Author Archives: Wayne Smallman

About Wayne Smallman

When you're young, you think you know everything and life is indistinguishable from a game. It's only when you get older — when you begin to doubt the authenticity of the event and question the rules — that experience begins to count for something. And to quote the inimitable Forbes Bingley, a recurring character of several novels: "Life makes you stronger, at a price." In a sense, life has been preparation — practice, perhaps — for this wild stab at being an author. After all, how hard can it be, putting one word after another? Of course, like anything else in life, you only get out what you put in. At times, writing is both cathartic and semi autobiographical, where I catch myself looking backwards whimsically, lustily, with regret, a wry smile, a despondent glower or growing doubt. But writing is also a journey, one with no intentional destination, just waypoints I may navigate towards from time to time, at leisure. Though I must admit, it's a journey I would prefer not to make alone.

Colourful words

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Race. As they say in the noble game of cricket, it can be a sticky wicket. But it’s a subject some, like me, approach fearlessly.

Not that I’m approaching the subject of race as if it were a contest or a battle, but as a subject of complexity and nuance, without trying to hide the ugliness it harbours, or over-enhance the equality argument.

I attempt to present the subject as it is for what it is, rather than how I — or anyone else — might imagine it to be.

Is literature turning colour blind? That’s the question posed by The Independent, to which I replied:

Ultimately, you can only write from your own experiences. Yes, fiction allows us to extend that reach with our imagination, but there are practical limits and key differences when writing about people.

You can’t guess and just make things up when it comes to people as you can when considering the future — people exist and their cultures are a known quantity.

I had the same issues when writing A Darkening of Fortune, where Joe — a guy of Arab extraction — is the protagonist. In part, I write from my personal experiences of the people I have known of different races and cultures, but there were limits to what I could write before running the risk of speaking / writing out of bounds.

If, as a topic, you avoid race, you run a greater risk of either simply avoiding people of any race other than your own, or aligning yourself with stereotypes. Neither option is agreeable.

Start / Fail

Starting is like failure, but in reverse. You’re either trying to escape from or are tumbling towards something that has gravity. Either way, if you do manage to escape, your trajectory tends towards that of success. Can you escape?

Rank outsider?

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So the question of whether I’m any good at promoting my books on the web came up. Hmm, kind of.

The thing is, I’m in that enviable position of knowing how to market a thing — be it a product or a service — which I routinely advise my clients on, through my business, Octane. However, it’s because I know what’s involved, and the amount of effort required, that I often hire people to do it for me. Lazy? Not really. I have better things to do with my time — like write.

So, in answer to the aforementioned question, I had this to say…

Earth Day — my first novella — has it’s work cut out, competing with an internationally recognised day of hope of unity. A big ask any day of the week.

Lucidity — another novella — faces a similar mountainous challenge, going up against a slew of definitions and expositions on dream interpretation, therapy et cetera. Dream on?

On a lighter note, A Darkening of Fortune — my first major novel — fares better, which is to be expected, given it’s uniqueness (I’m not aware of anything else occupying that particular wording or phrase), and I rightfully dominate page 1 of Google, through Smashwords, Goodreads, Twitter, my own website, and Amazon.

By day, I’m a web developer with a background in SEO, so I know what I’m up against. However, even though I know what makes for a good ranking, I’m not going to “sculpt” the name of my novels to game the rankings, because that’s kind of placing the cart before the horse — no-one is going to become a best seller because they rank high on Google, but they’ll sell more via a good Google search results ranking once they’re a best seller.

Of course, you may have very different results.

Wayne Smallman on Bkclb

“Bkclb?” I hear you say!

Bkclb is a platform enabling writers and publishers to sell their work just the way they’d like.

Bkclb want to help move the book discovery needle along from “indie writers & publishers to adventurous readers,” with the minimum of trouble, and in doing so they make the bold claim of being: “the best way to discover & publish ebooks,” and I’d tend to agree with the latter part at least, given how quickly I managed to publish my own works, via Bkclb.