Fourteen years ago I published my first novel. Thirty books later, I did something I’d never done, and which I’d recommend to almost no one: I read all of them, back to back, from the beginning.
It took the better part of a year.
I didn’t do it out of nostalgia. An author friend—someone doing considerably better than me in this business—gave me a piece of advice I didn’t much want to hear. He said: take a break, and then take a hard, honest look at why your books haven’t done as well as you’d hoped.
So I did. And the honest answer turned out not to be the one I expected.
I assumed the problem was the books
That’s what you assume, isn’t it. If they aren’t selling, they must not be good enough. Not sharp enough, not commercial enough, not whatever it is that the ones that sell have.
I was braced for that. I sat down to read thirty books by a writer I was fully prepared to be disappointed by.
That isn’t what happened.
Some of them are better than I remembered. One or two have problems I can see clearly now and couldn’t see then. But mostly the books were fine—and in a few cases considerably better than fine.
The problem was everywhere else.
What I actually found
Four of my novels had been sold as young adult fiction for years. The keywords said teens with super powers. The categories put them next to Divergent. Those four books contain rape, murder, heroin addiction and the sexual exploitation of children. I wrote them. I chose those words, or approved them, and then never looked again.
The right reader couldn’t find them. The wrong reader was being invited in.
One book’s entire description was a note about me. Not a hook, not a premise—a paragraph explaining that this was Tim Heath’s twenty-seventh novel and his third screenplay adaptation. That was the whole thing. A reader deciding in four seconds learned my production history and nothing whatsoever about the story.
And two of my books weren’t even in the right genre. A novel about football and a novel spanning a century of Estonian history were both filed as thrillers, sitting in a category where nobody looking for either would ever find them. They weren’t badly written. They were badly shelved.
The pattern
I kept a file as I went, and after a while the same sentence started appearing in it.
The book is better than the listing.
Every single time. Not once did I finish a novel and think, ah, that’s why. Every time I finished one and then looked at the page where it was being sold, the page was the problem.
That’s a stupid thing to discover after fourteen years. It’s also, I’ll admit, a relief—because a book you can’t fix is a very different situation from a description you can rewrite in an afternoon.
So what now?
I’ve spent the last few months rewriting all of it. Descriptions, categories, keywords, the lot. Some of it needed books republished. Some of it took ten minutes and should have been done in 2019.
And along the way I collected rather a lot of material that’s too interesting to leave sitting in a spreadsheet.
So I’m going to write about it. The worst villain I’ve created and why he isn’t the one you’d guess. The book I got wrong, and what I’d do differently. The reviews that changed my mind about my own work.
Starting with the one I’ve been avoiding.