My thanks to Linda Gillard for being my guest on Random this week and for the extremely enlightening and interesting post about her latest venture into e-publishing. And a hugely successful venture it has been too and all of us who read her books with great enjoyment are delighted to hear it. I was very intrigued to read about the ins and outs of How to Get a Book Published this way, but one thing is very clear, and this is obvious to those of us who have explored the books self-published for the e-market, is that there is a lot of dross about and you cannot just think you will write a book and publish it and the money will roll in.
Linda makes it very clear that she has a readership and a following she has built up over the years, mainly by her own efforts, by keeping in touch, by her own website and by building up good relationships with reviewers and bloggers. So, though her publishers decided they didn't want the House of Silence, she knew that we did and had a base of readers waiting for her latest novel. This is a perfect example of solid hard work paying off and I see from her comments that she is now going to republish two of her earlier titles as e-books which must surely now sell even better than they did before.
When Linda took over Random the other day I had yet to read House of Silence and now I have. I did not review it straight away, always good to spread them out a bit methinks, so mine is coming a little late to the party but am delighted to say that I enjoyed it very much indeed.
I have read all of Linda's output and each one is different so that we don't know what we are going to get. While it seems this makes marketing her books difficult as she does not fit into a genre or type, it makes her an interesting author and, I would have thought, would have been a publisher's dream as each book can be targeted to a different readership. However, I suppose if your publisher wants to get your book into Asda and Tesco this makes it rather difficult. Tough - they should try harder.
Well Linda described House of Silence as Rebecca meets Cold Comfort Farm which is as good a way as describing it that I can think of with an old houses containing dark secrets and deceptions and a dishy gardener who, one supposes, has not seen something 'nasty in the woodshed'.
Our heroine, Gwen, is a damaged individual who has suffered the loss of her family through drink and drugs and found her mother dead on the floor one Christmas day morning. Her aunt and uncle suffered early deaths through promiscuous living and as a result she has learned to grow a second skin and to present a tough and capable face to the outside world. When reading Linda's description of Gwen a sense of deja vu crept over me:
"...if you're 5' 9" and single you'd have to be supermodel confident to think you could wear heels and still have a good chance of pulling.....to make matters worse I was intelligent and articulate. Not exactly self-confident but I was at least capable, a 'coper'...I earned my own living and I was pursuing a career. I wasn't killing time until I could bury myself alive with babies and soft furnishing. But nor was I a girl about town, clubbing, drinking, sexually promiscuous. I liked sewing, reading, tending my houseplants, pottering about in flea markets and Oxfam shops. I enjoyed old black and white movies and I listened to Radio 4. On the basis of this, more than one e-boyfriend had described me as seriously weird'"
Oh Linda were you following me around during my teenage years?
Gwen, who is a wardrobe mistress, meets Alfie, an actor playing a role in a costume drama and the two embark on a relationship 'everything was going really well. Until I mentioned Christmas'..... Alfie goes home, reluctantly, each Christmas to spend the time with his family, his four sisters and his mother who is a famous author of a series of children's books who has suffered a nervous breakdown and is mentally fragile. Alfie is the boy she used as a model for her young hero and he resents this bitterly as he now finds himself saddled with a label that prevents him progressing in his acting career. He also resents his family, but Gwen yearns for one and so she accompanies him to Creake Hall.
"I didn't know what I'd been expecting. A ramshackle farmhouse. A Georgian rectory perhaps. I certainly wasn't expecting an Elizabethan manor house, a jumble of tall barley sugar chimneys and crow step gables, read brick walls and a battery of mullioned windows, winking at me as the car struggled up the pot-holed drive. It was love at first sight"
Of course we know that in a house like this there are going to be dark secrets and deceit and lies and so it is. There is a tragedy lurking at the core of the family and it revolves around Alfie, who is reluctant to be there and indifferent to his family and their affection for him. Gwen begins to suspect that all is not as it should be after looking at family photographs of Alfie as a young boy and notices that in a picture of Alfie playing cricket, he is batting left handed. But Alfie is right handed and when Gwen questions him about his school days she knows he is lying to her. It is clear that he is not only acting a role in his profession, but in real life and that she does not know the real Alfie at all.
OK so I am stopping right there as if I go on any more I will give the entire plot away. There are whole sections of the House of Silence that I would like to quote, so many descriptions and turns of phrase that I bookmarked (thanks to Linda I now know how to do this on my Kindle and make notes too...) but cannot put them all in this post otherwise I would be hear all night. Here is an example of what I mean:
"Is she married?
Only to the job. She was married to boring Bryan, a social worker, even duller than Deb - till he upped and did a runner with his Tai Chi teacher..."
Priceless.
Linda has a style that is very much her own and is instantly recognisable no matter what genre her books may fall into - sparky, witty and quirky but never tipping over into being too clever for its own good. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and am already looking forward to her next, no matter what format it is in.
Simply delighted that she has had so much success with the House of Silence and, once again, my thanks for her entertaining and fascinating post.
