Crime Novelist Self-Published His Books With Huge Success!
The writing community gave him the confidence to keep trying
When I first joined my local writers’ group, among the first people I met was crime author, Dave Sivers, who has self-published a range of ebooks for Kindle and recently found his work among the top selling books in his genre.
At that time, he’d published Scars Beneath the Soul, a detective story of murder and mayhem in the Chiltern Hills, Buckinghamshire. I asked Dave to tell me about his writing journey. This is what he said…
“I seem to have been a ‘writer’ for about as long as I have known how to read and write; it has been a constant for me through all the changes that life throws at you. In a sense, either my writing has been like a soundtrack to my life, or my life has been like a soundtrack to my writing — I’m never 100% sure which.
“My first love was fiction. I started trying to write ‘proper’ novels in my twenties, and produced something half-decent in my thirties, which received encouraging feedback from agents and publishers — but no publication deal.
“Over the next ten years, I found I had a tougher outer shell than I’d realised. Writers have to learn that rejection is an occupational hazard — you either learn from it and move on, or give up in favour of something less challenging, like alligator wrestling.
“Joining a writers’ group marked a big step-change. Suddenly, I was exposed me to a wide range of ‘real’ writers who were doing all sorts of stuff that I hadn’t thought about. And I realised that I needed to be flexible as well as persistent if I was going to make a success of writing.
“So I tried my hand at journalism, first securing weekly columns with two local newspapers. This developed my professionalism, gave me discipline, and led on to success with magazine articles. I won prizes and publication with short stories, and have also dabbled in amateur stage material and TV comedy sketches.
“The big life lesson I had learnt was this: if at first you don’t succeed, don’t just try again, but try a different approach. I’ve now become a songwriter, almost by accident, and found I’m rather good at it. I’ve also started self-publishing my fiction as e-books, after years of ‘near misses’ with agents.
“If I’d only been getting standard rejections, I would have known I was rubbish, but there has been enough positive feedback to encourage me to take the plunge.
“As a self-publisher, I’m not only author, but editor-in-chief, typesetter, publisher, marketing manager and press officer. If I really was doing it all by myself, then writing really would be the lonely, solitary occupation the clichés say it is. But you know what? It doesn’t have to be. I have a little team of readers whose opinions I trust who read my stuff and offer suggestions. I have enjoyed collaborative work with various co-writers.
“I have my writers’ group and other writing mates to ‘talk shop with’. And I have my family, who have always supported me. Writing can be as much about team work as any other profession.
“I’ve also discovered that, for a writer, no bad experience is wasted. It can lead to an article, or it can be grist for fiction. Instead of getting mad at people, I can make them characters in short stories and murder them horribly. There’s no other job like it.”
Dave has since sold tens of thousands of copies of his books! You can read about that, and his approach to production and marketing in the story below!
Dave’s Books: You can view Dave’s literary collection here. Follow him on Twitter @DaveSivers or visit his website www.davesivers.co.uk
© Susie Kearley 2023. All Rights Reserved.
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