Scary. starry night

Nanowrimo v Hallowe’en

That’s the real battle, not the ghouls and the reindeer squaring up across the aisles in the supermarket from October onwards, we know how that one ends. The ghosties and ghoulies are vanquished by the 1st of November.

 

That’s when the scary bit starts. Most of the world is waiting for a knock on the door, counting the hours until the stroke of midnight and the annual ghoul fest is over for another year.

Much the same

What goes around comes, around. Aware of my absence from these pages for quite some time I picked up the threads with a tweet that bounced into an email this morning with a sense of deja-vu.

Amazon and the big publishers apparently having a bit of a barny about ebook pricing. Amazon's VP of Kindle Content, David Naggar, in the Daily Mail suggested the publishers drop their ebook prices to match the 99c price tag offered by the self-published and Independents on Amazon.

It didn't go down well and the Daily Mail and the Bookseller take the story further.

For me, it was like picking up an old chestnut. The shine had gone and the familiar wrinkles and dark tones were there, nestling in the palm of my hand.

A familiar tale and one that could be easily discerned as settled into two halves, Indie Self and Big Pub.

Yes, 99c can sell, and it does. However the danger lurks in the price that the Indie is undervaluing the work.

Stack it high and sell it cheap has lifted more than one supermarket or trader to a dominant place in the market, but that wasn't the thing that made me smile.

Publishing is a game of two halves, Independent and the Big publishing houses. Bill Shankly, the legendary manager of Liverpool once said about football being more serious than a matter of life and death. To paraphrase and shift the context slightly, he was commenting on the dedication needed to succeed.

The analogy can be transferred; Now, there are a handful of major publishing houses, and within their corporate body are the remnants of many smaller publishers, whose names linger like ghosts as imprints of the commercial giants. Consumed in the drive to survive and succeed.

I digress slightly, the analogy that came to mind is occasionally attributed to the early days of sport's coverage on the radio, but may be much older.

Back to square one.

As far back as the Nineteen Thirties, Association football, soccer, was regularly covered by the BBC and a helpful grid was provided in the Radio Times magazine, dividing the pitch into numbered segments, and during the game the announcer would report that play had moved back to square one. Urban legend tagged that as the original of the phrase.

I don't really think Football can take the credit here, although it's a good one for the pub.

The tradition of football commentary and the distortions of language that accompany it have become a part and parcel of the English language. The Plain English Campaign, an organisation focused on the demolition of gobbledygook have a variation of their gobbledygook generator dedicated to the language of the football commentator.

There is a traditional children's favourite that goes back to the late 17th Century that begins and ends on Square One, a much more likely originator.

Hopscotch; the numbered boxes can be chalked, scratched in the dirt or the sand, perhaps painted on to the schoolyard. The player moves along the squares, starting at one and progressing to the highest, which can be either eight or ten, and then returns to number one.

Having been away from the blog for a while - pretty much most of the summer. Coming back to it has a similar feel, of going back to square one,  and the ebook pricing discussion reinforced the feeling.

I may be exaggerating, but it's how I feel right now, so, here we go again.

What is the optimum price for an ebook, assuming it doesn't come free.

How much does the price of an ebook influence your appreciation of the quality of the work?

Something for the experienced and the aspiring independent to weigh in the balance, and I'm not sure their is a wrong answer to either of them.

Definitely a must read, if you love writing...

Anne's Blog  posted in the last few minutes: read it as a reader, and a writer
making the case for doing it yourself, with passion.

Come into my parlour..

Everything has a price, the bill will drop through the letterbox, and hope the total won't send the Bank Manager into a faint when the  balance drifts southward and the ink turns red. A situation  exacerbated by involvement with the Vanity Publishers. Adding up the figures had me wondering how it was done, then a little game began to emerge, whenever I land on a web page I scan the sidebars and skyscrapers, reading the links. then see where they go.  It became apparent very quickly that a lot of them would take the writer seeking publication to one or other of the Vanity Presses offering their services. The clicks rarely reached six, three or four was more likely. The adverts cropped up everywhere, they were almost unavoidable. What stopped me, a natural caution and not having that amount of money available.

The biggest,  which includes Author Solutions, see their authors as customers, and the “lifetime value” of an author relationship to generate $5,000 for the company ( £2950)). Even in "partnership" with the smaller companies , the figures can climb into the thousands before the job is finished. Check the websites for yourself, and play around with the figures. Subsidiaries of AuthorSolutions, including AuthorHouse and Xlibris offer a range of virtually identical packages but not at the same; the basic package at xlibrispublishing.co.uk and authorhouse.co.uk  differ by £100 ($170). 

The question remained, faced with the price tag of the packages and the additional fees that creep on to the balance sheet what are the options available. Consider the basic package from one of the Author Solutions brand, and then look at possible alternatives with the constraints of a tight budget in mind. Use the imagination that created your book to launch it on to the world.

A friend who studied film and video recalls a tutor who explored the idea of the low budget, no budget movie; so how about we apply the idea to our publishing adventure.

First, the package;

Paperback availability

eBook availability, interior design

Custom full colour cover,

Electronic galley,

Paperback author copy,

Complimentary worldwide availability through Ingram distribution

Digital formatting and Distribution

Professional Marketing consultation

Books in print registration

Author Learning Centre 12 month subscription

UK Copyright

Image insertion (10)

Paperback package books (1)

Book stubs (10)

Google and Amazon search programme

The list above is available for £499 ($847), and no mention of copy editing (at XLibris a reasonable length novel of 86,000 / words is charged @ 1.1 pence per word  and chalks up a tab for £946/$1590) or proof reading? Add it to the basic package and it starts pushing the numbers up; unless you want to do it yourself.

So what if we do the whole job or as much as we can ourselves, outsource where we need help? Dismantle the list, work out what we need and price up an alternative.

Why do I do it?

One day I'm going to... Then November comes around and the challenge hits you between the eyes. OK, so one day... today is that day. The First of November starts National Novel Writing Month; a day of hope and trepidation for anyone who has ever thought of writing a novel. A whole month of creatively splurging words across whatever typeface you are working at; paper, screen, Ipad, Android and  all wrapped in a tidy package. Thirty days to reach the target.

Why? What is it that encourages myself and thousands of others to sign up and squirrel another workload into already busy schedules at the time of year when the decorations are starting to appear for Christmas; as carols and Christmas songs begin to drift through the speakers in the shopping malls and supermarkets like an aerosol drug designed to loosen the bonds on wallets and purses.

It's the challenge, the taunt of come on then, come and have a go if you think...you have it in you. The pressure  of the words and the daily tally, 50,000 in 30 days is the sort of pressure that crushes doubt in a mad frenzy of scribbling, typing or both. Can you hold the mental,  creative and imaginative threads together long enough. Can you mix the stamina and bloody minded determination to see it through, cross the 50,000 word line within the 30 days and watch the validation screen flag up a winner; or still be in there when the clock ticks 11.59.59 on the 30th and see the figures change to 00.00 Dec 1, battling onwards.

Does anyone really lose with NaNoWriMo, or is it the real win-win scenario.  The challenge pits you against your strongest and meanest opponent, who knows all your temptations, weakness, and strengths and exactly how to undermine you; and you have your greatest ally with the same information, and the twist? They are the same; you!

That's the winner; you arrive at the end of the month having learnt something about yourself, and you have tasted what it must be like to write professionally, a daily workload, a climbing word count drawing towards a fateful The End where the story pauses, most of the loose ends tied up, but with an opening perhaps to lead the story arc into a sequel and beyond.

I was asked what NaNoWriMo means to me, and I chewed over the answer for a couple of weeks. It was a release, a confirmation of a way of doing things. There are two main personalities in National Novel Writing Month, plotters and pantsters, the question is where are you when the clock strikes midnight and the writing begins. Are you surrounded by plots and plans or unfettered by detailed preparation and plunge in, writing by the seat of your pants, winging it through the days towards the December deadline.

I go for writing by the seat of my pants,  I tried the planning and plotting but it felt like I was puling in two directions; bashing myself over the head with plot it, plan it and then write it only to find that when the characters found their own voice I was completely stuffed, they had read the notes and were determined to do anything except what the plot-line demanded. 

I wanted to go straight in and tell the story, see it unfold before my own eyes so the words dancing across the page were new and fresh to me. 

NaNoWriMo's uncluttered approach felt right, here was a bunch of people fired by enthusiasm and, apparently, caffeine with the nerve to go for it. Careering along a storyline waiting to see what the characters would do next is invigorating and scary! 

Make your characters believable and believe what they are telling you, it's their story, they live in the world of your imagination, but you are not in control of them,. Respect and they will respect you, and hopefully give you a story worth telling learn to trust what they are saying. Storytelling is a natural part of being human, so why make it unnecessarily difficult. If the Novel is intimidating, look at yourself as a  storyteller and be part of that great and ancient tradition, there have been storytellers, sat around  wood fires in ancient camps and propping up the woodwork in hostels and public houses for centuries, millennia, or multiples of both.,.

Writing is part of day to day life, too long without scribbling and I start to feel edgy and uncomfortable, and I go back to the typeface. The deadline of NaNoWriMo gives me a much needed boost, naturally it kicks the word count into orbit, but the confidence that I can meet the pressure and have the commitment to see it through without sweating about the details; just getting the story down in any shape ready be knocked about and rebuilt where necessary is welcome.

Chris Baty, founder of NaNoWriMo and author of "No Plot, No Problem" cites the deadline as the writer's most powerful tool, the Damocles' sword hanging over the keyboard. It works for me, focusing the mind and boosting concentration, and NaNoWriMo? 

Ancient cave paintings were the visual aids to storytelling and the themes are eternal, and for me National Novel Writing Month is a reminder that however solitary writing can be,, I am not alone, there are literally hundreds of thousands of people with something to say through the medium of the story. Whether plotting the minutest detail, winging it with half a wing missing and an engine shot away, literally on a wing and a prayer. Whatever your first line, Once Upon A time, in the beginning, it was a dark and stormy night, the scream shattered the night and his blood ran like ice through his veins. Be the storyteller and leave the day to day, step into the eternal and explore; travel in time and space, past, present and future - not necessarily in that order - or look at your own backyard through another pair of eyes.

NaNoWriMo is over for this year, but I'll be there next October waiting for the clock to strike the hour and shift the calendar from October the 31st to the 1st of November. I won't be alone, and if you chose to make the journey for yourself for the first time or for a return visit; travel well my friend. 

Skulduggery and Scuba, smuggled in

Smuggling, skulduggery and scuba diving and he was in the right place at the wrong time. A late evening encounter outside the compressor shed and a moment of panic. A tourist joins the list of missing persons, literally whisked away one night and missing for weeks. 
Don Steel wasn't any tourist, his new enemies may have been unknown but their ignorance of who they had snatched would prove costly. Battered, bruised and bloody he turns up in a ditch high in the mountains above Glencoe; airlifted to hospital for treatment his recuperation is disrupted by an attempt to silence him. Steel would be neither silent nor compliantly lie down. Leaving his attacker in the care of and needing the attention of the ward sister he takes to the road and begins a cat and mouse chase across the highlands and islands of Scotland to a final showdown in Tobermory Bay backed up by allies colleagues and friends, and one friend discovers just how far he will go. 

How Much!

The big question when you put anything out into the open market, and probably the biggest conundrum facing any author, self-published or otherwise, how much will the book sell for. Being an Indie I can't hand it over to marketing to do the calculations for me, but I know that Mark Coker at Smashwords has given the subject considerable time and thought. He's posted on the Smashwords blog and at Slideshare a couple of presentations (here and here) based on his research into the dynamics of ebooks sales.

Both presentations are worth a look at, and provide considerable food for thought. There is no magic bullet that I can see but more helpfully a solid appraisal of the situation facing any writer in the market place today.

There are likely to be as many ways of selecting the price for a book as their are writers, but one or two common factors seem to pop out. Obviously free shifts more dowlnoads than anything else, about 92 times more than, and ebooks come in a variety of prices but there is a correlation of approximately 30000 words per dollar, putting a full length novel edging towards epic length, (70000 to 1000000 words) around the $2.99 tag.

Have a look at the presentations, and see what you think.

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.

Online, All Locations/Items: Showing ads in eBooks (Fiction) Thriller - BookBarista

Online, All Locations/Items: Showing ads in eBooks (Fiction) Thriller - BookBarista Iceline and Control Escape click on the ad for links to major ebook retailers,

Early one morning just as...

Word count, download count, sales figures, for a business that is about words and sentences there are a lot of numbers involved, all useful and interesting, and a bit frustrating sometimes. the interesting bit comes along when you write, post and tucked away behind the website store-front a page view chart spikes. The obvious question is why did that happen, and then the wondering about what it was, if anything that I did perhaps created the spike. The grey porridge inside the head starts to move sluggishly around groping myopically around the corners of an unused attic space where all that information you haven't used since the family stopped playing you at Trivial Pursuit, and occasionally handed your team the edge in the Pub quiz is stashed away. The stuff that stops a conversation the way a field gun stops an elephant
You know the feeling, the bit you're looking for is there and it's brilliant, but you can't pull it out. It has everything a blog piece could want, charm, wit, intellect, and in a thoughtful way provocative - like I said, brilliant. In the end you lose interest and drift off across the internet and the post is forgotten, until you wake up in the middle of the night and try to scribble something down - and the story of the writer who had a notebook beside his bed for just such an occasion and woke up one night with a fantastic plot buzzing in his head, switched on the light; grabbed the notebook and pen and scribbled the idea down. Content that the genius was caught on paper he dropped back on to the bed and was asleep before his head hit the pillow.

Next morning he woke up and checked the notebook; the plot was there, but somehow it lost the magic of the early hours - it read simply Boy Meets Girl!

That is so frustrating!!!

Feedback - say that again - please!

Putting a novel out has its moments of sublime delight and mild frustration, working out how to get the word out, wandering through the labyrinth of the Internet, a whole host of things and then suddenly when you least expect it - music to your ears!

Excellent, couldn't put it down - simple words that writers dream of hearing. I heard them this week; Control Escape - the second Grange novel - was holiday reading for a friend of mine and the text after touchdown was "Control Escape Excellent" an honest unsolicited opinion. So here's the rub, don't take my word for it or his; check it out for yourself - a page turner you can't put down for the price of a decent cup of coffee, in fact try both of them Iceline and Control Escape for two cups of coffee.

If you're in the mood for something raw and closer to the typeface, where the words are being mined, try What You Ask For... - it started with Nanowrimo last November and the work progresses - it's a freebie download - while the construction work continues.

Bring your own coffee, or slide them from the Internet onto your favourite reader via the WiFi at your favourite coffee shop. Traditional British Thrillers with the flavours of John Buchan and Jack Higgins, a touch of crime and mystery stirred into a brew you will enjoy as much as your coffee, available from Smashwords, Apple iTunes, Diesel, B&N, Kobo, Sony.