Tag Archives: self-publishing

Making A Killing

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Actually, I’m not – making a killing that is, not in the money-coming-out-of-all-orifices kind of way, like some outrageously gaudy and crude Las Vegas naked-human-shaped novelty slot-machine jackpot. But on free downloads? Crikey, I looked this morning and a little bit of wee came out. And that’s not normal for a man of my age.

Look, before I get going on this second blog in two days, please, you have to bear in mind at all times that a long time ago (in blogging terms) this blog’s main purpose became far-and-away most importantly an online record of my journey from total and, some would say, deserved literary obscurity to… well I just want to leave a mark. DC Grimes in that little-known but superior British police procedural, Joint Enterprise, that should be on every mystery reader aficionado’s bookshelf put it best, “We’re all going to die. Most of us will leave no mark of our existence behind what-so-ever. Not a stain or a smudge or a smear on the face of history. I think that’s sad.” I agree with him, even if I can now see that the punctuation sucks. I’m not perfect.

I’m blogging for me, for nostalgia, for anyone who wants to know something of the process that I went through to self-publish – there are some things to learn from – and then how that pans out. With that understood, this post should be viewed as a follow up to yesterday’s: an update on the development discussed. I’m making it because it’s important to me and it might also provide some figures that other self-publishers might like to know. There doesn’t seem to be a wealth of information out there and when I was stumbling about cyber-space at the beginning, looking for anything helpful, I was pretty disappointed.

Now that I’ve got that off my chest, approximately thirty-six hours ago Amazon price-matched Rope Enough, the first book in my series of British police procedurals. They price-matched it to zero making it a free download. I was happy – see previous post. In that thirty-six hours the book has been downloaded 394 times on Amazon.com and a staggering 1431 times on Amazon.co.uk. (I wrote ‘Fucking hell!’ after that but decided to delete it.)

The immediate upshot of that is that the book currently sits at #27 in the Kindle store Best Sellers chart for free books. It was at #22 earlier. To my limited way of thinking that has got to be a positive thing. OK, I’m not making a penny out of it, but I do have two other titles that could see a knock-on from this. And I feel great.

Yeah, I know, people are just downloading a freebie; 95% of them probably won’t even read it; just ‘cos it got downloaded, doesn’t mean that it’s any good. I’m quite capable of pissing on my own chips, thanks.

There has been no discernable knock-on for sales of the other two books, yet. I’ll have to wait and see what happens.

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about two days – Saturday and Sunday – where I listed the second book in my three on the KDP Select programme for £0.00 to download. I managed 351 downloads through Amazon.co.uk there. I thought that was OK. So, perhaps, it makes a little more sense just how bowled over I am by getting four times that number in less than two days.

That’s all from me to me. Now, I really should get some work done.

The Loss-Leader Strategy.

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Writer’s blog: stardate: 10.04.2013

WARNING: This blog contains some big numbers to crunch.

Part 1

It’s Wednesday. It’s eleven o’clock in the morning and it’s the holidays.

Normally, for reasons explained previously, I’ve come to be a Friday-morning-blogger. So why today? Well, as mentioned, I’m on holiday and so I’ve got some time to update my self-publishing diary aka my blog. And I have an interesting development for an entry.

I say it’s the holidays but I’m at work.  My current-future-ex-wife has started to complain about me loitering around the place. I’ve only been on holiday for two days. I told her I’m on holiday – I don’t have to go to work for the week. She said that the house smells different when I’m there during the day. She implied that this was not in a good way. She suggested that if I want to write, why don’t I go to work where it will be quiet? So, I’m at work in the holidays. I’m writing and I quite like it. It’s peaceful. I can pick up a good coffee on the way in. There is still free food in the staff canteen at lunch-time. I’m living the life of a real author for a week – the kind that don’t have to juggle jobs and writing (writing doesn’t seem like a job to me, but maybe that’s because I don’t need the money.) And I can smell how I like without people complaining.

I can’t complain about the way things are going for me as a self-publisher – especially when one factors in that I have done no self-promotion worthy of the label. Since my promotional weekend with Amazon’s KDP Select programme I have noticed a marked increase in sales of all three titles. I’m still not making enough money to re-roof the dog kennel but I’m encouraged.

In the first nine days of this month’s sales figures I sold ninety-two copies of Rope Enough (The First Romney and Marsh File). That’s more than I sold in the whole of last month with the promotion. Factors of knock-on sales from said promotion and some good fortune with an Amazon sales algorithm – I doubt whether even God knows the mathematical equations involved in those – are likely reasons for this figure. The second and third books in the series are doing better than normal also. As usual I will share those figures at the end of the sales period.

Last evening I had settled down to watch Real Madrid thrash Galatasaray (good job I’m not a betting man) with one eye on the laptop when something in the Kindle download figures of my books caught my eye. It hadn’t been there an hour earlier. Kindle had made twenty-two price-match sales of Rope Enough ie given away twenty-two books for free. I checked on the Amazon.com site: thirty-four books price-matched. Initially, I was a bit peeved. Sales had been going well and I was netting 26p a download. But as I took the development on board, I became rather pleased.

I have seen it blogged by many successful self-published authors that giving away books as loss-leaders was a real boost to the spreading of the word, raising their online profile and, if they have other books available – especially in a series – good for knock-on sales.

Mindful of this, when I originally uploaded Rope Enough I tried and tried to get Amazon to list it as a free ebook – I have had it for download through Smashwords and their outlets for free since it was first published in December of last year. I notified Amazon of the availability of the book for free through B&N and Kobo et al (can you say et al for companies or is that reserved for people?) but they still wouldn’t adjust the price, so I had to plough on with it at 77p – the minimum that I could list it for.

I can only guess that now someone else, or the plural of someone else, has/have let Amazon know about a cheaper price and they have knocked it down to zero in line with their policy. I’m happy with that. It’s like having a full-time promotion going. I was only making 26p a download anyway, which is essentially nothing.

Rope Enough has finally become the loss-leader that I wanted it to be and I hope that it is going to attract attention and sales for the other two in the series. In fact I had trouble sleeping last night when I thought about this. Here’s the first reason why: in the first four hours of the change there were over two hundred downloads of the book on Amazon.co.uk and the same for Amazon.com.

Here’s the second reason why: when the book went live for free I, naturally, checked out the competition in the free category – Amazon’s top 100 chart. The book at the number one slot was called The One You Love by Paul Pilkington. I looked at his Amazon page for this book. He claims to have had over one-and-a-half-million downloads of this book since publication in July 2011. That is a shitload of downloads by anyone’s standards. And looking at the reviews a lot of people think that it’s shit (fitting). He has a sequel for sale. It’s a thirty thousand word novella (probably falling over himself to try to get something else published to capitalise on his fifteen minutes of fame before the freeloaders forgot who he was). It’s listed at £1.92. If he is on the 70% royalty scheme then he is netting @ £1.30 per download for that second title. If just ten percent of the people who downloaded his free book pay for the download of the second – and let’s face it, why wouldn’t they if they were happy with book one? – he is making a shitload of money (double-fitting). Good luck to him.

If Rope Enough can get one tenth of the downloads he got for his first book and then one tenth of those people go on to part with the meagre sum of £1.53 and £2.05 for the other two books in the series – both of which are better than the first (I would say that wouldn’t I?) then I might be able to give up my evening job at the petrol station – at least. Maybe even re-roof the dog kennel.

See why I’m in a fairly good mood today? That’s right – I’m a dreamer.

Part 2

This week, I’m really getting stuck into my two Sansom books. I’m editing like a battlefield surgeon in the Crimean War. I feel that there are a couple of half-decent stories in these books somewhere if I can tease them out. I’ve emailed the guy who did my book covers for the R&M trio and I’m waiting for his thoughts.

When these are done and out there I’m going to write the third in that series. It’s going to be focussed on Iran and their nuclear weapons programme. I have never been to Iran (I’m not likely to either) and I don’t know anything about plutonium enrichment, so, this is going to have to be a book that I need to do some research on before writing. That will be a novelty. I might even try planning the book beforehand for a change, just to see what that’s like. Another novelty.

The snowball effect.

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Writer’s blog: stardate: 05.04.2013

Part 1

Two weeks on from my KDP Select programme promotional weekend. (See earlier posts for details). In those two weeks the month changed and so a new month’s sales record was started. In those two weeks I have seen a steady and encouraging increase of sales for all three of the books in my R&M series.

Rope Enough has performed and continues to perform well. It has only fleetingly been out of the paid  top 100 for its Amazon category since the promotion. As mentioned previously, there could be knock-on reasons from the promotion for this but I am more inclined to believe that the book’s presence in that top 100, its visibility, is responsible. It’s also cheap at only £0.77.

Last month – the month of the promotion – with Amazon.co.uk I had 84 downloads of Rope Enough. April is not five full days old yet and already I have made 43 sales. Making a Killing has sold 9 and Joint Enterprise 4.

I do no self-promotion.

Amazon.com has seen no sales of any of the titles, yet.

For anyone who is interested in these things I have collated total sales of the three books on the two Amazon sites below. No doubt in my mind that the KDP Select promotion has been a boost.

Amazon Sales Record

December

Amazon.co.uk

Rope Enough – 6

Making a Killing – 4

Joint Enterprise – NA

Amazon.com

Rope Enough – 10

Making a Killing – 5

Joint Enterprise – NA

January

Amazon.co.uk

Rope Enough – 11

Making a Killing – 13

Joint Enterprise – 5

Amazon.com

Rope Enough – 14

Making a Killing – 10

Joint Enterprise – 3

February

Amazon.co.uk

Rope Enough – 8

Making a Killing – 4

Joint Enterprise – 2

Amazon.com

Rope Enough – 11

Making a Killing – 9

Joint Enterprise – 7

March

Amazon.co.uk

Rope Enough – 84

Making a Killing – 20 (351 through free promotion)

Joint Enterprise – 14

Amazon.com

Rope Enough – 11

Making a Killing – 3 (219 through free promotion)

Joint Enterprise – 7

April (up until today – 5th of the month)

Amazon.co.uk

Rope Enough – 43

Making a Killing – 9

Joint Enterprise – 4

Amazon.com

Rope Enough – 0

Making a Killing – 0

Joint Enterprise – 0

Part 2

I am looking again at the first book that I ever wrote. It is a thriller. I wrote it about three years ago and it has been resting in a drawer at home waiting for the right time for me to sort it out. I am glad that I have waited. The overall plot, characters and progression, I don’t find particularly horrible to experience again, but the writing needs a substantial amount of attention. Reading it has demonstrated to me just how much, to my own way of thinking, I have grown as a writer – I want to write improved.

I am reading it on the computer and changing things around as I go. It’s quite nice to get reacquainted with the characters. It’s quite embarrassing to read some of my sentence structures and clichéd descriptions. It’s quite a relief that I waited before doing anything with it.

I have also written the sequel to this book, which I will go onto next. Both are around 100,000 words. Then I think that I will self-publish them.

I have posted before about the difficulty of finding titles for books and this first book has been the bane of my output to date. I have gone through at least a dozen titles that I have been temporarily keen on only to find that after a week or two, a month or two, they just don’t do it for me anymore. I have even toyed with the idea of changing the central character’s name so that I could utilise it (cleverly) in a series of titles as seems to be the fashion. I was going to change him from Sansom to Double. Then Sansom to Counter. Both words combine with others to provide a wealth of opportunities for snappy titles. But he isn’t Mr Double and he isn’t Mr Counter. He is Sansom. The character of Sansom has been a part of my life and as well as liking the name I can’t be so mercenary with it. I have an association with this character that I don’t want to corrupt; I wouldn’t be comfortable selling him out. Is that stupid, I wonder?

Anyway, the read-through has now given me a title that I like a lot, for now. I am going to call this book, Dirty Business. It’s a good fit. It’s short and suggestive. I hope that I still like it in a week. Also it will allow me to keep the title of the sequel, which I have – surprisingly – kept since writing it, Loose Ends. I need to commission the cover art soon, so I have to be sure. I’ll give it another month. By then I hope to have both books ready to go out.

The knock-on.

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Writer’s blog: Stardate: 29.03.2013

Friday morning is turning out to be a good time of the week for me to write a blog-post. It’s usually quiet here in the Istanbul City Zoo monkey enclosure: all the week’s cleaning gets done by Thursday, the resident vet has paid her weekly visit, fresh straw has been laid for the weekend and the manager sees his mistress on Thursday nights and doesn’t often pitch up to work until just before lunch.

The sun is shining and it’s quite warm here already. It has been suggested that the temperature might get up to seventeen degrees tomorrow. If that were not indicative enough of spring approaching the males are eyeing up the females with a primate’s hint of a leer.

On Monday I blogged of my weekend’s free listing experience regarding one of my titles with Amazon’s KDP Select programme (see two posts previously for details. I’m not doing it all again.)

One of the things that I was interested to learn from this exercise was whether the two days of giving my book away for free would have any discernable impact on subsequent sales of the other two titles that I have listed with Amazon that are in the same series.

At the end of the promotion my figures were as below:

Amazon.co.uk

Rope Enough – 36

Making a Killing – 5 sold (351 free downloads)

Joint Enterprise – 7

Amazon.com

Rope Enough – 8

Making a Killing – 3 sold (219 free downloads)

Joint Enterprise – 5

Currently, Friday morning 10.20 (GMT + 2), my sales figures are as below:

Amazon.co.uk

Rope Enough – 63

Making a Killing – 13 (2 units borrowed through KDP select programme).

Joint Enterprise – 8

Amazon.com

Rope Enough – 11

Making a Killing – 3 (0 units borrowed through KDP select programme)

Joint Enterprise – 7

I like these figures – the UK ones. I don’t have the statistics for previous months’ sales (of course I could look then up but it isn’t really necessary) however, I can say that the number of copies of Rope Enough that have been sold since Monday morning – essentially only four days ago – is probably more than I have sold in total in the three months or so that it has been available. And there is the curious figure of eight copies sold of Making A Killing in the same time frame – a very healthy number when compared to previous month’s sales. As well as that book having been free last weekend I did increase the price of it from £0.77 to £1.53 last week.

No noticeable effect on sales in the US market. Again, this is a little odd as over the months my US sales have always topped the UK sales. But then again, as far as I’m aware, Rope Enough did not stray into any charts this week on the Amazon.com site (see below).

Since the promotion I have slipped in and out of Amazon.co.uk’s top hundred rankings with Rope Enough in the crime, police procedural category. And when one hovers on the periphery of this, two or three quick sales can see a book move several places (up to seventy-nine for a short while). I only mention this because it seems reasonable to venture that at this end of the top hundred rankings it really is only a matter of a few odd sales that can make a difference, not dozens or hundreds. Something that I didn’t know.

On a personal note, yesterday I finished my second edit of Bad Sons, my latest crime/thriller novel. In two read-throughs I have changed very little – nothing of the structure or the plot; really, just vocabulary, punctuation and fleshing out some details. I’m not sure what to make of that. I have the same positive feelings about the overall story, its telling and unfolding as I did with each of the R&M books and I take encouragement from that. They didn’t turn out to be so bad in my opinion and the opinions of a good many people who generously left feedback.

I have a bit of a dilemma with this book now. Do I ignore it for a couple of months then come back to it and see how it reads, as per general perceived wisdom, or do I just go ahead and add it to my self-publishing portfolio? My heart says publish, my head says wait.

An instance of KDP Select versus Smashwords

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Two Sundays ago I enrolled Making a Killing (The Second Romney and Marsh File) in the Amazon KDP Select scheme. The weekend just gone I took advantage of two of the allotted five promotional days where Amazon allows one to list one’s book for free within the 90 day period of said scheme. It was an interesting and thought provoking experience.

I am happy to provide some figures and observations here for those who are looking for information and numbers to crunch regarding the whole KDP Select initiative. Regardless of some dubious aspects of validity and reliability involved in this little sales episode I still think that some patterns are suggested.

I have three ebooks available with Amazon. They are all in a series of British police procedurals. Not exactly mainstream fiction. Making a Killing is the second book in the series.

My Reasons for trying KDP Select

I was interested to discover four things.

1) How many consumers would a free download promotion attract for the book in question?

2) Whether I might experience a knock-on effect with sales of the other two books in the series (these are priced a £0.77 (the 1st) and £2.05 (the 3rd).

3) How the numbers would compare to my download history through the Smashwords outlet and their partner sites where the three books have all been free to download for a few months.

4) Will there be any discernable long-term effects on sales from this free promotion.

The Numbers

Coming into the promotional forty-eight hours my download figures for this sales period stood like this for the three ebooks:

Amazon.co.uk

Rope Enough (1st in series) – 11 (1 copy sold in the week leading up to the promotion)

Making a Killing (2nd in series) – 5 (0 copies sold in the week leading up to the promotion)

Joint Enterprise (3rd in series) – 4 (0 copies sold in the week leading up to the promotion)

Amazon.com

Rope Enough – 3 (0 copies sold in the week leading up to the promotion)

Making a Killing – 3 (1 copy sold in the week leading up to the promotion)

Joint Enterprise – 2 (0 copies sold in the week leading up to the promotion)

After the promotion had ended the figures looked like this:

Amazon.co.uk

Rope Enough – 36

Making a Killing – 351 free downloads

Joint Enterprise – 7

Amazon.com

Rope Enough – 8

Making a Killing – 219 free downloads

Joint Enterprise – 5

An unexpected result of the promotion was that I also got downloads from other Amazon sites, but only for the free book.

Amazon.de – 12

Amazon.fr – 5

Amazon.es – 2

Amazon.ca – 4

Total downloads across all Amazon sites for Making A Killing – 593

I did no self-promotion prior to this give-away period. I understand that people do and I wonder if creating some awareness through the limited outlets available might have increased downloads. Perhaps next time I do this I will experiment with that option and opportunity.

Amazon V Smashwords

Making A Killing was available for free through Smashwords and its partner sites between 23.12.2012 – 12.03.2013 (thirteen weeks). It achieved a total of 367 downloads. One weekend on Amazon and it had a total of 593.

If my experience is typical, the figures show that, despite Smashwords valiant efforts (and I do admire Mr Coker and what he is doing), Amazon is still far and away the leading outlet for authors looking for downloads and exposure.

Bestsellers Rankings

This was something that I hadn’t thought about prior to the weekend but when things were active it became something to take some amusement from. Before I went to bed, Making A Killing reached the dizzy heights of:

The knock-on that Rope Enough sales got saw this title break into the top 100 paid for Police Procedurals… for about one hour. It got to number 97 when an Ian Rankin title was at 99. I thought that I was about to hit the big time. Next hour, Rankin was at number 14 and I had disappeared without a trace. Pfffttt. (I bet DI Romney could have Rebus in a fist fight.)

When I was keeping my eye on how the books were doing in the charts (see above) I noticed that the other titles around mine predominantly had dozens of reviews. This made me think that perhaps these books had been trotted out before on promotional days, had hundreds of downloads from readers who took advantage of a freebie, a number of whom then went on to feedback on the reading experience. I could be wrong about this, of course. But if I am right then it suggests that when one enrols in the 90 day KDP select programme it is wise to space one’s promotions well apart – probably at the beginning, like I have, to give people a chance to actually read the books and then leave a review – and then towards the end of the promotional period for a final push when there are a good number of reviews in place to attract the confidence of the bargain ebook hunter.

I could be alone in this but I think that even when books are free people are more attracted to books with a good number of reviews already in the bank (providing they aren’t all one and two star of course) rather than taking a chance on a book with a handful of reviews obviously written by friends and family. I have seen many reviews from people who have taken a chance on a free book and wished that they hadn’t wasted their time on it. Free books of self-publishers seem to have something of a tainted reputation – certainly the work has got to be top drawer in all respects to avoid the tar-brush. If readers can see that many others have gone before them to try out a new and unknown author and not hated the experience, even rated the offering favourably, then to my mind it is more likely that the casual and increasingly discerning downloader will stand a better chance of being tempted. Let’s face it there are hundreds of books being offered for free at any one time and that number is only likely to increase.

I will be very interested to see whether Amazon readers are more inclined to leave a review than downloaders of Smashwords and their partners. I will obviously have to leave that a while before I can pass judgement.

The big and pleasant surprise here is the number of Rope Enough downloads. Perhaps that will, in good time, lead to some more Joint Enterprise downloads and/or some reviews and attention.

Like I said, all in all it’s all been an interesting and thought provoking experience. I hope that you might get something out of this.

Just the beginning.

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Writer’s blog: stardate: 20.03.2013

Further to my post of last weekend detailing my change of tack regarding what can be done to offload (surely, strategically increase the sales dynamic of) as many ebook copies of the Romney and Marsh Files in the quickest time possible, I have selected Saturday and Sunday of the forthcoming weekend as free promotional days for Making a Killing (The Second Romney and Marsh File), which some of you may remember I have enrolled in the KDP Select programme. It is hoped that this gentle shove will see a marked increase in sales of the other two books that I am still asking some recompense for writing (The First and Third Romney and Marsh Files).

It is timely, then, I think – nay possibly a sign – to be pleasantly surprised with an email from my literary agent (Amazon) this evening providing forward notification of royalties to be paid to me later this month. £1014 for sales so far accrued. It really is most encouraging and the blood, sweat and tears are starting to look like they might have all been worth it.

I would like to take this opportunity to say a massive RomneyandMarshFiles thank you to all those wonderful people who took a chance on an unknown and parted with their hard-earned cash to further my ambitions of one day becoming a full-time writer.

Amendment: Sorry, I missed out the decimal point in the figure above. It should read £10.14. Another seven years, three months like that and I will have recouped the cover art investment. (Cue malfunctioning firework.)

Time for a change.

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Writer’s blog: Stardate: 17.03.2013

I’ve been a bit impulsive this week. Twice to be precise.

First impulse: Tuesday, I decided to pull the 2nd and 3rd Romney and Marsh books from Smashwords and the outlets that they supply. All three books have been available at no charge through Smashwords since I published them. I have explained why in previous posts but for the sake of clarity here it boiled down to one reason: encouraging people to read them and let me know what they thought of them.

It worked to a degree that I must be satisfied with. Rope Enough was published 05.12.2012 and has encouraged 538 downloads to date. (That’s still available for free through Smashwords and related outlets.). Making a Killing was published 23.12.2012 and has had 367 downloads. Joint Enterprise was published 13.01.2013 and has managed 234 downloads. How those stats relate to other people’s experiences I have no idea. They are what they are. I have received enough reviews and comments through the channels of communication that I made available to understand that the books have been generally well received and are without horrible errors and plot holes. (See Romney and Marsh Comments page here.) Job done, I suppose.

In the same period on Amazon, where I have had all three books selling for £0.77 and the $ equivalent, I have had significantly less than a tenth of the total number of downloads that I have through Smashwords. The reasons are obvious and not worth going into here.

On Tuesday, after pulling the 2nd and 3rd books I bumped their prices up on Amazon and changed from 35% royalty scheme to 70% royalty scheme. Regardless of what I typed into the price boxes, Making a Killing is now £1.53 and Joint Enterprise is now £2.05. Rope Enough stays at £0.77.

Second impulse: Today, Sunday, I have grasped the nettle and, now that the 2nd and 3rd books have had a chance to be removed from the Smashwords’ outlets, I have enrolled Making a Killing, The Second Romney and Marsh File, into the Amazon KDP Select programme. I’m waiting for that to go live.

I am interested to see how enrolment in that scheme might affect downloads of that title and influence downloads of the other two titles. For reference, so far in this sales period my current download stats for Amazon are as below. Since I bumped the prices of the 2nd and 3rd titles I have received a total of one download of those two books between the two sites.

I will now have to give some thought to using my free download days to my best advantage.

Amazon.com

Rope Enough – 3

Making a Killing – 2

Joint Enterprise – 2

Amazon.co.uk

Rope Enough – 10

Making a Killing – 5

Joint Enterprise – 4

 

Ding dong! Avon Calling!

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Writer’s Blog: Stardate: 14.03.2013

I have astounded myself. On the 22.01.2013 I mentioned in a blog that I had been inspired to start writing a new book by reading a Raymond Chandler novel. (Just to be clear, it was his writing style that inspired me not theft of his plot or anything like that.) I have just finished the first draft. It is eighty-two-thousand words in length. Checking back on my computer, I created the first file for the first chapter of this novel on 16.01.2013. By my calculations that means that I have written the book in less than two calendar months (and one of those was February). I repeat: I have astounded myself.

I’m not bed-ridden, retired or unemployed. It’s not like I don’t have a life outside of my mind and away from my computer. Like every other aspiring author, I have to go to work. I have a family to support. I have a one-year-old son who insists on having my full attention during his waking hours if I’m at home. I go out. I read books too. In those two months I have written seven blog posts (not including this one), which any blogger will know needs time and attention. I have to perform all those mundane but necessary tasks like eating and washing. So where have I found the time and energy to write a book in two months?

And it’s not crap. Whatever you might be forgiven for thinking, it is not crap. You’ll just have to take my word for that. It’s not finished either but it is a first draft.

And I have a title. My last blog was about the trials, tribulations and turmoil involved in finding a title that will do justice to my book. And I have one. For any would be writers out there who struggle to find that elusive title I have some great advice: when in doubt do the following.

1) Wait until you are well advanced with the writing of the story so that you are able to pick out one or more really key themes central to it.

2) Condense that theme or themes into one or two words that sum the themes up precisely. Simple is best.

3)Take those words and type them into the Shakespeare search feature at http://www.rhymezone.com

4) Sit back and revel in the number of quotes that come up for said search term.

5) Find inspiration from the best there has ever been.

No one has ever written so much so well as the ‘Bard of Avon’. And the variety of choice phrases to ‘borrow’ is staggering. Or it was for me. There is also the bonus of using the full quote (and crediting it if you’re feeling inclined) on the title page of your book to make yourself look well-read and intelligent. I intend to.

So, what’s my title? Well, it sounds so simple and uninteresting but when it’s taken in the context of the full quote and measured against the five criteria that I set myself for selecting a title it’s a Cinderella’s slipper of a title. Don’t believe me? It’ll be out on ebook after the metaphorical six weeks in a drawer and obligatory fourteen edits.

Bad Sons – ‘Good wombs have borne bad sons.’  The Tempest, I,iii.

What’s in a name?

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I am approaching the final chapters of the first draft of the novel that I am currently writing and I have a problem. It’s something that’s been niggling away at me for weeks to develop into an issue. It is not a problem with the writing of the book and how I’m going to end it; all that is chugging along quite nicely – for a first draft. My problem is what to call it. Nothing is really working for me for longer than a few hours, maybe a couple of days. I think that I have something and I get excited and then I either find that someone else has already used that particular combination of words, or my enthusiasm for it simply wanes.

I have given myself five criteria, which must each be satisfied, to my thinking, before I can settle on a title. In no particular order they are:

Uniqueness: I don’t want to use a combination of words that has been used before for a book title. Apart from the inevitable confusion for readers searching on-line self-publishing outlets – that I am confined to – for my book (pause for laughter)  only to be confronted with perhaps three or four different books with the same title, I have more personal reasons. The first book that I self-published I called, ‘Rope Enough’. I was trying to be creative and get original. There are many books out there with the words ‘enough rope’ in the title. I didn’t do my research thoroughly. I have since discovered that typing in, ‘Rope Enough’ as a book search term with Amazon, for example, will first return a book of that title with two young men kissing on the front cover. That’s not my book by the way.

Cleverness: I want something with a hidden double meaning that the reader might reflect on at the end of the book and go…oh, I get it. That’s clever.

Conciseness: it’s still got to be short and punchy. Something like, ‘The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie’ isn’t for me. And there is also the typography issue to consider when the cover art is shrunken to a thumbnail image. It’s going to need to stand out. A sentence of a title can’t do that.

Appropriateness: obviously it’s got to strongly reflect/suggest something of the content.

Eye-catchingness(?): it’s got to be something that readers of the genre it’s aimed at will linger over as they scroll through the hundreds of other titles listed. Downloaders must be immediately hooked and intrigued by it.

When I choose a book to read whether I’m buying it, borrowing it or downloading it for free I find myself increasingly reliant on my initial reaction to the title and the cover-art, unless it’s a book by an author who I know and enjoy. Example: I just finished a thriller by the quite superb Gerald Seymour called, ‘Traitor’s Kiss’ and I eagerly anticipate the next book of his I can lay my hands on, but the title doesn’t really do it for me and the cover art I would ordinarily pass without pausing. If I didn’t worship the paper his pencil scrawled across I wouldn’t have given that book a second glance. More fool me I suppose. But with all the books to choose from there has got to be something that lures one in.

I’ve just had a look at some of the titles on my shelves. How do the authors or their publishers come up with some of them? What made someone think that, ‘Billy Bathgate’, ‘Moby Dick’, ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay’, ‘Waterland’, ‘Ratking’, ‘Birds Without Wings’, ‘The People’s Act of Love’, ‘Great Expectations’, and ‘Debbie Does Dallas’ for examples, would work for those authors?

 

The Last Rites

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I learned something sobering today. I have quite possibly ruined my one-in-three-hundred-and-forty-seven-million chances of getting my Romney and Marsh books properly published.

I was engaged in conversation with a fellow blogger who informed me about the concept of ‘first rights’ in the publishing world. Basically, this refers to the first publishing rights that a book can enjoy. If one self-publishes one’s book, then the first rights have gone and literary agents and/or publishers will not entertain touching one with the proverbial barge pole because of something to do with the first rights of the book in question having been already exploited and that is what they are interested in. After half a bottle of the local grape juice, it’s a little difficult to describe it, as well as piss straight. I wonder if the concept of virginity lends itself to an appropriate analogy – first rites are a bit like virginity. You can only lose it once and when it’s gone you’re officially screwed.

But wait! I blogged here about James Oswald (free publicity that was not reciprocated) and his securing of a publishing deal after he had notable ebook success with his detective novels. And there are others that spring to mind: Eragon, Wool …er …Wool, Eragon, for examples, that started out as self-published novels and have gone on to make it big with proper publishers. The Highfield Mole. That’s another one. There must be many. But as my learned blogger friend pointed out, the exceptions are those who make it super big. And I suppose that they prove the rule.

So am I devastated? Not really. But I won’t be self-publishing anything else until I’ve had the customary round of rejections and some clarification on this.

Funnily enough I received a comment on my R&M comments page today that altered my whole perspective on my self-publishing venture and made the lack of fame and fortune seem fleetingly worthwhile. Here it is. Copied and pasted.

I am not an avid reader,i had not really read a book in like 20 years.My wife loves to read and gave me her old nook.i downloaded your book (making a killing)and i could not put it down.i can’t wait to read the other ones.thank you for opening a whole new world to me that i had lost.

Would I trade that kind of humbling recognition, that overwhelming sense of self-worth, that unique and swamping feeling of having finally done something decent and good in my life, for a tepid approach from a tuppenny-ha’penny literary agent? I’m a writer. What do you think?