Argleton

The double-edged sword of mechanisation

by Suw on January 16, 2014

Via Mary Corbet’s Needle ‘n Thread blog I discovered this fantastic video about embroiderers in Appenzell in Switzerland and how their way of life was destroyed by mechanisation.

The documentary paints a fascinating picture of the rural families that earnt a living through incredibly delicate embroidery, supplementing what would have been a meagre income from fairly unproductive small-holdings. The woman of the household would pass on her skills to her children, boys and girls alike. They would all embroider from dawn til dusk and on into the night by candlelight. The school-age children would attend classes, but would still be expected to do significant amounts of embroidery in the evenings. The children who weren’t good with a needle worked at the household chores, often taking on many of the tasks that a mother would normally do so that she could embroider more.

The particular embroidery type that Appenzellers made was called whitework, and this still from the video show just how delicate it can be. (Sorry I couldn’t find a better picture that was also CC licensed!)

Appenzell whitework

Of course, fashions moved on which, along with mechanisation, put many embroiderers out of business. Those changes cannot have been easy for the rural families who depended on embroidery to make ends meet, and who didn’t have many, or any, other reliable income. But the life of an embroiderer would not have been easy either, working all hours and earning relatively little for very demanding work. One mistake would result in money being docked, and they weren’t being paid much in the first place.

Whilst mechanisation freed whole families from gruelling work, (although they may not have seen it like that whilst they were figuring out what else to do), it also likely resulted in the loss of many skills. The story is the same across the crafts. As mass produced materials superseded the hand-crafted, the knowledge that allowed those items to be made, that had been passed down from mother to daughter and father to son, was lost, if not in total then in major part.

The economics of hand-made items were never good. Time-consuming processes require either low-paid workers or very high prices that only a few can afford. The craft industry these days relies on both models, not just because of sweatshops in the developing world, but also Western hobbyist (or, in some cases, subsistence) crafters who sell their work for the cost of the materials rather than including time and other overheads because it’s hard to sell anything otherwise.

The results of this are, I fear, a gradual loss of skill and, worse, a loss of interest in those skills. That’s why I love blogs such as Mary Corbet’s, and why they are so fundamentally important. Although there are institutions such as the Royal School of Needlework who do a great job of preserving and passing on knowledge, craft blogs allow anyone to not only be inspired by the beautiful work on display, but to also learn a little about how it’s done. It is because of Mary’s blog that I’ve picked up an embroidery needle, with the intention of doing something more interesting than just a few French knots.

Argleton embroidered cover

But this is also why I like including aspects of crafting in my work, both my books and my writing. The Argleton project included a hand-embroidered silk-covered edition, and The Lacemaker, well, obviously, makes reference to the making of bobbin lace. I love learning about new crafts, as much as I love learning about engineering and physics – indeed, embroidery involves quite a bit of materials science, with different threads and fabrics behaving in different ways.

As the subtitle to my blog implies, I find it easy to nerd out over almost anything, and in that I don’t think I’m alone. There’s currently a boom in interest in knitting, which I hope will be followed by a revival of all sorts of other crafts, including embroidery and bobbin lace. Of course, if anything I write or create helps inspire anyone else to look into our rich crafting heritage, that’s great, but it’s people like Mary we should be looking to, and supporting, as they share their expertise in the crafts for all our benefit.

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There’s a lot of advice on how to design book covers floating around the internet. Lots of it is very sensible: Your book cover should reflect the genre and cleave to its tropes. It should reflect the tone of your story, communicating to potential readers what they are getting before they even open the book. The text should be readable in thumbnail, so that it shows up well in Amazon, but it also needs to look good full-size in print. Plus it needs to work in black and white, or rather, the dark grey and light grey of eInk ereaders. What you’ll rarely hear is “And it need to look good when foil-blocked on to French silk bookcloth”.

Argleton is a short novella, possibly even a novelette. It is too short to print via services like Lulu without ending up with a lot of blank pages at the back or using very big type. The only way it will find itself in print again is if I do another and hand bound edition, so any cover I have for the book has to work well in that context.

Hand binding a book brings with it certain constraints, particularly if you are working with a minimum of equipment. For example, having strong, bold horizontal or vertical lines are a mistake, because then you have to make sure that everything is lined up perfectly. That can be done, but I’m a perfectionist and even if the book came out even a tiny bit skew it would drive me up the wall.

You also have to think about how you are going to transfer the design to the book. When I did the first edition of Argleton, I did one version with a paper cover, and one with a hand-sewn silk cover. I don’t think I’d do either again now. The paper cover was a pain in the arse to work with, and the hand-sewn silk cover took forever to put together – four separate pieces of silk that had to be bonded together then embroidered. Each one took about 20 hours to complete.

Silk book cover for the first edition of Argleton

Instead, future books will be foil blocked, ie the design is stamped on to the cover using a hot block and a metallic foil. Foil blocking looks gorgeous and I’m hoping to be able to find a small table-top machine that I can use at home to do this.

Now, I could have had two designs done for each novella – one for the ebook and one for the hand-bound book – but I didn’t want to pay for two covers for a book that is no longer really selling and I didn’t want to dilute the book’s brand. So one cover has to do double duty as best it can.

When I was talking to my designer, Thomas James, about what I wanted, it wasn’t just the constraints provided by the foil blocking that I had in mind. I also wanted a cover design that was typographically and graphically strong, something that looked a bit different to the usual ebook fare and would stick in people’s minds. For me, the key inspiration was the classic Penguin paperback design:

Day 286 by prendio2

Day 286 by prendio2

I also wanted a design that would grow as my own catalogue grew, with each addition of a new book adding more depth to the overall feel of the others. If you had these books lined up next to one another on your bookshelf, they should speak to one another in warm and kindly tones, they should look like they belong together, each bringing out the best in the other.

The design that Thomas did for Argleton was beautiful, featuring a gorgeous hare that I would just love to one day turn into a necklace:

Argleton cover design

If Argleton does ever get a second edition, this is roughly what it would look like (though smaller and slimmer – it’s just not that long of a book!):

Mock-up of a print version of Argleton

When it came to Queen of the May, I wanted to Thomas to work exactly the same magic, and he did. The design is based on an angrek, Angraecum magdalenae, a rare orchid that features in the story.

Queen of the May cover

And again, the mock-up for the hand-bound book:

Mock up of the Queen of the May print book

The chances of Queen of the May making it into print are reasonable. If there’s a good response to the ebook and I can get enough people interested in a print version, then I’ll run the Kickstarter that I was planning earlier in the year, though I may well strip it right back to basics so that it doesn’t become a massive time sink. (If you are interested, then subscribe to my monthly newsletter to make sure you don’t miss out on any news!)

Even without the print versions, I think the strong visual design and typography makes these covers work exactly as I had hoped they would. They don’t say much about the genre that I’m writing in, which is fine because I’m not even sure what genre that is. They don’t tell you much about the story that you’re getting either. But they do gives you a sense of identity, an idea of their sensibilities. I can’t wait to get my next novella finished so that I can see how the third design fits in with and speaks to the others.

Argleton and Queen of the May are available via my ebook store.

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This blog post started off as a comment on Glyn Moody’s Google Plus post linking to this post on Medium about ‘free culture’, and the discussion that ensued. You might want to read those first.

The biggest problem with discussions of how to financially support the artistic sector, as per the article Glyn linked to, is that although the landscape has changed a lot, and continues to change, our maps aren’t up to date. A lot of the conversations I see on this issue are based on ideology and assumptions, with very little in the way of evidence. And when we do get evidence, it’s not often generalisable beyond its original context. So it’s very easy to understand where we are, and where we need to be, but nigh on impossible to say how we’re going to get there or, more importantly, how a specific person is going to get there. 

I’ve long been a proponent of free culture. Indeed, whilst at ORG I ran a project looking at how artists of varying sorts were successfully using a free or pay-what-you-will model. However, they say that no military campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy, and no theoretical framework for earning money as an artist survives first contact with reality. 

My own journey as an author began with an assumption that free was the way forward, because that was what I believed. I recently did an analysis of my stats for my first novella, Argleton, and wound up with these figures: 

Free Downloads: 23,180 (% downloaded by humans unknown)
Sales: 782
Remittances: £210.86

I have more recently realised that the assertion that “If people love what you are doing, they will pay” is not entirely true. People can love what you’re doing, and be vocal about that to you, and still not pay even 99p to support you if they have the option to get your work for free instead. And really, why should they? In these economically straitened times, people want to and need to save every penny they can, so if you give them free, they’ll take free, even if they love your work to bits. 

Equally, the assertion that your fans will sell your work for you is overhyped in the extreme. Getting fans to promote your work is actually incredibly difficult. I’ve had people pledge up to £500 on Kickstarter, so clearly people do value what I do, but there’s a disconnect between their willingness to pay and their willingness to promote it on my behalf. When I tweet about my new novella, Queen of the May, for example, I get very, very few retweets. It is unrealistic for me to assume that others will do my marketing for me. 

The problem is that too often outliers are interpreted as indicative of the general case, and they’re really not. Most authors are not, for example, Amanda Hocking or John Locke or Hugh Howey. They are not going to have a runaway success, because those are extremely rare and we don’t live at Lake Wobegon

For the vast majority of authors, the road to success is long and very slow and, to start with, rather expensive. There is no secret sauce. Free is not a magic bullet. Obscurity is a problem, but a pure free model is not the answer. 

For Queen of the May, I’ve taken a long-term view and gone with a semi-free model. Argleton and my short story, The Lacemaker, are free and Queen of the May is 99p if you sign up to my mailing list. If you don’t want to sign up to my newsletter, the two novellas are £2.49, and the short story is 99p. This means that I’m giving people a chance to become familiar with my work by offering some of it for free, but I’m still getting some value from the transaction – I’m getting them on my mailing list. Yes, they could subscribe and then unsubscribe having downloaded the freebies, but so far no one has actually done that. 

In two and a half weeks since I released Queen of the May, I’ve had about 90 downloads or sales, and pulled in £38 after PayPal fees. It took me two years to reach £210 for Argleton. And my mailing list has 35 new subscribers, which will make promoting my next book much easier. 

Kickstarter, too, is not an easy option. It’s certainly a useful tool, but it’s very hard to get enough attention for your project to ensure it completes, and even harder to get it to complete at a level that pays you for your time. And if you don’t get paid for your time, you’re not on your way towards a financially sustainable career. 

The truth is that reality is horribly complicated with lots of confounding factors; no ideology can stand up to reality; and we lack the evidence to understand what really works even to the point of not knowing if, for example, Google or Facebook Ads have any worthwhile return on investment. 

There’s far too much cargo cult thinking going on. Far too many people trying to mindlessly duplicate what they see successful writers/artists appearing to have done without thinking about what exactly they are doing and why. Ultimately, ‘free’ is only a part of the puzzle, to be used wisely and as part of a broader strategy. 

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I finally sat down and trawled through all my website stats and Kindle sales reports for Argleton, which I published in August 2011 on my website and then the next month on Amazon. The results are interesting, to me at least, because the numbers are far higher than I had anticipated. I counted downloads of the PDF, txt, mobi, ePub and HTML files, all of which were free, and the sales in all Kindle stores where the book was available. I also totted up all the remittances that Amazon sent me, which isn’t a true total as Amazon has minimums for each store that you must cross before it’ll send you your money. There are still a few dollars here and there in various regional stores.

Free Downloads: 23,180
Sales: 782
Remittances: £210.86

That’s actually a lot better than I had anticipated. The price on the Kindle store fluctuated a little, but was generally around the £1.20 – £1.50 mark. My average royalty was 27p per copy.

The graph of sales tells an interesting, if unclear, story:

Argleton sales

The free downloads (top line, in blue) behave very much as you might expect, with a big peak at launch followed by a slow ebb in downloads. I’m not sure what caused the peak in March 2012. They then settle down to around the 700 per month mark. It must be said at this point that I don’t know how many of these downloads are from actual people, and how many are from bots and other non-humans. Even if half of them are bots, the numbers are still good.

The Amazon sales could have behaved in one of two ways: an initial surge followed by a decline, or a slow build as the book gained traction with Amazon’s algorithms. The graph begins to show the second pattern, with a slow increase in sales up to a peak of 185 in May 2012. But then, beginning in June 2012 and completed by July, the numbers crash. This co-incided with two events: The book received three 1 star torpedo reviews* that slated the book as being childish, and Amazon changed its algorithm to effectively punish cheap books. It’s impossible to say which event killed my sales, but something did. By early 2013, I’m lucky if I’m selling 5 copies per month.

This is behind my decision to pull Argleton from Amazon and only sell my ebooks direct through this very site. If I’m not going to benefit from Amazon’s much vaunted recommendation engine and have to do all the promotion work myself, then I may as well send people to my own shop. If I control the point of sale, then I can both track where people come from and invite them to join my mailing list when they buy my books. I can’t do that with Amazon and, at the moment, data and subscribers are much more important to me than sales.

Well, I say that, but sales are still very important! I spent £250 on the cover redesign for Argleton, and I’m only 16 full-price sales away from breaking even on it. For Queen of the May, I’ve so far spent £350 on editorial and cover design and I’d very much like to make that back. My new pricing structure is this:

Short story: 99p
Novella: £2.49
Novel**: £3.99

Those prices are higher than I was selling Argleton at on Amazon, but the average reading speed is about 200 words per minute, so it would take over three hours to read Queen of the May — you’d have to be really nursing a glass of wine or pint of beer to make it last that long. And, in this neck of the woods anyway, you’d be lucky to get a drink down the pub for just £2.49 so I think they are reasonable prices. For those of you who love a bargain, I will of course be offering deals via Twitter and my mailing list.

So let’s do the maths: In order to break even on Queen of the May, I need to sell 141 159*** full-price copies. Given I sold 782 copes of Argleton over two years, I feel quite confident that I will sell more than 141 159 copies of Queen of the May, not least because this is a much, much better book than Argleton. It might take a while, but it will happen.

Out of curiosity, I totted up the hours I had spent working on Queen of the May. Ignoring the Kickstarter stuff, I have spent a little over 150 hours writing and editing. We won’t mention that those hours have been spread out, embarrassingly, over nearly two years, but we will say that I’ve been finding it easier to focus on writing recently so I’m hoping my productivity rockets.

If I wanted to be paid minimum wage, ie £6.31 per hour, for the time I’ve already spent writing, then I need to sell 381 429 books, netting me £948.09. And if I want to be paid at a rate high enough for to be able to stop consulting and write full time, I’d need to sell 1000 books per month, or 1071 to cover the time I’ve already invested.

Were I still selling through Amazon at the lower price point that’s expected there, I’d need to sell 8185 ebooks per month to be able to give up other work, a number that seems impossibly high. If I upped my price to £2.49, which would hit the 70% royalty rate, then that number would come down to 1267. I think it’ll take me quite a while to build sales up to 1000 novella-equivalents per month, but it doesn’t seem like a ridiculous number.

I am, of course, excited to see what happens with Queen of the May, now freshly published! I’m literally just waiting for the cover art to arrive and then it’ll be ready to be published. But I’m under no illusions regarding just how much promotional donkey work I’ll have to do, with no Amazon algorithms to rely on or give me a signal boost, just Twitter, my newsletter and you, dear reader. So if you like my writing, please do tell your friends, and tell them to tell their friends.

 

* It’s worth noting that at least one of the 1 star reviews came from someone who had bought Argleton because it was recommended as an ‘also bought’ on Hugh Howey’s Wool and they were very disappointed that Argleton wasn’t Wool. The two books couldn’t be more different, and it was a rather stark reminder that Amazon’s recommendations engine can cut both ways.

** There is a novel coming, honest.

*** Update: Damn it, I forgot PayPal takes a cut. For every £2.49 you spend, I get £2.21, which is about 88 percent of list price and still better than what I’d get from Amazon. For every 99p you spend, I get 76p, which is about 77 percent of list price, dramatically more than I’d get from Amazon who, at that price point, would give me only a 30% royalty or 23p. All numbers have been adjusted to take that into account.

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Starting as I mean to go on

by Suw on January 2, 2013

Over the Christmas break, I had a couple of quiet days where I could pretend I was a full-time author. Having plotted out the new end of The Queen of the May early in December, and having promised myself that I would finish the second draft before the end of 2012, I spent 31st December writing like crazy. I finished the second draft well within time and it’s now time to get editorial feedback from my trusted readers.

I also managed to draft a short story that I drafted late last year too, provisionally called The Lacemaker. That’s going to sit for a bit and then needs a polish before I publish it here. Historically, I’ve always had a bit of a problem with short stories: they tend not to stay short. This one, however, is a bit over 1,500 words, which is by itself a small miracle. 

Finally, I’ve now sorted out my own webshop to sell Argleton directly to those of you who’d like to buy it directly. You can still download it for free, of course, but if you wanted to contribute a wee bit to the Charman-Anderson coffers, then you can get the mobi, epub and pdf for just 99p. If you’d like to buy the bundle, just click the “Buy Now” link in the sidebar. 

This year, my plans are to: 

  • Finish and publish The Queen of the May
  • Finish and publish The Lacemaker
  • Analyse, tweak and novelise my script, Tag
  • Redraft The Books of Hay
  • Try to think of more short stories to write (not my forte but I’ll give it a shot)
  • Make more books!

Remember, if you want to stay up-to-date with all I’m up to, join my roughly-monthly mailing list

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Brixton Book Jam

I’m  going to be reading an extract from Argleton for the Brixton Book Jam on Monday 1 October, if you want to come along and see my first ever book reading! Zelda Rhiando, who helps organise it, describes it as “a free quarterly literary event, where famous and not so famous authors do a five minute reading each to a highly appreciative and attentive audience.”

Some of the other authors, and their books, that I’ll be sharing the stage with are:

  • Jim Bob (Carter USM) – Driving Jarvis Ham
  • Courttia Newland – The Gospel According to Cane
  • Adam Mars-Jones – Pilcrow
  • Martin Millar – Lonely Were Wolf Girl
  • James Dawson – YA thriller Hollow Pike
  • Keith Kahn-Harris – The Best Waterskier in Luxembourg
  • Doug e. Graves – Homerton Sweet Homerton

There will also be a popup bookshop featuring Herne Hill Books, local presses and indie authors.

Date: Monday, 1st October 2012
Time: 7.00pm
Location: Hootananny Brixton, 95 Effra Road, SW2 1DF

Download the flyer.

Women in Publishing

I’m also going to be participating in Women in Publishing‘s upcoming panel discussion on the recent sockpuppet furore, which I’ve covered extensively on my Forbes blog. We’ll be looking at the scandal itself; how it has been handled by the media, the publishing industry and readers; and what we think could or should be done about the issue of sock puppets now.

Details are still forthcoming, but the panel will be on the evening of 10 October, from 7pm. I’ll update this post when I have more information.

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New cover for Argleton

by Suw on September 23, 2012

I’m delighted to finally reveal the new cover for Argleton, designed by Thomas James. I asked Tom to put together something for me that was stylistically simple, informed by the effortlessness of classic Penguin designs, and which could form the basis of the covers for my next few novellas. The design also had to work digitally too.

We started off thinking about the hardcover design, which will be quarter bound with a gold foiled title. Tom has also designed fantastic endpapers, which I’m not going to show you now because then it won’t be a surprise when I do a second print run! Cruel, I know, but suffice it to say that when this beauty is finally turned into a real book, it’s going to look just gorgeous.

Argleton hardback new cover

We then moved on to the digital cover. The challenge with the digital version is that if we kept the exact same sizing as the hardback, the title would impossible to read when the size of an Amazon thumbnail, so we had to be a little bolder. I love the shade of green that Tom chose, it fits nicely with the original design and the hardbacks’ forest green endpapers. I also adore the hare, it’s so beautifully drawn. Now I just need to find someone who can create a sterling silver necklace from it!

Argleton digital cover

And this is the mock-up of how the digital cover will look, roughly speaking on an iPad:

iPad mock-up

All the ebook versions on this site have now been updated not only with the new cover but also to remove a few typos that slipped through our proofreading fingers first time round. Do feel free to download a replacement copy for the first edition, and to email whichever files you like to any friends you think might like it. I’ll also be getting the new version up on Amazon as soon as I can!

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Argleton audiobook now available

by Suw on January 14, 2012

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.

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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:

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!

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Argleton New Year Sale, Now On!

by Suw on January 5, 2012

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):

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?”

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    Argleton cover redesign brief

    December 14, 2011

    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 […]

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    Argleton: Now available in (a few) libraries

    December 5, 2011

    A couple of weeks ago I offered a few copies of Argleton to any libraries who wanted to claim them. I ended up with 15 libraries showing interest, so decided to simply say yes to all of them and send out 15 copies. So if you want to borrow a copy of Argleton you will […]

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    Lessons from Kickstarter Part 1: Don’t go off half-cocked

    November 30, 2011

    The last 18 months has taught me a lot about Kickstarter and putting together my own self-publishing project. This is the first of a series of blog posts in which I’ll go through what I’ve learnt, partly in case it’s of interest to anyone else but also to codify it in my own head so […]

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    Five copies of Argleton available for libraries

    November 23, 2011

    ALL COPIES HAVE NOW BEEN CLAIMED! Thank you all for your interest. Fourteen libraries have requested copies and although I was only going to give out five books, I’ve just checked and I’ve enough for all fifteen libraries (including DigitalMaverick’s). All copies will be sent out in the next few days. Back when I was […]

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    Win a copy of Argleton

    November 4, 2011

    I have decided to give away one paperback copy of Argleton to a random person on my Writing & Bookbinding mailing list, just as soon as it hits 100 subscribers! Yay! Note that this doesn’t automatically go to the 100th person, because that wouldn’t be fair to everyone who signed up in the beginning. Rather, once […]

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