The history behind Cawnpore: the final word.

I hope you've enjoyed my week of posts about Indian history. I've blogged about the siege of Cawnpore and the British reprisals afterwards quite recently, so I'm not reposting these: click on the links if you want to read them. There is a post about Nana Sahib, seen by the British as the villain of the piece, HERE.

Cawnpore, now called Kanpur, remains the largest city in Uttar Pradesh. It flourished for a while as a centre of the cotton trade, but cotton manufacture has moved on to cheaper countries and many of the mills are closed. It remains, though, a centre of industry with significant plants producing wool and leather, as well as factories supplying the defence industry.

The Cawnpore Memorial in 1860. Now demolished.

The memorial well, which marked the site of the second massacre, was demolished after Indian independence in 1947. A park was built in its place with statues of leaders of the independence movement, including Tatya Tope, who many historians believe was the man behind the massacre. The park is called Nana Rao Park, in memory of Nana Sahib.

A cultural diversion

I'm reposting a lot of old blogs about India this week, so I thought I'd give you all a treat with an extra blog about something completely different.

A few weeks back, I wrote about a production of Carmen at the Soho Theatre. Now, in my continuing attempt to inject some High Culture into my blog, I'm writing about the ballet. And I'm posting it now because Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo have just two days more in London before they vanish beyond the M25, and I'd like you to have the chance to see them before they go. You'll probably have to kill someone to get a ticket, but it will be worth it, I promise.

It's ballet, Jim, but not as we know it.

There are a few men in the history of ballet who have enhanced their reputations by dancing en pointe. Frederick Ashton famously choreographed the comic lead in Fille Mal Gardée for him to show off in the tortuous footwear that, for so many people, defines the classical ballerina. So when the curtain rises on the company affectionately known as “Les Trocks” there must surely have been some mistake. For this famous company of male dancers are draped around the stage ready to dance Les Sylphides, a classical ballet which seems designed specifically to test the ankles of even the slenderest ballerina.

It’s no mistake. Chopin’s music starts and the company glides, apparently effortlessly, into their version of this chocolate box ballet. What follows is, as ever with the Trocks, an astonishing mix of virtuoso dancing and brilliant comedy. They stagger, they fall, they miss their cues – yet when they settle to perform a set-piece dance, every step is perfect. In fact, their technique is significantly better than many a more traditional company. If you are to get a laugh by collapsing on your fellow dancers, the audience needs to know that there is no question but that you did it on purpose.

Much of the comedy is straightforward slapstick, but there is also a subtle (or sometimes less subtle) sending up of many of the conventions of classical dance: the pretty-boy principal who stands around propping up (or, in this case, not) his leading lady; the endless rearranging of ballerinas around the stage because, back in the 18^th century, moving around to make pretty patterns was much of what ballet was about. The audience roars with appreciative laughter as dancers fall to the ground, somehow landing in perfect splits. Splits? But these are men. For a moment, despite the chest hair peeping above some of the costumes, we’ve all forgotten. But splits? From a jump? One or two, maybe. But the whole company?

Photo: (c)Zoran Jelenic

Yes, splits, fouettés, spins, even high lifts (though the man doing the lifting is barely bigger than the “girl” he lifts). The Trocks do it all, with a passion and élan which lets their love for ballet shine through. Les Sylphides is almost a parody of classical dance and it deserves sending up, but never have I enjoyed a performance so much and, when I’ve wiped away the tears of laughter, I realise I am still sitting through some sublime classical ballet.

Next it’s Merce Cunningham’s turn. Older ballet fans, like me, may still vaguely remember when Cunningham was exciting and new. It was pretty strange, though, even then. The Trocks dance it wonderfully, though it is so far beyond parody that I'm not sure that there would be that much difference if they did it straight. A couple of live musicians accompany them in music that the programme describes as “after John Cage”. Let’s face it, getting a laugh out of Cage’s music is not difficult but, as the sound of rustling paper gives way to the popping of bubble wrap, the audience collapses. The pastiche of the music is crueller than the sending up of the dancing, yet, even at its cruellest, it is still recognisably music (of a sort) and unmistakably John Cage.

The Trocks on Wall Street    Photo: (c)Zoran Jelenic

The Balanchine parody is nicely done, but it is nothing to the Dying Swan. I'm old enough to have seen Margot Fonteyn dance the Dying Swan as a gala piece and it was very lovely indeed. But this dying swan was like nothing you have imagined in your wildest nightmares. Shedding feathers, clutching its stomach, palpitating at its chest, there’s no doubt this swan is in a very bad way and then, suddenly, the dancer is channelling Fonteyn with that lyric pose, held for a breath – before she breaks it to gesture for more applause. It’s classic Trock – technically brilliant, beautifully moving and then crashing straight into the crudest slap-stick. Brilliant!

Finally we get the peasants dancing in the village from – well, from every three act classical ballet you ever saw really. Ostensibly, this is Don Quixote, though the programme notes tell us that “due to economic reasons” neither Don Quixote or Sancho Panza features. Peasant girls do, though. And gypsies. And an ugly hag, a virtuous mother and somebody else who hangs around in the background doing not a lot, because classical choreographers always like to put in a part for their old girlfriends whose dancing days are pretty well over. There’s a handsome hero and an ugly old man who tries to steal away the beautiful heroine. And there are fairies. Why not? It’s a traditional classical ballet – why shouldn't there be fairies? The plot, such as it is, is communicated through those mime gestures that little girls learn in their ‘First Ballet Book’ and these are shoe-horned in whether they are appropriate or not, together with the odd gesture that definitely doesn't feature in the ‘First Ballet Book.’ There are solos and pas de deux and pas de quatre and dances for the whole company and, by the end, you have seen every village dance scene you will ever want to see and, if you stop laughing for long enough, you will notice some truly beautiful dancing sandwiched between the jokes.

Photo: (c)Zoran Jelenic

There is no other company in the world like the Trocks. What started as a joke in an off-off-Broadway show has become an institution in which an astonishingly talented multi-national cast of male performers dress up in tutus and dance their hearts out. And are really, really good. And funny. I did say that they’re funny, didn't I?

I doubt you can get tickets for the London run by now. (It closes on Saturday.) But they are just starting a UK tour that lasts until mid-November. Whether you are a ballet fan or just enjoy a really good laugh, do yourself a favour and go.

Fanny Parks: A Wandering Pilgrim in 19th Century India

Yesterday someone asked me about the journeys Williamson makes in India.

These were based on accounts of travelling in the sub-continent from the time. Several of the incidents are drawn directly from the book by Fanny Parks, who wrote about her own experiences in India in the first half of the 19th century. She was an extremely interesting woman and I recommend her book. (Avoid the expensive edited versions and read the original, which is available online for free.)

I wrote about her for 'English Historical Fiction Authors' in 2013. As Cawnpore is being promoted at the moment and I'm taking the opportunity to repost some of my notes about India, here's my account of Fanny Park's life.

Fanny Parks: A Wandering Pilgrim in 19th Century India

Fanny Parks went to India in 1822, accompanying her husband. Arriving in Calcutta, she and her husband lived respectably with the other Europeans, although she was quick to learn Hindi so that she could communicate with the servants.

After two years in Calcutta, her husband took up a post in Allahabad, 500 miles to the north-west. It was her first experience of rural India and she loved it. The time was, she said, "the most approaching to delightful that we had passed in India." Once there, her husband became manager of the ice works. The manufacture and storing of ice in the days before refrigeration was an important industry, but managing an ice plant must have had more than a passing similarity to watching paint dry. Fanny threw herself into organising the household, arranging an avenue of trees and digging a new well. (She quotes the local proverb: "Plant a tree, dig a well, write a book, and go to heaven.") It seems pretty clear, though, that she was bored.

Equipped with her workable Hindi and her horse, Mootee, she spent much of her time exploring the country. "Roaming about with a good tent and a good Arab [horse]," she wrote, "one might be happy for ever in India."

As a woman, she was allowed to socialise with Indian women in a way that local custom would have considered quite unacceptable for men. She formed friendships with many Indian women and was even able to visit them in the zenana (harem), an area completely forbidden to men other than the immediate family and therefore a continual source of exotic rumour amongst most Europeans. It was her accounts of life in the zenana that, in part, led to the success of her autobiographical Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, two extraordinary volumes which gave an unparalleled insight into Indian life under British rule in the first half of the 19th century.

Her husband seems to have been, by the standards of the time, unusually relaxed about leaving her to travel on her own. When the two of them went to visit the Taj Mahal, he sent her ahead in her own boat and she writes about her experiences and adventures on the river as an unchaperoned woman. Her behaviour was considered improper by more conventionally minded memsahibs and she seems to have had few women friends among the European community, although she is always writing of the men she knows and visits. (Even back in England she shocked people by going out and about unchaperoned. "I shall never be tamed," she wrote "… to the ideas of propriety of a civilised lady.")

She took to wearing Indian dress, even having a burka made for herself (though she doesn't say that she ever wore it in public). She complained that "a lady in European attire gives me the idea of a German mannequin" and contrasted European women's stiff walk with "that snakelike, undulating movement, – the poetry of motion" that she saw in the Indians. Although the early 19th century saw generally good relations between the Indian and European communities, Fanny Parks was much closer to the local aristocracy than most and was regarded by many Europeans as having "gone native". She learned Urdu, which was the language of court and which she described as "Hindostanee, intermixed largely with Persian."

She was sympathetic to Indian religions and contrasted them favourably with Christianity.

"The fakir, who from a religious motive, however mistaken, holds up both arms until they become withered and immovable, and who, being, in consequence, utterly unable to support himself, relies in perfect faith on the support of the Almighty, displays more religion than the [bishop], who, with a salary of £8000 per annum, leaves the work to be done by curates, on a pittance of £80 a year."

Her enthusiasm for Indian religious observance did not, however stop her from stealing idols that she found in the countryside and adding them to her collection of Indian artefacts. On her return to England she proudly announced that: "My collection of Hindoo idols is far superior to any in the [British] Museum."

She was entranced by fabrics and fashion and learned the esoteric skill of dressing a camel. "There is but one thing in the world that I perfectly understand, and that is, how to dress a camel," she claimed. She was good enough at dressing camels to be asked to dress the camel of a local Rajah. The dress was made of "many yards" of black and crimson cloth covered in seven hundred bells, one hundred beads and thousands of cowrie shells. She drew the line, though, at actually riding the beast, saying that she would be frightened of tumbling off.

Much of her time was spent at entertainments, whether the balls given by the British or more elaborate entertainments provided by the Indians. Having animals fight seems to have been considered a great sport, with elephants and even rhinoceroses being pitched against each other. Nach dancers provided a more relaxed entertainment.

With no need to find herself employment, Fanny Parks gives the impression of a life spent in a continual round of exploring, socialising and being entertained. The realities of life in India do intrude, though. She is constantly reporting herself unwell, often through the effects of the heat. She matter-of-factly records the deaths of native friends, servants and Europeans as smallpox, plague, heatstroke and other unspecified illnesses take their toll. Even her substantial domestic menagerie suffers. "The sickness in our farm-yard is great: 47 … sheep and lambs have died of small-pox; much sickness is in the stable…" There is the occasional murder to break the monotony of death from illness sickness. The East India Company offered generous pensions. Fanny Parks reminds us of why they could afford to: most of their employees failed to survive to collect their pensions. A detailed study of the mortality rate amongst British troops in India in the 1840s suggested that almost 3% died every year. A 21-year-old soldier in the Bombay army was reckoned to have only an evens chance of surviving 25 years of service – much less than he would need to collect his pension.

The life expectancy of the native Indians was, of course, less than that of the Europeans. Besides issues of sanitation and general health, the natives suffered the effects of famine. Fanny Parks describes passing through a famine area:

"There lay the skeleton of a woman who had died of famine; the whole of her clothes had been stolen by the famished wretches around, the pewter rings were still in her ears, but not a rag was left on the bones that were starting through the black and shrivelled skin; the agony on the countenance of the corpse was terrible. Next to her a poor woman, unable to rise, lifted up her skinny arm, and moaned for food. The unhappy women, with their babies in their arms, pressing them to their bony breasts, made me shudder… I cannot write about the scene without weeping…."

In 1839, Fanny Parks returned to England to visit her family, her father having died. She complained that the country was small and dark. Even the mutton was compared unfavourably with that in India, although she was fascinated by her first experience of a steam train. Her visit was not a happy one. While she was in England, her mother died and she herself was seriously ill for three months. It was not until 1844 that she returned to India. She seems to have spent less time now exploring the country and complained of life being monotonous. Years in India had sapped her health and that of her husband. In 1848, both of them left India for England, arriving on New Year's Day 1849.

Her homecoming was unpropitious. "[I]t was bitterly cold, and I began to speculate if it were possible to exist in England." Exist in England she did, though, surviving until 1875, when she died at the age of 81.

Indian Mutiny or War of Independence?

In Cawnpore, I refer to the events of 1857 as the Indian Mutiny. The book is written from the point of view of a Victorian Englishman and "Indian Mutiny" is what Victorian Englishmen called it. Nowadays, though, what to call that uprising is an intensely political decision. To many Indians and Pakistanis the war was the First War of Indian Independence or the Freedom Struggle of 1857.

Leaving aside political considerations, part of the confusion as to what to call it is down to the fact that several conflicts coalesced into a single rebellion. There seems little doubt that the actual fighting started with a mutiny. That is, soldiers disobeyed a direct order and, when some were imprisoned, their comrades rose up to release them, murdered some of their officers and broke camp. Whether the soldiers were encouraged to mutiny by political activists seeking independence from the British is uncertain. Some Europeans were convinced that the whole thing was a calculated plot, but it is the nature of the political class always to claim that acts of rebellion were incited by "outside agitators" and there is no clear evidence on this either way. What is certain is that the first troops to mutiny decided to march to Delhi and put themselves at the service of the Mogul emperor.

With mutineers claiming to be acting in the cause of the deposed rulers, the conflict quickly began to take on a wider political complexion. Other rulers, like Nana Sahib, saw the opportunity to re-establish their power while the British, deprived of the support of their native troops, were weakened. The situation was further confused because these rulers did not all act in concert. For example, as mentioned in my novel, the troops who mutinied at Cawnpore first marched towards Delhi to put themselves at the service of the Mogul emperor, before being persuaded to return to Cawnpore to serve the Peshwa, Nana Sahib. Although the various leaders of the Indian forces made common cause against the British, their failure to act effectively as a single political or military force counted against them.

One of the first acts of the rebels in many places (including Cawnpore) was to open the jails. So beside the mutinying troops and the various forces of the native rulers, many of those who joined in the fighting were local convicts who simply saw an opportunity to profit from the general unrest. Thus natives who were associated with the British (such as Christians or other Eurasians) were often attacked and murdered, less to achieve military or political goal than because their attackers could then loot their property. With an almost complete breakdown of law and order and mass conflict spreading across huge areas of the country, there was an opportunity for many old scores to be settled.

There are clear modern parallels. In Iraq the fighting following the American-led occupation was blamed on elements of the Army (essentially mutineers), forces loyal to the old regime, criminal elements and those settling scores between different religious groups. In Britain, at least, commentators struggled for ages to find a term which encompassed all these different elements before they settled on "insurgency". Perhaps that is how we should refer to the events of 1857. But, whatever the best term should be, for the British involved, and for most historians, even today, the bloodshed and horror of that year are simply summed up as the Indian Mutiny.

Cawnpore

Cawnpore is on offer this month (99p in UK, 99c in the USA), so I probably ought to take the time to tell you why you should read it.

I asked Accent if they would put this book on price promotion because, of the five I have written, this is my personal favourite, but I don't think it's ever going to be the best selling.

The books that people like to read are the ones about James Burke, the dashing spy who wins through against the backdrop of the battles of the Napoleonic wars. I enjoy writing them and I hope that you enjoy reading them. The history is realistic and therefore, inevitably, sometimes a bit gruesome, but the tone is generally light. Burke is not unduly worried about the morality of his work and there is an underlying assumption that it is the proper role of the British Army to travel round the world beating the French. (And why not?)

A sharp contrast to these books are the memoirs of a fictional mid-Victorian called John Williamson. There are two so far and I've just finished writing the final instalment of the trilogy.

John Williamson and James Burke could hardly be more different. Williamson is a gay man from a working class background who finds himself elevated to positions of authority in Britain’s colonial empire. An outsider on grounds of both class and sexuality, he finds himself questioning the situations he finds himself in, torn between a conventional assumption of the rightness of British rule and doubts as to what the British end up doing to the countries they have occupied.

The books aren't an attack on colonialism. Williamson sees the good as well as the bad in colonial rule. The result is that the poor guy is constantly conflicted.

The first book, The White Rajah, is set in Borneo, where Williamson is working with James Brooke, the adventurer who famously came to rule his own country. Like all first novels, it took years to write and it still shows that I was new to the game. It will always have a special place in my heart, but it’s not my favourite.

Cawnpore followed on from The White Rajah. Technically, that makes it a sequel, but the story stands by itself. The book finds Williamson in the eponymous city during the months running up to the Indian Mutiny. He loves India and develops a deep attachment to the culture. He also enjoys his work, which he sees as improving the lives of the natives. But he is far from comfortable with the narrow-minded bureaucrats who make up his colleagues. When the Indian Mutiny breaks out, he is torn between his loyalty to England and his love of India.

The story sticks very closely to the well-documented history of the siege of Cawnpore and the eventual arrival of a British relief force just too late to prevent the massacre of the entire European population. Williamson is in the remarkable position of, at different times, finding himself fighting on both sides. It can't end well, and it doesn't.

It's a deeply depressing book. Nobody – Indian or European – comes out of it particularly well. Given the historical facts, it is hardly a plot spoiler to say that most people don't come out of it at all. Many people who have read the book have told me that it reduced them to tears. You can see why it's not a book that is going to attract casual readers who don't know me. In fact, when I was first trying to sell the Williamson books, I was advised to get myself better known with something more commercial before letting these out on the world. That’s how James Burke was born.

So Cawnpore is a book written in the first person (with all the long sentences and peculiar vocabulary that you associate with the mid-19^th century), by someone who is deeply distressed about events that end up killing most of the characters. Why on earth would you want to read it? Well, this is what some other people have said about it:

On Goodreads

… an excellent introduction to India as part of the British Rajah, and to the siege of Cawpore. The author does not deviate from the facts and the novel is a solid piece of history turned into a fascinating story and well worth a read.

Evocative and haunting. I couldn't put this book down. Not only is it a solid account of the tragic events at Cawnpore, it's a rattling good adventure and a gentle, understated love story. It's one I'll return to.

 … approaches that ranks of Sarah Waters in storytelling.

On Amazon

A moving and thought-provoking novel.

An absolute gem of contemporary literature!

I read this all in one sitting and it's one of those evocative and haunting books I know I'll return to again.

… a fine work of historical fiction, faithful to the events but able to reveal far more about them through the interpolation of self reflective fictional characters.

Historical Novel Society

For anyone who has a love for this period, Cawnpore is probably one for you.

Cawnpore is on offer throughout September. I do hope you will take the opportunity to read something a little different.

Remember to buy tissues.

Social media and me

This week I'm guesting on the lovely Jenny Kane’s blog. (Go and have a look: it’s fun!) So I’ve got a week off from trying to think of amusing or interesting things to talk about on my own blog. Instead, I am thinking about the whole business of social media: what we do and why we do it.

Note that I am talking about the “business” of social media. If you want your friends to know what you had for breakfast, that’s between you and your friends. And I still use my personal Facebook page in a quaintly old-fashioned way to keep track of my social life. But what I'm talking about here is authors (I write books, remember) whose use of social media is part of their job.

Make no mistake about it. For an author today Facebook, Twitter and blogging is part of the job. All publishers encourage it: some (thankfully not Accent) insist on it. The unfortunate thing is that many (most?) authors do not take naturally to social media. Oh yes, they can turn out a lovely blog post, but they often struggle to "engage" with their readers. It's hardly surprising. Writing appeals to the sort of person who is happy spending many hours alone with a word processor and relates especially well to characters who exist only in their imagination. They do this for months or years, and then their book is published and suddenly they are told that they must get out and meet people and deal with individuals who can't be written out of the story if they do anything inconvenient. I was once at a meeting of successful authors with major publishers who were being told that they had to get out there on Twitter and Facebook: an audible groan ran through the audience.

“Engagement”, though, is now essential (it seems) to selling books. The death of traditional publishing (and, make no mistake, it has died – even in those companies that we still think of as traditional publishers) means that thousands of books are out there fighting for the attention of readers who have few ways of separating the wheat from the (let's face it, substantial) chaff. In this situation, readers will go for writers that they know – which means established authors they have read before or, in the case of lesser-known people (me, for example), people who they "know" through their social media presence.

For me, the natural way to reach potential readers seems to be this blog. I write historical novels which assume the readers are interested in immersing themselves in a different world for at least a couple of hundred pages, so I imagine that they are the sort of people happy to read up to a thousand words or so in a blog post. This format also allows me to talk about the historical background to my books, aspects of writing (including posts like this one) and occasional entirely random stuff like opera reviews or posts about tango. I’m lucky in that I quite like writing this. I can be self-indulgent once in a while, as today, and sometimes people seem to particularly enjoy such posts. (I was astonished when a piece so self-indulgent that I nearly didn't publish it became one of my most popular posts: Apples and oranges.)

The problem is that, just as people can only find the books if something – hopefully the blog – directs them there, so they can only find the blog if something lets them know of its existence. Hence Facebook and Twitter.

At first, my Facebook author page mainly had links to the blog and to books of mine that were on promotion, or books by other Accent authors that I wanted to tell people about. Apparently, though, this doesn't "engage" people enough. If you have an author page, Facebook even sends you a weekly e-mail to remind you that the number of "engagements" that you made in the last week was not up to scratch. So, with dreadful inevitability, to Twitter. The problem with Twitter is that the average tweet has a life of, apparently, around six minutes. This means that if you want anybody to see it and re-tweet it to their thousands of followers (the Holy Grail of Twitter) you have to post every few hours or there is little chance of visibility. Actually, the logic of this argument suggests you should post every seven minutes, but sometimes you can take logic a little too far.

So now, like many authors, I spend much of my life on Twitter and Facebook trying to encourage people to come and read my blog. Every month, it seems, many of you do. I'm currently averaging around two thousand page views a month, which isn't really all that many but does give me a warm glow inside. (So if you are reading, thank you so much.) There is one tiny problem with this, though. That is that my blog does not generate any income at all. Like most authors, I only make money from writing when people pay for my books. Unfortunately, two thousand people a month are not buying them. Some are, and I'm grateful, but really not that many. And there are some peculiarities in the way that promotion and sales work. For example, the majority of my blog readers are American and, when I put book links on social media, the majority of people who click on them are American too. But since I switched to a UK publisher (the lovely Accent Press are based in Wales), sales in America have been much less than sales in Britain.

Blog hits in last month by country. USA, I love you!

It's all very confusing.

Of course, it's not all about sales. It's also about feedback and reviews. Feedback when you write to me through the comments at the bottom of this blog (and I do read all of them), or respond to a Facebook post or a tweet. It's lovely when people do, but it really doesn't happen that often. A couple of times people have got in touch just to say that they have read and enjoyed my work, and this almost justifies social media on its own, but I'd really enjoy hearing from more of you. You can write on this blog, message me on my Facebook author page, or reach me through my twitter handle: @TomCW99.

Reviews, on the other hand, are when you tell everybody else how much you enjoyed my book, and they are important, as I posted in my last blog piece. (Which, unfortunately, doesn't seem to have resulted in any more reviews, though hundreds of people have read it.)

Anyway, I’ll continue to write this blog. And post on Facebook. And tweet on Twitter. But if you’re reading this, could you please do something for me? Choose one of the following, according as to the amount of time and/or money you think the blog is worth.

• Get in touch. Say, ‘Hello!’ 
• Follow me on Twitter, ‘like’ my Facebook page or follow the blog. (Not that ‘following’ on Blogger achieves much unless you are on Google+)
• Write a review and publish it on Amazon or Goodreads or both.
• Go mad and buy one of my books. Cawnpore is on offer this month, so a mere 99p/99c will give you guilt-free blog reading for the rest of 2015.

If you’ve got this far, thanks for reading. Normal service will be resumed shortly. In the meantime, do read all about tango and sex in my post this week on JennyKane’s blog.



PS I promised on Twitter to give a shout out here to all my followers and I just realised that I've only thanked the people reading the blog. I'm sorry. I really appreciate my Twitter followers too, especially the ones who retweet and the ones who helped me navigate the Twitterverse when I first arrived. You're all lovely.

Reviews

The last couple of posts here have been book reviews. This isn’t a book review site, but sometimes there’s something that seems really relevant or grabs my attention, and then I may write about it.

It’s an odd thing, this desire to review other people’s books. After all, why should any of you care what I think? Yet book review sites are popular. Even in the old, non-digital, world, newspapers carry book reviews. (My wife loves to read them because she says it saves having to read the books.) So, obviously, there are people who are interested in what reviewers write. My blog statistics suggest that some of you even care what I write, so, if you are one of them, thanks for reading.

Some people might suggest that the last thing the world needs is more book reviews, but they’d be wrong. The joy of digital publishing is that there are more books out there than ever before. The trouble is that sorting the gold from the dross is becoming nearly impossible. There used to be a fond notion that you could rely on publishers, but even big publishers have started to turn out some very questionable stuff when they see the possibility of riding a trend and making loadsamoney and there are some extraordinarily good books that are self-published. (Jodi Taylor, whose books I keep raving about and who is now published by Accent, started by publishing them herself and giving them away.) So when people try to sort good books from bad, they increasingly turn to reviews to help them. And, for better or worse, the reviews they turn to are the ones on Amazon. (You can review books on Goodreads too, but the most commercially important is – love it or hate it – Amazon.)

Amazon reviews matter. They matter a lot. Not only are potential readers attracted by positive reviews, but the robots that decide which books Amazon recommends check the ratings as well. The more reviews you have, the more Amazon recommends your book, and those recommendations are vital if anyone outside your immediate circle of friends (or you lovely people reading my blog) are going to find your book. There are well over a million books on Kindle: people are unlikely to come across yours purely by chance.

Readers have told me that they like my books but they are not sure how to go about posting a review on Amazon. It really is easy. You do need an Amazon account, but it doesn’t matter if you bought the book from Amazon. Go to the page for the book and under the title (next to the star rating) you will see that it says how many reviews it has. That's a clickable link. Click on it and it will take you to the reviews. There, right underneath the bar chart showing how many people have given it whatever star rating, it asks you to rate the book and write a review.

One thing that you really need to know about the rating system is that Amazon class four and five-star reviews as positive and one, two or three star reviews as negative. This drives lots of people nuts if, like me, you feel that a three star review means that the book was just fine, but nothing special. It's worth knowing, though, that as far as Amazon are concerned you are saying that you didn't like the book. If that's what you meant to say, that's okay, but if you did like it, then do give it a four or five star rating. It would be lovely if everybody read your reviews rather than just judged on the rating, but research suggests that if a book is going to sell, it has to have a rating of four stars or above. Three star reviews that say "approaches that ranks of Sarah Waters in storytelling” (and, yes, that has happened to me) are particularly frustrating.

As to the review itself, just write what you feel. Something a little more than, “This was a really good book,” is going to be more helpful to your readers, but any review is better than silence. Amazon used to have a minimum length for book reviews, but they seem to have dropped this, so short and sweet works well. (Or short and bitterly acerbic, if that's how you feel.) People tend not to read very long reviews anyway.

Publishing reviews lets you share your opinions with other readers. It's a nice thing to do for the community at large and the single best thing that you can do for writers – short of buying multiple copies of their books and giving them to everybody you know. (We’re into September now, so it's not too early to start thinking about Christmas presents.)

Writing reviews is also one way of making contact with authors. I'd love for you to write to me through the comments space at the end of this blog, but not that many people do. One of the ways I can find out what my readers are thinking is to look at their reviews. Some authors claim never to do this (though I'm not sure that I believe them), but I do read my reviews. I welcome all feedback on my work, either here, or on Amazon, or Goodreads. Oscar Wilde said, "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about." When it comes to book reviews, he was definitely right.