PUBLICATION DAY

After the Sea Rose

"The year is 2041. Half of Britain has disappeared beneath the waves. Young Pete is on board the Orpheum Lass when the crew is forced to call at Cannock... an island like no other where the terrifying occupants have transformed it into a hunting ground..."

From M.F.W. Curran, author of Sandcastles on the Moon, comes a new story of a dark future, of flooded cities, devastated lives and the perilous days that follow ...

PLEASE NOTE: Due to contractual rights After the Sea Rose is not officially available in the UK. However we are in the process of ensuring that UK distribution rights are secured so bookshops and schools in the UK can order copies in.

For those who can't wait, it's available now via Editions Didier or Amazon UK.

Experiences being LinkedIn Part 1

I'm new to LinkedIn. Yeah, I've had an account for a while but until recently, its been little more than a ghost presence; unsubstantial and faceless, without any activity for months and months. 

LinkedIn ain't writing, which is why I've done little with it. 

But writing is also a business. It's a reflection of our dependence on Internet publicity and e-books, that writers are doing more than simply writing books these days. Moreover, it is this business sense that has catapulted self-published authors above their more traditionally published rivals. 

They've achieved this not because the self-published's story-telling is superior. 

They've achieved this because they understand the business of writing more than the traditionally published. 

The self-published bestselling author has more control over their own affairs than their traditionally published because they’ve become business people. 

So in order for the traditionally published to match that success, they’ve had to become business people too. But that's a good thing. It might seem like an arms race now, rather than the crapshoot of three years ago, but it means that good writing will find an audience and not because of a price point.  Business acumen and awareness in writing has made it that way. 

You can’t learn to be an excellent writer, but you can learn to be an excellent businessperson.

Now before I go on, I have a confession: I'm not a fan of the business side of writing - it's too close to my day-job, and I've always believed it restrains creativity. I don't need someone telling me what I can or can't write, right?

Wrong. Because that's naivety. Creative naivety, okay, but it's still naivety. Being a businessman isn't about restricting my creativity but giving me more freedom to do what I want to do, which is write. There are times I've had to remind myself of that, because I've made decisions in the past that weren't good business. Good for that creative soul, yes, but not good for pocket, which breeds freedom. Money still rotates the world, whether the Artist likes that or not.

In my situation, I still I have a day-job to get me by. I don't particularly love my day-job. I serve the community and I get plenty satisfaction from it, but everyone knows I'd rather be writing instead. The only way to do that is become a businessman, earn enough money to live on through my writing and be one of the lucky 10% of people in the world who actually do a job they love.

So how do you become a businessperson as well as a writer?

Well, the chances are that if you are already published, you’ve started being one and haven’t noticed. For me, it started with this blog, and the setting up of the Macmillan New Writers blog. It then continued with Twitter, the setting up of Thirst eDition Fiction, the websites etc etc. 

And networking, let’s not forget networking.

The last two publishing contracts I've signed have been wholly down to contacts. It is doubtful my current publisher would have found me without them. And when I signed with Dorothy Lumley a few years back, again it was down to contacts. I didn't go down the traditional route of the aspiring writer, sending letters and the opening chapters of my current project. I met Dorothy face-to-face, we chatted, got on well, and she signed me up.

It's expected that once those golden doors of publishing are opened, you network, or you stagnate. Nine years later, dozens of book launches, editorial and agent lunches have taught me that.

So I guess I have been a businessman already. But not a conscious one, and certainly not an industrious businessman, despite first impressions and what I’ve achieved so far. I’ve worked hard building up opportunities, but I haven’t dealt with them with that cool, business-head which I use in my day-job. 

And that’s the difference. An aware businessperson seizes opportunities and makes the most of them. A writer who doesn’t know they are a businessperson, is too passive to take advantage of a good thing and because of that, opportunities pass by like buses. 

Infrequent buses, in this competitive world of publishing.

So, I've gone to LinkedIn, because LinkedIn is about making contacts, which is really important in becoming a self-aware businessperson. 

For me at least, this move is timely: my first bond fide young adult book comes out this week. (I say bona fide, because for all intents the first two Secret War books and Sandcastles on the Moon, were kinda YA, or rather "adult-young-adult" books, if you wanna pigeon-hole 'em.) After the Sea Rose is being marketed as YA by my publisher, which means it's school territory, and that means school visits to promote it. There's even talk of it becoming part of the French National Curriculum.

As one teacher said to me, your effectiveness in reaching a wider YA audience will depend on who you know in academia, and they suggested LinkedIn be that starting place, as well as a place to meet up with other writers and creatives. 

And that is just as important to me. Currently, my writing isn’t just about young adult fiction; and it isn’t just about my science fictions, or historical fictions either; I’ve got scripts, ideas for graphic novels, plays etc etc. So many ideas, I’ve got files under the desk full of them, but not the time or the contacts to realise them. And like my books, these other projects are burning a whole in my imagination. They want to get out, but I can't do it alone.

LinkedIn may or may not increase opportunities, either to speak at schools, co-create a graphic novel, write a collection of short stories, or just understand the quickly changing publishing world out there, but it’s worth the endeavor. That’s what a businessperson would say.

So here I am, LinkedIn, and ready. I’ve started to take this business-malarkey a bit more seriously now. That should mean I’m properly damned. But if I am, it should at least give me more freedom to do what I wanna do, damned or not…

“There is a disturbing (lack of) presence in the Force”

It was pointed out to me recently, that my footprint on Facebook has been, for quite some time now, limited.

‘What the hell have you been up to?’ I was asked.

‘Well, you know … Stuff,’ I replied.

‘Writing stuff?’

‘Living stuff. And writing stuff,’ I replied.

‘Well it’s the living stuff we want to know about,’ they said. ‘We all know you can write, Matt ...’

I turned forty last year. Some people know that. Most people don’t. It wasn’t a world-changing event. Not even to me. We went drinking around Sheffield, and before that we took the kids to Centre Parcs for a week. It was a good time. But when I turned forty, I didn’t mark it with a flurry of activity on Facebook, it was just one of those things that was the mid-point of my life.

I am at that place in the book, to use a writing analogy, where there are less chapters ahead of me than there are behind. But that’s okay, because I’ve achieved quite a bit.

When I was eighteen I believed that by the age of thirty I would be published. And by the age of forty I’d have a family. I count myself lucky that I’ve done that. True, back when I was eighteen I thought I’d be a bestselling author at forty, like Stephen King, and probably married to the girl I was with when I was eighteen, but life doesn’t follow the plans of an eighteen year old. It does its own thing. It makes it interesting, and nowhere in life’s book is a blurb about how it might all go, nor can I skip to the end and read the last sentence.

For many people, Facebook is that life book, a record of it at the very least. A living one that people can read along to, if they have the time. And that’s one of the big problems I have with it: Facebook consumes time as much as it records it. After spending too much time behind the camera than in front of it with our first child, I’ve discovered that when you are running a commentary on your life, you’re not living it.

That’s how I feel about social media as a whole really, which is why only on rare occasions do you find me tweeting about family things, and only then because my kids are as geeky as me (poor souls). If people want to know what’s happening to me, they can use their imagination: I’m living the life of a middle-aged man, happily married, with two lovely kids, and I’m a writer; and all of this is happening in a leafy corner of Sheffield. I can see the Peak District from the window where I write. Today there is sunshine. Plenty of it. And, coincidently, as I type this, Scott Matthew’s Sunshine is playing over my stereo.

Life is good.

‘So why have a Facebook account at all?’ I was asked during that tiresome conversation, where I felt I had to justify myself, as all non-Facebook users have to.

I didn’t have a reply at the time. You see, I don’t use Facebook for business either. In my view, friends and family shouldn’t be pushed into buying my books. They will or they won’t. That’s up to them. As long as they know one’s coming out, that’s great. I will, on occasion, just give people the head’s up, and today I changed my profile picture to After the Sea Rose, and I may even say when it’s published at the end of August. But I draw the line there.

So, I just shrugged my shoulders to the question, sipped my drink, thinking of ways to change the conversation.

It was only later that it dawned on me why, indeed, I still have a Facebook account.

I guess Facebook reminds me of where I came from. It’s an anchor. Everyone needs an anchor, especially an author who has flights of fancy; someone who spends much of their waking life hiding in their imagination.

Also - and this is where my 40^th and the 40^ths of those I went to school with reminds me - it was there, back in South Cheshire, that my peers insisted I would be a published writer one day. They, like my parents, had complete faith I would make it.

I never wanted to let them down.

I have confession: 

Each book I’ve had published, each little success, I have thought of those times in the school library, or in the 6^th Form Common Room of Holmes Chapel Comprehensive school, where I listened to my friends say I would be published; that those mental, and sometimes quite horrific short stories of mine, would one day find an audience, (other than those friends I spent several years with – and I might add, several of the most important years of my life).

Yeah, faith goes a long way. If faith had an exchange rate, I’d say there were moments it had dipped in value over the last twenty-five years or so, but I’m glad I banked it all, because really, faith is why I’m here.

So maybe I don’t need Facebook to sell books, and I don’t need it to remind me I’m doing okay, or tell others that I’m fine.

But on occasion, perhaps I need reminding it took a lot of hard work, and the faith of others to get me here, on this chapter.

On this page.

Thanks guys.

- Matt