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2EadieB
James Oswald is the author of the Inspector McLean series of detective mysteries. The first two of these, Natural Causes and The Book of Souls were both short-listed for the prestigious CWA Debut Dagger Award. Set in an Edinburgh not so different to the one we all know, Detective Inspector Tony McLean is the unlucky policeman who can see beneath the surface of ordinary criminal life to the dark, menacing evil that lurks beneath.
James has also written a classic fantasy series, The Ballad of Sir Benfro, which will be appearing in Kindle editions soon. Inspired by the language and folklore of Wales, it follows the adventures of a young dragon, Sir Benfro, in a land where his kind have been hunted near to extinction by men.
James has lived in England, Scotland and Wales long enough to qualify for any of their rugby teams, but not Ireland yet - he gets in there through his maternal grandfather. He has pursued a varied career - from Wine Merchant to International Carriage Driving Course Builder via Call Centre Operative and professional Sheep Shit Sampler (true). He currently lives in a large caravan inside a Dutch Barn in Fife, with four dogs and (alas) no cats. He farms Highland cows and Romney sheep by day, writes disturbing fiction by night.
Biography
Born in the south of England, I was sent away to boarding school at the tender age of seven, only finally escaping back to the land of my father when I went up to Aberdeen University eleven years later. I read Psychology there, coming out with a 2.1 and the certainty that I never wanted to work in any field that involved Psychology. Moving down to Edinburgh, I began a postgraduate course in Artificial Intelligence, but dropped out when I realized my skills in maths and computer programming were about ten years behind everyone else on the course. I had been writing before then, but began in earnest in the early 1990s, hoping to make enough to survive. This didn’t work out exactly as planned, and I spent the next twenty years or so pursuing a series of dead-end jobs just to feed my writing addiction. I’ve been a wine merchant, a course builder for international carriage driving championships, complaints handler in a mortgage company call centre, agricultural IT adviser, self-taught web developer and perhaps most notably spent a happy couple of summers collecting samples of sheep feces for analysis. I moved to Fife to take over the running of the family farm after my parents were killed in a car accident on the A9 south of Inverness in 2008. I now raise pedigree Highland Cattle and New Zealand Romney sheep on 350 acres of land overlooking the silvery Tay, farming by day and writing by night.
How a Scottish farmer became crime fiction’s next big thing
James Oswald thinks up plots on his cattle and sheep farm, and has just won a six-figure deal
By Tom Rowley
5:56PM BST 04 May 2013
James Oswald is talking about his success as a crime writer when he suddenly becomes distracted and turns to the computer on his battered desk. His “lamb cam” shows a live feed from the shed some 500 yards across the fields. “I think that’s a little head,” he says, pointing excitedly.
We cut across a field of ewes to his poly-tunnel. Inside, a tiny newborn lamb is crouching next to a ewe. “Here comes the second one,” Oswald shouts, as it emerges and crouches on the straw while the ewe licks it warm. He creates a new pen so the ewe and its lambs won’t be disturbed by the rest of the flock. At last, Oswald is satisfied: “I’ll leave her to clean them up.
“I’ve been up since 5.30am,” he explains as we head back indoors. “As I was giving them hay earlier, I noticed one of them was struggling a bit and I had to help the lamb out. This is as hands-on as it gets.”
Oswald’s days are about to get even busier. On Thursday, his debut novel, Natural Causes, will be published, and two more are expected to hit bookshelves by next spring. He will have to juggle writing and farming with interviews and book-signings.
The 45-year-old already has experience of such success, however. In fact, he has become a self-publishing phenomenon, racking up 350,000 online sales for Natural Causes and its sequel, The Book of Souls, when he released them last year for download to e-readers such as the Kindle. The figures astonished publishing houses that are normally impressed by first-time authors who can sell 20,000 books, and Oswald was soon at the centre of a bidding war to publish his work in book form. Penguin won the auction, while the international rights have already been sold to six countries. The book has proved a critical success, too, making the shortlist for the Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger Award.
So Oswald could be forgiven for relishing this moment in the limelight, booking a London venue for a glitzy bash on Thursday night. Instead, the book will be officially launched in… the Dundee Waterstones.
He points across to the city from his window, showing how convenient the party will be. His view is rather wider than that, however. His home overlooks the River Tay, some two miles wide as it reaches its mouth. Twenty minutes’ drive south of Perth, Oswald can see the Grampian mountains to the west on a good day, while the Tay stretches to the North Sea beyond Dundee to the east.
Oswald shares the study-cum-kitchen with three dogs; his partner, Barbara, will soon join him. Logs stand next to the wood-burning stove, and a whiteboard pinned above his desk is covered with scrawled ideas for future novels.
“I’ve always wanted to write,” says Oswald, perched on a black leather chair, incongruous among the dog blankets that clutter the floor. “I just love telling stories. My uncle told my mother when I was four that I’d be a writer because of the tall tales I used to tell. But you can’t be a full-time writer unless you’re really, really lucky, so you need to have a day job.”
He has worked on farms since he graduated from Aberdeen University in 1990, first doing odd jobs in Scotland before settling in rural Wales, working as an agricultural consultant.
He had just bought a house there with Barbara five years ago when two police officers knocked on his door one day at 3am to tell him his parents, David and Juliet, had died. Their pick-up truck had collided with a car on the A9 in an accident that also killed a Dutch man and his young son. Oswald inherited the 350-acre farm he had hungered for in the toughest of circumstances. “I’d always wanted to take over – but after my dad retired, not after an accident like that. It was enormously traumatic. I had no enthusiasm for anything at all. I certainly didn’t want to write, and I didn’t write for about two years.”
He moved to the farm and prepared to abandon his dream to tend his 12 Highland cattle and 50 New Zealand Romney sheep. In despondent mood, he realised the publishers had been right to turn down Natural Causes when his agent had hawked it around a few years previously.
But at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival a few weeks later, he got talking to Allan Guthrie, whose first e-book had just sold very successfully. “I hadn’t really cottoned on to the whole Kindle thing, but I just had to pay $80 for the cover to be designed and for a few beers for my friends for proofreading. I thought I’d give it one more go.”
Within weeks Oswald was shifting 2,000 copies a day. Readers loved his protagonist, Edinburgh’s Det Insp Tony McLean, who combines old-fashioned sleuthing with supernatural intuition, and Natural Causes soon topped Amazon’s e-book chart.
“Nothing gives you your self-confidence back like 350,000 people downloading your book,” he grins. “The sales figures are updated in real time and it was really addictive. I had to ration myself to only checking them after a day on the farm.”
Far from finding it a bind, he says his day job helps him to write. “If I’m on the tractor, it’s not mentally taxing so I can just think through plots. If I go for a walk and I lose the dogs because it’s all going off in my head, then that’s brilliant. My notebook is never far away, so I can scribble things down. It has all sorts of questionable stains on it.”
He was mending a fence in a hailstorm when his agent called with the result of the auction. “My fingers were barely working, but I managed to get the phone out. She said she’d done a six-figure deal. I thought, 'I can pay someone to come and do this fencing for me’.” He quickly frittered some of the money away on such luxuries as a new tractor.
The hefty advance suggests that Penguin considers Oswald in the same bracket as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid. So surely he can give up the day job? “I could never move,” he insists. “For all that it is bloody hard work, there is something magical about lambing and calving. I could do my writing in a city staring out at a brick wall – but this is the view I want.”
Inspector McLean series
James Oswald‘s gripping crime thriller series has been compared to the work of Ian Rankin, Peter James and Val McDermid. Originally a self-published author, James’s first Detective Inspector Tony McLean title, Natural Causes, was an overnight success and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Since then, he’s gone on to become one of the best authors of Tartan Noir around.
Number Title
1 Natural Causes
2 The Book of Souls
3 The Hangman’s Song
4 Dead Men’s Bones
5 Prayer For The Dead
6 The Damage Done
7 Written in Bones
8 The Gathering Dark
9 Cold as the Grave (2019)
10 Bury Them Deep (2020)
The Ballad of Sir Benfro series
Number Title
1 Dreamwalker
2 The Rose Cord
3 The Golden Cage
4 The Broken World
5 The Obsidian Throne
Constance Fairchild series
1 No Time to Cry (New Series) Paperback – November 1, 2018
2 Nothing To Hide (2019)
Novellas
1. #Choose The Plot (2014) (with Jane Casey and Christopher Fowler)
Here’s where you can find James’ blog and more info about his books:
http://sirbenfro.blogspot.com/2012/04/dragons-policeman-knew-were-supposed-to.ht...
I have copies some of his blog about The Inspector MacLean books:
SIR BENFRO
A place for the musings, observations, rants and other moans of James Oswald, self-published author and owner of too few cats and dogs.
December 31, 2013
SO THAT WAS 2013
Cross-posting from over at jamesoswald.co.uk because I'm lazy...
I don't think I've ever done a review of the year before. Mostly it's been about tying up loose ends before saying goodbye to the old and hello to the new. But 2013 has been such a ride, I feel it needs looking back at, just to be sure it really happened.
2012 was itself fairly momentous, going as it did from just about to give up writing and become a farmer full time, to best selling self-published author, to three book deal with one of the UK's biggest publishers and half a dozen foreign rights sold. 2013 was where it all started to kick off, though.

First came the news that Natural Causes had been selected as a Richard and Judy Book Club Summer Read. I was whisked off down to London to meet the two of them - a somewhat surreal experience, but enjoyable nonetheless. Then the book actually came out, and started selling in astonishing numbers. And as if that wasn't enough, it ended up being voted reader favourite. Not a bad start at all.

The press had got a hold of my unusual story and seemed keen to run with it, which meant long articles in the Times and the Telegraph - as well as shorter pieces in most of the tabloids - that any debut author would sell his soul for. The farming press has been very kind to me too, especially when it got out that I'd used my first advance to buy a shiny new tractor.
Being a published author seems to mean that people want me to talk at them, and possibly sign things. I'm not used to the limelight, but I've done my best. Events this year kicked off with the launches for Natural Causes and then The Book of Souls, both ably compered by my good chum Russel D McLean (whose Dundee-based PI thrillers you should all read).
I've talked at people in Kirkwall, Inverurie, Dundee (twice), Ayr, Edinburgh (twice), Perth, Stirling, St Andrews and Glenrothes (oh, the glamour!). I've even had a nice conversation with Russel in a castle in Aberdeenshire, eves-dropped by a couple of bemused passers-by and most of the staff running the place. I've lost count of the radio interviews I've given (tosses head nonchalantly), although the most fun so far was doing Loose Ends on Radio 4. Surreal moment of the year number one has to be sitting in a London pub after the recording, talking about Highland Cattle with Clive Anderson. (He has a farm in Argyllshire the land of which he rents out to a local farmer, and he would love to have Highlands grazing it.) In between all this, I've been to pretty much every Waterstones and WH Smiths in the central belt to sign stock, as well as making a trip up to Aberdeen to spend the day in my old chum Mike's comic shop, where I managed to sell about forty books!
I was filmed for a short piece on my self-publishing success last year, but the BBC were obviously impressed enough to come and interview me again for Reporting Scotland as I was about to launch Natural Causes back in May. My rabbit-in-the-headlights stare might have had something to do with my not realizing until it happened that it was going out live on the evening news, nationwide. That and the fact that it was the middle of lambing and I'd not slept more than a couple of hours straight in the previous three weeks. April and May are not easy months for a livestock farmer; a fact I hope my publisher has now taken on board.
August isn't so bad though, and that was when Landward, the BBC Scotland rural affairs program, came out to film me and my sheep and cows. The weather gods were kind, and we spent a fun three hours filming what would edit down to a ten minute slot when it aired in October. What next? Countryfile?
I'll probably have to take this down soon, but here's a peek at my evening performance on Landward.
The publicity side of being an author has been more demanding than I imagined, but none of it onerous. Having spent twenty years and more writing essentially for myself (and occasionally Mr Stuart), there's something very heart-warming about people being interested in you and your writing. It doesn't always work - the nice lady in St Andrews I tried to persuade to buy my books was very firm in her refusal, and quite happy to tell me why she hadn't liked the first one - but by and large people have been very positive.
Interviewers always ask about how you felt when you first saw your book on the shelves in a shop, or when you held your first copy in your hands. On the shelves is a bit of a mixed feeling - there are so many other books there! The first time I saw Natural Causes and opened it up, I discovered a rather alarming error (rapidly corrected by my publishers, I'm happy to report) that may have rather spoiled that moment for me. The best feeling of all, however, was when I got onto the train at Kings Cross on my way home after yet another round of interviews, and saw that the lady sitting across the aisle from me was reading my book. Spotting one in the wild is the best feeling ever.
Of course, then I had to decide whether to introduce myself to her or not. What if she hated it, and then spent the rest of the journey to Edinburgh glaring at me? I asked Twitter, but the responses were evenly balanced either way.
Then, somewhere around Peterborough, she finished it, and immediately passed it across the table to her husband, with a 'here, you can read it now.' Taking my life in my hands, I apologized for interrupting her, and asked 'Did you enjoy that?' - figuring that if she said no, then I could always claim a friend had recommended it and now I wouldn't bother.
She said that yes, she had. So I introduced myself, much to her and her husband's delight. We chatted on and off for most of the journey (which rather scuppered my plans for writing), and I ended up signing the book for them.
I'd delivered the third Inspector McLean book, The Hangman's Song, in early January, thus fulfilling that contract. It wasn't enough for my publishers though, who were hungry for more. Thanks to the awesome negotiation skills of my lovely agent, Juliet Mushens, I signed a deal for three more in the series, with the ambitious target of delivering one every six months. The first draft of book four is now done, although as yet it lacks a title. I'll be starting on book five in the new year, and already know what happens at the end of book six. Where McLean goes after that is up in the air.
The Book of Souls came out in early July, and in its first full week of sales made the Sunday Times top ten. That was another of those somewhat surreal moments. I still find it hard to believe that these books which I wrote seven or eight years ago and had pretty much given up on, have now sold more than half a million copies in print and digital combined.
The second half of 2013 has been mostly about running around like a blue-arsed fly, writing book four, planning books five and six, and trying to adjust the farming system to allow me more time away. Oh yes, and building work has started on the house - one more task to add to the list.

Today they poured the concrete for the slab of phase one of the house build. Here's a time lapse of a day's work in a minute.
The last week of November was especially busy. It started off with the first ever Iceland Noir, which was a wonderful excuse to go back to Reykjavik (and claim it on expenses). This was my idea of a perfect crime fiction convention - small, friendly and informal. I'm already making plans to go back next year. I got home to a series of back to back events for Book Week Scotland which were fun, but exhausting.
Things have been moving on the fantasy front, too. I was always keen to try and sell my epic dragon fantasy, The Ballad of Sir Benfro, and after some good-natured negotiations, Penguin have picked up the worldwide rights to that series too. The first three are already out there as ebooks, and Dreamwalker will be coming out in print in Autumn 2014, hopefully just in time for all the fantasy and SF cons - any excuse for a party.
The deal was announced just before World Fantasy Con in Brighton, which I went to as one of eleven (or was it twelve?) of Juliet's authors in attendance. The con was great fun, I think despite rather than because of the WFC committee. I will say no more about that, except to once more thank Lou Morgan, Jen Williams, Andrew Reid and all the other redcoats who basically made the whole thing work. You guys rock.
It was at WFC that I learnt that I'd been short-listed for the National Book Awards New Writer of the Year award - perhaps the icing on a particularly tasty cake of a year (mmm cake). Being a farmer, the full import of this news didn't really sink in. Fortunately Juliet was there to get overexcited on my behalf.
I went down to London in mid-December to attend the award ceremony and The Agency Group Christmas Party the next day. I didn't win the award, but just being short-listed was awesome enough. And I got to wear my kilt in London, which is always amusing. Just a shame that the hotel I was staying in put me in a room right below the air conditioning condensers for the whole building.
Around about the same time, I received my free copies of the Czech language translation of Natural Causes. They look amazing, but I've no idea whether or not they are any good. Fortunately a friend of a friend is a Czech speaker, so I've sent them a copy. Hopefully the feedback will be fine.
I was recently asked to write a piece for The Big Issue about my favourite books of the year - something to tie in with being shortlisted for the National Book Awards. I duly sat down and started to list them, only to discover on checking that most of them I'd read in 2012. Sadly it seems that the one thing that has fallen by the wayside in this most busy year of my life has been reading. My to be read pile is growing all the time, augmented by an alarming number of ARCs that are being sent my way in the hope that I might have time to read them and then write something nice. Since I get to read for about half an hour before conking out each night, and quite often that's reading my own manuscripts for rewrites, the list of actual books I read this year is rather pathetically small. I've barely watched any television at all this year, and only been to a couple of movies and gigs.
So what of 2014? Well, it doesn't look like it's going to be any less busy. The Hangman's Song comes out in February, and I've no doubt there'll be some publicity stuff I have to do for that. Book four is scheduled for July/August, and Dreamwalker will be out later on in the year. Meanwhile there's the small matter of writing McLean books four and five and getting started on The Ballad of Sir Benfro book four - The Broken World. I suspect there'll be a lot of editing and rewriting going on as well. Pity it's not a leap year - I could do with that extra day.
The farm is beginning to come together too, with livestock reaching maturity and being sold, and the Highland fold and Romney flock growing in number. I've got help now, and a network of local contractors I can call on when I need to be elsewhere. It's not quite how I envisaged running the place when I took it on, but I'm not complaining.
And there's the house build. I hope to have phase one habitable by the spring, which means I can move out of the caravan (and finally have a bath!). Phase two may take a little longer to get started, but it would be nice to have it wind and watertight by the end of the year. The writing comes first, though. For the first time in years I'm really enjoying it, even with the ludicrous workload and tight deadlines. Who knows, things might go tits up in a spectacular fashion next year. I hope not, obviously, but really I don't care. 2013 has been amazing, and I'm happy with that.
And since we must have lists:
My top three albums of the year -
Pedestrian Verse by Frightened Rabbit
Theatre is Evil by Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra
Dear River by Emily Barker and the Red Clay Halo
My top three books of the year -
Gun Machine by Warren Ellis
Poison/Charm/Beauty by Sarah Pinborough
Long Way Home by Eva Dolan (I know, technically it doesn't come out until 2014 - bite me.)
Bear in mind that if you ask me to list my three favourites again in five minutes time, I'll pick something different. These are all great, though.
So that's it, my round up of the year. A Happy New Year to you all, and may 2014 be at least half as good for you as 2013 was for me.
Interview With James Oswald
Next up in our series of interviews with self-published authors is Penguin's 'next big thing' James Oswald - author of Natural Causes, the first in the Detective McLean crime novels.
So, how does it feel to be hailed as Penguin’s ‘next big thing’?
In a word, strange. I’ve been writing for so long, always hoping to be published but never quite making it. To go from nowhere to the sales and exposure I’m getting now, almost overnight it sometimes seems, is both brilliant and terrifying. I fully intend to enjoy the ride for as long as it lasts.
What or whom inspires you to write?
I’m not sure I’m inspired to write so much as compelled. I get twitchy fingers if I’ve not written something by the end of each day, even if it’s just an outline for a short story or a treatment for a scene. I’ve been influenced by too many writers to list, but inspiration comes from a pathological need to try and impose order on the chaos of everyday life. Writing helps quiet the madness, I suppose.
For those who are unfamiliar, can you tell us about your books?
My Inspector McLean series are crime novels, set in Edinburgh and featuring as their lead Detective Inspector Anthony McLean. He is a young detective, only just promoted to inspector in the first book, Natural Causes. The crimes he ends up investigating almost all have a possible supernatural explanation to them - the invocation of evil spirits acting through people, rather than actual monsters - and he is the only detective even remotely open to the possibility of these things existing.
Cross-genre work is traditionally more likely to be rejected. Was this a problem you found with your work? To what extent is self-publishing giving readers and writers greater freedom when it comes to what they read/write?
I first wrote Natural Causes in 2006, and submitted it for the 2007 CWA Debut Dagger. It was short-listed, which got me a lot of attention from publishers. Almost universally they rejected it because of its cross-genre nature. When the second book in the series, The Book of Souls, was shortlisted the following year, again I had the same problem. A lot of my writer friends suggested I remove the supernatural elements and make the book just a straight Police Procedural. I tried, but it felt flat to me, and the one publisher who was showing most interest at the time subsequently turned the book down.
Self-publishing allows you the freedom to write what you want and then try it out in the market to see if there’s a readership for it. In my case this worked out well, but for a lot - perhaps the vast majority - it doesn’t and their books sink without trace.
Without trying to sound too self-important, I think publishers will pick up cross-genre work if they feel it is well enough written, but it has to stand head and shoulders above the more easily defined work for them to take that extra risk. I can see it from the publisher’s point of view - they invest a lot of time and money in getting a book to market, so they need to be reasonably certain there’s a market for it. The problem with that mode of thinking is that it’s all to easy to end up narrowing the genre down and down. Readers get bored of being dished up the same old fare, so stop reading and books become less and less successful - until something new and different comes along and they fall on it with glad cries. (I say ‘they’ of readers here, but should perhaps say ‘us’. I am a reader too, and I get frustrated sometimes.) A great deal of the success of Fifty Shades of Grey is probably down to the fact that it was something new to a lot of readers who were getting bored of the endless round of identikit chick-lit novels being pumped out at the time.
Natural Causes has been a huge ebook success. Is there a particular moment in Natural Causes’ journey where you realised it had ‘broken through’?
I started off selling Natural Causes at £1.99, and shifted two or three copies a week for the first couple of months. Then I dropped the price to free and started seeing downloads of 1500 to 2000 a day. It went from nowhere to number one in the Kindle free charts almost overnight, and stayed there for weeks. That was when I thought I was onto something.
If you could pinpoint one thing in particular that grabbed readers in Natural Causes, what would you say it is?
I honestly have no idea.
In a recent interview, you said you decided to remove the original opening chapter from the upcoming print edition. Can you talk us through the reasoning behind that decision? Does self-publishing bring with it a certain level of compromise between readers and writers?
The decision to remove the opening chapter came about after a discussion with my editor at Penguin. The bulk of my bad reviews for Natural Causes (very few in total, it has to be said) focused on that opening chapter. Most readers thought it was sick, stomach-churning and not in keeping with the tone of the rest of the book - if they actually read the rest of the book and didn’t just give up after chapter one.
I wrote that opening chapter when I decided to put the novel in for the CWA Debut Dagger award in 2006/7. For the competition, you send in 3000 words and a synopsis. I felt the original opening was fine, but not exactly gripping and needed something to grab the judges by the throat, so to speak. Since the story revolves around the discovery of a murder that has taken place sixty years earlier, I thought I’d describe that murder, much in the way it might be portrayed in a one minute segment before the opening credits on a TV show. The result, once it had been honed down, was just over five hundred words, describing the ritual gang rape and murder of a young woman, from her point of view.
It was undeniably effective - I was shortlisted for the award - but it was also somewhat incongruous. There are gruesome murders in the rest of the book, but they serve a purpose, allowing the characters to develop as they react to them and interact with each other.
None of the main characters in the book are present at the time of the initial murder, so it doesn’t do anything to develop their characters. It is, in the end, only there to shock.
I left that chapter in when I self-published, and I think one of the beauties (and problems) of self-publishing is that pretty much anything goes. There is a readership, albeit small, for everything you can imagine and a lot more besides. A self-published author does not need to compromise at all as long as he stays within the terms and conditions of the e-book service he is using and within the law.
This can be creatively liberating, but can also lead to some very questionable books being written.
Working with a publisher, and especially with a household name publisher like Penguin, brings certain responsibilities that self-published (and to a lesser extent small press published) authors can perhaps duck. Had I felt that the opening chapter was essential and integral to the book, that without it my creative vision for the story was fatally compromised, then I would not have agreed to removing it. I could, however, see that it had both offended a small but important potential readership, and that it was in the book for all the wrong reasons. In the end it wasn’t a difficult decision to take it out.
Why did you choose to self-publish? Did you try the traditional route first?
I’ve been writing for most of my life, and seeking publication in one form or another for over twenty years (a quick check of the bookshelves shows that the earliest Writers' & Artists' Yearbook I own is dated 1991.) I have had a few short stories and one comic script professionally published, and have come very close to securing a traditional book deal a number of times. I have also self-published: first with a very short run of a print edition of a travel book I wrote in 1990 done as a commemoration following the death of a friend; then about ten years ago when I made some of my novels available as PDF eBooks on my website. Neither were great commercial successes - the first because it was never intended to be; the second because the technology was not ready and the market did not exist (and, perhaps, the books were a bit rubbish).
Choosing to self-publish the third time around came about after a chance conversation with the author and agent Allan Guthrie. Al had self-published some of his novellas and short stories on the Kindle, with great success, and suggested it might be something for me to try. The technology had moved on so much since my earlier attempts, and people I knew were raving about e-readers. The two McLean books I had written at that time had both been around the houses without managing to enthuse any major publisher, so self-publishing in the new format was a last throw of the dice for them, really.
Would you have taken the opportunity to go down the traditional route if that had been a possibility?
If a publisher had picked up Natural Causes or The Book of Souls off the back of the CWA Debut Dagger shortlisting, then I would have gone with them happily. Self-publishing has many benefits, but it is also very time-consuming, and requires a wide set of skills that most writers don’t necessarily have or want to acquire. I’ve always wanted to be a writer, not a publisher.
What do you think the greatest advantage of self-publishing is?
Self-publishing, at least in eBook form, is very easy and very rapid, both in setting up a book to sell, and in getting feedback and sales figures. It’s also very easy to make changes - correct errors that your readers have pointed out to you, for instance. The ease of it is perhaps both its greatest advantage and its greatest weakness.
On the other hand, is there anything you feel self-published authors may miss out on? Such as the editor-author relationship.
Very much that. Although I’ve spoken to authors who have very little input from their editors, the team at Michael Joseph are brilliant. When I self-published the e-books last year, I looked into the cost of hiring professional editors to hone and proof-read my books before publication and it was just not feasible. You could easily spend thousands of pounds with no guarantee of making that back.
Being with a traditional publisher also means access to a much larger market than I could ever reach through eBooks alone. Print books still account for the vast majority of titles sold each year. If I’d gone down the traditional self (or vanity) publishing route of printing up a thousand or so copies and trying to sell them myself, I might have shifted a few through local independent book shops, but the numbers would have been tiny. Penguin get my books into chain bookstores and supermarkets, massively increasing my readership. They also put me forward for things like the Richard and Judy Book Club - again something I would not have been able to do myself as a self-published author.
How important do you feel interacting with your fans has been?
I found myself using the term ‘fans’ and had to stop and think a bit. I prefer ‘readers’ and whilst it’s enormously time-consuming, I really enjoy interacting with them. It’s wonderful enough that someone has decided to read my book, but mind-blowing if they’ve enjoyed it enough to make the effort to contact me afterwards. It would be rude not to respond, really.
From a cynical marketing perspective, these ‘fans’ are great brand ambassadors, hand-selling my books to their friends and acquaintances. Word of mouth is the ultimate advertising and readers are far more likely to spread the word if the author has responded to their questions.
It’s also great to talk to people who have the same love of stories as I do. Much better than making stilted conversation about the weather or politics. I’m a reader too, after all.
Do you feel there is more of a sense of community with self-publishing than there is with traditional publishing?
I think the community is of writers as a whole rather than defined by who their publishers are. I’ve met many writers, from big name authors to unpublished but hopeful and everything in between, mostly at writing festivals, but increasingly online - and on the whole, they are very supportive.
There are, of course, egos, as there are in any business. Some writers seem to think that other writers are the competition, as if there were only a finite number of books that could be sold and any increase over there is a decrease over here. Generally speaking, they are in the minority, and they exist in both self-publishing and traditional.
How important is marketing yourself in the early stages of your self-publishing career? Any tips?
Marketing yourself is crucial, and the key part there is yourself. It’s not about telling the world you have a book out, but telling the story of who you are and how you came to do what you do. If people find you interesting, then they’ll go and have a look at your book. So that would be my top tip: sell yourself, not your work.
Did you design your own cover? How important do you think cover design is to a potential reader?
My original eBook covers were designed by the multi-talented J T Lindroos, who does a lot of eBook covers for Blasted Heath and several successful self-published authors. For Natural Causes, I gave him a couple of ideas that felt right to me. He mocked them up and we settled on the splayed hand with a nail through the palm image that so many people obviously found intriguing. The image for The Book of Souls was entirely his own work, and is a piece of Photoshop genius in my opinion.
Michael Joseph have designed a new set of covers that I am equally happy with. They work well both at the thumbnail scale and printed on the paperback books. Cover design is very important, and something that I wouldn’t recommend most authors try for themselves. If you’re going to spend any money on your self-published book, then spending it on professional cover design is probably wisest. Just don’t expect to earn that money back.
Finally, do you have any advice for writers looking to self-publish?
Write the best book you possibly can. Spend only what you can afford to lose - first on a cover, second on basic editorial services, third on getting someone else to format for you if you really can’t do that yourself. Use social networking to sell yourself, not your book - interact with your readers, however few they may be at first. Be as professional as you can about the whole process. Do your research - I self-published my books a year ago and already much of the technical aspects of doing that have changed.
And finally, or perhaps it should be firstly, ask yourself why you’re self-publishing. Is it because you want to get rich? Is it because you believe agents and publishers have only rejected your manuscript out of spite and an inability to recognize your genius? Or is it because you love writing and words and want to share your stories with anyone who might read them? Only one of those reasons is the right one - and it’s not the first two.
James has also written a classic fantasy series, The Ballad of Sir Benfro, which will be appearing in Kindle editions soon. Inspired by the language and folklore of Wales, it follows the adventures of a young dragon, Sir Benfro, in a land where his kind have been hunted near to extinction by men.
James has lived in England, Scotland and Wales long enough to qualify for any of their rugby teams, but not Ireland yet - he gets in there through his maternal grandfather. He has pursued a varied career - from Wine Merchant to International Carriage Driving Course Builder via Call Centre Operative and professional Sheep Shit Sampler (true). He currently lives in a large caravan inside a Dutch Barn in Fife, with four dogs and (alas) no cats. He farms Highland cows and Romney sheep by day, writes disturbing fiction by night.
Biography
Born in the south of England, I was sent away to boarding school at the tender age of seven, only finally escaping back to the land of my father when I went up to Aberdeen University eleven years later. I read Psychology there, coming out with a 2.1 and the certainty that I never wanted to work in any field that involved Psychology. Moving down to Edinburgh, I began a postgraduate course in Artificial Intelligence, but dropped out when I realized my skills in maths and computer programming were about ten years behind everyone else on the course. I had been writing before then, but began in earnest in the early 1990s, hoping to make enough to survive. This didn’t work out exactly as planned, and I spent the next twenty years or so pursuing a series of dead-end jobs just to feed my writing addiction. I’ve been a wine merchant, a course builder for international carriage driving championships, complaints handler in a mortgage company call centre, agricultural IT adviser, self-taught web developer and perhaps most notably spent a happy couple of summers collecting samples of sheep feces for analysis. I moved to Fife to take over the running of the family farm after my parents were killed in a car accident on the A9 south of Inverness in 2008. I now raise pedigree Highland Cattle and New Zealand Romney sheep on 350 acres of land overlooking the silvery Tay, farming by day and writing by night.
How a Scottish farmer became crime fiction’s next big thing
James Oswald thinks up plots on his cattle and sheep farm, and has just won a six-figure deal
By Tom Rowley
5:56PM BST 04 May 2013
James Oswald is talking about his success as a crime writer when he suddenly becomes distracted and turns to the computer on his battered desk. His “lamb cam” shows a live feed from the shed some 500 yards across the fields. “I think that’s a little head,” he says, pointing excitedly.
We cut across a field of ewes to his poly-tunnel. Inside, a tiny newborn lamb is crouching next to a ewe. “Here comes the second one,” Oswald shouts, as it emerges and crouches on the straw while the ewe licks it warm. He creates a new pen so the ewe and its lambs won’t be disturbed by the rest of the flock. At last, Oswald is satisfied: “I’ll leave her to clean them up.
“I’ve been up since 5.30am,” he explains as we head back indoors. “As I was giving them hay earlier, I noticed one of them was struggling a bit and I had to help the lamb out. This is as hands-on as it gets.”
Oswald’s days are about to get even busier. On Thursday, his debut novel, Natural Causes, will be published, and two more are expected to hit bookshelves by next spring. He will have to juggle writing and farming with interviews and book-signings.
The 45-year-old already has experience of such success, however. In fact, he has become a self-publishing phenomenon, racking up 350,000 online sales for Natural Causes and its sequel, The Book of Souls, when he released them last year for download to e-readers such as the Kindle. The figures astonished publishing houses that are normally impressed by first-time authors who can sell 20,000 books, and Oswald was soon at the centre of a bidding war to publish his work in book form. Penguin won the auction, while the international rights have already been sold to six countries. The book has proved a critical success, too, making the shortlist for the Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger Award.
So Oswald could be forgiven for relishing this moment in the limelight, booking a London venue for a glitzy bash on Thursday night. Instead, the book will be officially launched in… the Dundee Waterstones.
He points across to the city from his window, showing how convenient the party will be. His view is rather wider than that, however. His home overlooks the River Tay, some two miles wide as it reaches its mouth. Twenty minutes’ drive south of Perth, Oswald can see the Grampian mountains to the west on a good day, while the Tay stretches to the North Sea beyond Dundee to the east.
Oswald shares the study-cum-kitchen with three dogs; his partner, Barbara, will soon join him. Logs stand next to the wood-burning stove, and a whiteboard pinned above his desk is covered with scrawled ideas for future novels.
“I’ve always wanted to write,” says Oswald, perched on a black leather chair, incongruous among the dog blankets that clutter the floor. “I just love telling stories. My uncle told my mother when I was four that I’d be a writer because of the tall tales I used to tell. But you can’t be a full-time writer unless you’re really, really lucky, so you need to have a day job.”
He has worked on farms since he graduated from Aberdeen University in 1990, first doing odd jobs in Scotland before settling in rural Wales, working as an agricultural consultant.
He had just bought a house there with Barbara five years ago when two police officers knocked on his door one day at 3am to tell him his parents, David and Juliet, had died. Their pick-up truck had collided with a car on the A9 in an accident that also killed a Dutch man and his young son. Oswald inherited the 350-acre farm he had hungered for in the toughest of circumstances. “I’d always wanted to take over – but after my dad retired, not after an accident like that. It was enormously traumatic. I had no enthusiasm for anything at all. I certainly didn’t want to write, and I didn’t write for about two years.”
He moved to the farm and prepared to abandon his dream to tend his 12 Highland cattle and 50 New Zealand Romney sheep. In despondent mood, he realised the publishers had been right to turn down Natural Causes when his agent had hawked it around a few years previously.
But at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival a few weeks later, he got talking to Allan Guthrie, whose first e-book had just sold very successfully. “I hadn’t really cottoned on to the whole Kindle thing, but I just had to pay $80 for the cover to be designed and for a few beers for my friends for proofreading. I thought I’d give it one more go.”
Within weeks Oswald was shifting 2,000 copies a day. Readers loved his protagonist, Edinburgh’s Det Insp Tony McLean, who combines old-fashioned sleuthing with supernatural intuition, and Natural Causes soon topped Amazon’s e-book chart.
“Nothing gives you your self-confidence back like 350,000 people downloading your book,” he grins. “The sales figures are updated in real time and it was really addictive. I had to ration myself to only checking them after a day on the farm.”
Far from finding it a bind, he says his day job helps him to write. “If I’m on the tractor, it’s not mentally taxing so I can just think through plots. If I go for a walk and I lose the dogs because it’s all going off in my head, then that’s brilliant. My notebook is never far away, so I can scribble things down. It has all sorts of questionable stains on it.”
He was mending a fence in a hailstorm when his agent called with the result of the auction. “My fingers were barely working, but I managed to get the phone out. She said she’d done a six-figure deal. I thought, 'I can pay someone to come and do this fencing for me’.” He quickly frittered some of the money away on such luxuries as a new tractor.
The hefty advance suggests that Penguin considers Oswald in the same bracket as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid. So surely he can give up the day job? “I could never move,” he insists. “For all that it is bloody hard work, there is something magical about lambing and calving. I could do my writing in a city staring out at a brick wall – but this is the view I want.”
Inspector McLean series
James Oswald‘s gripping crime thriller series has been compared to the work of Ian Rankin, Peter James and Val McDermid. Originally a self-published author, James’s first Detective Inspector Tony McLean title, Natural Causes, was an overnight success and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Since then, he’s gone on to become one of the best authors of Tartan Noir around.
Number Title
1 Natural Causes
2 The Book of Souls
3 The Hangman’s Song
4 Dead Men’s Bones
5 Prayer For The Dead
6 The Damage Done
7 Written in Bones
8 The Gathering Dark
9 Cold as the Grave (2019)
10 Bury Them Deep (2020)
The Ballad of Sir Benfro series
Number Title
1 Dreamwalker
2 The Rose Cord
3 The Golden Cage
4 The Broken World
5 The Obsidian Throne
Constance Fairchild series
1 No Time to Cry (New Series) Paperback – November 1, 2018
2 Nothing To Hide (2019)
Novellas
1. #Choose The Plot (2014) (with Jane Casey and Christopher Fowler)
Here’s where you can find James’ blog and more info about his books:
http://sirbenfro.blogspot.com/2012/04/dragons-policeman-knew-were-supposed-to.ht...
I have copies some of his blog about The Inspector MacLean books:
SIR BENFRO
A place for the musings, observations, rants and other moans of James Oswald, self-published author and owner of too few cats and dogs.
December 31, 2013
SO THAT WAS 2013
Cross-posting from over at jamesoswald.co.uk because I'm lazy...
I don't think I've ever done a review of the year before. Mostly it's been about tying up loose ends before saying goodbye to the old and hello to the new. But 2013 has been such a ride, I feel it needs looking back at, just to be sure it really happened.
2012 was itself fairly momentous, going as it did from just about to give up writing and become a farmer full time, to best selling self-published author, to three book deal with one of the UK's biggest publishers and half a dozen foreign rights sold. 2013 was where it all started to kick off, though.

First came the news that Natural Causes had been selected as a Richard and Judy Book Club Summer Read. I was whisked off down to London to meet the two of them - a somewhat surreal experience, but enjoyable nonetheless. Then the book actually came out, and started selling in astonishing numbers. And as if that wasn't enough, it ended up being voted reader favourite. Not a bad start at all.

The press had got a hold of my unusual story and seemed keen to run with it, which meant long articles in the Times and the Telegraph - as well as shorter pieces in most of the tabloids - that any debut author would sell his soul for. The farming press has been very kind to me too, especially when it got out that I'd used my first advance to buy a shiny new tractor.
Being a published author seems to mean that people want me to talk at them, and possibly sign things. I'm not used to the limelight, but I've done my best. Events this year kicked off with the launches for Natural Causes and then The Book of Souls, both ably compered by my good chum Russel D McLean (whose Dundee-based PI thrillers you should all read).
I've talked at people in Kirkwall, Inverurie, Dundee (twice), Ayr, Edinburgh (twice), Perth, Stirling, St Andrews and Glenrothes (oh, the glamour!). I've even had a nice conversation with Russel in a castle in Aberdeenshire, eves-dropped by a couple of bemused passers-by and most of the staff running the place. I've lost count of the radio interviews I've given (tosses head nonchalantly), although the most fun so far was doing Loose Ends on Radio 4. Surreal moment of the year number one has to be sitting in a London pub after the recording, talking about Highland Cattle with Clive Anderson. (He has a farm in Argyllshire the land of which he rents out to a local farmer, and he would love to have Highlands grazing it.) In between all this, I've been to pretty much every Waterstones and WH Smiths in the central belt to sign stock, as well as making a trip up to Aberdeen to spend the day in my old chum Mike's comic shop, where I managed to sell about forty books!
I was filmed for a short piece on my self-publishing success last year, but the BBC were obviously impressed enough to come and interview me again for Reporting Scotland as I was about to launch Natural Causes back in May. My rabbit-in-the-headlights stare might have had something to do with my not realizing until it happened that it was going out live on the evening news, nationwide. That and the fact that it was the middle of lambing and I'd not slept more than a couple of hours straight in the previous three weeks. April and May are not easy months for a livestock farmer; a fact I hope my publisher has now taken on board.
August isn't so bad though, and that was when Landward, the BBC Scotland rural affairs program, came out to film me and my sheep and cows. The weather gods were kind, and we spent a fun three hours filming what would edit down to a ten minute slot when it aired in October. What next? Countryfile?
I'll probably have to take this down soon, but here's a peek at my evening performance on Landward.
The publicity side of being an author has been more demanding than I imagined, but none of it onerous. Having spent twenty years and more writing essentially for myself (and occasionally Mr Stuart), there's something very heart-warming about people being interested in you and your writing. It doesn't always work - the nice lady in St Andrews I tried to persuade to buy my books was very firm in her refusal, and quite happy to tell me why she hadn't liked the first one - but by and large people have been very positive.
Interviewers always ask about how you felt when you first saw your book on the shelves in a shop, or when you held your first copy in your hands. On the shelves is a bit of a mixed feeling - there are so many other books there! The first time I saw Natural Causes and opened it up, I discovered a rather alarming error (rapidly corrected by my publishers, I'm happy to report) that may have rather spoiled that moment for me. The best feeling of all, however, was when I got onto the train at Kings Cross on my way home after yet another round of interviews, and saw that the lady sitting across the aisle from me was reading my book. Spotting one in the wild is the best feeling ever.
Of course, then I had to decide whether to introduce myself to her or not. What if she hated it, and then spent the rest of the journey to Edinburgh glaring at me? I asked Twitter, but the responses were evenly balanced either way.
Then, somewhere around Peterborough, she finished it, and immediately passed it across the table to her husband, with a 'here, you can read it now.' Taking my life in my hands, I apologized for interrupting her, and asked 'Did you enjoy that?' - figuring that if she said no, then I could always claim a friend had recommended it and now I wouldn't bother.
She said that yes, she had. So I introduced myself, much to her and her husband's delight. We chatted on and off for most of the journey (which rather scuppered my plans for writing), and I ended up signing the book for them.
I'd delivered the third Inspector McLean book, The Hangman's Song, in early January, thus fulfilling that contract. It wasn't enough for my publishers though, who were hungry for more. Thanks to the awesome negotiation skills of my lovely agent, Juliet Mushens, I signed a deal for three more in the series, with the ambitious target of delivering one every six months. The first draft of book four is now done, although as yet it lacks a title. I'll be starting on book five in the new year, and already know what happens at the end of book six. Where McLean goes after that is up in the air.
The Book of Souls came out in early July, and in its first full week of sales made the Sunday Times top ten. That was another of those somewhat surreal moments. I still find it hard to believe that these books which I wrote seven or eight years ago and had pretty much given up on, have now sold more than half a million copies in print and digital combined.
The second half of 2013 has been mostly about running around like a blue-arsed fly, writing book four, planning books five and six, and trying to adjust the farming system to allow me more time away. Oh yes, and building work has started on the house - one more task to add to the list.

Today they poured the concrete for the slab of phase one of the house build. Here's a time lapse of a day's work in a minute.
The last week of November was especially busy. It started off with the first ever Iceland Noir, which was a wonderful excuse to go back to Reykjavik (and claim it on expenses). This was my idea of a perfect crime fiction convention - small, friendly and informal. I'm already making plans to go back next year. I got home to a series of back to back events for Book Week Scotland which were fun, but exhausting.
Things have been moving on the fantasy front, too. I was always keen to try and sell my epic dragon fantasy, The Ballad of Sir Benfro, and after some good-natured negotiations, Penguin have picked up the worldwide rights to that series too. The first three are already out there as ebooks, and Dreamwalker will be coming out in print in Autumn 2014, hopefully just in time for all the fantasy and SF cons - any excuse for a party.
The deal was announced just before World Fantasy Con in Brighton, which I went to as one of eleven (or was it twelve?) of Juliet's authors in attendance. The con was great fun, I think despite rather than because of the WFC committee. I will say no more about that, except to once more thank Lou Morgan, Jen Williams, Andrew Reid and all the other redcoats who basically made the whole thing work. You guys rock.
It was at WFC that I learnt that I'd been short-listed for the National Book Awards New Writer of the Year award - perhaps the icing on a particularly tasty cake of a year (mmm cake). Being a farmer, the full import of this news didn't really sink in. Fortunately Juliet was there to get overexcited on my behalf.
I went down to London in mid-December to attend the award ceremony and The Agency Group Christmas Party the next day. I didn't win the award, but just being short-listed was awesome enough. And I got to wear my kilt in London, which is always amusing. Just a shame that the hotel I was staying in put me in a room right below the air conditioning condensers for the whole building.
Around about the same time, I received my free copies of the Czech language translation of Natural Causes. They look amazing, but I've no idea whether or not they are any good. Fortunately a friend of a friend is a Czech speaker, so I've sent them a copy. Hopefully the feedback will be fine.
I was recently asked to write a piece for The Big Issue about my favourite books of the year - something to tie in with being shortlisted for the National Book Awards. I duly sat down and started to list them, only to discover on checking that most of them I'd read in 2012. Sadly it seems that the one thing that has fallen by the wayside in this most busy year of my life has been reading. My to be read pile is growing all the time, augmented by an alarming number of ARCs that are being sent my way in the hope that I might have time to read them and then write something nice. Since I get to read for about half an hour before conking out each night, and quite often that's reading my own manuscripts for rewrites, the list of actual books I read this year is rather pathetically small. I've barely watched any television at all this year, and only been to a couple of movies and gigs.
So what of 2014? Well, it doesn't look like it's going to be any less busy. The Hangman's Song comes out in February, and I've no doubt there'll be some publicity stuff I have to do for that. Book four is scheduled for July/August, and Dreamwalker will be out later on in the year. Meanwhile there's the small matter of writing McLean books four and five and getting started on The Ballad of Sir Benfro book four - The Broken World. I suspect there'll be a lot of editing and rewriting going on as well. Pity it's not a leap year - I could do with that extra day.
The farm is beginning to come together too, with livestock reaching maturity and being sold, and the Highland fold and Romney flock growing in number. I've got help now, and a network of local contractors I can call on when I need to be elsewhere. It's not quite how I envisaged running the place when I took it on, but I'm not complaining.
And there's the house build. I hope to have phase one habitable by the spring, which means I can move out of the caravan (and finally have a bath!). Phase two may take a little longer to get started, but it would be nice to have it wind and watertight by the end of the year. The writing comes first, though. For the first time in years I'm really enjoying it, even with the ludicrous workload and tight deadlines. Who knows, things might go tits up in a spectacular fashion next year. I hope not, obviously, but really I don't care. 2013 has been amazing, and I'm happy with that.
And since we must have lists:
My top three albums of the year -
Pedestrian Verse by Frightened Rabbit
Theatre is Evil by Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra
Dear River by Emily Barker and the Red Clay Halo
My top three books of the year -
Gun Machine by Warren Ellis
Poison/Charm/Beauty by Sarah Pinborough
Long Way Home by Eva Dolan (I know, technically it doesn't come out until 2014 - bite me.)
Bear in mind that if you ask me to list my three favourites again in five minutes time, I'll pick something different. These are all great, though.
So that's it, my round up of the year. A Happy New Year to you all, and may 2014 be at least half as good for you as 2013 was for me.
Interview With James Oswald
Next up in our series of interviews with self-published authors is Penguin's 'next big thing' James Oswald - author of Natural Causes, the first in the Detective McLean crime novels.
So, how does it feel to be hailed as Penguin’s ‘next big thing’?
In a word, strange. I’ve been writing for so long, always hoping to be published but never quite making it. To go from nowhere to the sales and exposure I’m getting now, almost overnight it sometimes seems, is both brilliant and terrifying. I fully intend to enjoy the ride for as long as it lasts.
What or whom inspires you to write?
I’m not sure I’m inspired to write so much as compelled. I get twitchy fingers if I’ve not written something by the end of each day, even if it’s just an outline for a short story or a treatment for a scene. I’ve been influenced by too many writers to list, but inspiration comes from a pathological need to try and impose order on the chaos of everyday life. Writing helps quiet the madness, I suppose.
For those who are unfamiliar, can you tell us about your books?
My Inspector McLean series are crime novels, set in Edinburgh and featuring as their lead Detective Inspector Anthony McLean. He is a young detective, only just promoted to inspector in the first book, Natural Causes. The crimes he ends up investigating almost all have a possible supernatural explanation to them - the invocation of evil spirits acting through people, rather than actual monsters - and he is the only detective even remotely open to the possibility of these things existing.
Cross-genre work is traditionally more likely to be rejected. Was this a problem you found with your work? To what extent is self-publishing giving readers and writers greater freedom when it comes to what they read/write?
I first wrote Natural Causes in 2006, and submitted it for the 2007 CWA Debut Dagger. It was short-listed, which got me a lot of attention from publishers. Almost universally they rejected it because of its cross-genre nature. When the second book in the series, The Book of Souls, was shortlisted the following year, again I had the same problem. A lot of my writer friends suggested I remove the supernatural elements and make the book just a straight Police Procedural. I tried, but it felt flat to me, and the one publisher who was showing most interest at the time subsequently turned the book down.
Self-publishing allows you the freedom to write what you want and then try it out in the market to see if there’s a readership for it. In my case this worked out well, but for a lot - perhaps the vast majority - it doesn’t and their books sink without trace.
Without trying to sound too self-important, I think publishers will pick up cross-genre work if they feel it is well enough written, but it has to stand head and shoulders above the more easily defined work for them to take that extra risk. I can see it from the publisher’s point of view - they invest a lot of time and money in getting a book to market, so they need to be reasonably certain there’s a market for it. The problem with that mode of thinking is that it’s all to easy to end up narrowing the genre down and down. Readers get bored of being dished up the same old fare, so stop reading and books become less and less successful - until something new and different comes along and they fall on it with glad cries. (I say ‘they’ of readers here, but should perhaps say ‘us’. I am a reader too, and I get frustrated sometimes.) A great deal of the success of Fifty Shades of Grey is probably down to the fact that it was something new to a lot of readers who were getting bored of the endless round of identikit chick-lit novels being pumped out at the time.
Natural Causes has been a huge ebook success. Is there a particular moment in Natural Causes’ journey where you realised it had ‘broken through’?
I started off selling Natural Causes at £1.99, and shifted two or three copies a week for the first couple of months. Then I dropped the price to free and started seeing downloads of 1500 to 2000 a day. It went from nowhere to number one in the Kindle free charts almost overnight, and stayed there for weeks. That was when I thought I was onto something.
If you could pinpoint one thing in particular that grabbed readers in Natural Causes, what would you say it is?
I honestly have no idea.
In a recent interview, you said you decided to remove the original opening chapter from the upcoming print edition. Can you talk us through the reasoning behind that decision? Does self-publishing bring with it a certain level of compromise between readers and writers?
The decision to remove the opening chapter came about after a discussion with my editor at Penguin. The bulk of my bad reviews for Natural Causes (very few in total, it has to be said) focused on that opening chapter. Most readers thought it was sick, stomach-churning and not in keeping with the tone of the rest of the book - if they actually read the rest of the book and didn’t just give up after chapter one.
I wrote that opening chapter when I decided to put the novel in for the CWA Debut Dagger award in 2006/7. For the competition, you send in 3000 words and a synopsis. I felt the original opening was fine, but not exactly gripping and needed something to grab the judges by the throat, so to speak. Since the story revolves around the discovery of a murder that has taken place sixty years earlier, I thought I’d describe that murder, much in the way it might be portrayed in a one minute segment before the opening credits on a TV show. The result, once it had been honed down, was just over five hundred words, describing the ritual gang rape and murder of a young woman, from her point of view.
It was undeniably effective - I was shortlisted for the award - but it was also somewhat incongruous. There are gruesome murders in the rest of the book, but they serve a purpose, allowing the characters to develop as they react to them and interact with each other.
None of the main characters in the book are present at the time of the initial murder, so it doesn’t do anything to develop their characters. It is, in the end, only there to shock.
I left that chapter in when I self-published, and I think one of the beauties (and problems) of self-publishing is that pretty much anything goes. There is a readership, albeit small, for everything you can imagine and a lot more besides. A self-published author does not need to compromise at all as long as he stays within the terms and conditions of the e-book service he is using and within the law.
This can be creatively liberating, but can also lead to some very questionable books being written.
Working with a publisher, and especially with a household name publisher like Penguin, brings certain responsibilities that self-published (and to a lesser extent small press published) authors can perhaps duck. Had I felt that the opening chapter was essential and integral to the book, that without it my creative vision for the story was fatally compromised, then I would not have agreed to removing it. I could, however, see that it had both offended a small but important potential readership, and that it was in the book for all the wrong reasons. In the end it wasn’t a difficult decision to take it out.
Why did you choose to self-publish? Did you try the traditional route first?
I’ve been writing for most of my life, and seeking publication in one form or another for over twenty years (a quick check of the bookshelves shows that the earliest Writers' & Artists' Yearbook I own is dated 1991.) I have had a few short stories and one comic script professionally published, and have come very close to securing a traditional book deal a number of times. I have also self-published: first with a very short run of a print edition of a travel book I wrote in 1990 done as a commemoration following the death of a friend; then about ten years ago when I made some of my novels available as PDF eBooks on my website. Neither were great commercial successes - the first because it was never intended to be; the second because the technology was not ready and the market did not exist (and, perhaps, the books were a bit rubbish).
Choosing to self-publish the third time around came about after a chance conversation with the author and agent Allan Guthrie. Al had self-published some of his novellas and short stories on the Kindle, with great success, and suggested it might be something for me to try. The technology had moved on so much since my earlier attempts, and people I knew were raving about e-readers. The two McLean books I had written at that time had both been around the houses without managing to enthuse any major publisher, so self-publishing in the new format was a last throw of the dice for them, really.
Would you have taken the opportunity to go down the traditional route if that had been a possibility?
If a publisher had picked up Natural Causes or The Book of Souls off the back of the CWA Debut Dagger shortlisting, then I would have gone with them happily. Self-publishing has many benefits, but it is also very time-consuming, and requires a wide set of skills that most writers don’t necessarily have or want to acquire. I’ve always wanted to be a writer, not a publisher.
What do you think the greatest advantage of self-publishing is?
Self-publishing, at least in eBook form, is very easy and very rapid, both in setting up a book to sell, and in getting feedback and sales figures. It’s also very easy to make changes - correct errors that your readers have pointed out to you, for instance. The ease of it is perhaps both its greatest advantage and its greatest weakness.
On the other hand, is there anything you feel self-published authors may miss out on? Such as the editor-author relationship.
Very much that. Although I’ve spoken to authors who have very little input from their editors, the team at Michael Joseph are brilliant. When I self-published the e-books last year, I looked into the cost of hiring professional editors to hone and proof-read my books before publication and it was just not feasible. You could easily spend thousands of pounds with no guarantee of making that back.
Being with a traditional publisher also means access to a much larger market than I could ever reach through eBooks alone. Print books still account for the vast majority of titles sold each year. If I’d gone down the traditional self (or vanity) publishing route of printing up a thousand or so copies and trying to sell them myself, I might have shifted a few through local independent book shops, but the numbers would have been tiny. Penguin get my books into chain bookstores and supermarkets, massively increasing my readership. They also put me forward for things like the Richard and Judy Book Club - again something I would not have been able to do myself as a self-published author.
How important do you feel interacting with your fans has been?
I found myself using the term ‘fans’ and had to stop and think a bit. I prefer ‘readers’ and whilst it’s enormously time-consuming, I really enjoy interacting with them. It’s wonderful enough that someone has decided to read my book, but mind-blowing if they’ve enjoyed it enough to make the effort to contact me afterwards. It would be rude not to respond, really.
From a cynical marketing perspective, these ‘fans’ are great brand ambassadors, hand-selling my books to their friends and acquaintances. Word of mouth is the ultimate advertising and readers are far more likely to spread the word if the author has responded to their questions.
It’s also great to talk to people who have the same love of stories as I do. Much better than making stilted conversation about the weather or politics. I’m a reader too, after all.
Do you feel there is more of a sense of community with self-publishing than there is with traditional publishing?
I think the community is of writers as a whole rather than defined by who their publishers are. I’ve met many writers, from big name authors to unpublished but hopeful and everything in between, mostly at writing festivals, but increasingly online - and on the whole, they are very supportive.
There are, of course, egos, as there are in any business. Some writers seem to think that other writers are the competition, as if there were only a finite number of books that could be sold and any increase over there is a decrease over here. Generally speaking, they are in the minority, and they exist in both self-publishing and traditional.
How important is marketing yourself in the early stages of your self-publishing career? Any tips?
Marketing yourself is crucial, and the key part there is yourself. It’s not about telling the world you have a book out, but telling the story of who you are and how you came to do what you do. If people find you interesting, then they’ll go and have a look at your book. So that would be my top tip: sell yourself, not your work.
Did you design your own cover? How important do you think cover design is to a potential reader?
My original eBook covers were designed by the multi-talented J T Lindroos, who does a lot of eBook covers for Blasted Heath and several successful self-published authors. For Natural Causes, I gave him a couple of ideas that felt right to me. He mocked them up and we settled on the splayed hand with a nail through the palm image that so many people obviously found intriguing. The image for The Book of Souls was entirely his own work, and is a piece of Photoshop genius in my opinion.
Michael Joseph have designed a new set of covers that I am equally happy with. They work well both at the thumbnail scale and printed on the paperback books. Cover design is very important, and something that I wouldn’t recommend most authors try for themselves. If you’re going to spend any money on your self-published book, then spending it on professional cover design is probably wisest. Just don’t expect to earn that money back.
Finally, do you have any advice for writers looking to self-publish?
Write the best book you possibly can. Spend only what you can afford to lose - first on a cover, second on basic editorial services, third on getting someone else to format for you if you really can’t do that yourself. Use social networking to sell yourself, not your book - interact with your readers, however few they may be at first. Be as professional as you can about the whole process. Do your research - I self-published my books a year ago and already much of the technical aspects of doing that have changed.
And finally, or perhaps it should be firstly, ask yourself why you’re self-publishing. Is it because you want to get rich? Is it because you believe agents and publishers have only rejected your manuscript out of spite and an inability to recognize your genius? Or is it because you love writing and words and want to share your stories with anyone who might read them? Only one of those reasons is the right one - and it’s not the first two.
3Olivermagnus
Thanks Eadie!
There are so many great authors that have been getting their start through Amazon's ebook program. I'm glad he took a chance after talking to Allan Guthrie.
There are so many great authors that have been getting their start through Amazon's ebook program. I'm glad he took a chance after talking to Allan Guthrie.
4Carol420
Thanks Eadie. I always thought it was interesting that Stuart MacBride was a friend of his and had such influence on him to write. Love that he named a character in this series for him. We know that MacBride will survive even if Tony doesn't:)
5Andrew-theQM
Thanks Eadie. 👏 Interesting that Stuart MacBride got him to move away from fantasy and try crime fiction. Hate to say it Stuart but think his writing has surpassed yours based on the Logan MacRae series.
6Carol420
>5 Andrew-theQM: The Logan MacRae series would be much better if he'd lose Steele.
7Andrew-theQM
>6 Carol420: And if he stop the police coming across as so incompetent!
8Carol420
>7 Andrew-theQM: I think Scottish authors must all hate their police. They all portray them as incompetent imbeciles.
10Sergeirocks
Belated Thanks, Eadie, :)
I found this snippet of interview with the man - doesn't tell us much that is new, but it's interesting to see and hear him IRL as it were. He comes across as very unassuming and down to earth...
https://www.peterjames.com/video/peter-james-james-oswald-authors-studio-meet-th...
(It's from peterjames.com, so should be a safe site. Just one question they didn't ask him: 'What's with the pink coat?')
I found this snippet of interview with the man - doesn't tell us much that is new, but it's interesting to see and hear him IRL as it were. He comes across as very unassuming and down to earth...
https://www.peterjames.com/video/peter-james-james-oswald-authors-studio-meet-th...
(It's from peterjames.com, so should be a safe site. Just one question they didn't ask him: 'What's with the pink coat?')
11EadieB
>10 Sergeirocks: Couldn’t get the James Oswald interview thru the Peter James site but I googled James Oswald Intervew and a YouTube of the interview popped up. It was a very interesting interview. Thanks!
