It was a fruitful and satisfying London Book Fair (LBF) in April — my first ever — where I participated over three days at the beautiful Olympia Exhibition Centre in a range of meetings, seminars, workshops and chance encounters with other authors, publishers, book printers and binders, film producers and even one or two coffee carts! Hachette (UK), which earlier in 2023 took delivery of BETRAYED for release and distribution through the UK and into Europe, were terrific support, and their marketing staff offered me valuable insights into the LBF in order to maximise my time and opportunities at the event. While worldwide sales — starting in Australia with the book’s release in June 2022, and then more broadly online later that year and into the UK/Europe in early 2023 — are not in the ‘best-seller’ stratosphere, the numbers are certainly very healthy for a first-time author in a genre — true crime — which has been buffetted by a number of competing distractions: COVID certainly turned readers more towards romance, fantasy and fiction (and away, to some extent, from non-fiction and true crime) given the terrible consequences of the pandemic (in other words life was a struggle enough without true-crime reminding us all how negative it could be!); true-crime podcasts have increased significantly across the internet and whereas at one time, true-crime lovers largely got their fix from detailed re-telling of the events in books, there are now podcasts with actual voices of the dead and the defendants, or recreations of the crime and events surrounding it. And finally, book sales continue to be challenged by other forms of ‘entertainment’ as discretionary income tightens and living costs increase.
But that said, I remain confident about BETRAYED’s future as I know it’s a well-researched investigation which has so far captivated thousands of readers with its story of drugs, deception, corruption, family betrayal, unequal justice, compromised foreign relations, political compromise and ultimately, redemption of a sort. And that’s only the beginning!
You’ll be interested to learn BETRAYED has been recently listed on the website Shepherd.com, which is a two-year-old online bookstore with almost half a million monthly visitors. They asked me to list five of my current favourite books and offer a short review for each, which I’ve done. It was fun and is a great way to not only attract more eyeballs to my book, but also to these five others — all Australian authors, incidentally.
The other exciting news comes from the Australian Crime Writers Association, sponsors of The Ned Kelly Awards, Australia’s oldest (since 1995) and most prestigious recognition honouring published crime fiction and true crime writing. BETRAYED has been shortlisted alongside four other very good books in the 2023 Ned Kelly Award Best True Crime category!
It’s up against ‘Tiger Tiger Tiger – The Lindt Cafe Siege‘ by Officer A; ‘Death Row at Truro‘ by Geoff Plunkett; ‘Rattled‘ by Ellis Gunn; and ‘Out of the Ashes‘ by Megan Norris. Just being short-listed is a real honour and I am so appreciative of the Australian Crime Writers Association’s support for Australian authors.
And finally, to those readers who enquire about seeing BETRAYED on the screen, and to those producers and directors who have contacted my publisher Hachette, or me about rights, I am hopeful the book’s early optioning to be turned into a story for the big (or less big) screen will pay dividends in the coming weeks and months as we get closer and closer to a decision. The truth is though, when I first became interested in the fate of Toddie and Beezie 45 years ago, I wasn’t thinking about a book, let alone a film or TV deal. Instead, I was thinking about two retired American women in a foreign land just handed a 14-year jail sentence with no chance of parole, for a crime into which they had been duped and betrayed by a close family member.
Their legacy is what remains most important to me.
Sandi Logan 