Time, finally, to talk about my new book. It’s called The Medici Murders and will be out on October the fourth in hardback in the UK, US and in e-book from Severn House, worldwide in audio in English from WF Howes on that same date – available through Audible and all the other usual audio outlets. And there’ll be a mass market paperback from Canongate in summer 2023.
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This is what Graham Greene used to call an ‘entertainment’. A story with a lightness to it, a degree of humour and an engaging mystery at heart. Oh, and with an enormous sense of location too. In Venice again, a place I don’t just want to describe for you in The Medici Murders; I want to transport you there so you can hear the gulls and the church bells, smell the lagoon air, feel the chill of a carnival February, taste that pasta our protagonist’s eating in a little bar – a real one, there are lots of genuine locations here – as he embarks upon a uniquely Venetian adventure.
Last week I ran an interview with my Venetian writing mates, Gregory Dowling and Philip Gwynne Jones, which you’ll find below. One point raised by Gregory in that chat near San Basilio kept nagging at me: that old and thorny subject of writing about what you know.
Gregory rightly pointed out that, as an academic, it was second nature to him to try to find out everything he could about a subject before sitting down to write about it. My background in journalism — with deadlines always looking — made my approach very different.
Neither’s right or wrong of course. There’s no such thing when it comes to working on a piece of fiction, just what works for you.
But here are a few thoughts on the subject from my point of view. Feel free to jump into the discussion in the comments below if you like. This is also a test of my new podcasting system ahead of a bigger project to come — I hope the audio quality is starting to improve.
As anyone who knows me understands I love Venice. A lot. I’m just back from my third trip there this year and it’s time I paid some dues. First a podcast on how a random press trip to the city and a boring press conference kickstarted my writing career just when I thought it was over.
And tomorrow a treat I’ve promised on Twitter: an interview with two British writers who live in Venice and write about the city in very different ways: Gregory Dowling, creator of the Alvise Marangon mysteries, and Philip Gwynne Jones, author of the Nathan Sutherland books.
But today here’s why I will always be grateful to Venice for teaching me some important lessons about writing…
This year Thrillerfest in New York was pretty much about audio for me. I gave a talk on what audio means for writers at Craftfest. Later I was on a panel with some audio industry luminaries and two wonderful audiobook narrators, Therese Plummer and Robin Whitten.
A good time was had by all, and as always, listening to audio professionals, I came away learning lots of useful new stuff. But you know what? Thrillerfest seems to be mainly a convention for people looking to get into the writing business these days. And an awful lot of them didn’t seem to know audio is the most dynamic bit of the business around at the moment, and the only part that is growing at a phenomenal rate.
I was amazed frankly. The books world is looking pretty flaky right now. I came into this business a quarter of a century ago and, while I’m by no means a household name, I’ve done well enough to retire if I felt like it (I don’t — I love writing and never intend to stop). Today, for a variety of reasons, it’s harder than ever to have a financially secure writing career with any longevity. In the future authors will have to be all-round storytellers, able to turn their attention to different media when the opportunity arises, if they’re going to live off their writing skills alone. Audio could make the difference.
So here’s a version of the talk I gave at Thrillerfest, delivered in audio as a podcast because, well, that’s the medium, isn’t it? It’s the first time I’ve tried podcasting and, if everything works, should be available shortly on the usual outlets such as Apple and Spotify.
As an experiment I’ve left the comments open and will try to respond, as time allows, to any queries you have. As for the technical quality of this first stab at podcasting — no apologies. I’m new to all this and it’s my first day on the job. Still learning. And the failings of this first stab illustrate one of the points I make in the talk — producing good audio is hard.
Here, to make things easier, is an illustration of the dialogue tagging example I gave in the talk.
And here, with all its misspellings, is my original PowerPoint file used in New York. Please excuse repetitions and misspellings. It was all done in a hurry and I’m a writer not a presenter.
If you want to understand this medium from the point of view of a professional narrator I highly recommend the audiobook Storyteller: How to be an Audio Book Narratorby Lorelei King. Lorelei is a busy actor in many media but also one of the most prolific and talented audiobook narrators around at the moment.
More podcasts coming shortly, and from Venice where I will be chatting to a couple of fellow writers who live there. Watch this space as they say…
David Hewson 