How My Novel Climbed 97,388 Amazon Places In A Single Morning

So how do you get your novel to climb 97,000 Amazon places in a single morning? The answer is that you get it mentioned on National Public Radio. NPR may not have a huge listenership compared to some commercial stations in the US but it's a listenership that buys books. On Friday last the great Nancy Pearl, "America's Librarian", went on Morning Edition to talk about some undiscovered literary gems from her personal library. The very first book she mentioned was The Cold Cold Ground. (You can listen to the entire story, here.) Nancy described it as "one of the best crime novels she had ever read" and the host of Morning Edition read out the first paragraph of the book. Within minutes TCCG began climbing on the Amazon rankings and by the end of the day it had cracked the famous Amazon 100. Now of course this was only a temporary blip and soon it had begun to fall back down again. But still it was nice to get a little glimpse of the dizzy heights of best sellerdom even if it was only for a brief period of time. 
...
It was especially pleasing for me that this happened to The Cold Cold Ground, a book that I worked really hard on, was well received in the UK and Ireland, which won a couple of awards but which was utterly ignored in the American press because it didn't have a big publisher and a big ad campaign behind it. Apart from the honourable exception of The Arizona Republic I didn't get any newspaper reviews in the American papers (there was however a nice write up about me as an author in The Wall Street Journal). It shows you how difficult it is for a new or newish writer to break through if you don't have a marketing juggernaut behind you (or you don't live in Brooklyn). If a crime fiction reviewer is sharp enough or is well read enough to have heard of your book, chances are their editor will spike the review because the paper needs to appeal to a broad audience and the audience demands reviews of all the old favourites plus all the new Nordic Noir books. Classic Catch 22 then: you can't get reviewed because no one's heard of you and no one's ever going to hear about you because you can't get reviewed. So it's very nice to know that at least someone looks outside the box for the unconventional and the different. And to have that someone be the great Nancy Pearl is especially sweet. 
...
If you want to look at my current fading amazon ranking or even buy the book itself you can do so, here. And thank you again NPR and the well read and wise Nancy Pearl! I enjoyed my moment in the sun. 

The NPR Voice

I think the success of a show like Moonshiners
 is in part down to the interesting
regional accents on display

Regional accents are the delight of the English language. You dont have to be Henry Higgins to spot a Scot or a Yorkshireman or a Cockney. And boy are those accents fun to listen to. I can identify (and imitate) about twenty different British and Irish accents and I love them all. Every accent has its own pleasures and as an accent connoisseur I can appreciate accents that some people aren't so keen on such as West Belfast, Brummie and the strange sounds that come from Geordieland. Those latter 3 accents used to be despised but they've all made something of a comeback in recent years, perhaps reflecting a rebirth of regional pride. Americans, I feel, dont appreciate their regional accents the way we do currently in the British Isles. Americans are going through the phase now that Britain went through from 1950 - 1980 when regionalism was discouraged on the radio and TV and a received pronunciation BBC English was the stultifying and rather boring norm. Back in the day in the UK newsreaders were only trusted if it sounded like they had gone to Eton and even comedians/satirists only got on the telly if they had been president of the Cambridge Footlights. But all that changed in the 80's when regional accents became seen as more authentic than the clipped and rather boring RP English. Nowadays on BBC's radio flagship Radio 4 and BBC TV's flagship's BBC 1 regional accents are everywhere. 
...
National Public Radio is often presented to me as a beacon of progressive thought in an American media world dominated by vast corporations who have evil hidden agendas. It's a fair point. ABC, NBC, Fox and CBS are all part of massive corporations whose primary and only duty is to their shareholders. (When Diane Sawyer is reading the news you know that she'll never report anything bad about the Walt Disney Corporation.) And the American talk radio landscape is worse by far: a fetid sink of articulate paranoid, quasi fascist, God bothering hackery. So yes NPR is a lone voice of calm in a swirling tempest of shouting nutjobs...but and it's a big but (insert Kardashian joke here) NPR is actually kinda crap. NPR is the way Radio 4 used to be twenty five years ago. Its a network for older white college educated suburbanites and its oh so patronising and complacent and dreary. And the thing that really drives me up the wall is the voice. That awful NPR voice! Bland and slow and so deadly dull. All hint of emotion or regionalism or humanity has deliberately been removed from the presenters and announcers on NPR for fear of offending someone or being misunderstood, but this policy is completely misguided. American regional accents are fantastic and beautiful and need to be cherished and loved, not crushed under by the bland sameness being pumped out by national networks in DC or New York or LA. American regional accents are dying as people move around more or feel it necessary to hide their roots in order to move up the corporate ladder. NPR is in part responsible for this with the subconscious message of conformity they pump out every morning. I lived in accentless Denver for 8 years and now I live in accentless Seattle and I can see how much richer the culture is in Chicago, Boston, New Orleans, Memphis...places with a regional identity and a regional voice. 
...
NPR needs to do what the BBC did in the 1980's and embrace regionalism, not suppress it and if it does I'll bet the quality of its programming rises too. The BBC is still dominated by a privately educated clique who look out for one another (hence the Jimmy Saville scandal) but it is changing - slowly - and NPR can change to. America is 3000 miles wide with dozens (maybe hundreds) of unique subcultures, let's hear some of them on National Public Radio and we'll all be better for it.