I am very happy to announce that Lucinda E. Clarke has a new book coming out! Please check out her work and her website and blog!
WRITING TO MARKET
No one told me when I morphed from TV scripting to scribbling books that I should choose a genre and stick with it. Stephen King did it, Wilbur Smith did it and all the other writer ‘household names’ did it.
Lucinda E Clarke didn’t.
Not, because I was being difficult, but because I didn’t know any better. I can’t remember all the topics I wrote and filmed over the decades, from health to housing, to voting, manufacturing, educational subjects, finance, dramas, plays, corporate, council and so on and so on. You name it I’ve written a programme about it, and, that even includes splitting the atom.
I followed the advice I’d heard a hundred times over, ‘Write what you know’. So, I did. I knew Africa, and making movies and writing for a living, along with all the other hair-raising adventures living in 8, or was it 9 different countries?
Memoirs out of the way, I dived in and wrote books that one reviewer called ‘The new, modern Wilbur Smith’.
I scribbled on to write 5 more African books: adventure stories, wild animals, political coups, civil war, bombs and child trafficking, there was never a dull moment for my heroine Amie as she struggled to rescue and survive.
Then I took a step back – I think it had something to do with the argument when I began laying a place for Amie at the dinner table. That, was a step too far.
So, I dreamed up a new character, Leah. I kept her in England and proceeded to torture her in a psychological way. I gave her an abusive husband, a nightmare stepdaughter and a scheming best friend.
To my amazement, A Year in the Life of Leah Brand outsold all my other books and then some.
Why? It dawned on me that I was writing to market. It’s what readers are looking for right now. Psychological thrillers are the flavour of the month. I know this because BookBub have offered to send out a new-release email for me to all their psychological thriller readers for a mere $950.
The other current genre favourite is cosy mysteries, the kind where the heroine bakes cupcakes, rescues kittens from trees and solves murders where the victims die peacefully, no one bleeds to death, and their limbs aren’t chopped off.
Two more books A Year in the Life of… followed, and have also been popular, but I have made two more enormous mistakes.
As I began the last chapter of Leah, I still hadn’t decided which person was to blame. Who was the villain? So, I suggested two possibilities. Some readers didn’t like that, so, I’ve now included the beginning of book 2 at the end which should reassure them. Hopefully they will read that far. Now, readers have part of the answer.
Error number two: I made Leah a little too passive, for booklovers who cry out for a kick-ass woman who’ll take on all the men and leave them in a pool of tears clutching a certain part of their anatomy in the middle of the street.
I had emails telling me how much everyone loved Belinda, the sassy, out of control teenager. So now, she has her own adventure in a brand-new book.
Sure, she faces some very unpleasant characters and challenges, but she takes it in her stride, well up to a point that is. I did let her cry when she was buried alive – but then you would, wouldn’t you?
A Year in the Life of Belinda Brand is out this Friday, and along with every book in the series is priced at $/£ 0.99 as times are hard for many of us right now.
Belinda wrote a book during lockdown and it’s become a bestseller, winning a major award to the delight of her agent and publishers. It’s snapped up by Hollywood to be made into a blockbuster film, and she is catapulted into the limelight.
But Belinda has a secret and someone is threatening to tell and not only end her dreams but take her life as well.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08HM5FX3N
Lucinda E. Clarke’s webpage
Lucinda E. Clarke’s blog
Amazon author page author.to/Lucinda
Twitter: @LucindaEClarke
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lucindaeclarke.author
