Reliable service??

OK, here goes a rant! Himself and I are fed up, and also frankly bemused, by the number of people who are supposed to be there to provide a service, or are in business and (one would have thought) trying to secure work for themselves - and simply let us down. Is it just us? I don't think so, judging by the sympathetic nods of agreement I get whenever I moan about this to friends and acquaintances.

Take this morning for example. Someone from a carpet company who had arranged to come and measure our spare bedroom between 9 am and 10 am failed to arrive, and when Himself (sighing with irritation) phoned him to find out whether he was running late - he calmly said 'Oh, was it supposed to be today?'  Needless to say, he was told to forget it, and we went elsewhere.

Just the other day I was promised a call back by a restaurant where I was hoping to book a Christmas meal for at least a dozen people. Nobody called me back, meaning I had to call again. I'm now waiting for an email I was promised from them. Somehow it won't surprise me in the slightest if I have to chase that up too.

That's the most dispiriting thing about this: the fact that it doesn't even surprise us anymore. We recently had both our kitchen and bathroom refitted. Quite a big, not to say expensive, job, so we did the sensible thing and shopped around for the best prices. Of the local kitchen and bathroom specialists we approached, there were two who came along, measured up, made notes, and each spent over an hour of their time talking us through the work required and even giving us some useful ideas (thanks, guys!) ... and then never came back to us with a price. Two of them!  The first one, we gave the benefit of the doubt, gave him a call to ask how he was getting on with our quote, and were given an excuse about a child being ill and then a family holiday ... we didn't bother to call again. When the second one failed to get back to us, we decided not to bother chasing him up at all. Why should we need to? If he was that unreliable, we didn't really want him for the job. We've never heard from either of those guys again. And furthermore, even one of the big national DIY stores, who did at least produce a plan and an initial price for us, never got back to us again when we asked for some changes.

What is it with these people?!

Contrary to anything you might think, we are not hard to contact. We have, between us, one home phone, two email addresses, two mobile phone numbers, and a postal address. We're not even out at work during the day. We're reasonable people who don't (without good reason) complain, moan or expect the earth - we just want people to respond to us when they say they will, to turn up when they say they will and do what they've offered to do - or at the very least, to contact us and let us know if they have to be late/not turn up/let us down in some way.  How do people like this stay in business? Isn't everyone supposed to be desperate for work these days?

We were shocked, on a recent holiday in the USA, to find that the bad service epidemic seems to have spread over there too. Once again, we asked ourselves: Is it us?!  We had gone there expecting to find extreme efficiency and top-dollar customer service. Sadly, our experience in the hotels we stayed at was the opposite. In none of them was there enough staff to cope with the number of tourists staying there (we were part of a coach party) - so that there were horrendously long queues for breakfast, with tables not being cleared, food running out, hot drinks not being offered - it was really poor. For an evening dinner at one hotel we were asked to wait, standing up, in a reception area until a table became available. The staff were struggling to cope and seemed too demoralised to care.  We don't look for luxury when we stay in hotels - just basic comfort, good food and good manners!  Fortunately, apart from this the holiday was great! - but the hotel service was certainly a sad and surprising let-down.

As someone who is frequently on the receiving end of reviews (Amazon in my case - and fortunately the majority are usually good!), I know how important they are, and how much they can hurt if they seem unfair. I've made it a personal rule to only post reviews on sites like Amazon and Trip Advisor if I've really been pleased with something.  I was taught early in my life: 'If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all!'  So I don't post negative reviews, and I will spare the tradesmen and hotels mentioned above from being named and shamed, even if they do deserve it! 

We've since phoned another carpet company, whose representative came round within hours, at the time promised, measured up, treated us with extreme courtesy and helpfulness when we visited the showroom, and they're going to fit the carpet next week on the day we wanted. We're feeling delighted about it. But surely ... it should just be the norm, shouldn't it? Or ... is it just us?!

Wiv Words - Wivenhoe, Essex



Just in case anyone in the Essex area happens to be reading this, you might be interested in the WivWords Festival 2013, now taking place at Wivenhoe, near Colchester.

I'm taking part in an author panel event at the library there, this Friday from 3 - 4 pm. The other three authors are my good friends Maureen Lee, Jean Fullerton and Fenella Miller.

It should be an interesting event - please do come along and meet us, and have a chat over tea and cakes!

When is a change not a change?

OK, they say a change is as good as a rest, and so I decided this blog needed a facelift. Not so much that I needed a rest from it, but I needed an incentive to write it more often! 

When I started the blog, my most recent novels were written under my Olivia Ryan name - but now that isn't the case. I use my own name much more than the Olivia one, so it seems to make sense to write the blog as Sheila Norton.

I can manage most of the technical things an author needs to do ... but like many of us 'of a certain age', that only applies if they're things we do regularly. Show me how to work my own CD player, for instance, and I'll probably have forgotten again by next week.  So I was quite pleased with myself when I discovered, almost by accident, that it was possible to change the name of the blog without any difficulty. Farewell to 'Olivia's Oracle', long live 'Sheila Norton: the Blog'.  That's if I've done it right - obviously I'm not sure now how I did it.

But sadly I can't, for the life of me, discover how to change the name of the 'author' which appears under 'about me'. I can apparently add another author - but only if you send them a request. It seems a bit batty to send myself a request but maybe that's the way to go.  Any technical genius, or blogging genius, reading this is very welcome to give me the benefit of their wisdom if they have any ideas!

Meanwhile I hope that, as if by magic, putting the blog into my own name will remind me to publish my snippets of chat and useless information on here more often. I already have a couple more things to tell you ...

Short stories - the long and the short of it.

I haven't been very good at keeping up this blog, have I!  Every spare moment these days gets devoted to writing the novels - pretty much at the expense of everything else. As well as neglecting the blog, I've also more or less given up writing short stories. And talking to one of my friends from the Essex group of the RNA yesterday over lunch, I realised I'm not alone in that.

Years ago, before I ever had a book published, I was quite a prolific short story writer. My acceptance rate was good and I earned some decent money from it. This was in the days of Woman's Realm, and when the other magazines mostly published a lot more fiction than they do now. I was still working full-time at my day job, dreaming of writing a novel but never actually managing it (I did eventually, of course!), and at times I actually thought I'd give up trying and instead just devote my spare time to writing short stories for the rest of my life.

It was when Woman's Realm - my best and most lucrative market - went out of publication that I decided to try more seriously to complete a novel, so in a funny way I have to thank them for that. But throughout the following years I did continue to write short stories too, and continued to have a reasonable percentage of them published.

Over the years, though, my success rate with short stories has dipped, (and to be fair, so has my output - I now prefer writing novels). There's no doubt it's harder than ever now to be successful in the women's magazine market. Although there are those writers who still do remarkably well, the competition is huge and the requirements ever more exacting. And to be honest, sometimes I've felt that the eventual fee (if you're lucky) is no longer worth the amount of time and effort taken, especially if the editor asks for re-writes.

I'm sure many writers will disagree, and I appreciate that I'm fortunate now to have the option of writing and selling my novels. As we all know, this is equally fraught with uncertainty, any success being almost surely temporary! - and despite being with a traditional publisher for the first eight books, it was never very financially rewarding until I began to self-publish on Amazon. Now the e-books are doing well, and at my age I don't feel inclined to go on investing time on something I've been finding increasingly frustrating.

So unless I have some amazing short story ideas which absolutely demand to be written, I'm calling a halt to that side of my writing 'business' - at least for now. I've still got two stories out on 'spec' - submitted last year, still waiting for responses (that's part of the frustration too!) - so if either of them were to be accepted it'd be nice, but the fact that I'd almost forgotten they were still 'out there' speaks for itself.

It's sad in a way, because I once got so much pleasure from crafting and selling short stories. When I decided to have this break from them, I looked back through my file of published stories and re-read some of them, feeling quite proud, and enjoying reading them again - and that gave me the idea of re-publishing some of my favourites as a Kindle anthology. I decided to choose twelve stories with a common theme - they're all about travel or holidays, so I've called the collection 'Travellers' Tales'.
It's now available (under my real name, Sheila Norton) on Amazon for only 77p - click here to have a look: Travellers' Tales - Sheila Norton . I like the fact that I've been able to bring these stories back to life again and maybe I'll publish a further volume some time.

Or ... of course ... maybe one day I'll change my mind, give up writing the novels and go back to short stories again! Who knows.

A very worthwhile long wait!

As we all know - all those of us who've ever been a writer of any sort, published or not, successful or not - things are slow to happen in the world of writing! In the early stages of my writing life I became so used to waiting for months, even years, for responses to submissions, that when I was finally a published novelist I really didn't expect things to move any faster - and of course, they didn't!  That's just the way things were.

In some ways, all that changes when you decide to self-publish. Using Kindle Direct Publishing, once a book is ready to publish, it happens so fast you can hardly blink. But as with any form of publishing, it's one thing having a book 'out there', and quite another thing selling it! 

Well, I'm here to tell you never to give up hope of those sales happening. After nearly two years of being available on Amazon, my Kindle edition of 'The Trouble With Ally' (published under my real name, Sheila Norton) has suddenly started to sell so well, that during its best week so far, it got very close to Amazon's top 100, and was in the top 20 of their 'women writers & fiction' category! All the more surprising as 'Ally' was the first of my published novels - first published in book form 10 years ago.

I have no idea what kick-started this sudden massive increase of sales after so long, but obviously I'm thrilled, and the nice thing is that I'm also seeing increased sales in the other books (as hopefully, people who enjoy 'The Trouble With Ally' are going on to buy others).

I've also had a flurry of new reviews - nearly all of them very complimentary, and I'm sure that helps too. Reviews are so important, and it's so nice when readers take the trouble to tell me (and/or tell the world!) they've enjoyed one of my books.  And some reviews give constructive criticism (for instance, I had one, otherwise very favourable review, which pointed out some errors and formatting glitches. Mortifying, but at least it enabled me to take action, make corrections and re-publish).

So: to sum up, I'd just say to any writers who might be feeling fed up waiting for anything to happen - for a response from an editor or agent, or for something that's been accepted to actually appear in print, or for payment to arrive, or for a book to actually start selling a decent amount of copies - take heart from 'The Trouble With Ally'. I wrote it, and started submitting it, in 1999.
It was accepted for publication in 2002, and published in print form in 2003.
Now my Kindle edition is selling in thousands!

So thanks to Amazon, thanks to my previous publisher Piatkus who started the process, and to all the readers out there making it happen. And now I'd better get on with writing book number 11!

New competition

There’s a new book giveaway competition on my Sheila Norton website this month. It's very easy to enter, and there's no need to buy anything – you just need to go to the ‘Contact Me’ page of my website – www.sheilanorton.co.uk , and put ‘Competition entry’ in the ‘Comments’ box, followed by your answers to these three questions:

1.     Sophie and Debra have a younger sister, known to everyone as Millie. But what is Millie’s real name?  (You’ll find the answer on the website).

2.    Which of my books have you enjoyed the most, and why?

3.    Finally, if you’re the winner this time, please choose whether you'd like a free signed paperback copy of ‘Sophie Being Single’, or ‘Debra Being Divorced’ as your prize?

Please fill in your postal address as well as your name and email – I’ll need this to send your prize if you’re the winner. I promise your address will never be used for any other purpose.  

By entering, you'll also be given the opportunity to receive occasional email newsletters from me updating you about my books. Your email address will only be used for the purpose of sending you the newsletter and it will never passed to any third party.

The first completed response, with the correct answer to Question 1, having been drawn at random after the closing date of 9 March, will win a paperback copy of whichever of the above two books they have chosen. UK entries only, I’m afraid.

Good luck!

What's it worth?

When I wrote my series of blog posts, last month, about my experiences with self-publishing, I made the comment: 'I could write a whole other blog post about the pricing of ebooks.'  So that's exactly what I thought I should do now!

I went on, after the above comment, to say that people expect ebooks to be as cheap as chips, or in fact cheaper. I'd go further and say that applies to print books too. How has this come about, and how does it affect us - not only as authors, but as readers too?

To be fair, we all like a bargain, don't we! Who wouldn't grab a new book priced at £1, for instance, if it was a book you really wanted to read?  But would you necessarily buy it just because it was only £1, even if you weren't sure whether you were going to enjoy it - rather than a book next to it on the shelf priced at £5 which was by an author whose previous books you'd loved, or whose books had been highly recommended to you by a friend?

Since the start of the ebook revolution, how many of us can honestly say we haven't occasionally gone for a bargain at 99p or less which has left us wondering why we bothered? I suppose it's easier to shrug it off because it didn't cost the earth, but the feeling of disappointment remains. We all know that self-publishing, especially of ebooks, has enabled lots of good writers to reach a readership previously denied them - but has also opened the floodgates to other books which perhaps might have been better never seeing the light of day! So maybe, as readers, buying the occasional dud is the price we have to pay for wanting cheap books.

As an author, I priced my self-published ebook editions reasonably low, mainly in order to compete in a cheap marketplace. But I have mixed feelings about the concept of giving ebooks away for literally next to nothing. I do realise that there are no physical costs involved in the publication of ebooks - no paper, no printing, no cover or binding costs, no distributor or shop premises to pay for. But the item for sale still represents a year of my hard work; the intellectual property is mine. Why would I give it away (other than in an occasional free promotion in the hope of generating more sales)?

I think the expectation of free (or very, very cheap) ebooks came about in much the same way as some people expect free music downloads. They can't see a physical book, or CD, on a shelf - the item being offered is just 'out there' floating in cyberspace, and there seems to be a belief that because of this, it should be available for whoever wants it.

A similar feeling seems to have evolved about print books, in this case I think because very cheap paperbacks are readily available second-hand, not only from traditional second-hand bookshops (it's harder to feel aggrieved when these are supporting worthwhile charities!) - but also now on Amazon, for instance, where you can sell your own books second-hand, and of course on EBay. New books are also very heavily discounted in the big book store chains as well as in supermarkets. Gone are the days when the printed price on a book was what you paid for it!

That price, printed on a paperback's cover, is nowadays normally about £6.99 or £7.99, and I actually think that's very reasonable and realistic. I've heard people gasp 'I'm not paying that!' for a book, and yet pay almost as much for a magazine - and then pay the same for just two or three birthday cards. Is that really how little they value a book by one of their favourite authors?  Mind you, I've also known people who believed I, as a published author, was receiving the whole £6.99 from each sale of a copy of one of my books!  Oh, how I wish!! 


My new self-published print books, 'Sophie Being Single' and 'Debra Being Divorced', are currently priced at £6.62 on Amazon and trust me, I receive even less per copy for these than I received from my traditional publisher for my other books!

I do think they're worth the money - but then, I suppose I would! I wish I could sell them cheaper - because I'd like to sell more of them. But it's not possible, so I can only sell to people who are interested in the books themselves, rather than in a bargain for a bargain's sake.

Meanwhile 'Tales from a Honeymoon Hotel', the third book in my Olivia Ryan 'Tales from' series, is being released as an ebook by my publisher, who has priced it at £4.49 on Amazon ... roughly four times the price of my self-published Kindle versions of the other two 'Tales from' books.  Again - I think it's worth it - it's the latest Olivia Ryan book, still available in print, and I don't believe £4.49 is an excessive price for a commercially published ebook from one of the big publishers.

Here it is. If you haven't yet read it on Kindle it's available for pre-order now, and published later this week.
Tales from a Honeymoon Hotel



What do you think is a reasonable price for an ebook? And a paperback?