The Three Eagles: A What If? Novel of the U.S.A., Mexico and the First World War

The Three Eagles: A What If? Novel of the U.S.A., Mexico and the First World War

 

 

Today I self-published a new what if? novel on Amazon called 'The Three Eagles'.  I have long wondered why, having won the 1916 election on the slogan 'he kept us out of the war', Woodrow Wilson decided to enter the First World War in April 1917.  It was 23 months after the RMS 'Lusitania' with 128 US citizens on board had been sunk by a German submarine and it is clear that, despite the popular view, it had minimal impact on US foreign policy. 

 

Wilson decided to go to war despite him proposing peace terms to both sides of the conflict.  He seems to have been put out by the fact that both the Allies and the Central Powers, made no genuine proposals and simply put forward their list of objectives.  Two factors, however, meant that the USA entered the war on the side of the Allies, though it largely kept its armed forces separate and did not become a formal ally of Britain or France.  The first was the resumption of German U-boat attacks on neutral shipping, notably US ships.  The Germans had curtailed this on two previous occasions following requests from President Wilson but at the start of 1917 reneged on this.  The second was the Zimmermann Telegram sent to the German ambassador in Mexico to encourage the country to attack the USA.  Wilson was always more concerned with Mexico than Germany and US marines had occupied locations in Mexico in 1914 and he sent the so-called Punitive Expedition in 1916 commanded by Brigadier General Pershing to try to catch Pancho Villa, a revolutionary whose men had been responsible for raids into the USA.  The Expedition achieved little and Pershing was sent to Europe to command US troops dispatched to France, the American Expeditionary Force (AEF).

 

One important fact to remember is that in 1917, the US Army was very weak; smaller than that of Serbia.  Many troops had equipment and uniforms left over from the American Civil War which had finished in 1865; on reaching France they were largely kitted out by the French Army.  As the AEF received their own portion of the Western Front they were kept apart from the seasoned British, French, Belgian and Portuguese troops, so they had to learn from scratch.  Consequently US casualties were seven times higher than other units fighting on the Western Front.  Involvement in the war even for such a short time, meant the USA paid a heavy price.  However, the presence of US troops and the food and war materiel that accompanied them, gave heart to the Allies, particularly the French.  US troops were particularly important in defending Paris in May 1918 when the German Kaiserschlacht Offensive almost went further than German troops did in 1914 when they almost won as it was.  With no US troops in France in 1917-18, it is likely that the French and probably the British troops too, would have suffered widespread mutinies and the German Army would have reached Paris in May 1918.  They had already beaten Russia into surrender in March 1918.

 

Thus, this book works from the basis that the Germans avoided upsetting Wilson for a third time and he was left to carry out further action in Mexico, where just as on the Western Front in our world, the ill-equipped small US forces struggled against battle-hardened Mexican troops and the various revolutionary armies.  Meanwhile with the Germans having won a last gasp victory in Europe, they have not gained all that the nationalists fantasised about, but have been able to secure the worldwide empire that the Kaiser had dreamt of.

 

This is the counter-factual background, which, as with all my writing, has been carefully researched.  As with my other what if? books and stories, however, it is the impact on characters that interests me rather than labouring through details of battles.  This book is in three sections, the first features a National Guardsmen sent to occupy a Mexican oilfield in 1917; the second sees a US spy investigating a new German submarine base on the Gulf coast of Mexico in 1920 and the third is set in 1923 covering a pilot sent to root out one of the remaining revolutionaries operating in northern Mexico.  If you enjoy a alternate history setting as the background for adventure stories, then I trust this novel will appeal to you.

Provision - What If? Novel of the Second World War

Provision - A ‘What If?’ Novel of the Starvation of Britain During the Second World War

Just to announce that today I have published, on Amazon, a new 'what if?' novel called 'Provision'.  The diversion from our history occurs in April 1941 when the code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park is bombed, setting back efforts to decipher messages sent by Enigma used by the Germans.  In our world, the inability of the Allies to read the Shark version of Enigma, used by U-boats, for much of 1942 led to a trebling of the amount of Allied shipping the Germans sank.  This story envisages that problem persisting.  Food supplies to Britain become shorter even than in our world and fewer US troops can reach Britain to ready for D-Day.  In our history, the USSR received thousands of vehicles and tons of resources from the USA and Britain which in this alternative cannot get through.  Thus, the war runs differently on many fronts.

I decided to view the impact through the eyes of a family.  I could have come at it from an ordinary family struggling to feed themselves in a city.  However, I thought I could give an insight into a broader range of the impacts by having a prosperous family in a rural setting.  Thus, I developed the Seymour family living in Somerset.  Tom Seymour is an infantry captain based in Ulster; his brother Don flies patrols against U-boat wolfpacks in the Atlantic and his sister, Patricia is a member of the Women's Land Army dealing with rumbustious farmers.  Their parents are Reginald Seymour who works for the county agricultural committee regulating farming and Cecilia who  is a volunteer for the Women's Voluntary Service, looking after evacuees and running various resource-saving schemes.  Her brother-in-law Wilfred is employed by the Ministry of Food.  Covering the period 1943-44 the various threads show how life deteriorates and the challenges facing Britain and its allies as well as the peoples of the Allied countries.  By following a family through these troubled years, I trust readers can engage with what a different war would have meant far beyond the strategic level.

While based on an alternative history, extensive research has gone into the mid-1940s setting and actually what happened in the war on the land, in the air, at sea, in towns and villages and on farms.  Thus, the divergences are feasible ones, but also show much of an impact a minor change in history would have had and how different the war and Britain itself could have gone.

P.P. 15/11/2016

This book was selling well until I got a review which killed it:

1.0 out of 5 starsPoor effort at best

By Loving Patriarch on November 13, 2016

Very boring if you are an alternative history fan. There is so much dialogue that has next to nothing related to the premise of the book-which had high promise. I find myself skipped 10's of pages to get to actual historical content. This guy is obsessed with Ireland and country settings. If you like military action don't buy it.

Unfortunately I had forgotten what I have noted on previous occasions on this blog that for some people, unless the book has incessant fighting, it apparently does not count as an alternate history book,  As this reviewer indicates when he says he 'skipped 10's of pages to get to actual historical content'.  The entire book is set in 1943-44, thus everything going on it is (alternate) historical.  There are battle scenes both on land and in the air.  However, a book which was simply one battle after another would be tedious.  It would also be populated by one-dimensional characters.

The dialogue the reviewer so despises, explores what is happening to these people, how they cope with increasing shortages of food; why Britain ends up fighting in Ireland; why new warships, submarines, aircraft and tactics are developed; how the Black Market prospers;  how the British state becomes more authoritarian and Canada is put at threat all because of the 'what if?' the book discusses.  Thus, the entire book is about the premise in all its manifestations.  It is clear that in future I should just write a list of battles and units that have fought in them and that will be considered a 'true' alternate history book.

What Amazon does not tell you is that there are all these hidden rules about what a particular genre can cover,  My alternate history analysis books were condemned as not being alternate history as they suggested a range of outcomes rather than just one.  I imagine that authors in other genres get this kind of hassle, those who write detective novels get told off if the detective does not catch the killer or of romance novels are chastised because the heroine does not marry the hero,  There is nothing you can do about these rules, when a single 1-star review not only ends sales of that book but of any others you have up at the time.  You have to learn the rules by trial and error and not do what I did, and that was to forget them and write a 139,000-word novel which did not feature battle after battle and yet put it into the alternate history category.

I should have remembered from before:

http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/my-writing-is-so-bad-that-it-makes.html

http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/readers-of-alternate-history-books.html

but the ideas that come to me and my enthusiasm to write fiction, leads me to foolishly steam ahead and produce books that really offend people by stepping beyond the very narrow definitions that the reviewers have long agreed upon.

Three New Otto Braucher German Detective Stories

'Braucher and the Ransom'; 'Braucher and the Victim' and 'Braucher and the Trap'

Just to announce that I have just self-published on Amazon, the 15th, 16th and 17th books in the Otto Braucher detective series: 'Braucher and the Ransom'; 'Braucher and the Victim' and 'Braucher and the Trap'. They follow on chronologically from each other and come after 'Braucher and the League' published last June. I can only apologise for the gap, though in October, I did get out 'Munich White' featuring Braucher but set before this series,

The latest trio of books are set between June 1923 and October 1923. They feature Kommissar Otto Braucher and his team of detectives with Obersekretär Alfred Zeiler now well-established as his sergeant. 'Braucher and the Ransom' is set among the rich families of the Grünwald on the southern outskirts of Munich and into the Deisenhofener Forest, where someone is abducting the grown children of those able and willing to pay.

In 'Braucher and the Victim' the focus moves to Johanneskirchen lying beyond the Munich city limits to the North-East where a man's body stabbed through the eye with a pen is found in a deserted house. As Braucher investigates he finds he has to determine not only who was the killer but whether the dead man was truly a victim or a perpetrator himself.

The death of two bankers as the result of an accident on a road in the Berchtesgaden district of southern Bavaria takes Otto Braucher back to his beloved Alps for 'Braucher and the Trap'. Working with Austrian police from across a border that surrounds him on three sides; with an unusual victim and in an area where repossessions are turning farmers out of their homes, Braucher has to see through the range of possible suspects to find the one who has the skills to bring about the deaths whether intentionally or not.

I trust that fans of the Braucher books will welcome these additions to the series which combines the interesting elements of Germany under pressure in the early 1920s, well-realised settings and authentic characters with which to engage.

My Writing Is So Bad That It Makes People Uncomfortable

I have commented before on the reviews I receive of my books. The reviews are largely bad. Sometimes this is because I produce books that people do not want. Apparently my counter-factual history books cannot be in the alternate history section because I do not make firm enough decisions on what might have happened. My books of analysis are criticised for not being books of stories and ironically my books of stories are criticised for presenting the world as it might have been. Despite having 'Factual' and 'Counterfactual' sections in my books I apparently do not make the distinction clearly enough. My syntax is bad because my sentences are too long and also too fragmented. My books are 'BORING' as well.

Apparently despite my research, my portrayal of certain historical characters is seen as being speculative. I am apparently wrong to feel a victory for the Confederacy in the American Civil War or a US victory in Vietnam would be bad outcomes for the USA, though given the words of Donald Trump currently receiving such support I realise that I come from a very different planet to many Americans so it is inevitable that my views are different. A book featuring stories set in Britain is condemned because it is just about Britain. A story featuring the Mongols is apparently insufficiently pro-Mongol to have any credibility.

Some feel '[t]he concept is really clever. Unfortunately the writing is far from gripping.', possibly because not every story involves a huge battle. Even those who feel my books are 'interesting' will not give me better than the mediocre 3-star rating. Positive reviews present me as writing obscure stuff far away from the work of Harry Turtledove, though my books are pretty much like many of his collections, perhaps again I simply have insufficient fighting.

Nothing I do in my books, how I re-edit them or re-categorise them is enough to satisfy the majority of people who commentate on my books. I cannot find the right category for some people. I cannot write in the precise way certain readers want, though I spell check and grammar check repeatedly and revise again and again. I cannot write in American English though I have tried. I cannot turn myself into a Trump supporter and I know that there are enough books out there on Amazon in that style that fans of his have no need to come anywhere near my books. I cannot afford to use the copyrighted images that some people insist upon.

These are problems I have faced with my writing. The strength of feeling often surprises me; commentators take real offence at what I have dared to do. The attacks from so many sides make me want to abandon writing, which I know is the objective of many critics. Today's posting, however, is to indicate how much power I clearly have over people that I somehow 'lure' into reading my books. One has said that 'Even though I knew what I was buying, it just was not an enjoyable experience.' which makes my book sound like it is heroin and at least an enema. Indeed one commentator has said he found my book '[a]lmost painful'. As a writer I must be something like a venus flytrap. I am able to lure people in to buy my book and read it; not to return it for a refund as they can easily do, and yet write so badly that I make them really suffer to the extent that they cannot simply stop reading my book, but they have to utterly delete it from their e-reader.

I clearly have a weapon that maybe the British or perhaps the US government might want to pick up on. With training and practice it seems likely that I can write a book which is both so intriguing at yet so bad that it will kill someone. I know it is said that 'the pen is mightier than the sword' but had not realised how literal that the saying was. So far I guess I have produced books like a razor blade and with time I may work up to a stiletto and then a proper dagger.

My Books Creating Some Interest On The Internet

This posting is a bit of an ego-boost for me.  They say only sad people search themselves on the internet.  However, this blog has long been a tool to help me cope with life and all that it throws at me.  As can be seen from previous postings, I love writing books but am often exasperated by the feedback people give me that seems to dismiss me for being 'wrong' (as opposed to have 'wrong' opinions) or portrays me as having failed simply because I have not included something specific that they want.  I wish people would write to me here rather than condemn me on Amazon.

A recent reviewer on Amazon.co.uk complained that some of my stories were dull.  That is a fair point.  I do not agree but I accept for him they may have been.  Then he complains that I do not have dynamic links from the stories to the historical notes at the end.  This is a challenge with e-books.  People cannot put their finger in at one page and flick forward to the end of the book.  I was able to put such dynamic links into the five books concerned the evening that I read that comment.  If he had emailed me directly then I could have done it sooner.  People forget that you can amend and republish an e-book in 12 hours, sometimes even less if you are a regular publisher.

I suppose that most people do not want me to correct their error, because there is a tribe of reviewers who thrive on bringing down authors.  It is a hobby in itself.  It reminds me of all these 'errors' programmes about movies and television programmes, which show tiny mistakes that you never even notice when watching the original programme.  Some people have been great and written to me with updates or corrections and I have amended the book immediately.  However, most prefer to use any slips as a tool to condemn a book.  One word wrong on a single page in this society is enough for an entire 200-page book to be condemned as useless.  I know it makes them feel good and powerful but it means e-book authors face a much harder time than authors of the past, despite the fact that ironically, they have far greater power to amend errors.

Out of boredom, I decided to see if anyone was talking about my books in other contexts aside from the Amazon feedback sections.  In my alternate history books I outline that one of my goals is to stimulate debate about the possibilities in history and that I am happy if people disagree with me if they are discussing the topics.


This is the longest debate, about Japan becoming an ally of Germany in the First World War which comes from my in 'Other Trenches':
http://www.alternatehistory.com/Discussion/showthread.php?p=9702453 

They are not overly enthusiastic about my ideas, though it is rather presented as me saying this would happen rather than discussing the feasibility.  Some of the contributors see Japan before the First World War as a puppet of the British which is a mistaken impression.  This was the whole reason that Britain broke decades of behaviour and went into an alliance and with a country that no Power had considered a potential alliance partner.  The relationship only lasted 20 years.

The commentators also seem to miss how stretched British naval forces were in that decade with the fear of German naval power, though the fear was greater than the actuality.  They see no reason why the British would not try to restrain Japan in 1895 though this is exactly what they did in 1921-22 over the Shandong Peninsula and with warming relations with the USA they dropped Japan very quickly as an ally.  Yes, Japan did not have the strongest navy in the world, but in the North Pacific and against the forces the colonial powers could muster there, it was strong, especially if aided by the Germans.  This strength had been proven against Russia, though the commentators dismiss the naval strength Russia itself held before 1905.

This one is discussing the war between Italy and Greece in 1940-1 but mainly points to the chapter in 'Other Roads III' about the German invasion of Bulgaria:  https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/soc.history.what-if/zwZjrwRqDK4 

A couple of other people have said they have read my books:

Stig Haugdahl stated on Twitter he had read 'Other Trenches':
https://twitter.com/stighaugdahl/status/533293106804686848

 In August 2014 someone calling themselves 'Deceptively Calm' gave me a nice review: 'Just finished "In other trenches" by a guy called Rooksmoor. A great collection of WW1-What-ifs, intelligently explored. Not fiction, just alternate history. I've already bought the sequel and am eyeing his books on alternate 19th century scenarios as well.' 

 http://www.iswintercoming.com/what-are-you-reading-t16-735.html

I suppose all of us seek some supportive words. I get frustrated when someone attacks my books for being something that I never even intended them to be.  I have had to put up big warnings about the essays not being fiction.  Even then some feel that because I do not insist on a particular outcome I am somehow dodging what alternate history should be about; one even insisted I be removed from the alternate history category.  It is clear that they want me to be dogmatic so that they can be dogmatic back and dismiss my ideas.  A debate is harder to contest and they do not get the satisfaction of showing me what an idiot I am.  Book writing and reviewing has become a combat sport.

I am interested in how I often get turned from 'Alexander Rooksmoor' into simply 'Rooksmoor'.  Perhaps the blog name contributes to that, perhaps again it is characteristic of the pugnacious nature of online debate which so often turns to epithets drawn from physical violence, particularly rape.

P.P. 24/03/2015
I saw that a US reviewer, W.K. Aiken had posted a nice review of 'Route Diverted' which I felt 'got' what I have been trying to do and not simply complaining that I have not written the book that they want to write.  Though I do feature real people in the stories, I have deliberately sought to avoid the little coincidences which make me as an avid reader of 'what if?' to groan.  I want to treat the reader in a more mature way:

"Mr. Rooksmoor is a unique writer in that he does not take the usual "It's Alternate History!" tack when writing AH. Most writers will work twisty little ironies and whatnot into their prose - not a bad thing, mind you, just a common feature of the genre - and keep poking the reader with the "coincidences."

Mr. Rooksmoor has a much more subtle touch, relying on the existing knowledge of the reader a) that what is being read is fiction and b) of what really happened. He then takes a "slice of life" from whatever alternate reality he's created and lets the reader fill in the gaps. The narrative is more of a glimpse into what would be happening over the hill, around the bend and in the next town, away from the action on which Tsouras, Conroy or Turtledove would be focusing.

It's an intriguing approach and a nice contrast, but certainly more for the experienced AH maven.

Imagine Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men In A Boat" written from within a 240-year-old Commonwealth. How much would be changed? Having the advantage of "OurTime" perspective, the differences would be intriguing but the scope would be minute."

I would say that most of the scenarios have a far broader perspective than just a single book.  I like to note that small changes had the potential to affect millions.

Writer's Blues: Now the Bank Will Not Accept My Royalty Cheques

One reason for the neglect of this blog has been the fact that I have been busy writing 'what if?' history books in an effort to spread the word about this aspect of history but also to make some money.  Back in September 2012 when I first started doing this, I noted that whilst it was easy to receive royalties from Amazon for books you sold in most countries, for those sold in the USA it was a lot harder: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/kindling-some-e-books.html  The US government takes 30% of any royalties earned in the USA unless you are a US tax payer.  Unlike with sales in other countries, Amazon makes it harder still, by having a threshold of US$100 before it will pay the royalties.  For other countries, until late last year there was a threshold of around €10 before they made a payment, which meant that for some countries months and months could go by before you received the small crumbs of cash.  That limit has been taken off and you get paid whatever you have earned, even if it is equivalent to 30p.

Once I topped the US$100 mark a cheque (or 'check' as the Americans call it) was sent to me in US$, though in fact it just said 'dollars' and nothing bar Amazon's address showed that it was US$ and not Canadian, Australian or Hong Kong dollars instead.  I then had to take this to my bank, pay a £6 fee and wait six weeks while it was 'negotiated'.  By the end of the process I was lucky if I got 65% of what I had originally earned in the USA and am still liable to further tax unless I register as a US as well as a UK taxpayer.  This was very frustrating given that the USA has always been my largest market.  The situation has now got worse.  My bank, the Nationwide Building Society has started refusing cheques below US$250 and indeed returned one I had submitted to them last month and I believed was being processed.  I have contacted Amazon to see if they will hold on to my US payments until they exceed US$250 after the royalty deduction, but knowing them, they will simply ignore this and plough on saying their way is the only acceptable one.  This leaves me accumulating cheques with which I can do nothing so the 70% remaining from my sales will now go to Amazon.  It seems incredible that Amazon sticks to one way of paying these royalties and a non-electronic way which is quickly fading from usage certainly in the UK.  This week I wrote the first cheque I had written since January 2013.

I am at a loss what to do.  Cheques expire after six months and I am left trying to find a bank which can cash these cheques.  It seems ridiculous that I have to open an account at a different back just to get to my money.  There is never any point in asking Amazon to do anything and as I have noted before, despite their global reach their focus is simply on US writers with the rest of us largely being inconvenient and stupid in not understanding the 'proper way' these things should be done.  However, the many thousands of us are now earning Amazon a lot more money that we were doing before, simply because they stubbornly adhere to their self-made rules, but I guess that is the way they like it.

P.P. 01/03/2014
Surprisingly Amazon responded to my query and told me how I could alter the cheque payment to an electronic payment so money from US sales now comes the same way as for the other countries.  Why this is not the default as it is for all the other countries, I have no idea.  However, fortunately it has resolved my difficulty.  I did find that HSBC will take foreign cheques of less than US$250 so paid the outstanding cheque into an old account I had there, fortunately.  They charge £6 per transaction just like Nationwide.

From Conception To Retail In 3 Days: My Fastest e-Book

As regular readers have known, around two years ago I got into producing e-books. Not only did I self-publish the novels I had been writing over the past thirty years but I also made use of blog postings to create essay collections on alternate history.  These latter were very popular, especially those concerning the Second World War.  However, as time passed they began to be criticised, as is typical for many e-books, on the basis of minute points and people simply disagreeing with the content or the style and labelling it with a one-star review.  The worst being a review that complained that a 1940s pastiche novel was a 1940s pastiche novel and as the review said 'no-one wants that', so the critic felt it was down to him to remove it from circulation.  A one-star review means the book is no longer picked up by search engines and basically sales cease.  I have kept the book on sale for want of knowing what else to do with it.

Self-published e-books have brought other trends beyond the absolute power of a single reviewer to destroy a book.  One that is discussed in 'The Guardian' newspaper last weekend by Philip Hensher: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/01/philip-hensher-why-short-is-sweet  as if it had suddenly just appeared, is that such an approach allows the publication and sale of short stories in a way that has probably not been feasible for a century, maybe even longer.  I think Hensher would be pushed to sell a short story at £2.29 on Amazon as he suggests, but maybe someone like Zadie Smith who he focuses on, has sufficient standing to achieve that price.

Hensher seems to be oblivious to the fact that this trend has been going on for five years or so.  I guess he still reads books he buys in WH Smiths rather than traipsing through the online Kindle listings on Amazon on a Friday afternoon or clicking through from a blog to an author's stories sold on Smashwords.  Certainly he should have been aware of 'Shetl Days' by Harry Turtledove, an established if no literary author, published only online as a short e-book for 99p back in April 2011.  Hensher is write to praise the ability to produce and get out to the public books of very varied lengths.  Ironically, or perhaps logically, on Amazon the best-selling genre of short-story seem to be 4,000-word erotic e-books; I guess because people are not looking for much character or plot development in such stories!

This year with my books being torn apart for representing Finland in the 1940s in a way which people disapproved of, apparently using too many online as opposed to paper sources and having 'too much history' in my alternate history e-books, I took many of them down.  They were not making any money and it was soul-destroying just to be sitting there being slagged off in a whole host of ways.  These days, one minor typographical error is enough to have the entire book condemned as useless.  I guess that is a characteristic of our indignant societies; people are angry that their authors can actually be human and cannot afford to employ editors, even though most publishing houses do not bother with them these days anyway.  Conversely, people I meet want to see my books, but if they even read them, they never bother to include a review, leading me to think I indeed must be so bad and they are simply too embarrassed to say.

Some constructive criticism is what all authors need, such as suggestions on style or level of detail.  In this world it is all or nothing, either the reviewer condemns your work as needing to be removed for causing offence due to minor errors or the person is too embarrassed to say anything about what they did not like in the book.  The former simply want you gone out of the way of the 'proper' authors they admire so much more.  The latter, well, I do not know what they want, perhaps simply proof that when you say you are an author you actually are, maybe they hope to catch you out in confessing you are lying and the evidence simply ruins that game so they have nothing else to say.

Anyway, you get the picture.  However, these set-backs have not doused the ideas that I have bubbling away in my head.  Sometimes I have to simply write a story to get it out of my head otherwise it bubbles around in there getting in the way of other thoughts and indeed preventing me from sleeping.  One reason why the 10th-12th of the Braucher stories were written so fast was that they had been planned some years before but never written and reflecting on them kept me awake, I simply had to get them out and finished to get enough sleep and maintain my health.  This brings me to 'Against the Devil's Men' which is an e-book just under 9,000 words in length that I started writing on the evening of Saturday, 2nd November 2013, as a result of the weather meaning the wireless reception where I am staying was too poor to allow me to continue my game of  'Rome II Total War'.  I wrote the remaining 7,300 words of the book throughout 3rd November.  I edited it after work on 4th November, having created most of the front cover and the synopsis over my lunch break.  I put it up for sale that evening and by the morning of 4th November, had sold one copy. 

Of course, the ideas had been around for a long time.  The book is set in western Normandy in 1272 in an alternate world in which rather than retreating from Europe in the 1240s the Mongols have remained to continue their conquests and destruction.  The ideas go back to me reading 'The Devil's Horsemen' by James Chambers (1979) in 2007, playing 'Medieval II Total War' and subsequently producing a chapter on this blog and then in my e-book of alternate histories of the Middle Ages 'On Other Fields' (2012).  The story is told from the perspective of a cardinal charged with inspecting the frontline in the bocage country of Normandy.  I worry that it is too dense because the cardinal engages in religious thoughts and controversies.  I was also conscious of avoiding anachronisms, so he refers to the Mongols as 'Tartars' a mix up with the Tatars another steppe people; for centuries 'Mongol' meant a group of nomads rather than their ethnicity.  In addition, being seen as coming from the Devil, this was a reference to Tartarus, a hellish region of the underworld in Ancient Greek mythology.  He also refers to the Folban, the German term at the time for the people we now call the Cumans, another nomadic steppe tribe but one which fled in front of the Mongols and converted to Christianity in the 1220s.

My short stories have never sold as well as my longer books.  However, I have enjoyed being able to produce and sell a book within three days.  In the 1930s books on political events were often overtaken by a change in the global situation before they had been published.  In these days not only can you blog about such events but you can get a book out while events are still running; indeed with an e-book you can update as they change.  Perhaps Philip Hensher should catch up with the rest of the world and reflect on that new slant on writing and publishing.

P.P. 01/01/2016
I realised that I should have updated this posting in June 2014.  That month I stopped selling 'Against the Devil's Men' in large part because it was criticised as juvenile for taking the French rather than the Mongol perspective on the Mongol invasion of Europe.  Given how inhumane and brutal the Mongol invaders were to Christians and Muslims alike, destroying many aspects of civilisation where they attacked and killing people in particularly cruel ways, I would be very worried if I could write from the Mongol perspective on these things.  I did include the story in 'Déviation: What If? Stories of the French' (2014) where it seems to have attracted less attention.

My Delusions Of Being An Author

With 2013 the bad reviews of my e-books have turned from a trickle, if not to a flood, then a regular river.  I never would have expected that I would have been so savaged for my views on Finland.  I am taken to task for portraying it as an ally rather than simply a co-belligerent of Nazi Germany.  Furthermore apparently my counter-factual analysis is poorly researched and superficial.  I am naive in that I focus on single elements of change and apparently fail to grasp every logistical and political element of the implications, only mentioning some of them.  I never start with foregone conclusions, but rather through testing the ideas come to conclusion of whether the alternative was feasible and the extent of implications from it.  This is clearly an unacceptable approach.

Ironically I worried that my ideas were too sweeping.  However, clearly the style of Peter Tsouras whose writing encompasses every movement of every military unit on a day is what people want to read. I set out to write essay collections that stimulated debate.  I did not aim in 2-5,000 words to cover absolutely every aspect of a 'what if?' and so I am attacked as being incompetent and superficial.  Others feel that I put in too much actual history and looked at too many potential outcomes.  Overall there is no acceptance for the type of book that I have been producing and selling for the past year.  There is no point in setting myself up to be dismissed as foolish and sloppy.  Clearly there are loads of other writers out there who are far better than me and so I am poor in comparison.

Yes, I have made mistakes.  I have portrayed Finland in the 1940s in a way which is apparently unacceptable.  My defence of my view of its government is apparently too weak to be acceptable.  I mistyped 'John' when I meant to write 'James' Buchanan, the US president.  I also managed to mix up Rhode Island which is the size of London with Michigan which is comparable in size with the size of the UK.  My spellchecker changed 'regent' to 'region' and I failed to stop it.  Of course, in this world of the single reader as all-powerful, these errors, corrected in a matter of seconds, mark my books out as unacceptable forever more.  I cannot afford and editor.  I know no-one with sufficient knowledge to edit the books that I write covering so many countries and time periods.  Errors slip through even with leading authors, I have noted errors in books by Philip Kerr, Henning Mankel and for Jonathan Franzen the entirely wrong version of his book 'Freedom' was published.  These days, make a slip-up and that is your book condemned without chance of redemption.  I have been told that there are so many errors in my books that people have not got time to list them all.  This shows that I clearly know so little about history despite researching it and teaching it for the past twenty years, that I can never hope to write an 'accurate' book.

I used to think that I wrote English well.  I do have a tendency to write over-involved sentences with too many sub-clauses.  To some readers it is difficult to penetrate such writing.  At the same time Britons and Americans see my text as too fragmented.  Despite all my reading and re-reading and editing, apparently I end up with incomplete sentences and too much repetition of words.  I clearly lack the ability to step far enough back from my writing to see this, that is even though I spend far more time editing than I do writing.  I made a mistake in trying a 'chatty' style for my books.  Clearly what customers insist on is a very serious style with short sentences that are complete.  Though I have tried to do this I have clearly failed.  Readers find my style so offensive that they simply have to write about it in detail.  Apparently every page of my books are filled with grammatical errors, no matter how much I run the grammar checker over my text.

I have clearly been deluded from comments on this blog and from sales of my books over the past eight months that I could be an author of counter-factual books.  I thought I had found a style which was appropriate for e-books, engaging people in historical debate without drowning them in details.  However, it is clear that I was wrong in this.  My books clearly frustrate and upset people to such an extent that they have to take them to pieces and portray me as a foolish, sloppy, naive and ignorant man.  The one comment that I cannot forgive is to be told that I lack the skill of Newt Gingrich.  Gingrich is not a historian, he is an extreme right-wing propagandist who supports utterly unacceptable policies.  To have had my work even compared with his is incredibly insulting.

There is no point fighting against the strength of opinion regarding my books.  Clearly their very existence offends people and so I am removing all the counter-factual history books from sale and will eliminate all the references from this blog.  I will keep my novels active until the torrent of abuse comes about them.  In this age of indignation it is a mistake to put yourself in a position where people are able to pour vitriol on what you do.  The personal cost is high.

The Importance Of Sock Puppetry

Regular readers will have noticed how I have not been blogging a great deal over the past few months and that various ‘what if?’ postings and stories have disappeared from here to appear in e-books on Amazon. I did this for the simple basis that I was bullied into selling my house at a knock-down price and after months of unemployment I am in a job which pays £8000 per year less than my previous job and £16,000 less than what I was earning in 2010, whilst costs have risen for all of us. I am compelled to live with my parents until I can find a room to rent within a reasonable distance of my work, so that I simply do not spend what I save on rent in travel costs. The only consolation is that I am not being bullied in my current job. However, I am having to put up with the fact that no-one has decided to train me and I have to pick up scraps of how to do things from my colleagues who ration out such knowledge jealously. One told me I had no hope of escaping from this job, which as you can imagine hardly inspired me.


One thing I thought I knew I could do well was write. I certainly write fast and when not depressed or jobless I can turn out 2-3000 words per evening. In a job where despite my colleagues being very busy, I have not been trained in a range of activities and am begging to be given a password to access certain software, I am left trying to appear busy when, in fact, I have very little to do. Thus, me typing away busily at my computer looks reasonable. In addition, as I have commented before: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/kindling-some-e-books.html with the KDP system run by Amazon, I found a way to get a number of my novels and collections of essays on sale as e-books. I have sold a variety of these over the past months, the best has had around 400 sales, the worst less than 5. However, they all bring in money, even in small amounts. The system in getting payments from the USA, my main market, is hard. The US government takes 30% at source. Then you get sent a cheque in US$ which costs £6 and takes six weeks to process. However, I have been making around £200 per month, on which I will also have to pay UK tax come April. Obviously my hope was that my sales would increase as I got better known and this monthly amount.

The key challenge for me has proven to be buyer reviews. Back in 2008, I noted how hard it was becoming for sellers when buyers had so much power: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2008/06/strange-death-of-ebay.html  EBay did not collapse but the message boards for sellers show how hard it is for sellers to continue trading, as their account can be suspended after two negative reviews from buyers. Buyers are very aggressive in their comments and get upset about minor issues. Yes, of course, it is right to complain if an item takes weeks to arrive or is damaged. However, some buyers seem to expect things to be teleported across continents to arrive days after they have bought them, with no recognition of the reliability of their postal service. Some US shoppers seem to still believe the UK is part of the USA and are surprised we use a different currency and are on a different continent. One UK seller I know had a customer who bought some greetings cards. Thirty-eight days after they had been sent to her she wrote and complained she had not received them. The seller sent replacements and noted this on the buyer’s feedback. The reason for this is that some buyers are serial ‘non-receivers’ and are simply lying. Just making this statement that a replacement set of cards had been sent, led the buyer not only to leave negative feedback on the seller but also to bombard her with abusive emails.

In the world of online retail the buyer is not just simply ‘always right’ but is also immensely powerful. A single individual can drive a seller out of business on the basis of a petulant attitude. I guess it is of no surprise that I have encountered a similar experience selling e-books on Amazon.

I have to come to the conclusion that I am a very poor writer. Having sold over 500 copies of various books, I have had only three pieces of feedback and all of them are negative. One issue with Kindle sales, as I have been made aware of by those people I know who own them, exclusively middle-aged women, that people will buy stacks of books and never get around to reading many of them. One woman I worked with had 200 books on her Kindle within 3 months of purchasing it. I know that some people buy a set of my books at one time and I can imagine that many are sitting on their Kindles unread. Of course, given my experiences, if they did read them maybe they would be as critical as those people who have provided feedback.

Of the feedback I have received, one reader complained that I had portrayed wartime Finland’s political system wrongly so marked the book down. Another reviewing a different book said that I gave too much detail regarding the alternate outcomes that the ‘what if?’ element was lost. I do not really understand what they meant by that. The worst was on a third book which went into immense detail about how the style of writing was wrong. Being made up of essays from this blog, I had adopted a relaxed, chatty style, which I thought was refreshing and would make the books accessible. However, clearly the opposite was the case and I was condemned for the book being apparently incomprehensible and also with factual errors ‘on every page’.

As I have noted before, on Amazon, a 3-star review will reduce my sales (and I imagine those of other authors too), but two-thirds. The 2-star review I received for the last one mentioned above, not only made the book unsellable but also froze the sales of my other books, just before Christmas when I had hoped sales would be increasing. The number of books sold but then returned, has also jumped up. As a result I have had to withdraw the book for fear of destroying sales of the others. I cannot remove the review. I was told by Amazon I could respond to it, but this turned out not to be true, it kept saying I had to buy my own book in order to respond to a comment on it. Weeks of work has been destroyed by some review someone wrote in their lunch break.

Online reviews are a way of giving value to the facilities websites provide. Every time we buy something we are prompted to comment on the service we have received. In addition, commonly now, for example, with Amazon we are similarly asked to review the quality of the product. It is seen as a necessary part of the online experience. However, we live in a society in which indignation is a cultural norm. We expect anyone supplying us anything whether it is a bed & breakfast guest house, a baker, a bread making machine or a book, to address our own precise personal needs exactly, even without us saying what they are. If anyone falls short of writing a book in the very way we want it at this moment, then we feel it is our right, in fact our duty to get angry and express that anger. This is what makes online reviewing so very hazardous for providers. No-one seems eager to express pleasure at the service or item they have received, such pleasure is taken for granted. No-one bothers with neutral comments. It is simply the feeling of disdain that encourages a purchaser to make the effort to comment.

Yes, it is in the consumers’ interest to show up poorly written books. However, they can be destroyed by someone taking offence to a particular aspect. In one case I saw a book receive a 1-star rating because a new edition had come out with a new cover and the reader had bought this without realising he already owned the book. Rather than accept that he had been careless he put the blame on the author. It is always a challenge when writing counter-factual books as people will often rate them not by the quality of the writing or the analysis but simply whether they agree with the outcomes the book portrays. In theory such feedback should be beneficial in improving quality. Kindle books can easily be taken down, edited and put back up again within 12 hours (if in English). However, there is no point in doing that as the revised book will always carry the black mark of the review of the original version no matter how much you change it. You can ‘unpublish’ and even ‘block’ books on KDP but you can never remove the book from the site. Re-writing the synopsis to say the book is no longer available due to criticism is not accepted either; I have tried.

How does all of this connect to sock puppetry? It comes from comics/satirists who use a sock to make a simple puppet that they then have a kind of ventriloquist’s dialogue with. The most famous one is probably Lamb Chop, a puppet operated by Shari Lewis (1933-98) from 1957 onwards. It is a term which has come to refer to when authors use pseudonyms to write positive reviews of their books online. They can alternatively use friends to do this as well. In September crime author R.J. Ellroy was criticised for using the pseudonyms Jelly Bean and Nicodemus Jones not only to praise his own work but also criticise that of rivals. In 2010 Orlando Figes was charged in the same way and you can find cases going back to John Lott who 2000-3 used the name Mary Rosh to post positive reviews. Thus, it has been a tendency really since the birth of online reviewing; apparently the term goes back to 1993.

Unfortunately for my career as a writer, Amazon seems to have methods to prevent sock puppetry and despite my efforts I cannot create any kind of identity which can even respond to the negative comments that are being put on my books. Even if I could I am not certain that I could counter-balance comments which are so dismissive. Consequently, one-by-one my books are going to be snuffed out from Amazon as someone decided to turn their disdain on each one and end any sales of it. I suppose I have learnt a lesson, that I am not capable of writing for the global English-reading audience; I just do not have the language that people are happy to read. I have tried an easy-going style, that has not worked; I have tried a more serious style, that has not worked. In addition, writing counter-factual books makes me very vulnerable. It only takes me writing that a particular outcome was more or less likely or characterising a particular regime in a specific way to receive a bad review for the entire book. With that the book will no longer be bought, I guess because people judge by the star rating rather than the actual text of the review. I have no intention to go around damaging other authors, as I know how easily even a successful one might be eliminated by bad reviews. The customer has ultimate power because my books are now trapped on Amazon. It is not down to me if I am an author or not, rather this lies in the hands of some bored individual who decides to take against me.