Today Jemima Pett, author of the Princelings of the East series, begins the first of her regular post features on the A to Z Challenge Blog.
If, like my friends, you took a bit of a break last week due to exhaustion, you may by now have forgotten everything else you did in April. Judging by some of the Reflections posts, many people were like me - totally exhausted by keeping up the blog visiting!
The only thing I HAD to do in April were the chapter illustrations for my sixth book,
Bravo Victor, which came out last week. I thought it would be a nice relaxing thing to do in among all the blogging and visiting. Then I got into last-minute mode - you know, when you don't have to do something yet, so you put it off? I steeled myself and got most of them done over one weekend. Not many writers do chapter illustrations, and sometimes I wish I hadn't started, but in the end I enjoy doing them, and I get great feedback from my readers.
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| Castle Marsh (c) J M Pett |
They aren't great art! More sort of scribbly sketches. But my series is set in places I see clearly - the
Princelings of the East come from Castle Marsh, which in my mind is in the UK's Norfolk Broads, somewhere between Hickling and Winterton. It's a low lying area of reeds and cuttings filled with water, used by holiday makers who rent boats for a week to travel around and enjoy the sunshine. We get a lot of sunshine in Norfolk! This is Castle Marsh (the improved version, if you have the first versions of the first three books).
One I did for the new book is a view of the road from the dunes through the marsh to the castle, which captured the atmosphere I wanted exactly.
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| The Road to Castle Marsh (c) J M Pett |
The frustrating thing about writing series is that although everyone is doing it (it seems), it gets harder to promote them as you go on. I mean, if I see a book is part of a series, I want to start reading at the first one. Sometimes you can enter halfway through without losing too much, but it always makes sense to go back and find out how the characters and their world arrived where they are. I think it applies to all series, whether Suzanne Colliin's The Hunger Games, Lindsey Davies's Falco series, Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe books (I wish he hadn't done the prequels later), Harry Potter, or your favourite series. You have to announce your new book so all your fans can leap on it (thank you!) but otherwise, the promotion effort goes into the first one or two, to attract new readers. Is that true, do you think?
I met so many wonderful writers during this year's A to Z that I'm sure there are lots of experiences and opinions on this. Readers, what do you think? Have you jumped into the middle of a series? What's your favourite series, or do you prefer stand-alones?
Jemima Pett, part of #TeamDamyanti for the 2014 A to Z Challenge
Jemima's blog http://jemimapett.com
Follow on Twitter - @jemima_pett
The Princelings website: http://princelings.co.uk
Facebook http://facebook.com/princelings
