Another Book Emerges: Now What?
I’ve been working on Empire of Thieves steadily for six months. This week, I completed it, and after a bit more pruning and editing I have to decide what to do with it. Of course, designing the pages, choosing the text and lay-out yourself rarely works. It still ends up typographically as a dog's dinner of scattered indents and inexplicable line-breaks. That's why publishers employ eagle-eyed copy editors. I'm just a writer. Yet a writer, even with the current parlous state of publishing, and even after all these years, you still imagine that out-dated scenario where one writes a proposal, a synopsis, sending it off with two sample chapters to the publisher you fondly imagine ‘does this kind of stuff’ and waiting for a response. Of course, without a literary agent between you and said publisher, there will be no response other than your package returned un-read (or un-opened) or perhaps, if you’re really lucky, a rejection slip. Yet we keep writing. Five of my published books got into print via the traditional route; agent-publisher-response- deal offered; books in shops. However, such an option is long gone. But that’s no excuse to cease writing.
A lot has been said about would-be authors loading their works up on Amazon as e-books. Some, apparently, have even made a lot of money. Frankly, I can’t see how. I could carry on in the self-publishing cul-de-sac I’ve entered with other works. It’s pleasant to be able to design your own books, right down to the covers, get an ISBN number and eventually have a nice fat glossy printed copy in your hand. But of course, this method ruins what remaining vestiges of your vague literary ‘reputation’ still exist, and that work you devoted so much time and research to will vanish into the non-commercial ether, never to be seen again.
With Empire of ThievesI’d aimed purely at that Dan Brown/Jack Higgins post-war netherworld of unanswered questions, myth and military mystery. A bold, educated hero, robbery, a good woman, art, dark skulduggery and, inevitably, Nazis. Seeing as they’d made Valkyrie and The Monuments Men as reasonably successful movies, I decided to fully indulge my abiding fascination with the Third Reich and the theft of art and gold. Is it a ‘thriller’? I don’t know. Perhaps only a few people, those close souls who get a chance to see it, will tell me. But they are friends, not critics.
here's the back cover blurb;
As the Russians closed in on Berlin in April 1945, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, second in command of the SS, ordered his troops to rob Germany’s National Depository, the Reichsbank. As well as the tons of gold bullion, millions in currency, jewels and other valuables, the Nazis already had billions of dollars’ worth of art, stolen from doomed Jewish families, hidden away in the mountains of Bavaria and Austria.
70 years later, Kurt Kohler, art hunter and researcher, travels the world looking for works to retrieve and return to their owners’ descendants. But when an old farmer tries to sell a batch of ancient gold coins, Kohler is called in and the hidden history of one of the most feared organisations of the 20th century is revealed. Could it possibly be true that Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler, who supposedly committed suicide with a cyanide capsule at Luneberg, Germany in May 1945 was not Himmler at all, but his terrified double? The Himmler file at the UK’s National Archives is embargoed until 2045. But Kurt Kohler unearths the truth … and much more besides.
The book could be an ill-conceived pile of bullshit, but my nose is still buried in it so I’m used to the stink. Thankfully, no-one reads this blog so this occasional exercise in navel-gazing is simply here for future reference for anyone curious enough to seek out obscure writers. So, I shall order my printed copy of Empire of Thieves, put it on the shelf with the others, the successful books (there have been some) and the great un-read. The work will be like those calcified bodies they found in the ruins of Pompei. People will open the pages, read a few paragraphs and ask “What the bloody hell was he thinking of?” The answer will be simple. I just wanted to entertain.