First of all, Stuart,
it’s a real thrill for me to do the interview. Thanks very much for arranging
this home stop on the Book Tour.
You’re
welcome. And maybe you could start by telling us how you developed the story
for Assassins? I’d never heard about the
background before.
OK, so it’s 1938, and
Spain is in the grip of the civil war that had started two years earlier after
an attempted military coup by General Francisco Franco. The story of the
Spanish Civil War has been covered from lots of angles but I came across the
previously untold fact that, in the middle of ’38, with the outcome still in
the balance, Franco had not only set up an alternative government but had
established a Tourist Department – and then circulated brochures around all of
Europe’s travel agents, inviting tourists to visit his recently won
battlefields. Extraordinary! An incredible propaganda exercise. But it worked.
Something like 20,000 travellers took part in the tours over the following
seven years and, of course, carried away Franco’s side of the complex conflict.
So I thought: What if one or more of the people on the tour bus didn’t believe
the propaganda? What if one or more of them had hidden agendas? What if a batch
of unforeseen disasters befell these eccentric travellers? I hope readers will
think it’s an original way to find out about this still relevant piece of
European history.
I
did some digging of my own on this, and found that a lot of the characters who
feature in this story are real people. Far more than I’d imagined. Did that
create problems?
Actually, I don’t
think anybody else has spotted that. The characters who make up the bus-load of
travellers are all fictional – though even some of them are based on real
people. But the rest are mostly factual. As Franco’s armies slowly occupied
each area of Spain, they replaced all the democratically-elected
representatives with their own stooges, either from the military, or from the
extreme Right-wing and fascist Falange Party. It still exists, by the way. And
these were the people largely responsible for rounding up tens of thousands of
socialists, communists, trade union leaders, poets and artists, and murdering
them in what historian Paul Preston has quite rightly called “the Spanish
holocaust”. So the tours would have met a lot of these people and I wanted –
within reason – to get inside them a little. And, actually, there’s an
astonishing amount of information available. So no, it didn’t create a problem.
Though I’m always conscious that it might become so. The book’s selling
reasonably well in Spain, even in English, so naturally there’s always a chance
that the family of one of those people may pick up Assassins and not be happy about the portrayal.
I
also realised that both Assassins and
your previous novel, The Jacobites’
Apprentice, feature lots of stuff about spies. Is this a subject that
intrigues you?
D’you know, I hadn’t
thought about that before. Jacobites
is set in 1745, mainly based in Lancashire and deals with the Manchester
merchants who supported Bonnie Prince Charlie in his rebellion. But, yes, its
anti-hero is based on the real-life spy, Dudley Bradstreet, who was almost
single-handedly responsible for preventing the rebellion’s success. The
Jacobite army managed to travel all the way south to beyond Derby, with not
much more than 100 miles before they reached London. And there was nobody to
stop them. But Bradstreet, posing as a scout for Bonnie Prince Charlie, told
him a load of nonsense about English armies waiting to intercept them. The
Jacobites lost their bottle, went back to Scotland, and the rest is, of course,
history. In Assassins, I became
fascinated by the dozens of attempts on Franco’s life – sometimes by
professional spies and hit-men, sometimes by rank amateurs. And there was a
whole espionage story about the British covert operations that may have helped
Franco launch his fascist coup in the first place. But there’s no spying in the
third novel. Honest!
Ah,
the third book? What’s that about?
It’s set during the
second half of the Anglo-Zulu War in 1879. In a nutshell, it picks up the story
where Michael Caine and the film, Zulu,
left off. It’s told largely from a Zulu perspective and the title is The Kraals of Ulundi, due to be
published in April-May.
And
you write under a pen name. Can you tell us why?
When I started
writing, I soon began to run into problems. There are some quite evil moments
in Jacobites and I found it quite
hard, personally, to delve inside those darker sides of human nature as myself.
So I needed to develop an alter ego.
And then I realised that this wasn’t hugely different from my earlier “day
job.” I think most of us are different people in work than we are at home with
our families. Then, of course, I began to realise exactly how many of my own
favourite authors have written under pen names, and I imagine that some of them
must have similar reasons for doing so - C.S. Forester, Daniel Defoe, Ellis
Peters, George Orwell, J.K. Rowling, John Le Carré, Lewis Carroll, Patrick
O’Brian, Stendhal and dozens of others. Apart from all that, when I finally
started thinking about marketing, I realised that “Dave McCall” simply doesn’t
sound like the name of a historical fiction writer. Well, not to me it doesn’t!
So the “David Ebsworth” brand was born. Ebsworth is a grandfather’s name so it
feels right. Then, when I shut my workroom door each morning, I get straight
into this alter ego and start to
write.
You
have a writing routine, then? How do you fit that into your day job?
I officially retired
in 2008 so haven’t really got a “day job” any more. I do some voluntary work
still but, mainly, I write. I start around 7.00am by word processing the most
recent hand-written stuff that I’d worked on during the previous day. That’s
important for me since it gets me straight back into the story without risking
writers’ block. By the time I’ve finished this word processing, I’m “in the
groove” and carry on with new word count until maybe 9.30am. Then I print out
the morning’s work and take myself off to the swimming pool, do my lengths and
mull over what I’ve done. An hour later usually sees me in Caffè Nero, making
corrections and then hand-writing the next block of text. That’s the text that
I put away until the following morning. During the afternoon and evening, I
catch up with my marketing and any research that I need for the next section of
the book.
When
you say “marketing”, can you say a bit more about that?
Sure. It had never
occurred to me that there’d be so much marketing if you want your books to
sell. That sounds daft, but I genuinely hadn’t thought about it. When I was
writing Jacobites, I never thought
about anything except getting to The End. I just assumed that “somebody” would
do the marketing for me if it even got published. But that “somebody” doesn’t
exist and, by the way, it’s really no different for authors who are
“traditionally” published. Though I caught on quickly, I think. I developed a
marketing calendar with all the things I needed to do before publication (developing and regularly updating a website,
arranging launch events, building a social media profile on Goodreads, Twitter,
Facebook, Google Plus, Pinterest, etc); at
publication (press releases and interviews, arranging book reviews); and post-publication (getting myself invited
to author events, month by month, sometimes in bookstores but, more
productively, doing lively presentations about the story backgrounds). Then
it’s a matter of juggling all these plates and many more besides. But my main
bit of marketing is the production of a monthly e-newsletter that goes out to
family, friends, supporters and readers – whose e-mail addresses I’ve been
painstakingly accumulating over the past three years, since Jacobites was published. I’ve never
really found time for regular blogging – and the newsletter is a great substitute.
That’s
a good tip. Can you give any aspiring writers just one more?
Yes. To keep writing.
I think we have to be hugely talented or extremely lucky to sell huge
quantities of books at our first attempt. But if you build up some readership
with your first book, do some basic marketing, then go on and write a second,
then a third, and so on, that readership will grow incrementally and
irrevocably. I’m certain that there must be a mathematical formula for this. I
just don’t know what it is! The main thing is to keep writing books – doing it
well, naturally – and getting them published, even if you can only manage eBook
editions. Write them and they will come! In today’s market, I think it’s both
quality and quantity of our output
that spells success.
You
said right at the beginning that today’s interview is part of a Virtual Book
Tour. So how long does that last and where do you go next?
It’s another
marketing tool, of course – helping to raise the book’s profile. But I hope it’s
also good entertainment for bloggers’ readers too. I decided to run this one
over two weeks and I was really lucky that so many of you were interested in Assassins. Here’s the link to my web
page with all the details...
...but, basically,
I’ve got stops with UK bloggers in London, Bristol, Devon and Essex, US
bloggers in Ohio, Colorado, Texas and Wisconsin, and a Canadian blogger in
Manitoba.
Tomorrow I’ve got a
stop with Tori Turner (Lily Loves Indie) here...
...as well as Elaine
(Novel Pastimes) in Ohio...
