Well does sex sell book? You might say of course not its all down to the content but is it?
What attracts you to a page? For men it would be a beautiful woman and for woman a handsome man showing his six pack and looking sexy but does it sell books?
How many of you women looked at this page because of the man in the picture?
But would it entice you to read the book?
I was told to sex up my stories but how do you sex up stories about working in a prison? It's just not possible, no matter what sort of writer you are you cannot make working in a prison sexy, so that's not going to sell my book
Therefore the story-line has to be strong, ah yes that's all well and good if you are creating a fictional story and you can also add a bit of sexual intrigue into the mix but my story is based on real events and in real life a prison is a pretty non sexual environment, well apart from what the prisoners get up to behind the closed doors, in fact I remember on one occasion over the Christmas period, I was up on the B5 landing which was one of the longest prison landings in the country and as I walked along counting the prisoner numbers my colleague on the other side of the landing was standing outside a cell looking through the spy-hole
‘What you doing Malcolm’ I shouted across
‘Watching these two prisoners having sex with each other’
‘Well stop them it’s illegal’
‘Yea I will just as one of them gets to his point of no return’
And at that precise moment Malcolm banged on the cell door and shouted
‘Oy you two your nicked for having illegal sex’
But this little anecdote is still not going to sell my book as much as if I were to write about having illicit sex with the woman in the picture above is it.
Okay so I’ve established that my subject material for my book is never going to be sexy and racy so how do I get it to be interesting enough to entice my readers to read the book, well the only way is through word of mouth, one person likes it and tell a few of their friends and maybe one more will buy the book and so on, But the truth is I never expected my book to make big sales, it was my story and I just wanted to achieve a publication of my story and leave something of me for my grandchildren and their children to have a little piece of me in the future.
Remember Andy Warhol's words back in 1968 "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes", Although on researching this statement it was not actually said in those terms and not all by Andy Warhol, but I transgress. The point is my first book being published was never going to make money but it did achieve certain immortality for me through my family.
So my book was never going to be about sex but the facts had to be real and funny and even today I often think of little anecdotal incidents from back then and wish I had included those stories into the book to make it more humorous.
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