I’ve been feeling very guilty recently over the lack of promotion I’ve given to The Raven Sound, which is one of my favourite and most personal book babies. The other novels have had digital giveaways and pushes on social media, but I seem to have neglected this particular literary offspring, despite the fact it has sold more copies in America than all my other works combined. So, the question I have to ask myself is, why?
I think a part of it is that The Raven Sound is so geographically based, and rooted in localised Liverpool (I’ve blogged before about attempts to counteract this, like the difficult call to refer to ‘Toxteth’ rather than ‘L8’, which would be much more realistic in the historical setting) that I’ve lacked confidence that the appeal might be very specific to Liverpool. Another facet is that some of the characters were inspired by people I knew, who are no longer with us, so it feels very personal to me, and harder to promote.
During the lockdown period, it has also been difficult to promote books with few opportunities for events, or physical interactions or sales, and there are actually surprisingly few artistic sections in mainstream media outlets in Liverpool.
Another reason, and as you’ll know, I like to be brutally honest and transparent in my blogs, might be that I still feel a little uncomfortable with some of the content. While The Raven Sound is primarily a supernatural journey into the past of Liverpool, and a character study of a curmudgeonly old man re-evaluating his life choices, prejudice is a recurrent theme in the text, religious, racial, homophobic. I believe all writers should address and include these issues wherever they occur, I also know that in the current climate there is a pushback against anyone without ‘lived experience’ confronting the most sensitive areas. As an author I always research fully, and after drafts, I have review readers who feed back and influence what I include and how, but there is always an element of feeling like a fraud. Despite that, this is fiction I’m talking about, and I think any writer should be able to write about any subject (after all, few have lived experience of Dragons or Tudor Courts), so long as they do their research and approach subjects with sensitivity.
I’ve lived around the edges of L8 for almost 30 years, and was born just outside the city, but on the base level I’m not a scouser even, not by birth or accent, so my main character Jack should be rights fall into the same category of ‘outside lived experience’. On the flip side, all of the 1990s pubs and locations are drawn from personal experience and friends, and many situations are drawn from reality.
Perhaps I should grasp the nettle more, and push this book, as, apart from the ghostly story itself, I think it is worthwhile remembering some of the wonderful pubs that existed in the area, and that even in the 60s, there was far more sense of community in these, despite the deprivation and challenges, than we sometime hear.
Stay safe,
Kit