Mistakes, I've made a few ...

I've spent the past week going through the copy-edited manuscript of Defender of Rome. The MS is about three and a half inches thick and made up of 338 pages of A4 that contains, at the last count, around 110,000 lovingly crafted words chronicling the continuing life of Gaius Valerius Verrens, hero of Colonia, after his return to a Rome ruled by an ever-more erratic Emperor Nero.

There are a lot of vital stages in the production of a book, but the copy-edit is right at the top. It's a process that every writer has to go through, and for some it's a chore, but I thought it was worth giving you an idea how it works.

For me it's always a time of part-pleasure, part-frustration. The pleasure comes in knowing the book is another step closer to becoming a reality, and the fact that your character has developed in ways you would never have imagined when you wrote the first novel. The frustration is that I've had to drop my next book, Avenger of Rome, half way through, and that I'm having to face up to the numerous mistakes I made writing Defender.

My copy-editor, Nancy, has a wonderful eye and the Classical education I wish I'd had. She came up with twenty major queries or suggestions, which isn't bad in a complex story of over 100,000 words, and an average of about three minor tweaks (cuts, improvements or corrections) a page, every one of which improves the book in some way. While I checked what she's done (was I tired when I wrote that the world 'spun on its access' or just stupid?) I made my own corrections etc, which amount to a 3,000 word document affecting around 250 of those 338 pages. I'm never sure whether to be pleased I'm able to make such a difference even at this late stage, or embarrassed at the amount of work I've had to do on something I once thought was the finished article. Again, every change should be a further improvement in quality, whether its historical accuracy or the standard of the writing. Bear in mind that this is after my editor, Simon, has taken the novel through a similar process, focussing on the storyline and the writing rather than the facts, and I've probably checked it six or seven times already.

I'll have a chance to give it at least one more read through before I head off next Thursday to do an event with Manda Scott at the Transworld LitFest just outside London, and I already have another few changes in mind. After that, there's only one more stage I'm involved in, the final proof read, and the next time I see it, it will look like this.

Reviews: the dark side

Just a short rant on the subject of reviews again. I was interested in a new book by a Scottish writer that has barely been out for a couple of days and I took a look to see how it was doing on Amazon, as one does when one should be writing.

It was performing pretty well for a debut novelist, which is encouraging for everyone. But I was surprised to see that barely a day after it was out it already had three reviews, all of them five stars, all of them raving about the book and the writer, and all of them written on the same day. The opening lines read:

A page turner from the very beginning.
It made me sit up right from the start.
I was gripped from the start.


The first was by someone who had only ever written a single review, which is always a bit suspicious, but it was the second and third that really got my hackles up. The second reviewer had written seven reviews. Every single one of them was five stars, with not a single flaw to be found in any of the books, and even more incredibly every single book had been published by the same Scottish publishing house. Lo and behold, the third reviewer had written thirteen five star reviews for books by the same publisher as reviewer two.

I think we get the picture. What really annoys me is that I suspect this is a very good novel, by someone who will be a very good author, but I'll never know because I'd never buy a book that seems to be being 'promoted' by something that's the publishing equivalent of a Nigerian inheritance scam. It demeans the writer and it demeans her work and most of all it demeans the people who log on to Amazon expecting to see an honest assessment of the product.

They're our readers and our customers and they deserve better.

Defender of Rome

You wait six months and suddenly two come along at once.

This is the cover of my new G. Valerius Verrens novel, Defender of Rome, which will be published on August 18. Yet again, the designers and Simon my editor have done a fantastic job of producing a package that really adds impact to the storyline. Brilliant!

The story: Valerius reluctantly agrees to hunt down the leader of a mysterious sect which could undermine the whole social foundation of the Empire. But in Nero's court nothing is what it seems and he's soon drawn into a web of conspiracy, intrigue and betrayal that threatens not only his own life, but that of his family and friends.

As hunter becomes hunted the story races to an explosive climax on the shores of the Bay of Naples.

Castles, forts and the Jackson family tree

I was seething into my cornflakes this morning while I was reading this article Mystery of lost Ninth solved in the Mail on Sunday. It's a shameless plug for a new TV show, which itself is shameless piggyback on The Eagle, the second Roman film out this year based on Rosemary Sutcliff's novel Eagle of the Ninth. I've never read so much rubbish about the Romans in my life.

I don't mind any historian jumping onto the back of a movie to publicise himself, but this is about as relevant to history as a Kellogs advert. It's full of stuff we either knew already, has been disproved or is just waffle. Rubbish!

Historian Neil Faulkner, of Channel 4’s Time Team, said: ‘My guess is that the Ninth Legion was destroyed in a carefully executed ambush by northern tribes.'

Well my guess is that they were abducted by aliens and it's based on the same amount of evidence.


It almost makes me pine for Neil Oliver.


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On a more pleasant note I spent four hours getting soaked, muddy and freezing while I was down in the Borders at the weekend. I had a walk round Lanton Wood, which covers the hill overlooking Jedburgh from the north. It was an old stamping ground of my dad's who lived on the farm at Monklaw when he was a boy.


It's an eery place full of muddy tracks and old logging trails and I hadn't realised it was quite so extensive. I was looking for what was supposed to be a Roman camp, but among the trees I came across an old hill fort I'd never even heard of. Then on the far side of the hill I noticed Timpendean Tower, which I've only ever seen from the Hawick Jedburgh road in the valley below. It's not much of a ruin, but when I went to investigate I discovered it's actually part of a much larger defended complex. Some of the banks and ditches even put me in mind of the Romans.

The tower is sixteenth century and belonged to the Douglas's, who held extensive lands around Jedburgh, where Sir James, the Black Douglas, had a stronghold at Lintalee. The earthworks are a lot earlier, probably from around just after the Norman conquest, but a Greek coin of the second century BC was found nearby, so the Romans were probably around here at one point. It was burned down numerous times during the Border wars, most notably by the Earl of Hertford in 1545 during the Rough Wooing, but always rebuilt until it was abandoned in the eighteenth century.


I love hanging about places like this, but eventually I had to move back into the forest, because I had something special I needed to find. Every family needs a family tree. The Jackson family tree is in Lanton Wood. In an act of tender environmental vandalism my dad carved the name of each of his grandchildren and great grandchildren in the bark of a beech tree. It was a long time since I'd visited it and I wasn't sure how I'd feel when I saw it. When I reached the part of the wood where I knew it was, I wished I'd brought a knife to carve his name in it. It was only when I finally found it that I discovered one of my brothers had been there before me.

The Jackson family tree

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And finally, anyone who has been on my Facebook author site will already have seen this, but this week I got my first look at the front cover if my new thriller, which will be published under the name James Douglas (no connection to the above Black Douglas - my mum had me christened James Douglas Jackson). The subheads will be updated, but I think it's a real winner.

Some people find it odd that I should write across two genres, but the simple answer is that it keeps me fresh and provides a completely different challenge from historical fiction. The Doomsday Testament  is available for pre-order on Amazon and will be published on August 18

It's all ancient history now

Since I started researching and writing my books I've occasionally come across articles that promised great new possibilities, but that wouldn't let me access them unless I coughed up forty dollars or the like. Being on a tight budget (or a cheapskate, take your pick) I balked at paying out cash on the off-chance that I might learn how some Roman tied that loin-cloth thing that passed for underwear in the first century, or confirmation that they may not, in fact, have eaten dormice stuffed with larks tongues. There were a number of these sites, but the main one was something called JSTOR, which is an online repository of academic journals.

So there I was last week, frustrated again, when I looked at the list of institutions who actually do have access and one of them was the National Library of Scotland. Five minutes later I have a virtual library card and I'm in, feeling like a kid who's just found a fiver outside a sweety shop.

So I've spent the last couple of days with academics from Oxford and Harvard and the University of whotsit in Baaden Wurttenberg picking up the kind of nit-picking detail you can't get anywhere else on the planet and loving every dry, dusty mind-numbing minute of it. One of the most interesting things is how seldom articles on similar subjects agree with each other, which finally brings me to the point of this post.

I had an e-mail from a fellow author, James Mace, an American gentleman who writes the Soldier of Rome series, and he made the point that he always sticks as faithfully to known history as possible. Which begged the question: What do we mean by known history when we're talking about half a dozen sources who died two thousand years ago?

Reading my wordy academic works brought home that what we think of as known history is incredibly mixed up and messy. Roman historians, Tacitus, Suetonius and Dio, were writing decades, or in some cases hundreds of years after the events they're recording. Unless they tell you who was consul (and even that isn't 100 per cent reliable) they don't provide dates. Tacitus wasn't big on geography and he had a habit of missing out important detail. Suetonius lumps all the good stuff about an emperor at the start and the bad bits at the end, with no hint at when they happened. Dio pinched passages from earlier writers and added a few juicy bits. All of them will happily put words in their subjects mouths to make a political point, but I've read historians who quote Boudicca's speech before her last battle as if Dio was there taking it down in shorthand and we should believe every word. We don't know if the Boudiccan rebellion was in 59, 60 or 61AD, or if it happened over two weeks or two years. Dio's history of Claudius's invasion of Britain mentions an elephant, which gave me the foundation for my first two books. Fine, maybe there was, maybe there wasn't, but some quite highly regarded historian turned elephant into elephants, and somebody else turned elephants into a squadron of war elephants, which is just plain wrong. Yet kids will read it in their history books and believe it.

What I'm trying to say, in my long-winded way, is that when it comes to ancient Rome we don't know anything. We have sources and we have conflicting opinions about what those sources are saying and what they actually mean to say. We don't have facts, we have supposition and interpretation of tiny pieces of evidence.

So when you're writing historical fiction should you stick rigidly to the facts, or do you just go ahead and use what's there to write a good book and make it as authentic as possible?

I've seen the future and it might just work

One of the first recommendations at today's Working as a Writer in the 21st Century conference at the Scottish Book Trust in Edinburgh was to keep your websites up to date, so, as you see, I've taken that one on board at least.

It was a day that gave me an enormous amount to think about and increased my confidence that it is actually possible to make a long term living from writing, even in these gloomy times of dwindling advances, closing libraries and smaller publishers' lists.

It started off with a talk from Julian Westaby of Dunning/Creating Sparks who gave the forty or so assembled writers and agents a crash course in how to combine Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr into one big powerful marketing tool for their books and themselves. I'd never considered that either my books or, more importantly, me, lent themselves to video promotions, but by the end of his talk I was thinking how I could combine my love of Roman sites in Scotland with passages from the books to create something that people might be interested in.

Jenny Todd, from Canongate, gave us an insight into how e-books and the internet are changing the publishing industry's whole approach to marketing, with the emphasis on the above video promos, but independent bookseller Rosamund de la Hey and Birlin marketing boss Jan Rutherford made the case for the old-fashioned virtues of getting out there and meeting your customers.

Authors Sara Sheridan, Barry Hutchison and Janet Paisley used their own experiences to prove that there are a host of opportunities for writers beyond books if they'd only get out there and look for them. Everything from writing for TV, radio, the theatre, ghost-writing and hosting individual corporate events with a unique twist.

And finally, Aly Barr from Creative Scotland, Caitrin Armstrong, of the SBT and Borders Book Festival and Booknation boss Alistair Moffat talked about how help and support for writers is just an e-mail away.

So what did I learn? Firstly that its not just enough to write. You have to be proactive, both in your self-promotion and seeking out opportunities. Secondly that you have to be innovative and use every technological tool at your disposal. And thirdly, that with all the dynamism, energy and talent on display it's clear that Scotland's literary world is in good health, good heart and in pretty good shape to take on the challenges of the 21st century.

E-books, pricing and the end of the world as we know it?

Like everybody else involved with writing and publishing, the subject of e-books has been on my mind. Kindle was the best selling Christmas product on Amazon and more and more people I know seem to be buying e-readers of one sort or another. It's not something I plan to do myself. Mainly because I like proper books. A book for me is a treasure, to be kept for a lifetime and cherished, picked up and read at leisure. Some of them are works of art. It gives me pleasure to own books. I don't see owning a computer file on Kindle ever coming close to that feeling.

On the other hand, books, all kinds of books, are my future, so there's no way I'm going to be able to ignore what's happening.

It was brought home to me when I got my last review for Hero of Rome on Amazon. The reviewer loved the book, but he gave it only four stars because he thought the price was too high on Kindle. Just to ram the point home he got it out of the library instead and tagged it as a lost sale.

I took a look at the comments after some learned American was pontificating on his blog the other day about the future of publishing and if writers could ever be good publishers. His answer seemed to be a resounding No. It seemed a fair question to ask, and a reasonable answer, but just about every comment was on the subject of rip-off pricing of e-books.

Hero of Rome retails at £9.30 on Kindle. Caligula and Claudius just below a fiver. Now, you could argue, fairly, that the price differential is justified because Hero is pretty new and the others have been out for a couple of years. What's more difficult to justify is the differential between the e-book and the print version. A huge amount of investment goes into the printed edition (printing costs, cover design, paper etc.) whereas, and please don't quote me on this, as I understand it an e-book is about a 1MB file that is uploaded and needs a bit of editing. Then again, I doubt that the publishers make much of a profit from each copy of the print version, so there's also an argument that they're perfectly entitled to make a bit more on the electronic version.

The e-book anarchist movement seems to be of the opinion that no e-book should cost more than £1, and you'll find that most of those in the Kindle top 20 are in that price range, many of them by self-published authors who are doing a great job of marketing their books and are getting the lion's share of the price back in profit. That's fine and I don't grudge any writer a penny of what they earn. What worries me is that if Corgi or Bantam are forced to reduce the prices of my books to £1 or less and e-books take over the world, they won't make a profit, there'll be no decent advances, which are already few and far between, and fewer high quality, properly edited, really good books. - oh, and I won't make a living.

So what's the answer? Some sort of compromise probably. But the honest one is that I've no idea. The problem is that neither has anyone else.