Tag Archives: self-publishing

Just Another Conspiracy Theory?

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Writer’s blog: Stardate: 14.06.2013

I am yet to try Dan Brown. I have not given over time in my life to wonder about who was really behind the assassination of JFK. I’ve not felt the need to dwell on how come I look nothing like my father but a lot like our old milkman. I have no personal history of wanting to uncover ‘truth’. So, why am I thinking like I am? Where has the idea come from? I’m not a trouble-maker by nature.

I’ve not seen anything even suggested about it on the Internet and I’ve looked. Not a hint or a whiff regarding my wonderings. No mention in a blog-post, a tweet, a forum or an online article. I think that I could be alone, potentially joining the ranks of Felt, Tripp, Manning, Snowden. But more famous. (Is this just a cheap attempt to raise my sagging author profile and fuel downloads of my books?)

Should my worst fears be confirmed then I can only imagine that the publishing/self-publishing world will not be the same place again for a lot of people. And I don’t just mean authors. Such is my unease at the possible repercussions both personal and for Mankind of my theory turning out to having an element of ‘truth’ that I don’t even want to be associated with it. I want nothing to do with it. I don’t want to be the one remembered as bringing down ‘mother’. In…fact…I…am…using…all…my…willpower…to…stop…typing…but…I…can’t…help…myself.

I have written before about being my own worst enema.

In the film ‘The Matrix’ there is a scene where the code of the ‘fake’ world is broken and the screen of the monitor displays columns of numbers and symbols like falling green rain as ‘their’ lies are exposed and the ‘real’ world is unlocked. Sort of.

(Someone just tweeted me to, ‘Get on with it!’)

It’s about Amazon and download figures. I’m not talking about the algorithms that they employ to shuffle the runners and riders in the various charts. Although, if I’m half-right it would go some way to explaining why Amazon are so secretive about these algorithms and so reluctant to provide information surrounding sales numbers generally.

Below, I’m going to share my download figures for my book Rope Enough for the period since it became free to download. When I noticed that the book had been price-matched by Amazon to zero and downloads started mounting each other (?), I thought that it might be amusing to check and record them every day when I get up. Bloody sad too. I’ve been doing this since April 12th, which is only a day or so after things changed and approximately two months ago.

My first question that goes along with these figures is something like this: Do I find it an acceptable coincidence that the numbers of downloads per day are so similar for so long when there are literally millions of ebook readers out there regularly downloading books onto reading devices? That’s quite a long question.

My second question based on me giving the short answer ‘no’ to question one goes like this: If it is not an acceptable coincidence, is Amazon controlling and manipulating the download numbers? More on what I don’t know what I’m talking about after the figures.

(My ‘argument’ becomes slightly more valid late May onwards.)

April 12th – 784

April 13th – 971

April 14th – 1271

April 15th – 1041

April 16th – 1244

April 17th – 1522

April 18th – 1741

April 19th – 1452

April 20th – 1392

April 21st – 1952

April 22nd – 1311

April 23rd – 1093

April 24th – 966

April 25th – 1037

April 26th – 879

April 27th – 1046

April 28th – 1060

April 29th – 793

April 30th – 761

May 1st – 705

May 2nd – 705 (really)

May 3rd – 562

May 4th – 672

May 5th – 720

May 6th – 683

May 7th – 581

May 8th – 718

May 9th – 685

May 10th – 592

May 11th – 673

May 12th – 741

May 13th – 520

May 14th – 618

May 15th – 548

May 16th – 491

May 17th – 523

May 18th – 569

May 19th – 610

May 20th – 538

May 21st – 467

May 22nd – 421

May 23rd – 470

May 24th – 482

May 25th – 387

May 26th – 466

May 27th – 503

May 28th – 471

May 29th – 487

May 30th – 460

May 31st – 401

June 1st – 445

June 2nd – 538

June 3rd – 478

June 4th – 468

June 5th – 554

June 6th – 467

June 7th – 410

June 8th – 411

June 9th – 587

June 10th – 487

June 11th – 470

June 12th – 501

June 13th – 418

Okay, initially there isn’t much to get excited about, but from May 20th to now generally speaking there just doesn’t seem to be the fluctuation in daily download figures that I would expect when I consider the number of people out there with ebook reading devices. Am I wrong?

If Amazon were to be controlling and manipulating download figures, why?

Does my experience resemble the experiences of others?

Am I reading too much into these figures?

Have I become unhealthily paranoid as opposed to healthily paranoid?

Is there enough reliability and validity in the figures to make them worthy of consideration?

It’s not simply these similar figures of mine that cause me to wonder about things. As a self-publisher I look at the charts about as often as an alcoholic thinks about a quick snifter. The Amazon chart that I look at most often is the Crime, Thrillers & Mystery > Police Procedurals, which is where my books are featured. There are authors that have been lingering around the top ten of this chart like flies around a turd on a hot day for months.

Now, I am not saying that they don’t deserve to be there and I do. This is not that kind of blog-post. My point is that some of these authors have been there a long time and they are not household names and they don’t have huge numbers of positive reviews for their writing, or necessarily huge numbers of reviews. Some of them are self-publishers and some of them I’ve never heard of. All of which means nothing, of course, but I can’t help wondering why any of us are where we are.

Maybe the answer is simple. Perhaps they just get enough downloads on a daily basis to keep them there whereas I get enough downloads on a daily basis to keep me where I am.

Just two more questions:

Why is my monitor screen displaying incomprehensible code that looks like falling green rain?

Who is that banging on my front door?

The following is a transcript of the conversation overhead by the missing author’s mother and not to be bothered with by anyone with a life.

Agent Smith: We meet at last.

Mr Tidy: And you are?

Agent Smith: A Smith. Agent Smith.

Mr Tidy: Bit weird.

Agent Smith: Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.

Mr Tidy: I think that you must be looking for Neo. He lives at number fourteen. This is number twelve.

Agent Smith: I hate this place. This zoo. This prison. This reality, whatever you want to call it, I can’t stand it any longer. It’s the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I’ve somehow been infected by it.

Mr Tidy: Hang on a minute. That’s a bit strong. You can hardly hold me responsible for the bin-men being late.

Agent Smith: I’m going to enjoy watching you die.

Mr Tidy: I really think that you should leave now. MUM!

Don’t Panic!

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Writers blog: Stardate: 07.06.2013

Part 1:

Because of the timing of the competition that shall not be named run by the organisation that shall remain nameless that I failed to make an impression upon, last week’s blog-post was given over to clearing the ground for my subsequent face-planting.

But I had other news. Shocking news. What I really wanted to write about last week was my discovery and consequent reaction to learning that one of my books had been pirated and was available for download on the Internet. Really. Don’t believe me? http://pehahupa.jimdo.com/2013/05/30/rope-enough-the-romney-and-marsh-files-download/

I remember that when I stopped screaming, got my reptilian brain under control and my mind rationally processing the information and the consequences of my work being pirated (I would potentially never earn another penny out of the Romney and Marsh Files. Why would anyone buy them if they could download them for free?!) I almost had a stroke (apologies to anyone who was just offended. Please don’t lecture me on how truly horrible and debilitating a stroke really is. I know. It’s just a figure of speech.)

It was really a worrying fifteen minutes. A bit like reading about the cause of Michael Douglas’ throat cancer. I shudder to think some of the places that man has had his tongue.

I first learned of the situation when I noticed that Amazon.com had started giving away Making a Killing for free again in their price-matching way of doing things. I don’t want Making a Killing or Joint Enterprise being given away for free. I’m giving away Rope Enough as it is.

Amazon would only price-match to zero if they’d been advised by a customer that the book was available for download elsewhere for free. So I searched the Internet. And found ALL my books available for download on sites that I had no knowledge of. It was about this time that my stomach felt the way it did an hour after I consumed 3kg of cherries in thirty minutes.

Everyone knows that you’ve got two hopes of getting stuff taken down from the Internet that was put up in a country that was once part of the USSR – Bob Hope and No Hope. I was a worried man.

I emailed the service provider and asked them to take it down. I emailed Amazon begging them to ignore it – it’s piracy, I said. Amazon wrote back quickly and said it’s not; it’s Sony. What? Sony? Punch in Sony ebooks author name Oliver Tidy and sure enough all three Romney and Marsh Files available for free download. I was incandescent. How the fuck? Who the fuck? When the fuck? Why the fuck? Smashwords. It must be. Smashwords didn’t tell Sony to remove MAK and JE from their catalogue when I ‘unpublished’ them from Smashwords all those weeks ago and a reader has only just noticed and notified Amazon. And then, oh shit, if someone does the same with Joint Enterprise then suddenly all my books are being given away for free by Amazon and on top of that Amazon will rap me over the knuckles because MAK is in the KDP programme and it’s not supposed to be available for download anywhere else. It would be a violation of T&C. I could go to prison. I could be colour-listed. Or I could email Smashwords.

Good news – everyone was really quick, helpful and efficient about it. Amazon acted quickly and replied promptly with friendly, helpful emails. Smashwords sorted it quickly and were friendly. Sony removed the books without much delay. Even that service provider took down that website within forty-eight hours. I was pretty impressed all round.

My Amazon.com prices reverted back to what they were. I’d given away over two-hundred copies of MAK, but funnily enough it gave a bit of a boost to downloads of the other two titles.

What about the other pirated copies being offered on the web? I hear you ask. Well, when it all kicked off I smartly checked out the Amazon forums. Another useful resource. The consensus of opinion there was, don’t worry about it. Generally this kind of pirating is just a scam to get people to part with their credit card details. And when I went back to where the books were still available, sure enough one had to sign up, log in, provide this and that information. I don’t think that I have anything to worry about. And like they say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. You know what I mean.

Part 2:

Still working hard on the two Acer Sansom novels. I have some help for these and it’s all taking a little longer because of it. Good job too. If I’d sent them out when I thought that they were ready I would inevitably have had to suffer the similar valid criticisms that I have for the R&M Files regarding punkchuation, gramer and speelling errorz. I know that the books will be worth the extra wait. I haven’t had anyone asking after them, but should there be any readers keeping an eye out for publication my apologies for the delay. Other than that I can only crave your understanding.

Failure is just an option.

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I have big news of a personal nature to share this morning with all other writers out there who seek recognition and validation for their efforts.

Yesterday, I blogged about the clock ticking down to the official announcement of the CWA Debut Daggers Crime Writing Award Shortlist at the Crimefest International Crime Fiction Convention in Bristol. This was something that I had entered my three Romney and Marsh Files into. And because of my core belief in my writing and these books I confess to having harboured genuine hope of getting on that list.

I didn’t. I’m now officially part of the chaff.

Naturally, I’m disappointed, but there is nothing ever to be gained by wallowing in self-pity. And I’m not into self-doubt where my writing is concerned.

Anyway a good friend of mine advised me to check out the comments on Amazon of the books I have published if I needed a boost. No need. I have them all memorised. Well, only the good ones.

While I was on the computer, I went to my blog to see if anyone has visited recently and found the following comment posted this morning in my ‘About Me’ page:

Hi. Just finished the second Romney book and downloading the next. I have thoroughly enjoyed your writing. The two main characters are believable and the story lines are not bogged down in minute detail like many other detective books tend to be. Well done and thank you!

Carole, thank you for your most timely, welcome and encouraging comment.

I’m not known for dishing out good advice, let alone taking it (you should see the train wreck that my life is) but today I will make an exception. Here’s something that all writers slaving away at their art could do worse than to take note of: If you’re looking for recognition and validation of your work, as I am, you need only look as far as what your readers take the time and trouble to let you know what they think. No one’s opinions matter more than theirs.

It’s Crunch Time!

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This week, I wrote five hundred words of rubbish on another blog-post idea before I realised that my heart wasn’t in it. So I ditched it and decided to write about what’s really on my mind, what’s been on my mind all week and what’s been lurking in the deepest recesses of my thought box for the last few months to be lured out and toyed with now and again, like a good plot twist, as I sit in Starfucks and dream about being a ‘real’ author who sits in Starfucks all day.

Tonight is a very big night in the calendar for around five hundred unpublished crime authors across the universe. Tonight could quite easily prove to be a watershed in the lives of a few of them. Tonight most of their hearts are going to be broken; dreams are going to be shattered; spirits crushed; tears will well and fall; cats are going to get kicked; alcohol is going to drown sorrows and there is likely to be some swearing (good swearing and bad swearing). For tonight, ten unpublished crime writers are going to have to hang on to their hats and their stools as their names are revealed as having been selected for the CWA Debut Daggers Crime Writing Award Shortlist at the Crimefest International Crime Fiction Convention in Bristol. The unsuccessful will be cast aside like the soiled £50 notes that Dan Brown is (allegedly) choking his chicken into for fun these days.

In October 2012 I wrote the following blog-post  https://olivertidy.wordpress.com/2012/10/07/and-the-winner-is/

In January 2013 I wrote this blog-post  https://olivertidy.wordpress.com/2013/01/08/the-acid-test-aka-a-cunning-plan/

You can see that I’ve thought about the Debut Dagger a bit. Like buying £75 worth of Lottery tickets, I think that I’ve had something out of my entries already in the form of fantasising about someone posh reading my name out and other people having to listen to him, bored. (I once heard the National Lottery referred to as taxation by illusion. I wonder why I’m thinking of that now.) For all but ten entrants, that bit of fantasy is all we’re going to get for our money.

Of course, getting on the shortlist guarantees nothing for an author. The CWA even boasts that winning the Debut Dagger is no guarantee of subsequent industry interest. But…

Will it be the end of the world for me if I don’t get a mention? No. It’s more serious than that. It will be the end of my efforts to try to attract the notice of a literary agent and then a traditional publishing deal. I do not query agents anymore and I will not enter this competition again. That reads as a bit snooty. It’s not meant to. It’s just how I feel because of how things have gone for me in self-publishing in the last couple of months. Like I said in my last blog-post: I don’t need a traditional publishing deal, but I do want one. I’m just not prepared to go begging for one any more.

Thankfully, when the sun of Saturday morning rises on my place in the world and, as is quite likely, I have failed in my attempts to get noticed, I do have another project that I’m working on that is exciting me and will distract me from my disappointment. I am going to self-publish as soon as I feel it’s ready. And then I have another Romney and Marsh to get cracking on. Defeat and rejection will not mean the end of me as a writer. But I might be a bit grumpy for an hour or two.

What will I be doing as the clock ticks down to announcement time and the official sorting of the wheat from the chaff? Well, as it happens, I’m going out on the lash in Kadikoy (Istanbul, Turkey) tonight. I turned fifty this week. I feel like that deserves a drink and a good dinner.

(Before someone points out to me that I am already published because I am self-published and so I am ineligible for the competition, I did, naturally, check this with the powers that be and was assured that so long as one met one’s own costs when self-publishing then self-publishing was not a barrier to entry. So there.)

Update: 31.05.2013. 23.20 GMT+2

Failure was just an option.

You’re so vain…

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It has become my habit on a Thursday night, after my two-year-old son has climbed the wooden hill to Bedfordshire, to sit down and write my Friday morning blog-post. I leave it to simmer/fester overnight and then take another look at it in the cold light of day before titivating; correcting what I can see needs correcting, and posting. That’s how seriously I’m taking my blog-posts these days. Am I a dick for it, I wonder?

I do enjoy the writing of it. Word limits and deadlines are self-imposed. I please myself; I answer to no-one over the content, style, length or language. I can write fuck whenever I like. Fuck. And I can pick my own topic – something that is pertinent to where I happen to be in that particular week in this stumbling about of mine to become an author.

And it is this need to feel like a real author that is a large part of the driving force behind my significant effort, engagement and dedication of time and energy on all fronts: writing, editing, proof-reading, formatting, interacting with readers (hugely enjoyable), social-networking, building an internet presence – a ‘platform’ (vomit). (Not querying agents. I gave that up like I gave up putting teeth under my pillow and for much the same reasons.) But more and more I find myself wondering, what is an ‘author’? How should I be defining the word ‘author’? What should be my criteria for ‘making it as an author’? (My blog tag-line is and has been from day one: ‘on trying to make it as an author’.)

I’ve written three books. I have self-published them. They have been downloaded. The first is free, but a decent number of decent people have gone on to pay for the second and third (if you are one of those decent people, because I have complete editorial control over my blog – another plus of the medium – I am interrupting myself to offer you my sincerest thanks for your continued support and encouragement). They have been read. They have been generally fairly well received. Am I not an author already? If you want to answer yes, as I do, can someone tell me why I don’t yet feel like one? Am I like some flawed character that Aesop may have written about who spends his life looking for something only to find that he has it already? Did I already make the transformation from ugly-duckling to swan? Someone pass me a mirror. (Shit I look tired.)

I do want to see my books in print. I want to hold hard-backed, dust-jacketed, first impressions of the first edition of each of the three Romney and Marsh Files. I want to inhale their reality. I want to line them up on a bookshelf, arrange a chair opposite and stare at them. I want to be courted by an agent. I want to be fought over by publishers. I want to be someone on Twatter (thanks M) who other authors are following (anyone else noticed their cliquey little name-dropping groups – wankers; someone who aspiring authors tweet on the tweets of in the hope of a crumb of recognition falling from their high-table. I make myself feel a little bit ill with my shallowness sometimes.

I have this theory that traditional publishing is the new vanity publishing. I’ve detailed above what I’ve achieved on my own, for myself. To a fair degree, I have what I set out to achieve: books and readers and satisfaction, but I want more. It’s not about the money – I’ve got a day job. I want industry recognition – affirmation and confirmation from those who run things. And that is simple vanity because I don’t need it.

A couple of days ago I reblogged a post by another aspiring author. It makes quite sobering reading for people like me. Tin’s experiences of trying to land an agent – he did get an agent, but it  hasn’t yet amounted to anything. The agent advised him to self-publish! – and subsequent book-deal have served to reinforce how I’m feeling about it all – not horribly negative just realistically resigned and more determined to accept what I am and where I am and probably where I will be in a year’s time. For that I am grateful to him for sharing.

I like to ghost about the web looking at author sites seeing how they view things. I have noticed that there are an increasing number of successful ebook authors who are positively encouraging others to forget about chasing the rainbow of traditional publishing deals, to self-publish, self-promote, take control, enjoy the profits and the feeling and if you should be fortunate enough, or good enough (actually, let’s stick with fortunate enough. There are plenty of good writers out there who won’t be found by the traditional publishing industry because they are simply unfortunate.) to garner attention of agents looking for an author who has proven the market for themselves in every sense of the expression dictate your own terms. Here are mine: (1) a small, hard-back print run of each title (2) you need to hook me up with someone in the music business who can help me produce my music (3) buy me lunch somewhere nice (4) a Shetland pony. OK, three of them are negotiable. My vanity is really quite a powerful thing. I’m such a slut. I could be my own worst enemy.

A reblog from Tin Larrick’s blog

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DEVIL'S CHIMNEY COVER[C]
This is my first reblog of a fellow self-publishing author’s post. I’ve had some communication with Tin after I noticed that he was also writing police-procedurals set in the south-east of England. Eastbourne to be precise – next county along from Kent where the Romney and Marsh books are set. I think that Peter James is his closest geographical competition. Yikes!
Anyway, Tin sent me a link to this post of his during conversation and I felt that it would make interesting reading for anyone in the same position i.e. trying to make it as an author. (Incidentally, that’s been my tag-line on this blog since day one and the longer things go on the less I understand what I continue to mean by that phrase. Could be a blog-post in that one day when I can work it out.)
Of course, my first reblog wasn’t going got be easy was it? We blog on different sites and after a little research I understand that the only way that I can reblog his blog is to copy and paste it to mine. How amateurish of me. The original post can be found here: http://tinlarrick.blogspot.com/2012/02/devils-chimney-ebook-launch-or-why-jaws.html The rest of his blog is worth reading too in my humble opinion.
Finally, for anyone who is interested in these things, I have sought Tin’s permission before copying his words and the image above. He might also like me to let you know that his books are going to be free to download at Amazon this coming weekend. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tin-Larrick/e/B007S9VWW6/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_pop_1 The reviews are very encouraging. I shall be downloading them myself.
The post: With trembling hand and churning gut flora I click SAVE AND PUBLISH, and DEVIL’S CHIMNEY the eBook becomes a cold hard (well, virtual) reality available for purchase on Amazon’s Kindle store. Almost, anyway. It has to be approved by Amazon’s Kindle Operations Team to make sure it isn’t breaching the Obscene Publications Act, the Public Order Act or the Official Secrets Act (or something). 2 out of 3 ain’t bad, I suppose.
I was hoping for a curiously existential experience as I clicked the button, and it was – sort of. From all the highly illogical variables, high hopes and dashed dreams of the print publishing world to becoming master of my own destiny made me feel like all the little bits of me that have been propping up slush piles throughout London have come home to roost.
So, why the eBook route? To some the answer is probably patently obvious, but, let’s be honest, we’ve all read those rags-to-riches vignettes in the Writers’ Yearbook and similar, and have all dreamed of the letter from the publisher or the phone call from the agent that signifies that we might be one step closer to the dream.
I got halfway down that road. In 2010 three agents made some very enthusiastic noises about DEVIL’S CHIMNEY. Two of them offered to represent me, and I really believed my ship had come in. I signed with one of said agents (and Gawd bless her she still has faith in me – I think). In most of the aforementioned vignettes, signing with an agent was followed some weeks later by a multi-book contract and stick-in-your-throat advance from a major publisher. It was, I used to think, the natural progression of things.
However, 18 months and a LOT of rewrites later, the feelings about DEVIL’S CHIMNEY were rather more tepid. It won’t sell, they said. The market for police procedurals has cooled off, they said. The print world is changing, they said. The global economy has crushed all the little and not-so-little bookshops (Borders, Barnes & Noble) under the weight of its collapse, and if you can’t get stocked by a supermarket (who only stock big, minimum sales-return-guaranteed authors) then forget it. Ten years ago, a publisher would have picked up and run with DEVIL’S CHIMNEY, nurtured my career or something, but not today. Chalk DEVIL’S CHIMNEY up to experience, they said.
I was crushed, the words of one commissioning editor reverberating around my brain. (I couldn’t focus on the GOOD things that were said, naturally, only the BAD). This bit is wooden, this character doesn’t work, this bit is far-fetched. Also, THIS, THIS and THIS would not happen in real life. (I had hoped that my 15 years as a cop would lend some realism to the procedural aspects of the novel, but it seemed to pale into insignificance where this particular commissioning editor was concerned – there’s procedure, and then there’s procedure that sells. Ah well, being an ex-cop is still kudos for the CV, I guess, and maybe something to wax poncy about at [publishing] parties – maybe one day).
Why not publish it as an eBook, my agent said. Ebooks are 20% of the market and climbing. I didn’t want to, really. Like many, I wanted that magical phone call, that won-the-jackpot feeling of elation. And I wanted the tangible, real THING of a book in my hand with my name on it.
So I had to be scientific about it:
CONS:
  • It’s not a ‘real’ book.
  • As a consequence I don’t feel QUITE the same feeling of arrival I would have were I holding a book in my hand with my name on it. To frame this slightly nebulous notion, let me say that I WOULD rush to show friends and family a ‘real’ book; with an eBook, I might just drop it into conversation.
  • Similarly, I don’t feel like a professional. I wouldn’t put ‘author’ in the ‘occupation’ field of an application form just because I’ve published an eBook. I might if it had been a ‘real’ book, just to try it out.
  • It is, after all, self-publishing, which doesn’t have quite the same kudos as being offered a real deal.
  • I won’t be giving up work any time soon.
  • I don’t get to use my real name (Tin Larrick, in case you hadn’t guessed, is a pseudonym). This was on the strong advice of my agent – I’m still not sure why.

PROS:

  • I have complete control, I say when, I say where, I say how. I decide the price, the layout, everything. No longer do I have to await the rejection letters with dread, the ones that may (or may not) be sent out on a whim. I’ve even made up a publishing company for the purpose of e-publishing – The Obscure Cranny Press. Annual turnover – about 37p.
  • It seems strange, but people are more likely to take a chance on a book that costs one pound rather than seven (provided you can get it out there).
  • Similarly, people are more likely to take a punt on a book they can access instantly, without having to wait for mail order or drive to the shops.
  • I’m rolling with the times. I don’t subscribe to the school of thought that says print books will one day become extinct, but the eBook industry can only grow.
  • The thing is out there. It’s not languishing with what’s left of my optimism in a bottom drawer. (I could be wrong, but I do honestly believe DEVIL’S CHIMNEY is now as good as it can be – one of the cardinal rules.) It’s out there, and the readers can decide for themselves. You never know, you just never know.
But the thing that swung it for me? JAWS: THE REVENGE. It was on telly a few weeks ago. It’s a few years since I’ve had the misfortune of watching it, and it hasn’t got any better since then (even Lance Guest can’t save it). The plot is non-existent, the characters two-dimensional, and the effects cringeworthy. (The shark roars like a T-Rex, for Gawd’s sake – even my titchy son knows sharks don’t have vocal cords.)
So why make it at all? Because it was wringing the last drop of out of the cash cow that was the original JAWS. Because the box office receipts superseded the need for quality control (or the ‘art’ side of it, if you will). Despite all its flaws, someone in the biz thought it was ok to release it, because it might make them some money.
Which made me think again – who, in the entertainment business, really knows 100% what will work and what won’t? Who has the integrity to put something back on the shelf that needs further work, even though as it stands it will make a few quid?
It brought me back to the words of the commissioning editor – 10% of what the CE said was right, 10% was wrong (but I could never articulate it, however reasonable, because it would only ever sound like sour grapes), and 80% was entirely subjective.
So I took the plunge. I sorted out a cover, I uploaded it to KDP and I clicked SAVE AND PUBLISH. Easy – if you’ve done the graft. But I shouldn’t have worried so long about whether or not it was a good thing – ten years ago such a thing could not have happened.
Now just got to get out and market the damn thing.
That’s it. If anyone wants to take issue with anything in that please contact Tin directly. I have enough trouble in my life.

Tweets and Twits.

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(Warning: This post contains some fucking bad language at the end.)

Writer’s blog: stardate: 17.05.2013

Part 1:

Self-publishing has dragged me, if not kicking and screaming exactly then somewhat reluctantly into the modern technological age. As well as the computer skills that I have had to master – things like formatting the text of a novel, constructing a table of contents, uploading files and the like I have had to get into social-networking. (As an anti-social misery-guts, just the term social-networking makes me want to punch someone. I feel like such a shameless, hypocritical fraud sometimes, even though I have to admit that I’m enjoying myself immensely. But how it eats up the time. Take this blog-post, for example. I wrote it last night and I’ve proof-read and edited it at least five times. Why? Because it’s important. [I bet that there are still mistakes that I will find after I press publish.])

I’ve had a Facebook profile for a few years but it’s not something that I’ve wasted much time with. It was only created so that my two grown-up children and I could keep abreast of each others’ lives and in touch as we moved apart geographically. Quite ironic really then that almost as soon as I upped sticks and moved abroad they both blocked me from having access to their profiles.

With the decision to self-publish came the pressure from all good sources to create and maintain an online presence: a poor-man’s website, aka a WordPress blog. I really wasn’t keen. What on earth would I write about? Who the hell would be interested? How does it work? What does that button do? (Oh, crap. I just deleted my account.) But I have come to love my blog as much as any of my books. I am in the habit of writing once a week on my self-publishing adventure and when I look back on it, it really does remind me of things that I might otherwise forget. And that would be a shame. I’ve written over fifty posts. Each is a good few hundred words and I feel like I have a lot more to say.

I believed and hoped that that would be it – that a blog would be enough. But it isn’t. I’m already feeling that blogs are becoming somewhat passé. These days anyone who is serious about getting noticed for anything must have a Twitter account. I swore I’d never have one. I couldn’t see the point of ‘tweeting’ and being restricted to a hundred and forty characters. What could anyone say that was worthwhile in such a limited number of taps of the keypad?

A very kind and helpful reader of my books suggested that I should get a Twitter account and then get using it. So I have. And I think that, like most things in the right hands, it has the potential to be a brilliant tool. Essentially, I’m still ‘tweeting’ to myself, like in the beginning I was blogging to myself, but these days I get regular daily traffic on my blog from all over the world (incidentally, I find that quite fantastic). I can see the potential that Twitter offers if one should want to get heavily proactive (I haven’t yet) or followed by a few influential ‘tweeters’.

I see Twitter as a reflection of the short-attention-span-generation: little gobbets of information being pinged about (tweeted and retweeted), everyone in a hurry, quick remark and on to the next. I write a blog-post and it’s there for a week in pole position. I ‘tweet’ something and in an hour its old-news, superseded and buried in an avalanche of ‘tweets’. But the instant reach of the ‘tweet’ is not to be underestimated as a tool to garner attention and links and contacts and to generate interest. I just need to break into some of the cliquey (?) circles. (Will that be a chicken and egg thing? What comes first, success as an author and then a Twitter following, or success as a Twitterer and then an author following? [There’s something wrong with that sentence, but I can’t work it out. Still, I’m sure that you know what I mean.])

The biggest challenge that I’m finding with all this extra interest is where to find the time it takes, or rather the time I’m spending on it all. Every day there are things to check. As well as emails, I now have my blog comments and stats, my Twitter account, my Amazon download figures and comments on the books on Amazon and my Smashwords account. If someone’s got in touch then I respond (strangely not because I feel that I have to, but because I want to [see previous post]). I’m getting up half-an-hour earlier just to see to it all and sometimes that’s not enough. I ‘tweeted’ this this week and it’s true: Q: How do I split my free-time between self-promotion of self-published #RomneyandMarshFiles and new writing? A: Work twice as hard.

I need to become more disciplined. At the moment, every time I find myself near a computer it’s all of Lombard Street to a China orange that I won’t be able to resist logging on to all of the above – getting a quick fix and then getting cross with myself for my vanity, my weakness and my lack of self-discipline. I might as well be smoking again.

I hope that next week there isn’t something new to get my head around.

Part 2:

I had my first 2* comment this week. It was for Rope Enough – my free download. It didn’t make me happy. I really could accept a 2* comment with good grace if the person who left it provided an intelligent and valid reason for it – something to do with my writing. It still wouldn’t make me happy, but I could deal with it like a man. The reader in question downloaded the book, read it (?) and discovered it wasn’t what she expected.

‘Thought I would like this coming from Romney Marsh, but it’s not really what I was hoping for. I don’t recommend it.’

I wonder if you can hear my teeth grinding at that. I wonder if Christopher Fowler has to suffer comments like that for his Bryant and May series.

‘Thought I would like this having worked in a match factory….’

Maybe Colin Dexter has had to deal with his fair share of misguided comments for his Morse books.

‘Thought I would like this seeing as I used to work in the Signal Corps…’

Doubtless, Tom Selleck has had to deal with communications from angry viewers who tuned in to watch a programme about fucking ice-creams to be confronted with a fucking Private Investigator masquerading as a fucking seventies porn-star.

Just to be clear for anyone who might have sensed a bit of a tone here: Romney Marsh is the name of a little corner of Kent in England (see map above). It is a place and not to be confused with Romney AND Marsh who are fictional characters working out of Dover as quite fucking clearly stated in the fucking blurb of the fucking book.

Serves me right for trying to be clever, I suppose.

The Penitent Writer

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Writer’s blog: Stardate: 10.05.2013

 

If one is serious about being taken seriously as a serious writer, one must be seriously meticulous about one’s work – even more so as a self-publisher because a) one is starting at the back of the grid and b) when one is finally ready to press upload, presumably satisfied with the quality of what one has produced, there are no further regulators, filters or quality-control systems to correct any errors.

When my finger hovers over the Amazon submit-your-manuscript button, I feel a little like I would imagine the guy with his finger on the red button that will start the end of the world must feel – wondering if I’m about to make a big mistake; perhaps I should just check the situation one more time before launching a nuclear strike, or in this case my book on humanity. Actually, maybe I should experience a greater sense of anxiety – when I press upload my book can reach every continent on Earth. My reach is greater than the bloke in the bunker. I can only hope that my writing is not as damaging.

Despite rigorous proof-readings, scrupulous read-throughs, ruthless edits and regular prayer, however, mistakes are inevitably going to occur – be doing impressions of sore-thumbs, risking ruining the flow of the writing, exposing one for the amateur that one is and turning people off. It’s like getting all your new clobber on to go to the party and walking to the bus-stop thinking that everyone’s looking at you because you are obviously so cool when really they’re staring and sniggering at the big red 50% discount price tag that you left on that shirt you bought in the sale and it’s flapping in the breeze of your swagger behind you. Fail.

As a self-publisher, attention to detail is imperative. One very kind reviewer did mention in her comment that she hoped that I will be picked up by an editor soon. At the time it was my hope that the lady in question had made a simple slip and had meant agent/publisher. Now, I have to wonder if she meant what she wrote.

I’ve had enough feedback of my three books to understand that I have made mistakes. The misuse of homophones has begun to deprive me of sleep (style/stile, draw/drawer, banded/bandied, peace/piece; role-call, roll-call are examples that revolve and flash around behind my eye-lids in the darkness. Several readers have pointed out my mistaken use of ‘should of’, ‘would of’ and ‘could of’ instead of ‘should have’, ‘would have’, and ‘could have’. Bad mistakes from someone whose dad was Head of English. Father must be kicking up a veritable dust-cloud in that box on my mum’s mantel-piece every time that particular one is mentioned. I made two attempts at French in three books and got one wrong. Cretin. (And I even looked it up on the internet to be sure because I wasn’t. I spelt the French swear-word correctly, naturally, and then cocked up déjà-vous – a school-boy error.

But I have made one mistake in Making a Killing that two reviewers have kindly brought to my attention. And it is unforgivable. It is to do with measures to be taken to counter a diabetic-hypo. I wrote that the character in question should have taken insulin to bring them out of it when in fact that would not have helped at all – what the man in question needed was a quick and concentrated sugar intake. I didn’t check this. And I didn’t check this because I ‘knew’ that I didn’t have to. I ‘knew’ that I didn’t have to check because my dad lived with type-one-diabetes most of his life, so, naturally, I ‘knew’ all about it. Check. Check. Check. And to think that I toyed with the idea of having something terrifically important hang on the character’s diabetic turn. It makes me go cold. Lesson learned. When DI Romney contracts a nasty STD in the next Romney and Marsh File I will not rely on my memory for his treatment; I will head straight to the font of a knowledge and that most invaluable of writers’ resources – Wikipedia. They never get anything wrong.

Apart from the unforgivable medical error, I’m not going to be too hard on myself for the above. There’s no point and things can be corrected in new editions – which, incidentally, I will have to submit as a matter of urgency because one reader complained to Amazon that ‘Rope Enough’ has no table of contents – none of the books does – and Amazon sent me an email. Crap. I’ll have to make time for that now in case Amazon remove all my books for it.

Still, I suppose that over approximately 250,000 words I’ve not done too badly. And while I haven’t actually hurt anyone – except myself – I do think that some form of atonement is in order – crime and punishment (No, I’m not going to read it. My errors are not that bad.) So, for today and the weekend, I have rooted out my last birthday present from my current-future-ex-wife (that’s a picture of it at the top) and I am going to wear it as a penance. Just my luck that a warm-front is moving in from the south – that’s not another reference to my spouse by the way. (Warm! Ha!)

Don’t judge a book by its author.

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Writer’s blog: stardate: 26.04.2013

Part 1

I’ve quit my job!

I’m experiencing such a decent knock-on with sales at the moment on the back of my Amazon free listing that I have taken the plunge and quit my job – one of them, anyway.

This morning, I told the newsagent in the village to stuff his Sunday papers where the sun don’t shine – I’m not doing that paper-round ever again. Naturally, he demanded that the company vehicle be returned immediately. No problem – I was too big for that bike anyway and I hated the colour and the tinsel streamers that hung from the handlebars to dance in the breeze. I let the tyres down before I left.

I only took the crummy job to pay for luxuries for my family – things like bread and milk. But with the sales that I’m accruing in the Romney and Marsh series we’re necking gold-top till we puke and toasting sliced organic wholemeal loaves every morning for fun and frisbees.

Onwards and upwards.

­Part 2

I’m very excited about the forthcoming self-publication of my two Acer Sansom novels. I have the cover art, which I’m thrilled with. Knowing these two books very well indeed (I should do; I wrote them) I feel that the covers do a great job of simply, effectively and appropriately suggesting something of what the reader should expect from them, while also making it obvious that they are related to each other in a series. If they don’t then that’s your problem. I love them.

My over-riding concern with self-publishing these books under my own name is that people who may have read a Romney and Marsh File or three and enjoyed them enough to look out for something else from me might notice them and download them under the impression that they will be similar reads. They are not. They are so much better! Not really. But in their own way, I honestly think that if the reader will give them a chance then they won’t be disappointed, providing that said reader has some idea of what to expect. That’s where my job gets a little difficult.

I’ve got the Amazon blurb written and I like it, but I’m still not sure what category to list them under. They are sort of thrillers, but not white-knuckle, page-tearing, big-toilet-inducing thumpers. They are sort of action adventure, but not shooting up jungles of pygmies armed with blow-pipes, arrows tipped with lethal poisons. They are sort of crime novels, but not in a Romney and Marsh whodunit way.

I wonder if I should try to make all this clear on the book summary page when I list them. The very last thing I want is for people to feel miffed because they weren’t what they were looking for or expecting. Actually, the very last thing that I want is to die a slow and painful death in abject poverty surrounded by cats that are waiting to chew on my warm corpse.

Hope or train?

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Writers blog: stardate: 19.04.2013

Ten days ago Amazon price-matched my book Rope Enough – The First Romney and Marsh File – to zero. It is now a free book and I will keep it that way – forever. Despite this book having cost me a good chunk of time and effort to create – not to mention the blood, sweat , tears and hundred quid for the cover art – I cannot think of a better  means of constant, free and easy self-promotion. I cannot think of any other means of self-promotion that would see me – an unknown, newcomer to self-publishing – get my book in front of the people who I want to get it in front of – the people that matter: ebook readers.

In the ten days that it has been a free ebook it has had over eleven-thousand downloads through Amazon.co.uk. Yesterday, it was at number three in the Kindle free-download chart for all ebooks, and in the last twenty-four hours it was downloaded over one thousand, seven hundred times. That book is now on the reading devices and in the homes of eleven-thousand readers. How else could I possibly have achieved that?

A big chunk of the people who downloaded it won’t read it; I know that. But a good number probably will at some point. Maybe not this week or this month, but it’s on their device. In a year they might give it a go. They might like it and they might look for the second in the series and that’s where I realise I have inadvertently done myself and my self-publishing venture the best turn that I could – I already have the next two in the series available for download.

If I had just one book available and I gave it away for nothing I might get thousands of people download it. But what then? Those that read it and enjoyed it and wanted to find something else by me would soon be disappointed and move onto the next free book. I would. I do. By the time that I got around to writing and publishing the next book, I would have to start all over again. I would have missed my window of opportunity.

If I had one book available and I was asking money for it as an unknown, I doubt strongly that I’d see many downloads. And again, those that enjoyed the read would have nothing to go on to by me. See above.

I’m no expert in self-publishing, but I’ve learned some things about it. And if there is one bit of advice I would give anyone who is looking to make money from self-publishing it is this: my self-publishing formula for a modicum of success – or better.

  1. Write a series in a popular genre.
  2. Get professional cover art that clearly links the books in a series and identifies their places within in it.
  3. Make the first in the series free to download. Just swallow.
  4. Have at least one more title in the series available to download for those who enjoyed the first  – three is better. (Look around – commercially successful series are like buses.)
  5. Make the second in the series attractively cheap to purchase.
  6. Make the third in the series still cheap for a novel but up the price a little.

I can’t claim to have invented this formula and, like I said, it is simply good-fortune that I had already written three in a series before I got around to self-publishing. Others are doing it, have been doing it, or something like it, and doing well out of it, for some time.

Example: Alan McDermott has his Tom Gray trilogy out at the moment. I understand that it’s been out a while. The first in the series is a free download. It has been at number one on Amazon’s free download chart ever since I’ve been looking. If I can crawl up to number three with seventeen-hundred downloads in a day, how many does he shift in a day? and how many has he shifted in the months that he’s been self-published? A conservative estimate would be hundreds of thousands. It could be more. Book two in that series is in the top one hundred Kindle downloads for paid books. Book three is just outside the top one-hundred. Take it from me; he’s selling shed-loads and he is making some serious money. Best of luck to him.

Part 2

I have finished what I feel strongly will be my penultimate edit of Dirty Business – The First Acer Sansom Novel. I shall now email this new version to Amazon and it will be almost immediately pinged back to my Kindle reading device where I shall then give it the final proof-read. I’ve blogged before about how useful I find it to read through my books in a variety of formats: computer screen, hard-copy, Kindle. Each new reading experience brings with it a novelty factor that provides me the opportunity for a fresh perspective to spot errors. It’s what my circumstances have reduced me to. And I think that I’m getting better at it. In fact I’m feeling so confident about my abilities these days that I might even offer a reward for any typos spotted. Then again, maybe I won’t.

Yesterday, Kit Foster, the nice fellow who did the covers for the three R&M’s, sent me some ideas for Dirty Business and Loose Ends. I was very happy with elements of them and he is going to combine these into a couple of covers that I think will be effective, strongly suggestive and representative of the genre and story.

I’m still not sure about where to pitch the price on these two. The three R&M’s are priced on a sliding upwards scale – free, £1.53 and £2.05 (I wanted £1.49 and £1.99 but Amazon did something to the numbers that I still don’t understand.) The three R&M’s are all around the eighty-thousand word mark. The two Sansoms are one-hundred-thousand words each. Should that extra twenty-thousand words justify a higher price?

I’m drawn to list them at £1.99 each and it’s not because of the extra bulk. I still don’t think that that is expensive for a decent read, which I have to hope people will think of them. I do. I also think that I’ve established myself to a very small degree as a half-decent story-teller – reviews, comments and feedback lend weight to this notion – and perhaps, as it could be argued that I have let my first three novels go quite cheaply, even by ebook standards, those who have read them and enjoyed them won’t begrudge me looking to net just over a pound a book. I don’t think that looking to make one pound a book is greedy or likely to price me out of a potential sale. Time will tell on that. Of course, if people start writing to tell me how awful they find them and how robbed they feel, I might have to reduce the price a bit.

With the self-publication of the Sansom’s will come more work. All the information on my various author pages relates only to the R&M books. The images on my Facebook page and blog banner are R&M covers. I’ve also got to write a couple of elevator pitch style summaries for the forthcoming Amazon listings. I’m not complaining – I like all that stuff. It makes a change and I’m doing it for me.