trailers for every book I’ve written. Earlier this year, we made a six-episode web series based on the Night School series—it got 200,000 views in a few months.

Collectively, my YouTube channel has more than half-a-million views. No other social networking site I’ve used has had this sort of impact.

These days, whenever I have a new book out, I hit the ground running. I personally run a social media campaign to back up whatever my publisher is doing to promote me. I use Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. I run Facebook ads, which I design myself—I set a budget of $9 a day, and run them in carefully chosen regions to a targeted audience. I run YouTube ads to promote my videos—setting a similarly low budget. I cross-link everything to Amazon, and have buy buttons prominently displayed.

Social media is free (or damn-near free) advertising. It takes time to build an audience, but once you get the hang of it, it can be better than a traditional ad campaign. You reach people all around the world—opening up new audiences for your work. It can be a game-changer.

That said, it’s not as good as a tickertape parade. But you can’t have everything.

---

A former crime reporter, political writer, and investigative journalist, CJ Daugherty has also worked, at times, for the British government. She is originally from Texas and attended Texas A&M University. She now lives with her husband in the south of England. Night School is the first in a five-part Young Adult series with an accompanying web series. Her books have been translated into 21 languages.

Live From Thailand: Some Notes On A Long, Strange Journey

Publishing is never easy. You feel like an outsider. And being an American in Bangkok, you are.This is bestselling author Jake Needham’s story in his own words. They say persistence pays. Persistence also gives the last laugh…hundreds of thousands of copies later.Here’s Jake’s story Live from Bangkok.

Some Notes On A Long Strange Journey

By Jake Needham

In a review of one of my crime novels a few years ago, the Bangkok Post said this:

“Needham may be the best known American novelist almost no one in America has ever heard of.”

The Post meant it as a compliment, at least I think they did, and there are days on which I can see the humor in their observation. Really, there are. But on other days…well, maybe not so much.

What the Post was referring to, of course, was the oddity that my books were being published in Asia and widely read there when they had never been published in the United States. Worse, at least from my point of view, my books were only being sold in a few countries in Asia and in Europe, and not anywhere else. In spite of my first crime novel selling well over a hundred thousand copies in the handful of countries where it was distributed, not one copy of it or one copy of any of my seven subsequent books has ever been on the shelves of any bookseller in the United States or Canada.

Strange, huh? Take a seat and let me tell you how all that came about…

Once upon a time I wrote a few screenplays, mostly for the sort of uninspired movies cable television loved broadcasting back in the 80’s and 90’s. Occasionally, but not always, I even got credit for them, but at least I always got paid. After a few years, I realized that the movie and television business wasn’t really for me. To tell the truth, I don’t think the movie and television business is for anyone who sees himself as a grown up, but that’s a story for another day.

Anyway, as an escape from writing screenplays, I decided to see if I could figure out how to write a novel. I had always been intrigued by the fall of Saigon in 1975 and I had wondered more than once what had happened to all the currency and gold reserves held in the city’s banks when the North Vietnamese army suddenly rolled into town. I imagined a CIA operation to ship it all to safety and hide it somewhere in Southeast Asia, and from that idea my first novel, The Big Mango, just sort of wrote itself.

When I finished The Big Mango, I carefully composed letters to a list of literary agents whose names I had found in a directory I bought at Barnes & Noble and pitched it to them. Several agents asked to read my manuscript, but then that raised another problem. We were living in Bangkok at the time and we’re talking the 90s here, so forget electronic submission. Can you imagine what it cost to mail six copies of a four-hundred-page printed manuscript from Bangkok to New York? Don’t ask. Just don’t ask.

Anyway, I figured all that postage had turned into a pretty good investment when the legendary Perry Knowlton, the founder of Curtis Brown Ltd, asked to represent me. As it turned out, I was being wildly optimistic. Perry tried for nearly a year, but even an agent as respected as he was could never interest a single American publisher in my novel. It’s just too foreign, New York editors mostly said, and Americans don’t want to read foreign-set novels. Particularly not when they’re set in Asia. Bad memories of Vietnam and all that, don’t you see?

I was less disappointed than you might expect since I really wasn’t all that emotionally invested in the idea of becoming a novelist. Still, naturally I did want to see The Big Mango published somewhere so I gave the manuscript to a small Bangkok-based company that back then was the only English-language publisher in East Asia. They were quite happy to have it because of the story’s roots in the region and they published it almost immediately.

Helped along by the chain of Southeast Asian bookstores the company owned and the near monopoly they enjoyed over the distribution of English-language books in the region, they sold over a hundred thousand copies of The Big Mango within a couple of years in spite of the book’s distribution being limited to a handful of countries where hardly anyone spoke English (but where there were a ton of tourists and business travelers every year who certainly did).

I suspect my publishers were very pleasantly surprised at the book’s success. I certainly was. And that was when I decided I had better start taking this novel writing thing seriously.

After The Big Mango had made its splash, I published four more crime novels over the next five years, but each of them turned out to be with a different publisher. In quick succession I had two publishers in Hong Kong where I published Laundry Man and Killing Plato, one in Singapore where I published The Ambassador’s Wife, and one in the UK where I published A World of Trouble that was acquired by a Singaporean media group barely a month after I signed with them. Try as I might, I just couldn’t get away from Asian publishers.

I didn’t change publishers that often because I was disloyal or indecisive or certainly not greedy. It was simply that each of my publishing relationships quickly became too difficult to survive more than one book. Each was difficult in a slightly different way, of course, but the core issue was the always exactly same. Asian publishers wanted my books because I had a reputation for writing books that sold well, something that very few of their books did, but there were inevitably strong undercurrents of resentment over having to publish a white guy in order to sell books.

Asia cultures are ethnocentric to a degree most Americans have difficulty appreciating. If you’re a visitor, Asia cultures can seem welcoming, even friendly. But if you live there and you’re the wrong ethnicity, it’s made very plain every day that you’re not wanted. Now don’t misunderstand me. The problem wasn’t that I was an American. The problem was that in Thailand I wasn’t Thai, in Hong Kong I wasn’t Chinese, and in Singapore I wasn’t Singaporean.

Because I was an outsider, most editors at my publishers didn’t want to work with me, most PR people didn’t want to promote me, and most sales people certainly didn’t want to sell me. In spite of everybody dragging their feet, however, I got a lot of good press and consistently favorable reviews from most of the major media outlets in the region, and tourists and foreign residents bought a ton of my books…when they could find them.

After publishing five books in environments that ranged from unhappy to down right antagonistic, I’d had enough. I terminated my last print publishing deal and starting bringing out my own titles as e-books. I’ve since published three new books that way – The Umbrella Man, The Dead American, and The King of Macau –and I was also able to bring out all five of my older titles as e-books since I’d hung onto the digital rights to all my titles throughout the publishing deals I had done up until then.

I didn’t take the considerable step of terminating my print licenses simply because of the unhappy experiences I’d had with my publishers in Asia, but far more importantly because of the limited distribution my books were getting. Some of my titles had been published in translation, but the core of my readership was primarily native English-speakers who had either lived in Asia or discovered my books when they were visiting there, and I constantly received emails from people complaining that they couldn’t find copies of my books after they left Asia.

A few titles were sold in the UK and in English-language bookstores in Europe, but not all of them, and not a single title had ever graced the shelves of any bookseller in the United States, Canada, or Australia. Foreign publishers have great difficulty competing with the local players in those markets, so mostly they don’t even try.

E-books have changed all that for me. I no longer get those emails complaining that people can’t find my titles. Now anyone can buy any title of mine in any country at any time of the day or night.

And you want to know in which country I now sell the most copies of my e-books, thousands of them every month? The United States, of course. The very place where my agent was told by nearly everybody in publishing fifteen years ago that no one wanted to read foreign-set books.

Perry Knowlton died in 2007. But I can absolutely swear that somewhere out there I can hear him laughing.

View Needham's books on Amazon.com*

Jake Needham is the author of eight contemporary crime novels set in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Bangkok. Called "Michael Connelly with steamed rice" by the Bangkok Post, and “Asia’s most stylish and atmospheric writer of crime fiction” by the Singapore Straits Times, his books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies in those Asian and European countries where they have been available. You can learn more about Jake and his books at his website: www.JakeNeedham.com.

*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale.

Live From Thailand: The Life of a Crime Novelist in Bangkok

Being a writer in the U.S. is one thing, but being an American writing in far-off lands is quite another. We’ve heard from C.J. Daugherty, who left her Texas roots for the English countryside and found a niche in the European Young Adult market, and now, we bring you Jake Needham, who moved a little further away to Thailand.Jake, like C.J., found himself in a place where the stories flow, and his readers are anywhere but the U.S. In the first of two columns, Jake, who writes contemporary crime novels, shares his journey to Bangkok, including some excerpts from his works that best describe his adopted home. Next month, Jake will tell us about what it’s like to publish in Thailand.

The Life of a Crime Novelist in Bangkok

(Probably isn’t what you think)

By Jake Needham

A little over twenty-five years ago, I was living in Los Angeles and earning a reasonable living writing and producing crap movies for American cable television. Then, out of that proverbial clear blue sky, HBO got interested in a script I had written a couple of years earlier and my life spun off in an entirely unanticipated direction. The script was for a political thriller set in Asia, and it was making that film that resulted in me living for more than two decades in what is surely the world's most notorious city.This is how it came about. The production company thought it would be cool to shoot the film in Bangkok so they figured they ought to put at least one producer on the project who had some idea where Bangkok actually is. I raised my hand. Looking back, if I had known then what I was getting myself into with the movie business, I probably would have kept my hand in my pocket.The good news is that while we were in production in Bangkok I was lucky enough to meet the saintly woman who has been my wife for the last twenty-three years. She was born in Thailand, went to boarding school in the UK from the age of ten, and graduated from Oxford, and then she had been lured back to Bangkok to become the editor of the Thai edition of Tatler Magazine. She came out to the set one day with a writer who was interviewing me for a profile in Tatler. I think she was mostly curious to see what an American film producer actually looked like. I gather I passed inspection because a year later, to the complete horror of her prominent and respected Thai parents, we were married. We have lived in Bangkok for at a good part of every year ever since.These days, I am a novelist rather than a screenwriter, having come to the realization fifteen or so years ago that I really didn’t like movies all that much. I've published eight contemporary crime novels set in Asia so far and the ninth will be published later this year.The biggest advantage to living and writing crime novels in Asia, I suppose, is that I certainly never lack for inspiration. As I wrote in my Jack Shepherd novels Killing Plato and Laundry Man: Bangkok is an enigmatic city at the best of times, a place where the mystery of what you can't see is surpassed only by the ambiguity of what you can; but it is also a place of sensual immediacy, and lush, transporting power. Something magical always seems to be dangling just out of reach. Living in Bangkok, I sometimes feel as if I am playing out a scene from ‘The Third Man.’ Lurking warily in the shadows. Picking my way through markets, temples, and bars. Dodging gangsters, con men, and killers. Trolling the streets of the city like Holly Martins searching the back alleys of Vienna in 1945 looking for Harry Lime.

In narrow back streets, mysterious buildings lurk behind walls topped with broken glass. Uniformed guards pace in front of tightly closed gates, suggesting dark and mysterious doings within. Embassy compounds look like fortresses or perhaps prosperous prisons: all blast-hardened concrete, slit windows, high walls, and iron gates. They bristle with radio towers and satellite dishes, and flat-eyed men with automatic weapons track anyone who ventures near.

All over town you see them and wonder who they really are. Beefy, crew cut Caucasians, big men wearing big wristwatches. They sit in darkened corners of grimy bars watching the girls, sucking down cold beers, and talking in low voices to swarthy, Middle Eastern men who watch the door as they listen. Bangkok is a wide-open frontier town. You can get drunk on the intrigue.

On the other hand, there’s at least one big disadvantage to living in Bangkok. A lot people have strong preconceptions about westerners who live in Asia and their assumptions frequently make for somewhat weighty baggage as I wrote in The Big Mango:

Americans have always been keenly suspicious of other Americans who voluntarily chose to live in another country. After all, half the population of the world seems to be clamoring to move to California and work in a 7-Eleven. So what the hell was with this guy who wanted to live in Bangkok? He must have done something. Yeah, that was it. Committed a crime or something. If he wasn't a drug dealer, he had to be a tax dodger or maybe he owed child support to a penniless ex-wife in St. Louis. Bastard. Low-life. Had to be. Otherwise he'd want to live in America like everyone else.

The reaction I typically get back here in the U.S. when people find I am living in Bangkok inevitably goes something like this. Oh, the place is no doubt exotic and interesting, they murmur, but…well, it's a city where a lot of people go who aren't particularly nice, isn't it?

Sadly, I’ve never found a way to deny that with a straight face.

I have always thought there must be some kind of international network devoted to coaxing social misfits and dropout cases worldwide into coming to Bangkok, because come they do and by the thousands. They walk away from third-shift jobs in places like Los Angeles, London, Sydney, Berlin, and Toronto, buy a cheap airline ticket, and make their way to the Land of Smiles.

Some are looking for a cheap tropical paradise. Others think they've found Sodom and Gomorrah. But every one of them is hoping in some way or another to make a fresh start on a life that probably has had up until then very little to recommend it. Many of these refugees from reality probably couldn't locate the city on a map before they decided it was the place for them. Maybe they still can't, but now Bangkok is their last, perhaps their only hope. They are all there. The lonely, the frightened, the guilty, the depressed, and the psychotic. Soaked with sweat, they rush from one bar to another, reeking of that peculiarly sour, metallic odor habitually given off by the emotionally overmatched and underachieving.

After midnight, it is this floodtide of the lost and misbegotten that owns Bangkok. At its most benign, Bangkok is part Miami and part Beirut. But at midnight on the fault line, Bangkok is anything but benign.

When you’re a novelist who lives in Bangkok, a lot of people take for granted you’re one of those guys. They assume you're writing books, likely very bad ones, only because you're on the lam from the cops or maybe from another life you would rather forget, and they figure the books you write must be about the ocean of cheap hookers and crappy beer in which most people are absolutely certain all western men living in Bangkok constantly wallow.

So, please, allow me to take this opportunity to set the record straight.

I write crime novels that are set largely in contemporary Asian cities. My books are about people who live along the margins of society and work the netherworld of Asia.

My Jack Shepherds series series focuses on a high-flying American lawyer who has swapped the intrigues of Washington politics for the backwater of academic life in Bangkok. Now he’s just an unremarkable professor at an unknown university in an unimportant city, or at least that’s how the people he left back in Washington think of him. The truth is Shepherd’s anything but that. He’s a lawyer for clients who laugh at the law, a friend in a land where today’s allies are tomorrow’s fugitives, and a man perpetually assailed by the moral labyrinth that bedevils all western expatriates in Asia.

My Inspector Samuel Tay series is about a detective in the Criminal Investigation Division of the Singapore police who is a bit of a reluctant policeman. He is a little overweight, a little lonely, a little cranky, and he smokes way too much. When Tay thinks back, he can't even remember why he became a cop in the first place. All he knows is that he is very, very good at what he does, and probably not much good at anything else.

Shockingly, there's not a single sex tourist or hooker to be found in the books of either series.

Sorry.

I hope you're not too disappointed in me.

---

Jake Needham is the author of eight contemporary crime novels set in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Bangkok. Called "Michael Connelly with steamed rice" by the Bangkok Post, and “Asia’s most stylish and atmospheric writer of crime fiction” by the Singapore Straits Times, his books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies in those Asian and European countries where they have been distributed. Sadly, none of Jake’s books have ever been sold in the United States except in their e-book editions. You can learn more about Jake at www.JakeNeedham.com

Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale.

Live from the United Kingdom: Celebrity Fiction

Sure we have a passion for writing, and finishing a project is the best feeling in the world, but it would be nice to make a little money for the effort. Still, it seems haphazard at best, how some authors achieve fame and fortune over others.

Talent and skill are surely a qualifier, but it still seems a bit of a crapshoot, that is, except when it comes to works by celebrities. Because they are famous, publishers seem to swoon, and stuff gets printed that maybe should have been left in a journal and shoved to the back of a closet.

In the case of hugely popular British vlogger, Zoe Sugg, publishers hit a jackpot when her debut novel was released in 2014. The problem is she may not have written the book.

CJ Daugherty, our U.K. foreign correspondent and expat author living in England, discusses the publishing scandal and why writers end up getting the shaft. Again.

Celebrity Fiction

The great British publishing scandal of 2014 happened at the very end of the year. In December, a vlogger (video + blogger = vlogger) named Zoe Sugg released her first novel. And all hell broke loose.

If you’re over twenty you’re unlikely to have heard of Sugg. She’s an online ‘lifestyle blogger’ known to teen girls everywhere as ‘Zoella’. And when I say ‘everywhere’, I mean everywhere. She has 7.4 million subscribers to her YouTube channel.  Her videos have a collective 369 million views.

She blogs about makeup, girl problems, her boyfriend, and her dog. A video she put up 18 hours before I wrote this column already has 780,000 views. Here, you watch it, I can’t bear it.

When her novel Girl Online* was published by Penguin UK, it broke first-week publishing records set by Dan Brown and EL James, selling more than 78,000 copies in its first seven days. In a country where selling a few thousand copies can get you on the bestseller list, that number was mind-blowing.

Despite its fluffy cover, the novel tackled serious issues affecting teens today, including bullying and online harassment. The press couldn’t get enough of it; Sugg was everywhere – TV, newspapers, radio.

The only problem, it seemed, was that almost as soon as the book came out, rumours began swirling that Sugg didn’t write it.

On Twitter, authors muttered under their breath about it. People began putting the word ‘author’ and ‘wrote’ in quotation marks when Sugg was mentioned.

Full disclosure: I was one of those people. Several of my author friends had been approached about ghost writing this book. By the time Penguin found a writer, half the professional writers in the UK knew what was going on.

With so much publicity and gossip, the outcome was inevitable. At the end of December, the Sunday Times newspaper broke the story wide open with a two-page spread on Zoella and her alleged ghost-writer, an experienced, award-winning author of books for young adults named Siobhan Curham.

According to the newspaper, Curham was paid £7,000 (around $10,700 US) and given no royalties on the record-breaking sales. Rumours abounded that she was given only six weeks to pen the 80,000-word novel.

Curham, who allegedly signed a secrecy agreement with Penguin, has never admitted writing the book. Sugg has never admitted not writing the book. Everybody involved uses the word ‘help’ a lot.

In a statement, Penguin said, ‘As with many new writers she (Sugg) got help in bringing that story to life.’

In a separate statement, Sugg said, ‘Everyone needs help when they try something new.’

The only help I got writing my first novel came from coffee – and lots of it. But that’s neither here nor there.

The scandal made national news. The Internet was full of it for days. Teens on Twitter and Facebook claimed either not to believe it, or to be heartbroken, depending on which one you talked to. Either way, they kept buying the book, which has now sold nearly 300,000 copies.

Curham’s name never went on the cover. Sugg is now ‘writing’ her second novel.

Welcome to British publishing, where celebrity is king.

In the midst of the Zoella scandal, few noticed an industry announcement that Scholastic had signed fifteen-year-old Scottish pop singer Tallia Storm to a 5-book deal (FIVE). She’s said to be writing her first novel now.

In February, Zoe Sugg’s younger brother, Joe Sugg, signed a deal to ‘write’ a graphic novel for Hodder and Stoughton. His YouTube channel has 3.6 million subscribers.

And all of this was followed by a few months of the startling successful, and most aptly named book of 2014 – The Pointless Book*.

‘Written’ by Zoe’s YouTube boyfriend, Alfie Deyes (3.6 million YouTube subscribers), The Pointless Book is not a novel, but a notebook that buyers fill in themselves. ‘Write five places you want to go,’ it suggests on one page. ‘Draw genitals on the pictures below,’ another page demands. It sells for £7.99 and has an average 4.2 stars on Goodreads.

When Deyes held a book signing at a large book store in central London last fall, police were called to handle the chaos after thousands of screaming teenage girls crowded Piccadilly Street. Doors to the bookstore were locked. Teens left outside wept in despair.

‘I stood in line for three hours,’ one girl on Twitter wrote accusingly later that day, ‘and Alfie didn’t even hug me.’

Britain loves a book written by a celebrity. One of the bestselling UK children’s writers for those over the age of 8 is David Walliams, the erstwhile star of the hit adult comedy TV series, Little Britain, which took a dark look at life in the UK in the early 2000s.

On December 26, 2014, in the Bookseller Magazine list of the Top 20 books of the week, 15 were either books by or about celebrities including Walliams, or computer game tie-ins (Minecraft), or anthologies (the Guinness Book of World Records).

That means, two of every three books in the top 20 were not necessarily written by the authors credited, if an author was credited at all.

This was not an unusual week. The British publishing industry has long been fascinated by the famous and the easy money celebrity books bring in. But with the Zoella scandal, some writers, who had long tolerated the pretence that celebrities really write those autobiographies and cook books, grew restive.

Within the publishing industry – agents, editors, executives – the Zoella scandal was greeted with baffled dismay. ‘There have always been ghost writers,’ editors and agents wrote in the days after the Times broke the story. ‘What’s the big deal?’

It’s a good question. Maybe it was because the one person who got shafted on that deal, aside from the book buyers, was the writer. And that looks bad.

Perhaps, watching Sugg give interviews about a writing process she had not necessarily gone through was too much to stomach for writers struggling with falling advances.

I suppose in the end, though, the fantasy just went too far. Her readers are so young – most are aged 12-14 – and they believed she wrote the book. Really believed it. They love Zoe Sugg. They weren’t buying a novel, they were buying a piece of her. Something she had created. Or so they thought.

It was unpleasant to watch. Like an industry was lying to children for cash. And they paid and paid.

Like taking candy, you might say, from a baby.

I’m eagerly awaiting the release of the next celebrity teen novel. I wonder who’s writing it?

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A former crime reporter, political writer, and investigative journalist, CJ Daugherty has also worked, at times, for the British government. She is originally from Texas and attended Texas A&M University. She now lives with her husband in the south of England. Night School is the first in a five-part Young Adult series with an accompanying web series. Her books have been translated into 21 languages.

Live from the United Kingdom: Huge in Poland

Live from the U.K.

From across the pond, we would like to introduce Christi Daugherty, our U.K. foreign correspondent and an expat author living in England. Daugherty has been a writer for many years, launching into Young Adult fiction with her popular Night School series. As a way of introduction, she tells about – not an American in Paris – but an American writer in jolly ol’ England and how it feels to sell books in countries where you do not live and in languages you do not speak. Join her for a truly unexplainable European reality in publishing.

Huge in Poland

Funny things happen when you emigrate.

I left America to have an adventure. I wanted to see more of the world. Experience life as an expat.

I accepted a job in London writing and editing for a travel guide publisher, thoroughly expecting to last a year, get homesick, and head back to sunny, decadent New Orleans.

It never happened.

Fifteen years later, I’m married to a Brit, and living in a town with an honest-to-god castle smack-dab in the middle.

I went through some serious culture clash moments in the first couple of years, but now this just feels like home. I don’t notice double-decker buses. I know a Yorkshire accent from a Cornish drawl. I complain quietly about late trains and never, ever talk to anyone on the Tube.

Basically, I’ve gone native.

Probably because of all that, when I sat down to write a novel, the first question that popped into my mind was, ‘Who am I writing this for?’

At first, I just assumed I’d write about American teens. After all, I was once an American teen. Besides, Twilight hadn’t been out all that long at the time and the U.S. young adult book market was soaring.

I’d wanted to write a spy drama, and I came up with the idea of making it about young people – the children of elite politicians and CEOs. I wanted to look at the cynical, dangerous world of power through their eyes. Setting it in Washington, DC or New York just seemed logical.

The only problem was, no matter what I did, that book wouldn’t write. The voices in my head remained stubbornly British. In desperation, I relocated the setting to the U.K.

After that, I finished the first draft in five months.

I refused to consider what would happen with the manuscript until I finished it. I didn’t research agents or publishers, I just wrote the thing. So it was only when I’d completed the first draft that I learned exactly how tiny the U.K. book market is; and that the U.K. young adult market is miniscule. Advances are often £5,000 or less. That’s $7,000 for a book that takes a year to get published.

Worse, it is famously difficult to sell British books to American publishers. Don’t ask me why. I have no idea. British writers fret about it constantly.

Luckily for me, and undoubtedly because of my background, the voice of my story is mid-Atlantic, with a mixture of English and American slang. That’s generally how British teens talk anyway, to be fair. They say ‘Whatever’ and ‘Awesome’ and ‘Get OUT’ just like American kids, with added ‘Bollocks’ and ‘Blimey’.

I tried to strike that balance. And, at its heart, Night School is about the corrosive effects of power and the damage we do when we lie. I hoped those universal themes would resonate with readers beyond the UK.

The first publisher to sign my book was Little Brown, U.K. Within a few months, I’d sold translation rights in 22 countries. A small, feisty digital U.S. publisher, Bookouture, bought the U.S. rights.

I soon learned, though, that getting a book deal is no guarantee of success. When you cash the advance check, not one buyer has purchased a copy of your book in a shop. You can still tank. It’s kind of terrifying.

In fact, it’s impossible to predict where your book will succeed internationally. The Night School series is most popular in Germany, Israel, and Poland – in all three of those countries it has been a No. 1 or No. 2 bestseller. The series has also been in the Top 10 in France and Latin America.

The books have sold steadily in Britain and America, but not nearly well enough to reach those kinds of heights.

Basically, I’ve had to get used to the disembodying experience of selling books mostly in countries where I do not live.

Of course, it hasn’t all been good times. In three countries Night School has been dropped by the publishers entirely. (I’m looking at you, Portugal, Hungary, and Estonia.) So I’ve learned what it’s like to get that kind of news, too.

I couldn’t tell you why the book did well in one country or badly in another. A lot of it comes down to how cleverly the publisher publicises it. In others, it’s simply a matter of getting the timing right. Beyond that, I’m convinced it’s pure luck.

There’s no question that modern publishing is a rollercoaster ride for everyone. As an author, you have little control over what happens to your work.

When you’re on a rollercoaster, there’s only one thing to do: Hold on tight. And enjoy the ride.

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A former crime reporter, political writer, and investigative journalist, CJ Daugherty has also worked, at times, for the British government. She is originally from Texas and attended Texas A&M University. She now lives with her husband in the south of England. Night School is the first in a five-part Young Adult series with an accompanying web series. Her books have been translated into 21 languages.