Still treading on dreams!

Earlier this week ago I posted about Indies Unlimited March Madness, the feature of the month being experiences - usually bad - of independent authors at the hands of predatory publishers, Predominantly the vanity presses and new material has been posted on the site since my piece was published here.

The big player in the field is Author Solutions, but they are not alone and the predators aren't always the size of the proverbial Great White. Some are smaller, akin to the Piranha but the methods and principles are the same.

Who wrote that one?

Couple of weeks ago before I got stuck into NaNoWriMo I was doing the rounds checking the links from cheekyseagull to Apple and the other distributors. Basically checking which ones had the new covers for Control Escape and What You Ask For in place.

I dropped on to the Apple page for Control Escape and then clicked the links for other books by the same author.

Racked up across the page were a line of books all by Martyn Taylor, but half of them were written by my namesake. Another Martyn Taylor, (same spelling) his titles were local history around Bury St Edmunds in East Anglia. He works through a publisher. I publish independently and at the moment work exclusively in digital formats. I have plans to move into POD some time in the new year, again working independently.

I queried the situation with Smashwords who checked it out and reported back. Apparently there are no individual author pages on the Apple website and all publications by authors with the same name are listed together.

Mr Angry

Mr Angry was a character on the BBC Radio DJ Steve Wright's afternoon show some years ago, one of a number of characters who would respond to various prompts in the format of the show; his was a half throttled voice on the edge of screaming, the pent up rage evident through the strain on his vocal chords, and then there is the classic scene from Fawlty Towers; John Cleese beating his broken down vehicle and pouring out his anger and frustration at life's persistent little defeats.

I didn't become that angry, but reading a writing magazine article a few weeks ago did notch up the blood pressure. The continuing discussion about the merits of taking the self-publishing route occasionally throws out some odd remarks and one touched a raw nerve. I closed the magazine and stuck it back on the shelf with a few uncharitable thoughts running through my head. The comment, oh, yes, the comment was that the self-published independent author had more to prove than the traditionally published;  frankly the remark pissed me off.

So what do we have to prove; that working by ourselves or with a smidgeon of carefully selected professional assistance paid for out of our own pockets we can produce a book of the same quality as a multinational conglomerate with a huge workforce and  a marketing budget that looks like a telephone number. Duh, yes, that's the challenge thrown down by the Trads, and a lot of Self-Pubs do just that.

There is no point the traditionally published being high minded about standards and quality when they're already dining with the demons of Vanity, sidling up and buying them out, taking a cut of the harvest and shoring up their defences against the sea change taking place all around them.

OK, I keep banging on about smashwords, and why not, they've helped me reach further than I thought possible when I published Iceline almost two years ago, and I have a great respect for Mark Coker and the staff of smashwords. I read his indie author manifesto when he posted it at the smashwords blog and agreed with it, all of it.

The sea change is startlingly simple, the shift has nudged traditional publishers into partnerships they would have avoided with a ten foot barge pole a handful of years ago because the old gatekeepers have been bypassed by the Internet.

The Internet revolution in self-publishing  has changed the landscape as much as the introduction of the printing press. Small independents are laying the foundations of more than a game changing situation. This is digging up the sacred turf and carting it away then dismantling the stadium and rebuilding it, and that is what they are doing. Independent authors/publishers are doing the groundwork of a whole new way of reaching the public and giving them what they want; good quality writing, equal to any.

This is happening and the roll of Hugh Howey, Amanda Hocking, John Locke and others is the proof. The independents with a brand and a readership in place, the prospect of more books on the way, with an established franchise that can be marketed and backed by an already existing word of mouth promotional network spreading the word makes a better sounding investment than the old method of taking a chance. Let's be fair, if picking a bestseller was easy we would all be doing it, and the truth of it to quote Mark Coker in an interview with LateNightLibrary  "is like throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks."

Not the best method of picking your next big thing, and the greatest shift between the independent authors and the traditional is cost effective print on demand and distribution, a way forward for the self-published without the snares of Vanity publishing. The manuscript stored electronically and printed when a copy is needed may generate slower sales but without the constant jostle for shelf space the factor of time over sales dissipates.

Does any of this mean that the independent author has more to prove than their traditional counterpart? No. absolutely not. The challenge; traditional or self-published, bought in store or delivered by post, is that the end product should be of the finest quality across the board.

Admissions and submissions

Iceline, the first of The Grange novels took a long time to get where it is today, and the delay was not down to the amount of rewriting it required. The manuscript sat on the bookshelf for ten years. A sealed copy with a Post Office date stamp on the seal is still there, and whatever the merits of proving copyright,  the interaction with Post office staff when you explain why you are sending a parcel to yourself is worth it.

It was down to confidence, in myself and my abilities as a writer, I needed that encouragement, and the kick up the backside to get the thing off the ground, and like many writers I was looking for that way forward, the road to find an audience.

Reading through Mark Coker's blog at Smashwords and listening to an interview with him on Late Night Library from Portland  Oregon, via a link in his blog and hearing him recall his own experiences and the journey that brought him to establish Smashwords, and then how the company has developed and contributed to the revolution in publishing over the last few years. He refers to the time just over five years ago as the dark ages of publishing.

I can procrastinate when it suits me, and when I shouldn't but isn't that a common situation. Hanging fire and waiting for the right moment, but that moment has a nasty habit of never actually coming, so the kick in the pants becomes a useful tool. Perhaps that's a bit harsh, let's agree a healthy shove in the right direction is more diplomatic, but it amounts to about the same thing really.

Tradition is a great thing if you know why you are doing it, and for so many years the respectable way to publish has been "Traditional" publishers, with the Vanity and self-publishing apparently lumped together as more or less the same thing, (I'll leave that discussion for another time maybe), with each one looking up or down at the other depending on where they saw their niche in publishing society.

Whatever the merits or otherwise of the various strands of publishing they had their way of doing things, their own traditions and amongst writers there are tradition and mythology. I picked up a tweet a day or so ago, retweeted across the system and it irritated me; the gist of it was that "The first draft is supposed to suck" reposted with a twitter link to the The Indie View photo and taken with the context of the picture the advice is sound, but I have never set out to write anything that sucks, my aim is and always has been to be the best from the first word. the reason is simple, I really don't like proofreading, editing, etc, and yes I know everybody says you should get somebody else to do it, but there are perfect worlds and there is reality.

Reality, the stark reality portrayed to the aspiring author, the barely hidden subtext I found in so many books on how to get published always pointed to how difficult, nay, near impossible it could be to get into print.

They make it sound like rules and stuff, you do this or don't do that, and I find myself drifting back to Kenneth More's portrayal of Douglas Bader, in Reach For The Sky and two particular scenes. the first he turns up to rejoin as a pilot, already due to a flying accident a double amputee and is told that there is nothing in the regulations that says he can fly. His response; there is nothing there that says I can't. The second clip is when the much needed spares he requires to get his squadron operational arrive and he admits to having by-passed all the proper channels declaring that "rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men."

There had to be another way, and most of my life I have been an admirer of Bader, I wouldn't nominate him for sainthood. He was no plaster saint, to borrow from Rudyard Kipling and like many of his compatriots who were single men in barracks they had a job to do, and Churchill's rubber stamp  of "Action This Day" gave them the motivation. I needed a way and the motivation, and eventually found both.

I found Smashwords by accident, researching something else and looking for a book by the American Criminal Profiler, Pat Brown, and was wary of anything that said it was free, but the claim held good, and I found my way. Publishing on Smashwords was my Bader moment, I bypassed all the traditionally accepted channels, and took Mark Coker at his word, that every writer has the right to be published. That was motivation.

When Bader wanted his spares he went straight to Fighter Command, and I'm doing the same. You, reader, are the one I want to send my book out to you and they won't cost you an arm or a leg, maybe the price of a cup of coffee, Iceline (use the Smashwords discount code SG33N) and Control Escape (Smashwords Discount Code VK56T) are out already and What You Ask For, the third novel in the series is nearing completion, and while it is still a work in progress is a freebie from Smashwords. The other two are already out through the major ebook channels, nip across to www.cheekyseagull.co.uk/iceline  or /control_escape  and follow the links or use the links on this blog to reach my website. Have a look around while your there.

Is there anybody there?

Blogging can feel like shouting in the dark, hurling your words into the void and wondering if anyone is listening, or reading. The page view stats; are they real people or search engine bots crawling through the pathways of the Internet, devouring fragments of code as they go?
I suppose they must be a combination of both, and what and who am I?
We all carry tags and labels, a name for this and a description for that, simpler than lumping everything as a thingummy or a whatsit.
My tag cloud, the labels attached to this blog, the metadata for my website, all say something about the medium being used and reasonably would say it about me, so who, what am I.
I write, therefore I am a writer - there, I said it, wrote it;  I AM A WRITER! (Are capitals loud enough or is that the internet equivalent of screaming?)
I tell stories, so I am a storyteller, I like the sound of that too, and I live in Yorkshire, which is in England and part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, so I am also English, and British. That gives a choice of options for the tag cloud, my writing is fiction, but not entirely, I enjoy a good bit of factual research but the freedom of fiction is more immediate and fun. Novelist, my books are novels, or at least variations on a theme (Source Material, posted 23.03.13)
I self publish, via Smashwords, who are my distributors, which makes me an independent author, or an Indie Author to see the tag on Diesel ebooks, and the constant chatter about traditional, hybrid, legacy,vanity, indie, self published, privately published or whatever I personally find quite fascinating, confusing and irritating.
I like being independent, I gives me the freedom to explore what works, and what doesn't; that's where the exploration begins the personal trek to boldly go, or tentatively dip a toe to check the temperature.
Seriously, it is an adventure in whatever guise you step out on to the road, and it may be long and arduous, but it will be worth it.
So who am I, what's my tag cloud today?
Martyn Taylor, Writer, Indie Author, British Writer, Yorkshire, England, Self-published, distributed by Smashwords, storyteller, independent, novelist