Author interview. A. N. Widdecombe (yes, that A. N. Widdecombe!) talks about her writing career, turning to crime and the merits of self-publishing.

Photo: Poppy Berry

Today’s guest on The Crime Warp is A. N. Widdecombe, former politician, part time dancer and fiction writer.  I only recently found out that Ann was an author when her first foray into crime fiction, The Dancing Detective, was published on Amazon in July this year.  I thought Ann would be a perfect guest for The Crime Warp and here she is!

So, welcome to The Crime Warp Ann.  My first questions are about writing in general - how important is writing and when did you start writing? What kind of things did you write about?

I always wanted to write and finished what I grandly described as “my first book” when I was about nine or ten. In reality it was a couple of exercise books stuck together. I also wrote a play which friends and I used to act for the neighbours. By the time I was 18 I had produced a full-length novel but I am glad I did not try to get it published as it was set in Ancient Rome and I think the estate of Quo Vadis might have sued me for plagiarism!

I seriously thought that when I left University I would write in my spare time and gradually reach publication standard but then politics took over so thoroughly that all my spare hours were being poured into building a political CV. All I produced between leaving Oxford and entering Parliament were a dozen or so short stories and an unfinished novel.

It was even worse when I got into Parliament as it was still the age of the all- night sitting. Thus it was not until I left ministerial office in 1997 that I finally had the time to write properly.

Your first fiction novel was The Clematis Tree, which makes me want to ask lots of questions - what was it that made you decide to do a first novel?  What was the inspiration? What writing methods do you use?  How did you find a publisher?

One of the problems of having always wanted to write but not doing so in a concentrated way until my fifties was that I had so many ideas in my head it was difficult to decide which one to pluck out first. I was yearning to write An Act of Treachery (about a French girl in love with a German officer) but as it was set in Second World War France, I knew the research would be huge and I also knew that not having written anything for a decade and not having finished a novel since I was 18, I could not afford to be side-tracked by research. Instead I had to focus on the writing. So I chose instead an idea based on a contemporary theme - a family with a severely handicapped child.

People often ask if The Clematis Tree was based on a family I knew but it wasn’t. None of my books are based on actual situations, nor are any characters based on real ones except Anton in The Dancing Detective. I work entirely from imagination and for that reason I was quite apprehensive that parents of children with disabilities might write and say “you haven’t a clue” but instead I received so many letters asking how I could know so minutely what it was like to be in that situation.

Indeed the greatest reward of my writing career has been to receive appreciative letters about all the books. Father Figure provoked a raft of correspondence from grandmothers whose sons and grandchildren were being kept apart.

When I write I do not plot out a book in detail and never know what will have happened by chapter such and such. I think of a situation, introduce some characters to it and then I sit back and watch what happens so much so that in three of my four general novels one of the central characters has taken me by surprise at the end. Yet everywhere I go people tell me they worked out what would happen. Well, it is more than I did!

I use a laptop and write as and when I can: on trains, waiting for late night votes in the House when I was an MP, in my study looking out over Dartmoor. There is no set pattern or set number of hours or pages. I would probably be more productive were my schedule more organised!

I decided to write under my own name which was both a blessing and a curse for on the one hand it made the book more interesting to publishers but on the other was bound to provoke the usual “just cashing in on the name” reaction. The latter effect diminished with each book I wrote and An Act of Peace attracted very favourable reviews. I found a publisher, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, through my agent, Caroline Dawnay, now of United Agents. She was not at all sure she wanted to represent me until we met and we have been firm friends ever since.

 

Could you talk about the three novels following The Clematis Tree and how/why your writing took off.  How did you fit this in with an active political career?

 

After The Clematis Tree came An Act of Treachery, then Father Figure and next the sequel to the second book called An Act of Peace. I am working on the final one in the trilogy An Act of Brotherhood and am both flattered and pressured by the number of people who ask me where it is!

The reviews at first fell into two quite distinct categories. Some critics reviewed the book itself and those reviews were either favourable or mixed whereas others concentrated on my having written it and were consistently unkind.  Several mentioned the lack of explicit sex. Yet many authors write without this (think Jeffrey Archer or Ruth Rendell for example) and it is not a source of comment. It was only so with my work because of my known views on moral issues.

Hilariously one critic reviewing The Clematis Tree bemoaned the family’s not being on benefit. It was, he wrote, a cop-out. Had it not been a politician writing I doubt if the issue of social security would even have occurred to him but again he was focussed on the author not the book.

The Clematis Tree reached number eight and An Act of Treachery number 14 in The Times best-seller lists and all four books are still in print years after publication.

 

How different was it writing your autobiography compared to fiction?

When I retired I was keen to make progress on An Act of Brotherhood but I had always wanted to write a detective novel and while I was appearing on Strictly Come Dancing I suddenly had the idea of basing one on a television dance competition so began instead to write The Dancing Detective but my publishers were very keen for me to write an autobiography so everything else was put on hold for that.

It was a very different form of writing being my first foray into fact rather than fiction, give or take an occasional political pamphlet or paper. I soon found that memory can mislead and that it was necessary to check the dates and sequences even of events burnt upon my mind. A further difficulty was knowing how to pitch the tone and content given that I was writing for two completely different readerships. 

Those who were interested in the minutiae of the Killingholme cargo Terminal Bill would probably never have heard of Anton Du Beke! So I decided to give a flavour of a life which began in the days of Empire, saw me at a strict convent school in the swinging sixties, then at two universities and then finally on the road to Westminster before serving in government and then as Shadow Home Secretary and finally retiring to Strictly, pantomime and The Royal Opera House! Inevitably some grumble that there is too much politics and some that there is too little but it sold well and, again, I have received some wonderful letters.

 

So, turning to crime and your novel The Dancing Detective - why did you choose to write a crime novel?  Was this easier or harder than the other books?  Why did you choose a setting like "Strictly"?

 Writing a detective novel was a very different sort of challenge. As mentioned above I do not plan my books out in advance but instead let the characters do as they will. However one cannot write a detective novel without knowing who did it and how and why because clues have to be laid and then suitably confused. It was a much more confined way to write. However so far not one person has told me he or she worked out “whodunnit” so it was worth the effort. My current thinking is that I shall write a short series of six, all featuring the same detectives, but not switch  from general novels to this genre and  I am now back with An Act of Brotherhood as well as devising the second detective novel (set on Dartmoor among the brooding tors I know so well).

 

The Dancing Detective hasn't been published through a mainstream publisher - why did you choose to self-publish?  Can you talk about what you think are the merits of self-publishing versus traditional publishing?

My editor, Alan Samson of Orion, was enthusiastic when I told him that I was writing a detective novel,  but these days it is the sales team which seems to decide the merits of a book and the Orion sales department thought that, having published four novels and an autobiography, a third strand of writing would be difficult to sell.

My agent began talking to other publishers but by the time we had an offer I had resolved to try publishing on Amazon, which is where The Dancing Detective by A N Widdecombe can now be found. Many authors are convinced that this is where the future lies so from the point of view of the writer what are the advantages and disadvantages? And should traditional booksellers and Amazon be looking at ways of working together?

One of the biggest pluses for any author is the sheer speed of publication. A traditional publisher will take nine months from delivery of a book till publication but one can put up a work on Amazon almost immediately. You also start earning immediately with monthly royalties instead of getting paid twice a year. The flipside of that is that there is no advance so during the period of actual writing an author is working for nothing.

The royalties on kindle at 70% are vastly higher than a publisher would ever write into a contract, where the average paperback royalty is about 10%, but of course it is 70% of a much lower sum than the average book costs in a shop and the paperback royalties paid by Amazon are not much different (about 12%).

Perhaps the biggest drawback is the total lack of co-operation between Amazon and the bookseller or event organiser. Most bookshops will stock an author's work for a few weeks after publication and thereafter keep only limited stock so authors promote their work at literary festivals and speaking engagements, selling and signing at those events.

Event organisers buy books at discounted prices from the publishers on a sale or return basis but Amazon offers no such facility to either bookshop owner or event organiser. Indeed authors themselves can receive a discount only if they are prepared to pay postage from the United States which is where even UK books are printed. It is cheaper to buy the book from Amazon as though one were a customer but that leaves the shop or event without a profit and having to fund upfront costs. Given that Amazon gains from every book sold, it must surely be missing a trick here.

One huge advantage in Amazon publishing is that the author is boss from day one because he or she is the publisher and Amazon the distributor. So I had the glorious experience of being able to say “Of course I want it available in America”! One can also set one’s own price, change that price at any time and devise offers. You can even promote the second book by offering the first one free with the purchase. In exchange for exclusive distribution rights for a defined period Amazon also throws in some promotion of its own but of course very big authors can always rely on a lot of free marketing from their publishers in the conventional world.

 

Finally, can you tell us if you any other projects in the pipeline?  Will there be more criminal enterprises?

My current thinking is to publish three detective novels this way and then to take a long look at the results. It may be the best publishing decision I have ever made or the worst but at least I am not sitting here waiting for the first book to appear in nine months’ time.

Ann, thank you for appearing as our guest on The Crime Warp.  Fingers crossed for success with The Dancing Detective and crime novels still to come.

Romancrimeblogger