It’s amazing how much you can achieve through creative procrastination. I finished up the first draft of my next novelette, currently titled Queen of the May although that might change. The transcription from my handwriting wasn’t too bad, but it has resulted in a lot of errors because my writing has a tendency to get a bit scrawly when I get over-excited. The first first draft came in at 21,673 words, a number which is steadily decreasing as I tidy up the copy.

But I have to confess that editing out weird typos is not exactly the most thrilling of pastimes, so I’ve been putting a lot of energy into planning my next Kickstarter project and, this time, getting my costings spot on. I’m talking to Oldacres in Hatton Garden again for printing as they did such a great job last time, and between us we’re trying to figure out how to do a better job on the paper cover for the hardback.

Last time, we used just normal paper stock with a laminate finish. It looked really good, but it was a bitch to work with when binding. Not only did I have to deal with the paper fibres swelling, as is their wont, but the lamination worsened the problem meaning that I had to tape down each sheet in order to work with it. Since then I’ve done a couple of bookbinding courses at Falkiners, both of which were fantastic. I learnt some new techniques and got to play with some materials that I’d never have used on my own, and that experience has altered my thinking on how to bind the next set of books.

Firstly, I want to use Japanese paper for the paper-covered hardbacks. Japanese paper is made differently to western paper and because its fibres are random, rather than being all lined up as in our usual paper, it doesn’t curl when wet. This makes it a joy to work with. Japanese papers are also stronger, so you can work with a thinner stock which allows you to get much crisper, cleaner lines. But when you buy decorative Japanese paper, it has usually been screen printed, so although we can buy white sheets, how we print it is something that we’re still trying to work on. Oldacres are currently experimenting for me with some samples from John Purcell Paper, a wholesaler. I am very anxiously awaiting the results!

Secondly, the methodology I used for the silk covers last year turned out to be horribly, painfully time-consuming. I translated my “design” into blocks of colour, cut the right shapes out from appropriately coloured dupion silk, bonded them together and then sewed over the joins with embroidery. A very time-consuming process. The embroidery alone took 16 hours per cover. Beautifully as they came out, I cannot go through that again! So now I’m looking at the possibility of screenprinting, or maybe just doing a simpler embroidered design. This is going to require some serious and careful thought as it will have a big impact on the cover design. (You’ll be glad to hear that I’m not going to be doing the design myself this time!)

I’m also looking into possibilities for a leather-bound version. I’m talking to a number of binderies about my options, both for them to provide the binding service, and to explore whether there is any way that I can work on the leather bindings myself, under supervision. Whilst I worked with leather in my second Falkiners course, I have neither the equipment or the experience to do the leather versions myself. BInding in leather, even if it’s just an A6 novelette, is going to be far from cheap, but the results will be stunning.

Soon, I’ll have my costings nailed down and then I’ll be in the right position to start my next Kickstarter project. I have had a few ideas for exclusive rewards that I’ll be listing, but their numbers will be very limited indeed. I’ll be announcing the project through my mailing list first so if you want to be amongst the first people to know when it goes live, join the mailing list now! I send out very few emails and I manage the list using Mailchimp so you can set your preferences for type of email and can unsubscribe at any time without any risk of your email address winding up in the wrong hands.

I’m very excited to be planning my second Kickstarter project. It’s been 18 months since I put Argleton up, and the Kickstarter community has expanded dramatically over that time, so I’m eager to see what sort of support it’s possible to get now. My goal will certainly have to be a bit higher than last time in order to pay for a designer and my time: If writing is to be sustainable, it has to provide me with a modest living, and I would be very happy indeed if it could do that independent of the behemoth that is Amazon.

In the meantime, though, there’s only so long I can put off doing that edit!

Whilst watching this video of John Carrera’s project to reprint the Pictorial Webster’s Dictionary, I spotted that he had a nifty little device for putting holes into his book signatures, making sewing large numbers of books much quicker and easier.

Does anyone know if it’s possible to buy a jig like this? Is this standard bookbinding gear? Or would I have to find someone to make it for me?

Further to my post from the other day about my lost Four Corners post, recovered through the power of Twitter, I have dug up another of the essays I wrote for them. I had thought I’d written more, but it turns out there were only two posts, so from rom 26 April 2004, here it is the second:

Memory is synaesthetic. Sights, sounds, smells, sensations – all can prompt the sudden and unexpected recall of an old memory, musty, frayed around the edges and long since consigned to the dustbin of your mind, or so you thought.

Prising myself away from my desk a few weeks ago, I walked the 15 minutes to our nearest corner shop. The sky was a crisp blue, clouds sculled across it like fluffy white boats on a mill-pond sea. It was definitely a spring day, one that might in a few weeks metamorphose into summer, but for the moment it remained a pupa of a day, fat with possibilities but not yet ready to take wing.

That specific combination of the warm sunlight on my skin and the chill the air still held, itself a memory of winter, brought unexpectedly to mind childhood holidays in Cornwall.

Each Easter, my parents would take me and my brother to The Lizard for a couple of weeks, always staying at the Gwendreath Farm Caravan Park. No matter how things changed around us, our yearly holidays would remain a constant, as reliable as the great, graceful dishes at Goonhilly Earth Station that signalled we were close to our destination.

Often, the weather would keep us in the caravan, watching the sea fog roll in, listening to the distant mournful moan of the Lizard lighthouse foghorn, soulfully shooing boats away from the vengeful rocks of the peninsular that forms the southern-most tip of Britain.

Sometimes we’d be lucky, Cornwall’s maritime climate blessing us with sunshine and days on the beach, yet there would always be that nip in the air, a reminder that the weather could change faster than I could get out of my swimsuit and into something warmer.

Our Easter holiday ritual heralded for me the beginning of the end of the school year. Once I got back from Cornwall, the summer term would begin and it would be hardly any time at all before lunchtimes could be spent lying on the grass, contemplating maybe playing tennis tomorrow (although I never got much past the contemplation stage). Then, with indecent haste, exams and hayfever would be upon us, followed smartly by two months off.

My life no longer changes so reliably with the seasons. Easter is no longer a marker of the long summer to come, but instead a reminder that the year is disappearing too fast. I no longer dread June as the month of exams, but instead find myself hoping that I might clear enough off my to-do list that I can guiltlessly take the opportunity afforded by a few sunny days to lounge about in my sarong with a bottle of Pimms and a bowl of strawberries.

The chances of finding eight whole weeks to do nothing except what I want to do have dwindled to nothing – I almost can’t imagine it. I have a hard time imagining even two weeks off. But if I concentrate on the feeling of sun on my face, on that sensation, then there I am again with the sand under my feet, the salt in my nostrils and the squabbling of hungry gulls wheeling above me.

For just a moment, I can remember what it was like when there was nothing to do but explore.

In 2004, I was invited to write for a site called Four Corners. It was one of those blogs that aimed to be an international source of food for thought. Today a friend of mine asked about an old blog post that he remembered about me talking about history, almost as if the country was a palimpsest. All I could find here on Chocolate and Vodka was an excerpt and a link… to a dead site.

Thankfully, through the magic of Twitter we managed to track down the blog that underpinned the main site and which exists now as a rather worn and threadbare Typepad blog. It is almost a palimpsest itself.

Here is the original essay, written on 3 April, 2004, for the sake of history. I shall see if I can comb through the old blog there and pull up some of my other posts, just so that I have them. So much of my early writing has vanished, either trapped in print or lost from the pixels of the internet, so it’s nice to rescue this little bit of it.

It’s everywhere – in the air that fills your lungs, in the ground beneath your feet, in the water you drink. In your teeth. It permeates everything, often unseen, unnoticed, unfelt.

But pause a while, sharpen your senses, plant your heels firmly and connect to the rest of the world. Feel it seep up into your body, feel it circulate in your blood, feel it ebb and flow through you, binding you to the rest of time, to your forebears, to your descendants.

You cannot move in Britain for history. Modern, medieval, prehistory. History is here in abundance. Not just the buildings, in the dark oaken beams of a 13th century coaching inn, the fine sweep of majestic Georgian terraces or the peaceful solitude of a Saxon church built on ground that was sacred long before Christianity was brought to the British Isles.

Here, the earth itself bears visible witness to the past, at places like Maiden Castle or Badbury Rings, where the endeavours of long dead Iron Age villagers whose need to protect that which was precious to them found its answer in the ground. Huge earthworks, tonnes of dirt moved by hand to create formidable ditches and ramparts to keep the enemy out.

There is mystery carved into the living earth too – chalk scars connect to create white horses, military badges, human figures. Some of this history is undoubtedly ancient, such as the Uffington White Horse, the oldest and most graceful chalk horse in England, created in the Bronze Age. Some of this history is relatively new. The Fovant Badges were mainly carved during WWI, in remembrance of the soldiers who had given their lives in bloody combat. But look then at the Cerne Abbas Giant – is it an ancient celebration of virility or a relatively modern hoax?

In fact, even the very vegetation that shrouds the dirt with verdant disguise can be historic. The Monmouth Ash is said to still stand, the very tree where James Scott, Duke of Monmouth hid, trying to escape James II. Trees which have withstood the centuries, oaks or beech or churchyard yew, trees which have watched as the world changed, trees in which children played and from which criminals were hanged.

And this is the thread that runs through all time, uniting the historic with the present: the stories of the people who lived, laid and died in these places.

So much of history can never be told, lost to time. But the coaching inn that is still used as a hotel has seen generations of people come, stay for a while and leave. It has stood as each story unfolded and seen the parallels echo down the years, the same parts played by later generations. How many newly married couples, impatiently divesting each other of their clothes? How many children, frightened of sleeping in strange darkness, seeking the comfort and warmth of their parents’ bed? How many arguments, agreements, compromises?

Human experience shaped history and is shaped by history. Some things never change, we feel the same needs as our forebears, the same emotions, the same sun on our skin. It’s all there, everywhere, in front of you, now.

History. You don’t need to look for it. You just need to see it.

Nick Mamatas says it better than I ever could: Ten Bits of Advice Writers Should Stop Giving Aspiring Writers.

I was fascinated by this post from Tyler Nichols about his experience providing a freemium Letter from Santa service before Christmas. In short, Tyler had found that few people upgraded from the free version to the paid, and that those who did use the free version were much more likely to send him support queries.

I was wondering as I read how much of this is transferable to ebooks. Is the freemium model a sensible one for writers? Does giving away your work get you a bigger audience of people willing to pay next time round? Or does it just mean that lots of people download your stuff, never read it, and have no interesting in paying for future works?

I’ve always been a big advocate of free and I don’t think I’m convinced that it’s worth giving up on yet, but I did find this comment from Wei on Tyler’s post really interesting:

Freemium works with some business models but in this case, I’m pretty sure it’s not the right play. Freemium works best when you get the customer addicted to the point that they would be willing to pay money to get more of it. It seems like your website gave out the entire product for free and you are asking money for the accessories. Imagine Dell giving you a free laptop then get mad when you choose not to buy the leather case or an extra battery. Unfortunately I think that is how you have setup the site this year.

And this reply from Nate:

I agree. I always thought freemium was best explained in the gaming sense. You can play the game for free (e.g. MafiWars) but if you want the better weapon, or faster upgrades, or one time kill shot, you fork over $5, $10, or $20.

Most people won’t come in and instantly buy 1000 experience points. But after they’ve played for a time, for example a month, and are tired at how slow they upgrade, they fork over $5 for 1000XP without batting an eye. After all, it’s wired up to paypal, and the process is instant.

Giving away a book for free is the Dell model. You are giving someone the entire thing and then hoping that they buy the audiobook or a Kindle version or whathaveyou. But what would be the equivalent of the MafiaWars weapon upgrade? Certainly it’s not the last chapter, because that would essentially be a bait and switch, which is likely to piss people off.

Indeed, what upgrades can a book even have? Are people really interested in author annotations? I would imagine most are not. Audiobooks don’t feel like an upgrade – they aren’t an enhancement as much as they are simply a different version. Once you’ve read the story, you’ve read the story, you know how it ends. The audiobook is probably only attractive to the subset of your readers who like to listen.

So what about merchandise? That relies on the idea that you’re actually selling identity, not a story, and whilst in general terms that’s sort of true, is it true enough to pin a business model to? Or would selling merchandise simply mean that you have more awareness to raise and are taking a bigger risk spending time, effort and possibly money getting your shop set up? Even if you go with only on-demand merch, like t-shirts, there’s still an initial outlay on design, etc., so it’s not completely free.

But games and books are different to, say, software. People really do become enthusiastic fans of games and books, gobbling up every release as soon as it is out, in a way that I suspect isn’t the case for (much) software. I may love a particular app or service, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to upgrade to premium if I don’t need to or that I’m going to go and buy everything else that developer does. If I find an author I love, on the other hand, I will go and raid their back-catalogue without a second thought.

Of course the big problem is that as a newbie author, you don’t have fans, let alone the most valuable kind of hardcore fans that buy every version of everything. Your first and biggest challenge is reaching enough people to find the ones who are interested in becoming your fans. It is a huge hurdle, and although I’m still not sure what the most efficient way of surmounting it is, I do think I’ll be more likely to achieve that with the freemium model than without.

I’m reminded by Simon Goode of the the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, a collection of translated poems by Persian poet, mathematician and astronomer, Omar Khayyám. In 1912, a version of the book was bound by London bookbinder Francis Sangorski, who had a bit of a thing for shiny. Simon summarises:

The book took more than two years work to produce, bound in full leather with inlays of silver satinwood and mahogany. The Rubáiyát featured more than 1,050 precious and semi-precious stones – rubies, topaz, garnet and turquoise.

The rest of the tragic story is explained in this video:

I belong to an internet forum populated by a right bunch of weirdos some lovely people, and in the course of discussions about my survey, the one in which I’m trying to figure out how people discover new books and authors (it’s still open, please answer it!), the question was asked:

So what the hell is Literary Fiction? Is everything else is non-literary fiction?

The answers were far too insightful to just leave them hidden away in our little corner of the web, so I’m happy to say that I have permission to share them with you. Names have been redacted to protect the innocent.

Serious books that aspire to be literature. Full of high falutin ideas and not many knob gags.

You mean books that the reviewer and/or marketer didn’t understand (or finish?) and couldn’t place elsewhere?

And a lack of death-rays, super-villains etc

What’s the difference between “classics” and “literary?”

Classics is old. Literary is new stuff pretending to be good.

I reckon literary fiction is where the prose is so good the plot can afford to be poo. They make great reads but lesser films.

So can I assume “literary” is “everything left over without a genre”? You know, books about people and their problems who aren’t aliens/knights/spies/criminals/women?

Some are good, but some are a navel-gazing wankathons. Try The Finkler Question. Great prose, but sod all happens.

The stuff that wins awards, but nobody actually reads?

I think some of those definitions are pretty much spot on.

After several days of recording, re-recording and editing, I’m happy to say that the Argleton audiobook is now available on Bandcamp on a pay-what-you-wish basis, with no minimum price (i.e. free download). Due to Bandcamp upload limits, I’ve had to split it into Part 1 and Part 2, but you can buy them as an album which minimises the hassle as much as possible. Once I’ve sold enough, Bandcamp will allow me to upload a bigger file, and then I’ll have enough space to upload the audiobook as a single file.

If you want to sample the wares first, please feel free to stream the book either here on on Bandcamp itself. You can also embed the audio player on your own blog if you so wish.

Please feel free to give it a listen and if you like the sound of it you can grab both files over on Bandcamp.

I do love it when authors are honest about the kinds of sales they are making, particularly when they are not the pack leaders like Amanda Hocking or John Locke. I am sure both Amanda and John have worked incredibly hard for the success they currently enjoy, and I’m not slighting them in the least, but they cannot be said to be representative of the majority of writers going the self-publishing route. They are at the very head of the long-tail graph and as such they provide us with much needed hope and inspiration, but I want to know more about writers who are further down the spine, closer to the tail… closer to my position at the arse.

Via Zite I stumbled across William King’s recent blog post about how his four novels, self-published on Amazon, have been doing over the last six months. It’s a fascinating read. His sales numbers start off very small, as you might expect, but wind up being quite respectable: over 1500 for the month of December. His current prices stand at:

• Death’s Angels – £0.72
• The Serpent Tower – £2.92
• The Queen’s Assassin – £2.92
• Shadowblood  - £2.92

As you might expect, his cheapest title, Death’s Angels sells the best. He says he’s now making about £1900 pcm, which is a pretty decent income and certainly one that would allow me to write full-time.

The most interesting pattern I’m seeing in all this though is nothing to do with prices but is more to do with back-catalogue. A common theme amongst successful self-publishers is that they begin with a handful of books that they’ve written which they can release gradually and which each give the other books a bit of a boost. Having a back catalogue that is a series also allows you to price one book, probably the first, cheaply as a sacrificial lamb to encourage people to try your stuff out and hopefully pay more for your other books. I think this certainly provides an advantage, and is something to think about if you already have some manuscripts in your desk drawer which are currently sitting about doing nothing.

Unfortunately for me, my past manuscripts are either unfinished or shit, so I am just going to have to do this the hard way and write as I go along.

I’m interested in finding out more from readers about what they like and how they find out about new books and authors. I’m starting off with a very simple two-question survey. Please do take a moment to fill it out! When I’ve got a significant number of responses, I’ll publish the results.

UPDATE: Right, well that all went unexpectedly wrong! SurveyMonkey, it turns out, charges £24 per month to access your data as soon as you go over 100 responses, and I was rapidly heading towards 300. That £24 only pays for the first 1000 responses per month which, given the rate at which they were coming in, didn’t seem like it would last long. If you go over 1000, then you have to pay 10p per response, so if it really took off and I got 2000 responses, that would be £124.

Now, I don’t mind paying for stuff online. I buy a lot of independent software and pay for a number of key web services which I think are good value for money. But SurveyMonkey is taking the piss, frankly. I’d happily pay, say, a fiver per month or a few quid per survey if it came with unlimited responses, but I’m not going to pay £24 per month for such a horribly hobbled service.

So, I have been trying Obsurvey which has far fewer options that SurveyMonkey, but so far getting mixed responses from users as to whether that site is usable. If it turns out to be unusable is another option I can try yet, but I know that the more I change things, the less likely people will be to bother to fill things out. All I can say is sorry!

Today I passed the first milestone in my ebook pricing experiment: I have sold as many copies of Argleton in the first 11 days of January as I sold in the four months it was available last year. However, and it’s a big however, I’ve made less than a quarter of the money in royalties than I would have if I’d kept the price the same. A further big however, however, is that the absolute numbers I’m talking about are tiny: 49 copies sold in the last four months of 2011, and 50 sold in the last 11 days.

Nonetheless it’s a milestone and I’ve passed it. The question remains now is how long it will take to pass the next one: to equal the amount of money in royalties that I made last year, estimated at £54.79. I know that’s a trifling amount but we all have to start somewhere.

Of course, these are actually unfair comparisons for two main reasons:

• Argleton now has seven 5-star reviews in the UK store; one 5-star and one 4-star review in the US store. It should therefore perform better now than when it didn’t have those reviews.
• Lots of people got Kindles for Christmas that they want to fill with free/cheap content, so one would expect a sales spike in early January, which seems to be what I’ve seen. Sales have certainly decreased in the last few days.

Once I get to the end of January I’ll publish all my stats for comparison. I have to increase sales by an orders of magnitude or three before I really see a return, but I hope that one day these numbers will be the beginning of a rather attractive graph!

Today I stumbled across a blog post by KB/KT Grant about how authors who can’t handle negative reviews should really stay away from reading them, and certainly shouldn’t throw a hissy fit about any criticism they get. I hadn’t previously seen any of the examples of authorial meltdown that Grant refers to, but she is absolutely correct to say that writers should never, ever respond badly to reviews. Not in public. Not in private. Not ever.

Negative reviews are part and parcel of putting stuff out there, and if you can’t handle reading them you should ignore all reviews all the time. It’s really that simple.

But whilst Grant says that sites like Goodreads are for readers, not for authors…

At no time in Goodreads’ mission statement does it state that their site is for authors to promote their books

…and whilst that might be true of their mission statement, when signed in to the site as an author it is very, very clear that Goodreads does indeed think that the site is for authors to promote their books. On my author dashboard it says:

Check the stats for your books and giveaways, and learn more about how to promote your books on Goodreads.

That’s right up at the top of the page. In the sidebar, it says:

Learn more about how to promote your books with special tools on Goodreads.

Clearly, Goodreads does want bring authors and readers together. And there’s a risk in that, for both parties: Readers risk learning that a particular author is a moron and authors risk being harangued by moronic readers, for it is an undeniable truth that both moronic authors and moronic readers exist.

But you just have to get over it and move on.

I also think that reviews, even negative ones, can be really useful for authors, if they have the maturity to read them with both an open mind and a pinch of salt. A review is one person’s opinion and it may well be that that person is a douche. It may also be that your book really does suck, or that you really did mess up the ending, or that your characterisation isn’t as crisp as it should be. The truth to be found in negative reviews varies from ‘all of it’ to ‘none of it’, and only if you are honest with yourself as to the potential for flaws in your work will you be able learn something from them.

It’s also important to know when to ignore criticism. I have had one person criticise (not in a review, but in a comment on G+) Argleton, but they also told me that they had read only half the book. I had hoped that they would finish it and then either stand by their point or let me know that actually they now thought their initial assessment to be incorrect. They didn’t, which rather robbed their criticism of validity.

But these days, authors cannot completely escape contact with readers, particularly as authors both new and mid-list have to do a lot of their own promotion and a lot of that work is done online and in social media.

I personally believe that we should not even try to avoid contact (although if you’re wildly successful you will have to limit it simply because of scale: you simply cannot spend the time that would be required to reply to everyone). Even I, as an almost entirely unknown author, get people saying hello on Twitter because they have read or are about to read Argleton. I always try to reply politely, although as with all things digital sometimes I miss messages. But if someone were to say something negative, I would either respond gracefully, ignore it, or block them, depending on the nature of the message.

And that’s the key thing to remember. As authors, we do have some agency here. We choose who to follow on Twitter and who to block. We choose whose comments to allow on our blog, and whose to block. And if someone posts an abusive review on Amazon (as opposed to one that is simply negative), we can choose to report it and let Amazon deal with it. And the rest we can choose to ignore.

There’s something always Darwinian about the kind of stupidity Grant describes. If an author is going to wig out at their readers, then it is going to come back to bite them on the arse in the form of “Do Not Read” notices, more negative reviews, and the rapid creation of very bad reputations. Authors at any stage of their career except ‘already wildly successful’ will do themselves irreparable harm by such ill-considered actions because, by all accounts, publishers and agents do have a tendency to notice these sorts of things. Freaking out over a bad review isn’t just bad for one’s blood pressure, it’s also bad for one’s career.

As they say, Karma’s a bitch.

As a little experiment, I have put the Kindle version of Argleton on sale, so if you’d like to support my writing you can now do so even more cheaply than before! Here are the current prices (the confusion over the US price is because it shows up at $1.20 to me, but I had set it at 99¢ and have had a comment to say that that is actually what it’s selling for actually in the US):

• Kindle UK – 77p
• Kindle US – $1.20/99¢
• Kindle France – 89¢
• Kindle Germany – 89¢
• Kindle Spain – 89¢
• Kindle Italy – 89¢

Have at it!

Argleton Fields

Do you know where we’re going?” Charlie peered over the neatly trimmed hawthorn hedge into the field beyond. At its edge was a small pavilion, weatherboards and railings painted fresh white, beams and pillars in crisp black. Although the roof sagged a little, every decorative ridge tile was in place. Numbers painted in the small gable above the main door revealed it had been built in 1887.

“I have the precise co-ordinates of — well, you’ll see! — plugged into my map,” said Matt, brandishing his phone.

Thwack! came the unmistakable sound of cricket. The pitch was in play, men in cricket whites standing around in various states of relaxation. The bowler approached the wicket in a loping run, rolled his arm over and let go of the ball. Despite looking slightly harried, the batsman hit a four and a gentle cheer drifted through the air along with the scent of newly mown grass.

“Ah, there’s nothing like cricket to prove that summer has finally come,” Matt said, as they set off along the path that skirted the pitch. “You know anything about it?”

“A bit,” said Charlie.

“Never really figured it out, myself. All I know is that the team with the score most like a telephone number wins.”

“Well, that does rather depend.” Charlie glanced at the outfield where a portly gentleman stumbled backwards, trying to make a catch. “If they don’t finish play, say because of bad light or rain, then the second team doesn’t get a fair go, so the result has to be calculated.”

“Why does the ref wear a lab coat?”

“Umpire. The guy in the white coat is an umpire.”

“OK, so why does the umpire wear a lab coat? He’snot going to break off play for a quicky dissection halfway through, is he?”

…

Last year, I laid out my goals for the year. If was a relatively modest list which I had no doubt I’d be able to plough through in no time at all.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha. *pauses for breath* Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

At least I managed to (mostly) keep to my overarching goal:

Finish your open projects before you start any new ones.

I didn’t start any major new projects that I shouldn’t have, although I also didn’t finish quite as much as I had hoped I would. Still, I passed some pretty big milestones in 2011, so that makes me very happy.

Here’s my status update:

Writing
Completed:

• Argleton – Yay! An epic battle to get it all done to a standard I was happy with in a time frame that didn’t frustrate my supporters, but I managed in the end. There’s still more to come with Argleton in 2012 though, including an audiobook and a new cover design.

Still to finish:

• The Prequel to the Books of Hay – Still not started, but am going to have to think about it as, whilst I have the setting and some characters, the plot just refuses to come together in my head. Bah.
• The Books of Hay – I was some 30,000 words into this when Argleton struck, but need to figure out the prequel before I decide what to do with this.

New on the list:

• Queen of the May – 10,000 words into this already, and hoping to finish it up very soon. It somewhat jumped to the head of the writing queue because the story was fully formed in my head and so easy to get out.

Crafting
Ditched:

• Black crocheted cardigan – Took a look at this, decided that I didn’t like it any more and frogged it. (That’s knitting parlance for undoing a bit of knitting/crochet.)

Completed:

• Crocheted tablecloth – Hah! Done! Oh yes. Two weeks before we left the Arsenal flat and thus the table it was designed to fit, I finally finished it! Looks good on the gatefold barley-twist leg oak table we bought for the new place, though.
• Blue shrug – This was a gift for a friend, and these things work up really quickly so took no time at all.
• Furry cream shrug – For me! Too chilly to wear it at the moment but will be great for spring.
• Blue mini-scarf – With only one ball of yarn there wasn’t much to do with it except make a very narrow scarf. Came out lovely though!

Still to finish:

• Nuptial cushions
• Jewellery
• Mend throw
• Hatboxes

New on the list:

• Black hourglass jacket – I’m making this with the yarn from the frogged black cardigan.

Misc
Completed:

• Clear out boxes – The move from London to Working forced me to clear out a lot of stuff, and Kevin’s done even more over the Christmas break. Still a few to do, but as we’ve reduced our box count substantially I’m marking this as done!
• Recycle clothes – Done when we moved.
• Find home for unwanted computer – Also done when we moved. Was amazing how fast old computing gear was taken when we left it in our communal hallway with a note saying “Please take me”.

No other misc tasks still to finish or added to the list. Yay!

Focus for 2012
Without a doubt, my focus for 2012 is on writing. Writing is what I have always wanted to do with myself, and I finally have found a way to make it work. I’ll be writing at least two novellas/novelettes in 2012, which I will probably put on Kickstarter to fund the physical copies. I may novelise Tag, my script. I might even start some new novels – I have plenty of ideas, but need to prioritise my writing to take the most promising and quickest ones on first.

My aim is to build up a corpus, a fanbase and enough sales that I can being to transition to writing full time. Kindle sales have a long, long way to go before they can even begin to replace my other income sources, but I am hoping that I can build them up over the next year to provide at least a decent trickle of cash.

I think my main income from writing in 2012 will be from Kickstarter, which will fund the printing and hand-binding of copies of the books for my supporters. I learnt a lot from Argleton, and I can do future projects much more effectively and quickly, which will also make them more cost effective.

The big challenge, however, will be reaching enough people, without the fortune of being included in the Kickstarter newletter which happened last time but is very unlikely to happen again. I can only hope that my reach has increased over the last 18 months!

So, that’s my 2012. I really can’t wait to get my teeth into it!

So yes, I know it’s nearly Christmas Eve and I know I should be turning my brain off, but this blog post about ebook pricing by Declan Burke came across my radar today on Twitter (and yes I know I should have turned Twitter off too) and I couldn’t not reply.

Declan writes about his experiences with pricing the ebook version of his novel, Eightball, which he says started off at $1.99 and ended up at $7.99. He also briefly mentions the different pricing structures from publishers, and discusses the attitudes of some readers who appear to think that all culture should be free.

But the main bit of Declan’s post that caught my eye was his discussion of cost and value:

The other odd thing, from a personal point of view, is exemplified by the drop-off in sales for EIGHTBALL BOOGIE once its price started to go up. The e-book fan (or anyone with even the vaguest grasp of economics) will very probably be screaming right now at the screen a variation on, ‘It’s the economy, stooopid.’

I understand that. I really do. But from my point of view, EIGHTBALL BOOGIE is the same book regardless of whether it’s $1.99 or $7.99: it’s not a quarter as interesting, or funny, or thrilling, at the cheaper price, and it doesn’t come in at 25,000 words rather than 85,000 words.

It’s not my place, by the way, to say that EIGHTBALL is interesting, funny or thrilling. I’m just saying that whatever qualities the book had at the $1.99 price, those qualities remain the same regardless of whether I charge $7.99 or give the book away for free.

I suppose my central concern, when it all boils down, is that fans of e-books are confusing cost and value. That’s not to say that very good books aren’t being sold for $1.99, or $0.99, or even being given away free. But it’s patently self-limiting for a reader to impose an arbitrary price of (say) $4.99 on a book, and state that he or she refuses to pay any more, regardless of the quality of that book.

Unfortunately, I fear that Declan confuses inherent value with market worth, and the two are very different indeed. As writers, we would all like to think that our work has inherent value. The blood, sweat and tears that we leaked all over the page should, we tell ourselves, be valued by others as much as it is by us.

But the price that the public is willing to pay has little to do with any sense of inherent value; it is directed by what price the market will support. When it come to deciding what price we put on our ebooks, it is not sufficient to think about our concept of inherent value. We would all love our ebooks to sell by the shedload at a nice, high price. (And if we’re famous, they might well!) But for most of us, we should instead be striving to understand which price will maximise our profits. If we sell thousands at £1.79, is that going to bring in more profit than if we sell hundreds at £5.99?

And this is where almost every single blog post and news article I’ve seen on the subject falls flat on its face. The horrible, uncomfortable, inconvenient truth is that for independent ebook sellers and small publishers, we have no clue whatsoever as to what price will maximise profits. We just do not have the data. We have a few anecdotes from both ends of the spectrum, from the “I sold $millions” so the “I sold sweet FA”, and a very little from the middle where people are selling “enough”, for whatever value of enough they care to assign.

What we don’t have is what the big publishers have: Numbers. It’s impossible to compare the sales of a handful of books at different prices and draw any meaningful conclusions, because the books are not equivalent goods. My novelette Argleton is not equivalent to anyone else’s book because it’s not a perfect substitute.

If you’re in the market for a hammer, one is pretty much a perfect substitute for another. If I buy a hammer from Shop A, I am not going to buy a hammer from Shop B. But books are not substitutable goods. If someone buys Argleton, that doesn’t mean that they then don’t have any interest in buying Eightball.

Even comparing sales of the same title over time is more complex than saying “It sold a lot at $1.99 but nothing much at $7.99″, because market conditions change. It’s only in the large-scale aggregate that the numbers starts to provide genuine information. And sadly, that kind of data isn’t available to the likes of independent and small publishers.

So what do we fall back on? Belief.

I believe that my biggest problem right now is that not enough people know about my writing. My sole purpose is to introduce as many people as feasibly possible to Argleton in the hope that they will like it and be interested in my future work. That means that I believe that giving away Argleton for free is in my best interests.

But I also ideologically believe that free goods do not necessarily cannibalise the sales of the same goods offered commercially. We have some interesting data from people like Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig and Tom Reynolds that even if they don’t increase sales, CC-licenced copies of books do no harm to sales either. For them.

Of course, things could be different for other authors or other genres but again, the truth is that we simply don’t have enough data to say one way or the other.

Additionally, I believe that me giving away my books free has no impact on what someone is willing to pay for Eightball, or any other book, because the two are not substitutes. I’ve heard the argument that authors who give away their books are undermining authors who sell their books, but I’ve not seen a jot of evidence, or even logical reasoning, to support that point. The book market is not a zero-sum game.

And I disagree with Declan over the idea that giving away books is a “race to the bottom”.

For now it seems that many authors are happily collaborating in a race to the bottom on price. The mantra is very much quantity over quality, to the extent that many writers, in a desperate bid to get noticed and put one foot on the bottom rung of the slippery ladder, are now giving away their books for free.

There’s a certain kind of logic to this, although it only exists inside the e-publishing bubble, which appears determined to eat itself. Because once you give away one book for free, the expectation is that all your books will come at no cost, an expectation that derives from an entirely understandable mentality that runs, ‘Well, if you don’t value your work, why should I?’

I’m a teeny tiny sample, but by this logic no one should buy the Kindle version of Argleton, but they are. By this logic, no one should ever buy any of Cory Doctorow’s books, but they do. And also, by this logic, no one should ever give good, honestly earnt money to a nobody writer on the promise of delivery of a book, which could be fundamentally shite, and with absolutely no guarantee that they are going to get what they paid for and then, knowing all that, actually pay more than the book itself is worth. And yet, they have.

Our beliefs are sculpted by our experiences and our ideologies. My experiences appear to show me that giving books away whist also selling them, and tapping into an amazing community of generous supporters to achieve the publication of a physical book not only works, it is profitable. My belief is that people will happily pay for books that they like and that those who pull the “culture should be free” line out of their arse are the same people who would not have bought my book anyway, so there’s simply no sale lost.

But, just like Declan, I lack hard data.

This, sadly, means that rather than eating our own young, independent authors and small publishers are doomed to chase our tails, cherry picking the case studies to fit our ideologies and rejecting the points of view of those who disagree with us.

There is only one cure to this: Independents need to have a standard set of data that we all regularly submit to one big database which we can then pull reports from. We need, collectively, to share what numbers we each have, because that’s the only way we’re going to get the kind of scale we need to turn anecdotes into data. And data is the only way we’re going to get meaningful insights into how book buyers really behave.

We can’t afford to fanny about getting all ideological and relying on our beliefs to determine our business strategies. My biggest worry about my current strategy is that I could be horribly, hideously wrong, but I have absolutely no way of testing my hypothesis on my own. If I am wrong, then I will change my strategy immediately, because I’m not interested in proving myself right. I’m interested in creating a new career for myself where I get to live comfortably and make up stories for a living.

Being a scientist by training and a geek by choice, there are a number of Hollywood tropes about scientists and geeks that do rather get on my wick. So here, without further ado, are some real world situations that would never* make it into a Hollywood script.

1. The loner genius
You know that loner genius guy? The one with the crazy theory? The chap who says he can predict earthquakes and volcanic eruptions through secret methods that he’s not going to tell anyone? He thinks he’s spurned by the mainstream scientific community because they’re just not ready to accept his genius.

Hollywood: He’s right! And he saves the day with his cockamamy but accurate prediction/solution. 
Reality: He’s just some crazy dude who probably hasn’t understood some small but crucial detail.

2. The nerdie techie and the hot scientist
If you’re male and a geek, you must perforce also wear glasses, have dodgy teeth and no social skills. That’s the only way that the viewer can tell, you see, that they are observing a computer genius at work. If you’re female and a scientist, however, you must be stick-thin and look like a model, with long flowing hair – glasses optional but preferred – as your genius can be second only to your beauty.

Hollywood: We all know how smart people look, right?
Reality: Yes, they look just like everyone else.

3. The warrior-nerd love story
You’re in the middle of a disaster. Aliens have landed, or the earth’s climate has got a snit on, or a volcano has just erupted or zombies are on the loose. What better time to woo that hot nerd chick/fella than when you’re in charge of saving the world? I mean, it’s a certainty, given that you hated him/her on first sight, that by the time you’ve rescued mankind that you would have fallen head-over-heels in love. I mean, nothing says romance like an exploding mountain, right?

Hollywood: If they’re on opposite sides at the beginning, they must have fallen in love by the end.
Reality: If you’re busy saving humanity from $random_disaster, you’re more focused on getting enough sleep and food and generally not dying than flirting with the annoying know-it-all, no matter how big his weapon.

4. Human technology can talk to and defeat alien technology
Aah yes, because finding a zero-day exploit in an alien operating system is as easy as saying One, Two, Hab SoSlI’ Quch!. Understanding how to exploit said zero-day, er, exploit will of course come naturally to our human geek who, within a few keystrokes, will be able to write a virus that cripples all alien technology. Of course.

Hollywood: After a couple of false starts, human geekery and cunning will win over a completely superior technology. 
Really: We can barely get Windows, OSX and Linux playing nicely with one another, so unless Microsoft has a universe-wide monopoly they haven’t told us about, we’re fucked.

5. Human-lava interactions
That whole sinking into lava thing? Not gonna happen. The lavas you find in your basic geological disaster** movie are usually*** of a type that you simply can’t sink into: Humans are just less dense than lava. That doesn’t mean that you can walk over it, mind you, as you are likely to sublimate, catch fire or otherwise combust on, or prior to, contact. Lava is, after all, quite hot.

Hollywood: Arrrgh, I’m sinking!
Reality: I think Eric Klemetti has it nailed.

* For that definition of ‘never’ that also includes ‘rarely’. 
** No pun intended
*** There are some unusual lavas that have low viscosity which behave a bit more like the Hollywood lava, but you’re unlikely to stumble across them in your day-to-day disaster movie.

Last month there was a great blog post by Anne Allen about how important Amazon reviews are to new authors:

[...] Amazon reviews, which were only mildly significant three years ago, now have a make-or-break impact on an author’s sales.

When you’re buying an ebook, there’s no helpful bookstore clerk to tell you what might be appropriate for your nine-year old niece, or if there are any new cozy mysteries you might enjoy, or whether the new Janet Evanovich is up to her usual standards.

Instead, you check reader reviews and Amazon’s “also bought” suggestions. These are all generated by consumers, which gives the ordinary reader immense power.

The post then goes through some really good guidelines for people who might want to leave an Amazon review for an author they like. It’s well worth a read, even if you’re familiar with Amazon, because Anne gives a very clear idea of how the whole review system works.

I didn’t quite understand the power of Amazon reviews until I started publishing in the Kindle stores. I have books available now in six stores:

• Kindle UK
• Kindle US
• Kindle France
• Kindle Germany
• Kindle Spain
• Kindle Italy

The only store in which I have any reviews so far is the UK store and sales in that are way ahead of every other store, even the US store. Now admittedly there are potential language issues in the French, German, Spanish and Italian stores, as the buyers there might not be so interested in an English language book. But that shouldn’t be the case with the US and, in fact, the majority of my Kickstarter supporters were from the US so in theory I should have a good showing there. But so far, I do not.

I think this is down to reviews. I have three good reviews so far on Amazon UK, none in the US. It’s a shame that reviews don’t cross-pollinate stores, but there we go.

So if you’re feeling generous this festive season and you have read a book by a new author that you liked, it would be a wonderful thing for them if you took 10 minutes to write even a short review, or just give a star rating. Four and five star ratings are particularly useful as Anne explains:

Anything less than 4 stars means “NOT RECOMMENDED.” Don’t expect an author to be pleased with 2 or 3 stars, no matter how much you rave in the text. Those stars are the primary way a book is judged. Without a 4 or 5 star rating, a book doesn’t get picked up in the Amazon algorithms for things like “also bought” suggestions. Giving 1 or 2 stars to a book that doesn’t have many reviews is taking money out of the author’s pocket, so don’t do it unless you really think the author should take up a new line of work.

If a friend asks you to review something you found amateurish, or wasn’t your cup of tea, just tell her you don’t feel you can review it. That happens all the time and we appreciate it.

On the other hand, a 4-star review that recommends the book even though you have a few reservations, will earn you eternal gratitude from the author.

In fact, 4-star reviews can often be the most helpful. If a reader sees something like, “I loved this mystery, but the humor is pretty farcical. If you’re looking for a standard whodunit, this isn’t it,” or “this is awfully intellectual for something called chick lit.” Those offer honest information to buyers, without telling them not to buy.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t be giving 1-3 star reviews. I’m just saying that on Amazon (not all review sites) 3-Stars is usually taken as a negative rating. If you intend to be positive, then 4 stars will better convey that sentiment.

This was certainly something I hadn’t really thought about in detail before reading Anne’s post.

So if you have a favourite author who’s either just starting out or hovering around in the midlist, why not take a few moments over the Christmas holidays and leave them a review?

The cover for my novelette, Argleton, was designed rather laboriously by me during my Kickstarter project to produce a paperback, paper-covered hard back and silk-covered hardback. It is, I’m afraid, a bit pants; the experience certainly revealed to me the limits of my design ability!

In this blog post I’m publishing my brief for the Argleton cover redesign, but with an eye on something that can influence my future book covers as well.

The current Argleton ebook cover

Brief: Ebook cover redesign for Argleton. Style to be reused in future covers.
I need a new design for the e-book that can replace the existing one in order to really compete in Amazon’s Kindle store. But I also want to create a style which can also become the basis for the covers of my future books, in rather the same way that Penguin had a single design for their classics.

This is slightly complicated, however, by the need to have a design that can be used in several ways for future books:

• Digitally for the ebook
• Print, for the paperback
• Print, with border on Japanese paper for a hand-bound hardback
• In silk, screenprinted prior to or foiled after hand-binding (also hardback)

Argleton already has a fantastic frontispiece, by Sydney Padua, which might or might not be able to be used as part of the cover design (and would be replaced by a new illustration for future books).

Argleton frontispiece by Sydney Padua

I certainly think that a strong typographic element is important in producing a memorable, stylish and recognisable design.

The design should also be scalable. At the moment, Argleton is A6 size and, although it’s likely that my next two projects will also be printed at that size, it’s possible they could go up to A5 or one of the various paperback sizes, depending on the final length of the book.

The design should also be able to cross genres, as there is some variation in topics over my upcoming work. Here are some keywords for you to help illustrate what we’re likely looking at in terms of genre spread:

• Argleton: geek-fi, technothriller, mystery, maps & maths, sci fi, thriller, high tech
• Queen of the May: geek-fi, mystery, faeries, magic, fantasy, urban fantasy
• Books of Hay: books, magic, cats, fantasy, Wales, historic/modern

I am, indeed, otter-esque.

At this stage, I think I want to stay away from covers that include a full bleed photo montage or illustrations on the basis that this would need to be specific to each book and would reduce the ease with which we can reuse key design elements. This is as much about branding me as an author, via the medium of my book covers, as it is about branding a particular book.

Phase 1
The first thing I need is a redesign of the Argleton ebook cover to replace the existing one. I have a modest budget for this. No print covers will be needed. I expect to be able to commission this early in 2012 and although there’s no hard deadline (this is a replacement cover), it would be good to have it completed sooner rather than later. Please do feel free to download the book if you wish to get a feel for writing style.

Phase 2
When my next novelette/novella is finished, I will need a quote for that cover, which will include ebook and all print versions and may also include any illustrations required. (I already have one in mind, if we run with a design that requires it.) This cost will then be included in the budget for a Kickstarter project and work will kick off only if the crowdfunding drive successfully completes. I hope to be able to launch this Kickstarter project in the first half of 2012.

Phase 3
Same as Phase 2 but for my third novelette/novella. Timing TBC.

If you have questions about the brief, please leave a comment rather than email me, as then I can clarify things publicly.

If you’re interested in discussing this further, then please can you give me your details in this form. Sorry if that seems impersonal, but I need to make sure that I have comparable information for everyone.

Thank you!

As a newbie to self-publishing, I find myself transported back a decade to the time when I was so obsessed with my blog traffic stats that I made a spreadsheet and noted down what events caused spikes in traffic. After a while I lost interest in the numbers, but now I’m back to tracking thems, although the patterns are very familiar to me and rarely am I surprised by what I see.

I’m also now obsessing over my Kindle sales statistics. And yes, I have a spreadsheet which notes both sales through the Kindle store and free downloads from here. If you’re curious, to the end of November I had given away 6140 downloads of Argleton and sold 27 ebooks via the Kindle store, netting me a royalty of approximately £30. Well, we’ve all got to start somewhere.

But where it’s relatively simple for me to track downloads and traffic to this site, tracking my Kindle sales is a laborious process. Amazon’s stats pages are… well I can’t use the word “designed” because that would imply that some thought had gone into them, and it’s clear that’s not the case.

As you can see from this screenshot, you don’t get much information. This is the page for the UK shop. If I want to see reports from the other shops, I have to pick from the dropdown list. And if I want to look at last month’s sales, I have to click that link. Very tedious. (Click screenshots to embiggen.)

Worse, if I don’t keep a spreadsheet of my monthly sales, I lose access to that data as Amazon only gives me this month and last month’s. And there appears to be no way to go back further than that prior month.

Now then, if I want to see my royalties, then I can see those not monthly, but weekly for the past six weeks. Eh? Why give me sales by month and then royalties by the week for only the past six weeks?

Now, if I don’t grab this data, I can at least go do that third link down and download monthly spreadsheets from the previous 12 months. Except this is what those spreadsheets look like:

It’s a complete mess. I’d have to spend so much time doing basic spreadsheet cleaning before being able to process this in any way, it’s just not funny. Imagine if I was selling lots of different books: The spreadsheet would become unworkable.

Nowhere does Amazon give you an at-a-glance summary of your sales, or graphs showing how you’re doing over time, or an easy way to download properly formatted raw data. Is it really that hard to take a bunch of numbers, generated preferably in real time, and present them in a usable, sensible way?

What’s also frustrating is that I have absolutely no context for my buyers. Where are they coming to Amazon from? Are they finding me here on this blog and then clicking through to Amazon? Searching for me or Argleton on Amazon itself? Coming from some other site? Finding me from some other page on Amazon, eg recommendations on another book?

Amazon knows, but it won’t tell me. And without that information I can only see half the picture. I don’t know how to direct my promo efforts. Should I be blogging more here? Should I focus on pimping to book bloggers? Should I be Tweeting more? Facebooking? I have no clue, and I will never find out.

It’s great that new authors like me can sell our books without having to find a traditional publisher (not that I’d turn one down if it made sense!), but Amazon could do a much, much better job of providing stats. Surely it’s in their interests to do so, as the more successful I am as an author, the more money they make off me?

Sadly I hold out precisely no hope whatsoever of useful change, so I’ll just have to keep checking back every month and writing the numbers down in my spreadsheet. What a nerd, eh?