I offer detailed but mostly invented narratives about the provenance of my books.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
All of my books are based in some way on my personal experiences, or the experiences of members of my family, or the stories kids would tell me in school.
As an author of narrative history, I read a lot of history books.
I went back to the notion of story, which is always a good thing to have if you're trying to get people to pay attention to a book and pick up information along the way.
I buy a lot of books I've found via the Internet, whose existences I'd otherwise never have known about.
I tend to research as I write so that the narrative can take priority, which is important for a piece of fiction, I think, finding out facts as and when I need to.
As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.
I am a story-teller, and I look to academic research... for ways of augmenting story-telling.
I always market research my books before I hand them in by showing them to five or six close friends who I trust to be honest with me, so they are very heavily re-written already.
I write novels, mostly historical ones, and I try hard to keep them accurate as to historical facts, milieu and flavor.
I don't need validation, recognition or praise. What I need are facts and the facts are that one of my books gets sold, somewhere in the world, every second.