Fake Plastic Souks

Amazon Book Pricing Fun

2012-01-29T09:55:00.000+03:00

I discovered today that Olives - A Violent Romance is now on sale in the UK through The Book Depository. One of the things I did when setting up the international edition was plump for Amazon's Expanded Distribution Channel, which costs a few dollars but which opens you up to distribution through bookshops, libraries and the like. Amazon doesn't actually do a very good job of describing quite what this means, hence my surprise to see The Book Depository selling the book for £7.61 on amazon.co.uk, which is considerably less than its $15.99 US price tag (The book should cost £10.16 at today's exchange rate). I went and did a little digging to find out who The Book Depository are and why they were able to sell my book for less than the US list price.

The Book Depository is actually an Amazon subsidiary based in the UK. They'll sell you a paperback copy of Olives, with free delivery worldwide (including anywhere in the Middle East) for £9.98, despatched within 72 hours. You can order it here.

This means buyers of Olives in the UK and elsewhere get a better deal than those in the US, which is no bad thing. It also means you can walk into any UK bookshop and order a copy of Olives, as well as buying it from Amazon or have it delivered to your doorstep anywhere in the world for under a tenner!

But how can they sell a book for less than I'm charging for it on Amazon.com? Because the Expanded Distribution Channel pays a different royalty, in fact 60% of the cover price of the book goes to Amazon, so it gives them a lot of 'wiggle room' to sell books profitably at lower prices, in fact about $13.50 of wiggle room.

In other words, Amazon is actually undercutting me!

In related good news, they've stuck a promotional discount on the Olives Kindle Edition and you can now buy it for £3.99. Look, I'll even include the link for you right here! :)

Olives - The Blog

2012-01-27T16:38:00.001+03:00

The inevitability of it all! A blog of the book, a place for looking at some of the characters, locations and issues contained in that little 262 page slice of word-arrangement that is Olives - A Violent Romance.

It's linked here for your clicking pleasure.

How To Upset Your Customers

2012-01-26T12:23:00.001+03:00

Image via Wikipedia

I'm not sure I am aware of any organisation that is quite so skilled at ineptitude of the highest order as my bank, HSBC Middle East. As I have had reason to remark before, I cannot think of one aspect of personal banking that has not at some stage caused me problems, been mishandled or generally failed to deliver as promised. This is not generally considered to be a good thing.

You can search the blog for 'bank' if you want to steep yourself in the most recent five years of blthering idiocy, but it's been something like 18 years in total now since I first walked into the British Bank of the Middle East and admired the two gun-wielding bedouin guards at the door.

These days, I try and avoid going to the branch at all costs. It makes me physically angry even to walk in. (So please do take my remarks with a pinch of salt, I am not my usual calm and Zen-like self when it comes to issues related to banking.)

It's one reason why telephone and Internet banking has been such a Godsend. The vast majority of transactions can take place in a nice, automated phone call or browsing session. I actually only use phone banking because I can't remember all the passwords, PINs, forgettable questions etc. And even then, HSBC asks that you remember (and key in) your 10 digit personal banking number or your 12 digit bank account number, your date of birth, your six digit personal identity number and the average velocity of an African swallow.*

Now they've found a new way to get to me. They have started playing an advertisement for some financial service or another to their customers when they call up to use phone banking. The advert not only drones on in English, but is then repeated in Arabic. While.we.wait.

You can only imagine what kind of drooling nincompoop would have thought that interrupting customers using a service that's part of a service package they are paying for (and we pay plenty) and rendering them helpless to do anything other than wait out the interruption would be a good idea. It's frustrating, irritating and annoying. It clearly demonstrates the bank has nothing but disrespect for its customers, their time and their convenience. And it's clearly symptomatic of a failure to understand the nature and role of corporate communications at the most fundamental level.

Irritating and inconveniencing your customers is not smart marketing. It just shows your contempt for them.
* Okay, so I made the last one up.

Amazon Remittance - I Am A Wealthy Man

2012-01-25T17:38:00.002+03:00

Image by Ethan.K via Flickr

I'm dumbstruck. I don't know whether to do little jigs, run through the streets crying 'Eureka!' or just make myself a Vesper. Actually, let's face it, it's a no-brainer. Vesper it is.

You remember me mentioning that some of the 'big' moments in this self publishing thing have been the ones you'd least expect? No? Well, they have been. Getting the book from the printers wasn't a 'big' moment for me, sighting my first copy in a shop wasn't, either. But seeing the cover was and seeing Olives - a violent romance on the Kindle for the first time was. And this one is, too. A real wowzer moment.

I've just got my first remittance advice from Amazon. It's not much money, about twenty quid, but that's not the point. I just made money from my books for the first time. People actually went out and paid good money to own the book that over 100 agents turned their noses up at. What's more, people have been reading and enjoying the book. Some have let me know, personally or through reviews on Amazon and GoodReads. Nobody's asked for a refund either.

And now I'm looking at an email that says I made money from my writing.

I am inestimably happy and thought I'd share the joy. I'm off to make the down payment on a 50 metre luxury yacht now...

The Shipping News

2012-01-24T10:40:00.003+03:00

Last year, you may recall two ships landed on the beach outside our front door after their crews had lost control in bad weather. The two grounded around a week apart and became something of a tourist attraction.

A couple of recent spats of windy weather has once again wreaked havoc in shipping circles, with not two but three ships falling foul of the inclement conditions. An Iranian tug has landed on Ajman beach, while the 'Lady Moon', a small tanker, sank just off the breakwater at Sharjah's Hamriyah port last week. Now Hamriyah has a second sinking, the supply vessel Hatem II, according to Gulf News.today.

The Lady Moon was lucky - the 30-metre ship had offloaded its cargo of diesel, which could have resulted in a nasty little spill. Its crew were taken into custody, while the captain of the Hatem II has apparently hightailed it and is nowhere to be found. Presumably he tripped and fell into a lifeboat.

Five Smarter Tweeting Tips

2012-01-22T09:46:00.000+03:00

Image via CrunchBase

Just in case they're of any use, here are five smarter Tweeting tips triggered by things I've been noticing cropping up on Twitter recently.

1) Want retweets? Write for retweets!
Just in case you're asking, 117 characters is a 'retweetable' tweet - you can retweet without having to edit my tweet. In fact, much of my Twitter editing time goes into editing other people's tweets so I can share them. That's partly my fault, I have a long twitter handle (this has long been a subject of debate, but it's my name and I'm sticking to it) - but it's also people not thinking about where their tweet is headed. This is not a good thing, as generally you're sharing a tweet because you want to share information widely (otherwise, surely, you'd just be keeping it to yourself!) and retweets are grist to the sharing mill. With this in mind, it's generally a good idea to keep Tweets to around the 120 character mark. And, of course, a link will further reduce your character count! This means some judicious editing, but doesn't mean you have to sacrifice 'proper' language.

2) Edit like you mean it
I've come across a few posts out there about 'why writers should tweet' and the like and, while I generally agree that Twitter is a great way for content producers (that's what we call writers these days. It's so much more practical than 'novelist', isn't it?) to connect with audiences, I think it has a much more powerful role to play. You see, Twitter is a fantastic editing tool. The discipline required to get your message across in 140 characters (or, in my case, in 117 characters) is considerable. But it can usually be done - and without resorting to eight year-old text speak - with a little consideration and some editing.

The skills used in twediting are the same skills we use when editing writing - boiling sentences down so they say what you mean without unecessary verbiage and redundancies, rephrasing sentences to make them crisper and clearer. In fact, rare is the tweet that couldn't use a quick edit.

I thought I'd just pick a tweet at random to show what I mean:

The weather is so poetic this morning;the inspiration is just itching 2 get out doesn't it?We hope that ur inspiration is fully active 2day

This tweet left one character .What can we do to improve it? Well, we can get rid of 'this morning' as we know it's the morning. We could also get rid of 'doesn't it?', although you could argue this is an invitation to engagement, which would be a good thing. So we'll just change it to 'isn't it?'. And we can now ditch the 'text speak' and be left with a properly punctuated tweet of 120 characters that hasn't lost a thing:

The weather's so poetic; the inspiration is itching to get out, isn't it? We hope your inspiration's fully active today!

3) Delete Redundancies
One word you can almost always ditch, in twitter and MSs alike, is 'that' - a word responsible for almost as many wasted bytes as Tim Berners-Lee's //. It's almost always redundant. Phrases like 'somewhere else' can become 'elsewhere' and save five characters. And an odd thing I frequently see is hashtagged tweets that repeat the whole hashtagged phrase unnecessarily, as in:

Please read my book Olives! http://bit.ly/ttJ0Uq #Olives

Obviously, the hashtagged Olives can go, the tab being appended to the remaining Olives. And you can stop saying 'dah' in that tone of voice, I see people doing this all the time.

4) Consider the structure of your tweet
People often seem to forget that starting a tweet with the @ character means that only people who follow you AND the person you're @ing will see that tweet. If you want to address the widest possible audience, restructure your tweet to place the @ handle within the tweet itself, for instance:

Hey, @alexandermcnabb, I just bought your book! #Olives

Another thing about twitter handles is they're not invalidated by punctuation, so if you tweet Hey, @alexandermcnabb! I'll still get that tweet - there's no need to add a space either side.

5) Bear context in mind
When you tweet 'You're absolutely right!' to someone three hours after they have shared the tweet you agree with, you're likely forcing them to backtrack the conversation to find out what on earth you're talking about. Similarly, a Tweet like 'I think you'd probably agree with @randomperson on this one!' is hardly helpful.

Tweeting a link to your content more than once is a temptation, but I always think it's politer to append 'in case you missed this' or another phrase that makes it clear you're repeat tweeting.

Happy tweeting!

Olives and The Book Club

2012-01-18T07:13:00.002+03:00

Image via Wikipedia

The Expat Women's Book Club meets regularly at Paul Café in Jumeirah's Mercato shopping mall and had decided to 'do' Olives - A Violent Romance as their book choice having scanned through a list of the books that are to be at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. We made contact on GoodReads.com and before I knew it, the day had come when I was to 'Come at 8.45 so we can meet at 8.00 and have some time to dissect your book before you arrive.'

That sounded ominous...

I duly rocked up to find a group of about 12 ladies in a secluded corner of Paul (I didn't actually count, I thought it might have looked rude, you know?) with copies of Olives strewn around the table. I pulled up a chair and got ready to hear The Verdict.

'Right,' said Mary-Anne, who had organised the meeting. 'First I should tell you we really enjoyed it, so you can relax on that score...'

The rest of the meeting was bliss - an hour talking to people who had read my book, enjoyed it and wanted to ask questions about it. What more can life offer someone who's written something? Why did this character do this? Why did that happen? Why does Aisha wear red underwear? Who are the baddies? Why doesn't Paul flee the country? What's the publishing process been like? What will I get up to next?

The time flew and I found myself having to think about my own book in a way I hadn't before, seeing it through other people's perceptions of the characters and the plot. It was a strange and very rewarding experience, I can tell you. On one occasion I got caught out not knowing an event had happened in the book one eagle-eyed reader had asked me about. Oh, blushes!

Here, as a result, are five things you likely didn't know about Olives:

1) Paul is mildly OCD
Paul's got a touch of obsessive compulsive disorder in his makeup. He's always counting steps to see if they'll be an even number, because if they are this or that thing will be alright. There's a slight echo of that in Aisha, the girl who thinks of olive trees as serried ranks of courtiers as she walks through them. One reader suggested I might have been better calling the book, 'The Olive Princess' which I actually fervently agree with - it was a decision I nearly took at the very end of the process (the book's working title has always been Olives) and didn't.

2) Paul becomes a smoker in the book
As the book progresses, Paul takes up smoking. The Jordanian member of the club was hugely amused by this, knowing how prevalent smoking still is in Jordan. It's also symbolic of Paul's increasing 'Jordanisation' in the book.

3) Anne is Merrie Englande
Paul's girlfriend Anne is a metaphor for England and its pull on Paul as he adjusts to a new life in a strange country. One club member looked at Anne's part of the story from Anne's perspective which, I confess, I hadn't been conscious of doing myself before. Lucky, then, it all worked for her! Anne's role towards the end of the book really represents Paul's determination to follow his course and finally take sides once and for all.

4) Paul's dilemma is TE Lawrence's dilemma
To love what you betray and betray the thing you love - Lawrence tried to balance loyalty to his country with loyalty to the Arab cause, whilst the conflicting purposes of each ensured he betrayed both. It's one reason why the book references Seven Pillars of Wisdom and, specifically, the dedication. I actually contacted Lawrence's estate and got their blessing for the quotes, by the way. They're out of copyright. Similarly, the Mahmoud Darwish quote is fair do's, qualifying as 'fair use'.

5)No, I don't identify with Paul

I think as 'the Brit' in the book, there's a tendency for people to ask if there's any of me in him and my answer is invariably 'I hope not'. There's been quite a lot of 'I don't like Paul' feedback, but I think that might be missing the point a little as you're not actually supposed to like him - I know this was me making life difficult for myself. Paul, as blogger Sara pointed out with a precise nail/head occlusion, Paul is the side of all of us that we know is there, but would prefer to think isn't - that we'd be braver, wiser and more true to ourselves than we actually are. He's young and callow and emotionally a little inept. There's actually a lot more of me in 'bad guy' Gerald Lynch. My reader for Beirut (my next book, which is a much 'harder' thriller and whose main character is our Gerry) complained, calling Lynch 'A violent, unpredictable drunk'. My response was 'yes... and?'.

Mary Anne was evidently somewhat perplexed by the juxtaposition of the evil Lynch with the witty, urbane and charming* young man sat beside her. What can I say?

I'm not going to make such a big fuss about every book club meeting, don't worry (oh, long-suffering reader), but this was my first. And I owe everyone there a huge vote of grateful thanks.

* Would you be sick quietly, please? Thank you.

Remember when Ratings Were About Films?

2012-01-16T09:15:00.002+03:00

Image via Wikipedia

So a company in America called Standard and Poor's has pronounced on the performance of Europe's economies and governments and downgraded them. This has been taken seriously rather than laughed out of court. I'm sure I'm not alone in being totally bewildered as to how this is the case.

I first came across a rating agency, and the concept of 'ratings' in 2001, when I was working on launching a mobile network. My client's competitor had been rated (It was being primped for a sale) by one of the 'big three' rating agencies with many As and pluses. I was interested to see how the competitor could rate so highly in someone's eyes and obtained a copy of the rating report. The report cited a total lack of competition and an excellent infrastructure. At the time, (if memory serves me correctly) we had just noisily launched a competitive network with the backing of a major international telco brand. The competitor's infrastructure was also, as was obvious to anyone who had spent any time on the ground, woeful. Even their masts looked like rickety water pumps on a hick Ohio farm.

The chap from the rating agency told me they didn't just rate companies - they rated municipalities in the States, too - cities. I remember being awed at the idea that some company would actually have the power to rate a city and effectively change its ability to raise money.

It's an experience that's been very much in my mind over recent weeks as we hear this or that agency threatening to downgrade this or that government. Firstly that these three companies hold that power (and don't tell me for one second these decisions aren't politically or commercially influenced over cosy little lunches in Washington) and secondly that my one experience of them showed that the rating was based on what was presumably some pretty sloppy research and didn't reflect the actual market conditions prevailing.

I wonder why everyone's putting up with it?

How To Write A Book

2012-01-12T08:51:00.000+03:00

This, believe it or not, was my Christmas gift from
The Niece From Hell - a 'starter pack' of book napkins!.

You have to bear in mind the advice below comes from a self-published author who's just started out and will likely never sell more than a couple of hundred books, not Jeffrey Deaver, okay? You are, of course, more than welcome to buy my book and decide for yourself whether to listen to me.

Pal Abdulla Al Suwaidi (@Aabo0 to you) asked me on Twitter to share the resources I used developing my book, Olives - A Violent Romance. To that end, the below.

In terms of actual literature on writing books, there are hundreds of books on how to write a book. It's notable that few of them are written by successful authors of anything other than books on how to write books and many carry mendacious subtitles such as 'How To Get Published'. I think you've more chance of being published by wearing a duck on your head and standing naked outside Blackstone's than you have by reading these books. Books on writing will only take you so far - the rest of the process is as arcane and mystifying as the famous Nebulising Nonentity of Nether Thragulon Nine.

I own two books about writing, foisted upon me by an insistent and exasperated Phillipa Fioretti as we worked together on an early edit of Olives. Self Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Brown and Dave King and The First Five Pages by Noah Lukeman. Both are books I am very glad I bought. Other than those, I suppose I've read a load of articles and stuff online but most of my learning has come from working with writer friends on my manuscript or theirs - there are writer's websites such as Harper Collins' Authonomy or Litopia which let you post up your manuscript and allow others to 'crit' it. The upside of this is you get lots of advice and input, the downside is there can be a lot of backbiting, competitive 'backing' where, for instance authonomy, the site is based on competing and it can be hard to know if the advice comes from a seasoned pro or a complete dufus.

Should you join a writers' group? I have found (as I acknowledge in Olives) the company of writer friends utterly invaluable, but I stress they are friends - people whose company I sought and enjoy. I have never belonged to a writers' group as such and look on them with mild horror. But don't 'go it alone' for pity's sake. I did that for over five years and now fervently wish I hadn't wasted so much time.

I follow a number of blogs, but these are more focused on publishing rather than writing. However, I'd recommend:

The Passive Voice - mostly posts from other people's blogs, but his selections are usually thought-provoking and his observations often add value, too. And, of course, he's finding other writers worth following for you.

The Shatzkin Files - Consultant Mike Shatzkin was one of the early voices that 'got' digital and he remains a must-read commentator on publishing.

The Bookseller - The trade journal of publishing. I find this great for following the industry and occasionally useful for 'reality checking' some of the more strident neologist voices.

Pub Rants - A useful agent's blog. Kristin is one of the very few agents who I follow.

Writer Beware - A good early warning system for scams and scammers. As self publishing grows, so will the marketing scams that promise to market your book etc.

Mad Genius Club - A bunch of writers writing about writing, always worth a visit.

The Independent Publishing Magazine - Does what it says on the cover.

Obviously, if anyone else has any smart ideas on writer/author/publishing blogs to follow, feel free to chuck 'em in the comments.

As for the rest of it, here are some of my learnings so you don't have to smack your head against the same brick walls I did.

How to write a book

So, you've set up all these blogs in your reader and popped off to Amazon to buy those books. You've got a nice, sharp pencil and a piece of paper ready. Now you can start writing your book. Step back from that keyboard, I was serious about the pencil and paper.

1) A Novel Form
What kind of book are you intending to write? Be clear with yourself, categorise it from day one. Chic-lit for the over 30s European housewife? A thriller for early 20-something professionals? Tighten it as much as possible and try to imagine your audience. Is it a large audience? What kind of books is it buying? Where is it buying them? Is your genre of choice one you read a lot in? Which authors do you admire/enjoy the most? Are they selling well? How will you be different to them, yet occupy the same space on the shelf? (One writer solved this problem by using a pseudonym that placed him next to his 'target author' on bookshelves!)

These questions all seem far removed from the beautiful process of creating literature and they indeed are. But if you want your beautiful literature to get published, you'd better start thinking commercially from the get-go. Publishers don't buy beauty any more, they buy books they think they can sell in the mainstream. If you're in it for the beauty and to hell with the consequences, then you're self-publishing and you're as well to understand that before you press a single key.

Now to use that piece of paper (some people use whiteboards or big charts, I happen to use paper). Presumably you've got an idea of the basic plot of the book. Now you can Google 'narrative curve' and came back to this after you've spent a couple of days reading all the advice out there. I start out by putting the events in my book in little clumps of text and linking them with arrows, so each clump is a little like a scene. Each scene, then, takes your character forwards on the journey of your book (the journey can, of course, take place on an armchair), by moving the character or by moving other characters and situations that influence or impact your character. The arrows let you move to the next scene and connect scenes. Force yourself to do this through the whole book to the end (the temptation is to do about half and then decide to resolve the rest when you get to it). It doesn't have to be totally granular - it can be a very 'broad brush' approach, but you want to have an idea of what you're setting out to do. Ideally, the whole thing can also be colour-coded to belong to the beginning, middle and end, which takes you back to the narrative curve stuff.

2) Start writing
Now you can start putting your scenes on paper, knowing where they belong in the full picture. In fact, books are ideally structured in scenes, each scene having an objective to it that moves the story forward. Each scene belongs in a place, so be careful to let your reader know where he or she is. Each scene has a single point of view, that is the events are witnessed through one character. If you start using two or more POVs, you'll confuse the reader. This is where you Google "point of view" and come back to this article in a couple of weeks when you've exhausted yourself with the endless debate writers love to have about POV.

How much should you write? I'd aim for 1,000 words a day, but if you're doing 500 that's fine. The keyboard has arguably done us some dis-favours here as it makes it all to easy to dash ahead like a charging rhino, which is hardly the stuff of considered prose. Writers who worked long-hand did a great deal less editing, I suspect, than we do today.

3) Consider these things.
What person will you write your book in? There are arguments for first person and arguments for third person. Come back when you've done Googlin' - I wrote Olives in the first person, but my other books are all written in the third person. The first person demands that you really get behind one character and I created something of a rod for my back by choosing to narrate my story through a character who isn't intended to be necessarily likeable or admirable, in fact other characters elicit your sympathies and admiration. I personally think it's worked, but I'm biased. And it was a hell of a lot of work to do. Third person would have been simpler and easier all round. Having said that, there is some really smashing literature out there written in the first person and a cherry-pick of the very finest I'd suggest would include Camus' The Stranger, Fowles' The Magus and Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. If you're going to write in the first person, I'd recommend some movement of green paper over to Jeff Bezos' account.

Who is your main character? No, I mean really who? One of the things that makes JRR Tolkein's work so fabulous is that he created his world before he populated it, even down to defining its history, folk-lore, culture and languages. What are your character's personality and quirks, background and situation? How will your character be changed by the story you're telling? How will other characters interact with your main characer - and who are they? All of this is "characterisation" and, yes, you should Google it right now and come back to this article in a few days when you've defined your characters and fleshed out their lives so you feel you know them. They can develop as you're writing, of course - but you're best having thought them through first so you can have them react to situations realistically and in a way we believe and can empathise with.

4) As you write...
Think about where you are in each scene and how it is best experienced through your character's POV. What are the sights and sounds? The smells? The feelings? Close your eyes and breathe it in, live it. And now put it down on paper. Use one word where ten will do, but pick the word that really nails it. Don't kill yourself being a 'rivet man' and detailing the scene to the point where we all start haemorrhaging , just set it up in a few well chosen words and then make it come alive for us by referencing it through your characters' senses. Don't forget touch - a cold key in the pocket, a warm baby. You might like to Google "writing style" here and come back in a couple of months or so.

Language is the only tool you've got, in the same way as voice is the only tool you have during a phone call. That means you have to use it to create pictures, draw the reader in and build a sense of reality. Strangely, less is more - a few well chosen words is all you need because we will fill in the gaps for you. But do avoid cliché and don't use two verbs where one will do. In fact, one writer friend is a passionate killer of adverbs and she's right almost all of the time. Consider your choice of words. If Simon gets up and walks from the room leaving Helen behind is Simon being as interesting or engaging as if he pushes back the chair irritably and strides out of the room, brushing past Helen? Be careful not to let yourself get too 'purple' here, it's a balancing act.

Focus on your characters' emotional responses, but do try and avoid telling us what those responses, those feelings and reactions are. We're better off you showing us what they are in the way the characters react. Here's another Google moment, the idea of "showing not telling". See you in a few days.

5) Hammer away
Keep hammering away at it, building your scenes and helping your characters live the lives you've given them in your mind. Keep to the straight and narrow, don't forget we're going to have to read this, so your amusing, if self-indulgent invention of Granny Smith who is a totally great character but actually matters not one jot is something you might like to reconsider spending time on given you're almost certainly going to dump her when you get around to the edit. Do bear in mind many books suffer from a 'soggy middle', something you should avoid if you've planned well but can also avoid by bearing this particular bear trap in mind. One day, probably in about 80-100 days depending on your genre and story, you're going to sit back and experience a remarkable moment of satisfaction.

Now the doubt can creep in from the dark corners and gnaw at you. Is it any good? Did it all work? Will anyone read it? Is it just a pile of self-indulgent tripe?

Welcome to my world. And good luck to you.

When A Delay Means On Track

2012-01-10T11:27:00.001+03:00

Image via Wikipedia

It's a funny old world, isn't it? There you are reading Gulf News' front page Business, "Strategic Oil Pipeline On Track" and the next minute you've got the National with its contrary headline "Delay for UAE crude oil pipeline".

Is this some of that vaunted context and analysis at work? Or perhaps a little doublespeak and obfuscation? A closer examination of the GN story "Habsham-Fujeirah oil pipeline 'will be ready in six months" shows that the pipeline was originally scheduled to be commissioned last year. So where precisely is GN getting 'on track' from?

Even the National story talks about a six-month delay, but both newspapers' stories cite a handover date of six months from now. So if the thing was supposed to be commissioned last year, that's more than a six month delay, isn't it?

In fact, construction of the pipeline was completed in March 2011, according to oil and gas industry magazine Pipeline in this story, as well as to this highly detailed summary of the works on the Hydrocarbons Technology website. So we're looking at an eighteen month delay, aren't we? And why, if the construction is complete, are we regaled with a huge picture in GN of a pipeline under construction, leaving readers with the clear inference that the project is still at a pipelaying stage? The National's story is picture captioned "Construction continues on the Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline in Fujairah".

And why, if the thing was finished in March of last year? Neither newspaper is clear on any reasons for a delay. In fact, both stories left me (a humble reader) with more questions than answers.

Context and analysis. Keep repeating it

(BTW, a tweet from @patrickosgood led me to his story for Arabianoldandgas.com which is altogether more credible, clearly well researched and factual - and refers to, wait for it, an 18-month delay)

An Olive Update

2012-01-09T11:05:00.001+03:00

Image by jurvetson via Flickr

I had an argument with uber-geek Gerald Donovan when I told him I was planning to launch Beirut, my second serious novel, at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in March. He exploded with indignation at the very suggestion, waving his hands around and emphatically repeating, 'No, it's too early' in the face of my earnest assertions that this was publishing at internet speed and the new paradigm didn't wait around for months like old fashioned publishing used to.

It hurts me inestimably to say this, but Gerald was right and I was wrong. There. Got that out of the way.

Beirut will be lucky to see a September launch at this rate - it needs a great deal more time than I had anticipated to get the ball rolling as it is a very big and heavy ball indeed - although we can only hope it has commensurate momentum.

It's been nearly a month since Olives was launched at TwingeDXB and a great deal has been happening in that time, I can tell you. If you're considering self publishing, let me tell you this for a start - it's a hell of an amount of hard work. Distribution channels take a great deal of time to kick into place and bookshops have been taking their sweet time ordering copies from distributor Jashanmals, although the hard copies have been available all along in Jashanmals and Spinneys outlets. But it's really down, at this stage, to promotion, promotion, promotion. I'm trying to strike a balance between getting word out and annoying people with relentless promotion but, of course, you find yourself a little too close to it to be objective. That's why people need great communications agencies... :)

Reviews are important in this age of self-publishing. The recommendation of other readers can be key to people's buying decisions, so reviews on Amazon, GoodReads and blogs are gold dust. The first reviews are just now coming through and they're looking positive, which is something of a relief as well as a joy to behold - Big Dave's early review on Amazon was a grin-inducer and people have found it useful - particularly as said Mr Dave is, although a reader of this blog, unknown to me. My first blog review, cheating a bit as she saw the book before it ever got printed, was my censor's daughter, which was fun. It was also a sigh of relief as the book passed the critical test of a pair of young and culturally alert Palestinian eyes - again, a reader of the blog but otherwise unknown to me. Other reviews have followed, although they're not terribly objective as both authors are very well known to me - the lovely Sara Refai and scurrilous cut-purse Simon Forward.

The tweets have started to come in from people who've read and liked the book, which has been a daily treat, I can tell you. I'm giving a talk to my first book club later this month and Olives is on the reading list of other book clubs, too. There's a rumbling building up in them thar hills - a great deal more slowly than my deeply impatient personality would ideally like, but that's momentum for you.

So the million dollar question - how many have I sold? I haven't got the foggiest. It's too early to see a sales report for the print edition yet, but the online edition has probably sold something in the region of fifty copies, the majority on Kindle.

Which is fifty more readers than Olives would have had if I hadn't decided to do this - something that I stop and consider every day and which still brings a silly smile to my face. It's also, as I have now learned, very early days indeed.

Sharjah Festooned With Felicitation

2012-01-08T10:08:00.000+03:00

Image via Wikipedia

"How you doing today, Brian?"
"Oh, you know mate. Same old, same old. Festooned with felicitation as usual."

His Highness Dr Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qasimi is the ruler of Sharjah. He returned recently from France where he underwent a 'minor surgery'. As Gulf News reports today (although I can't find the piece online), the resulting outbreak of felicitations is nothing less than extraordinary. Free-standing posters of Dr. Sultan have started popping up everywhere in the emirate over the past week.

I had at first thought it was purely a municipality thing, but families, businesses and generally everyone has been getting into the 'put up a poster' act, so the roundabouts are now becoming literally festooned with pictures of His Highness, while more are popping up on any piece of spare ground people can find. They appear to be increasing in number daily, too.

This year will mark Dr. Sultan's fortieth year as Ruler of Sharjah. I get the feeling there may be something of a party in store for us all...

The Great Al Habtoor Robbery

2012-01-07T14:31:00.002+03:00

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After eighteen years of complaining about what robbers Al Habtoor are every time I get my Pajero serviced, I have finally actually been robbed for real while having my car serviced.

The checkers always remind you to remove valuables when you drop the car off, so I duly emptied the coin tray and packed myself off home, clinking merrily. Paying the taxi, I realised I'd left my wallet in the car. I called the girl at the service centre and headed back to Al Habtoor. I was laughing and joking with her as we got to the car together and I picked up my wallet, which had been relieved of its cash contents, about Dhs400 in all.

It didn't sink in at all until later. Someone had actually taken money from my car. To those of you living elsewhere, this will come as no surprise, you're probably sitting there thinking, 'Like, obviously, duh' and I appreciate why you would. But I live in one of the safest places in the world. We're all of us on the hog's back here, from labourers through to CEOs we're all in the UAE because we're better off than we would be back at home. Any criminal conviction, once you've done your time in El Slammer, means getting sent home and so crime, for the vast majority of us, doesn't pay.

The service centre manager was, I was told, investigating. After a while, he'd drawn a blank and, well, that was sort of that, really. I asked him to call the police. He said they wouldn't do anything, he'd had experience of this sort of thing before. I insisted. He refused. I pointed out it was his secure area, his employee and his responsibility. He said they had internal procedures and he couldn't call the police. I asked him to escalate to someone who could call the police and he ignored me. It all got a little heated. It wasn't really about Dhs400 by now, but about someone who had chosen to steal from me. I called the police myself. After ringing out twice, the 999 number answered. I had tried calling police HQ, but they didn't answer at all. You do wonder sometimes.

The CID chap turned up, a young chap in a baseball cap and dishdash. The service centre manager and I explained (he had no English) and he nodded sagely and took my ID, borrowing a pen and piece of paper from the manager to write down my details. Watching him, I was strongly reminded of our friend captain Mohammed filling out Paul's charge sheet in Olives, his tongue stuck out in concentration...

At this point one of the service staff popped in and put a wad of money on the manager's desk and murmered a name. I got the impression the staff had taken matters into their own hands - nobody really wants CID snooping around their workplace asking awkward questions. The culprit was called for - the most stupid thief imaginable - the man whose job it was to drive the cars around to the storage area prior to work commencing. He had already been through 20 minutes of questioning with the manager before the police were called and had professed his innocence. Now he broke down and pleaded for mercy.

The CID guy's first question to the thief was an incredulous, "You're a Muslim?"

So I got my money back and the thief was sacked and will be sent home. I asked the CID guy if he could leave matters at that, which he indeed could - in fact, I'd have to go down to the copshop and file a case against the man if I wanted it taken further.

Of course, later today I'll just have to hand the money over to Al Habtoor anyway. But I suppose at least they extract it with my (grudging) acquiescence...

The Emirates ID Card Moves Online

2012-01-04T07:29:00.001+03:00

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The Emirates ID Card was launched in 2008. Now, in 2012, we are to see the application process for the card implemented as an online form. Launched initially for UAE nationals only, the online application will be rolled out to UAE residents and GCC nationals in the 'next two months'.

This latest in a long line of announcements, many of which have been followed by clarifications, is potentially the most welcome (and useful) of all.

Gulf News, reporting on the move, focuses on the cost saving to applicants (you save the Dhs30 typing centre fee, so the card will cost you a mere Dhs240 instead of Dhs270) rather than the saving in travel, waiting, queuing, shuffling around from counter to counter with a pile of papers and general messing about involved.

Although, as is so often the case, there's a whiff of sulphur invading the clear air of paradise - Gulf News' story (linked here for your viewing pleasure) contains the line, "Online applicants can print out their receipt which will mention the appointment to visit an Emirates ID registration centre."

Of course, an online application process would involve filling in a form, uploading copies of any documents required, paying any fees online with a credit card and then having the card mailed to you, wouldn't it? It would be insanity to have people filling in the forms online and then having to make an appointment to physically travel to an Emirates ID registration centre and queue to have the application reviewed and the card issued to them in person. Nobody in their right minds would implement an online process like that, would they?

I should perhaps remind you that this announcement comes from the people that gave us the application application, an online application that allowed you to fill out and print the application form required to make an application for an appointment to make your application.

We can only await the usual clarification...

#SaveSamar

2011-12-27T21:26:00.000+03:00

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I'm sure someone wise and statistically inclined will analyse it, but the fact is the #SaveSamar campaign has raised $21,000 to send a terminally ill little girl from Ramallah to Florence for surgery on the brain tumour that would possibly have snuffed out her life before January 2012 had passed.

The Palestine Children Relief Fund's 'thank you' message is linked here. It's a remarkable demonstration of online activism, social media and all that. Sara of Ussa Nabulsiyeh fame and I both posted about Samar's dilemma (the dilemma being she was dying) on the 21st December. On the evening of the 22nd the fund was nearing 50% subscribed and we had heard privately that the fund was going to close thanks to the intervention of Salam Ya Seghar, the fund for children's education in Palestine backed by the wife of the Ruler of Sharjah, Her Highness Sheikha Jawaher Bint Mohammed Al Qasimi. The offline world works at differential speeds and so fundraising online carried on apace, with a spirited effort on Twitter carrying word out, so that by the time the Salam Ya Seghar offer was formally made and accepted, the online campaign had reached something like 70% of the fundraising target.

So you could say this online campaign raised the funds in 24 hours. You could say it took five days. But either result is remarkable for the speed, the generosity of people (Half-crazed uber-geek Gerald Donovan take a bow, BTW) and the involvement of am amazingly diverse and seemingly inchoate community in coming together to address a small, but vital, need.

The vital catalyst, the speedy element, was Twitter. The power of that platform constantly stuns me.

But I'm still grinning. Crumbs, chaps, we might have saved a life! Isn't that tiny, tiny thing wonderful?

Dying

2011-12-21T18:29:00.002+03:00

Samar Maree is ten years old. She describes herself as 'clever' and 'smiley'. She comes from Ramallah. And she's dying.

Many will remember the story of little Ola Abu Jarmous, whose life was saved last year because of the fast response of the Middle East online community and the GeekFest crowd. Ola had a month to live and money was needed fast to save her life. The cash was raised in record time after Ola's story first appeared on Sara Refai's Ussa Nabulsiyeh blog.

The video above is Steve Sosebee of the Palestine Children Relief Fund telling Ola's story at TEDx Ramallah this year. Ola is doing very nicely, thank you very much.

It's groundhog day, people. There's another little girl with a brain tumour that will kill her unless something like $20,000 is raised to get her out of Ramallah and to Florence, where the specialist surgeons and equipment she needs are to be found.

Please share links to this and Sarah's posts, post your own pieces on blogs, Twitter, Facebook - wherever and go here to the PCRF appeal page linked here where you can make donations. It doesn't have to be a lot, just a lot of you.

In the spirit of Christmas (or whatever spirit you fancy) - you can help save another life and we could get to see another little girl onstage at TED saying 'thank you' in Italian.

The Worst Radio Ads In The World

2011-12-20T08:14:00.000+03:00

Image by bunky's pickle via Flickr

I'm not sure what made the marketing team over at the UAE's National Bonds corporation think people wanted to hear the sound of women committing suicide, couples arguing bitterly or men drowning but that's certainly what their new radio ads present to listeners. I may well be totally alone in this, but I find it unbelievably unpleasant and invariably turn the radio off when these ads come on. There are a number of other ads which trigger the same reaction in me. This is becoming increasingly a problem for my radio listening life, as I often forget to turn it back on again - and I generally enjoy listening to Brandy and Malcolm talk business and bicker on the radio during my drive to work.

I have railed against the awfulness of Dubai's radio advertising before. (for instance, take this example of egregious sexism from LG) I'm sure I will again. I am assured that it isn't an issue unique to Dubai, that radio ads all around the world are also completely pants, but I can't help but feel we're in a league of our own. Of course, in my own weekly forays to the studio, I can't switch the damn things off and have to sit, tied down to the squeaky high chair, and listen to them. One day I'm sure the mic will go live as I'm in the middle of one of my not infrequent 'I hate all radio advertising' rants at hapless co-host Desley.

So are we really being subjected to the worst radio advertising in the world today? Mark Makhoul over at Kuwaiti blog 2:48AM thinks he's got the world's worst eample, linked here. It's certainly special.

This one from a company called 'SuperScreen' in the UK is pretty dire, too. The last, triumphant call of 'free parking!' rounds it off nicely. Here's another contender, a radio ad that can only have been produced by a group of people incarcerated in a highly secure institution for the long term mentally challenged. This one (the one at the top of the search) is introduced by advertising commentator Dan O'Day, and features a burger and a sausage being burned to death. What's remarkable (and the reason I included a whole search for Kingsford Charcoal's advertising) is that it is by no means a standout moment of fail for the company's advertising - it's all utterly woeful. Take a look at the third one down and then the seventh if you really want to wallow in other people's total failure to communicate at any meaningful level beyond deep irritation.

This ad from the UK's Flintshire Motors takes it to a new level though. This is nothing less than the product of an incestuously conceived drooling nincompoop with a mental age of six who has been given a massive dose of LSD. I couldn't even finish listening to it. It's contagious - your draw drops and you start to shake your head and wail as the insanity infects you. It is undoubtedly the worst radio spot I could find on the Internet.

What worries me is it wouldn't stand out if you played it on radio here. None of the ads linked above would. They'd just sink slowly into the puddle of odiferous mediocrity with a viscid 'plop' and never be seen again.

Let It Snow!

2011-12-18T09:41:00.002+03:00

Google the words let it snow and you shall be sore amazed, as Google has found a new way to turn us all into drooling morons following on from its amazing productivity-draining musical Google Doodle. Yes, your screen will frost up and you can clear it by holding down the mouse button and wiping the frost away or, if you're in a hurry or scared you might run into something, you can hit 'defrost' and it'll all clear away instantly.

I tried using my national ID card to wipe it away, but it didn't work. Given the current state of affairs, I'll get my chance to try out the card's ice-clearing action next week in the UK.

In the meantime, enjoy playing around with your screen as Google makes another $28 billion out of us all!

Thanks, George Winston!

2011-12-15T12:51:00.000+03:00

American pianist and composer George Winston's Four Seasons are some of my favourite musical things, perhaps surprising given I'm also quite fond of listening to System of a Down, but there you go.

There's an iPod in the bedroom at McNabb mansions and we go to sleep listening to music - nothing to shouty, you understand. George Winston's work is perfect. And so it is that one night I went to sleep listening to this music - February Sea from the first season, Winter into Spring. It made me think of a girl dancing in the rain and that's what was in my mind as my eyes for what someone cleverer than me once called 'the little death of sleep'.

I woke up in the morning with a book in my head, clear as day - clear as blacktop through the desert, the story stretched out in front of me. I bashed it out in four weeks, then spent seven years editing, changing and re-writing it.

Oddly the sequence of the girl dancing in the rain (I always knew she was downhill from the Blue Fig in Abdoun) has not only remained in the book but ended up pretty smack bang in the middle of it and marks the pivotal turning point in the story.

You can find the whole album on YouTube, but it's available on Dancing Cat Records and you can buy it here at Amazon.com which is the same place you can also buy this rather wonderful book.

Thanks, George!

Wadi Wurayah

2011-12-14T08:45:00.003+03:00

Image by Peachland Joe via Flickr

It's been a while since Wadi Wurayah has been in the news. In fact, as far back as this totally pointless piece in the now (you can see why, too) defunct EmBiz24x7.

But now it's a 7Days front page splash! OUTRAGE AS VANDALS SPOIL BEAUTY SPOT trumpets the terrific tabloid. Actually, I hate to tell you this guys, but Wurayah has looked like it escaped from LA Ink since the early 1990s, when a road was built that turned the former 19km offroad drive required to get to Wurayah into a two minute saunter in the old Tiiida.

Wurayah is the only year-round waterfall in the UAE and a site of very real natural beauty. If you nip up to the top of the waterfall there's a little bowl you can sit in and let the cool water run over you as you lie back and reflect that yes, it is indeed Tough In The Gulf. You used to get to it by turning off the Khor Fakkan road by a wrecked aeroplane (well, until they removed the wreckage, which caused a lot of readers of Motivate's Offroad in the Emirates more than the odd problem. Mind you, we found more lost travellers in Hatta after the track cited in the book was washed away. Motivate continued, of course, to sell the book!) and trundling up wadi beds in your 4x4 to get to the waterfall.

We went up just after the new road was built and the wadi was already strewn with graffiti and the pools at the base of the waterfall contained rubbish - tin cans and broken glass. We found a man there, camping. He had a light bulb on a pole in front of his tent and a generator to light it, which was causing a terrible racket and stank. That was back in 1994 or so.

Today's outrage is a tad overdue...

Olives - UAE Group Buying WIN

2011-12-13T18:36:00.002+03:00

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Group buying site LivingSocial has a great deal on for the next four days in the UAE - A Dhs100 Jashanmal books and stationery voucher for just Dhs 50.

It's linked here!

What makes this deal so very splendid is that it means you can now buy Olives - A Violent Romance for just Dhs10! The book's RRP is Dhs60, the voucher costs Dhs50 AND you get another Dhs40 in voucher value left over for other, less desirable books. Or rulers and rubber bands, whatever floats your boat.

So if you've been reading this blog over the past couple of weeks and been wishing I'd just shut up about the damn book, now you can play your part in actually silencing me! All I need to do is sell out the print run and I promise I'll never blog about it again! Well, not on here, at least. Well, not as often. Well, not as overtly...

Anyway, if you want to pay full price, Olives is available at Spinneys and Virgin and other discerning UAE bibliophile hangouts...If you're not UAE based, you can always buy the print edition from amazon.com or ebooks from just about everyone, including iBooks - links on the panel to the right! :)

I Am Glad

2011-12-11T08:12:00.001+03:00

Olives - A Violent Romance has launched and I am glad. It launched, in that any self-published book 'launches', with a talk/reading/Q&A session at last night's TwingeDXB event, 'Praise for Prose', which took place at the Wild Peeta Open Space down at Dubai World Trade Centre. It was fun.

I had a couple of conversations at the event about my decision to self publish and what that meant to me after so many years chasing a 'conventional' publishing contract. Those conversations were perhaps a little more poignant in the light of the internal memo from publishers Hachette, leaked to 'Digital Book World'. The memo outlines Hachette's 'messaging' for why it remains relevant in a world increasingly dominated by e-books and populated by a new wave of self published authors.

I had seen mention of the memo a couple of days back, but read it in full this morning after a link was sent to me by writer pal (and self published author of the most excellent Diary of a Small Fish, which I recommend as an interesting, fun and enjoyable read, BTW) Peter Morin.

The DBW story is linked here. It's worth a read - as is the memo DBW gleefully reproduces in full. There's an interesting rebuttal of the memo by self publishing poster child Joe Konrath, if you have the patience to read it all. If not, I can sum it all up with this sound.

How does this link to the chats I was having? Well, I was explaining to people how at the end of the day I was actually very glad indeed I took the decision to self publish. I can't say I could have taken the decision sooner, because there was a road I had to travel to get here - and if I hadn't taken that road, I wouldn't be as well equipped as I am now.

But I am glad for a wide variety of reasons. First and foremost, I have the cover I want for my book, created by the designer I passionately wanted to represent my work. A publisher wouldn't have let me within a mile of the cover design. I got to control the 'look and feel' of the book, from the paper (I know, I know, I've become a Paper Bore) to the typography. I also own all the rights to my work and can assign them as I see fit - a publisher would have insisted on me assigning my rights en bloc to them. And I have been able to promote and represent my work as I see fit - not have the way my 'content' is 'packaged' dictated by a marketing department somewhere in London. Those include the rights to translated editions, especially Arabic, by the way.

I have had to invest thousands of hours into promotion, writing, planning and executing my own marketing campaign - which has barely started. I'll have to invest thousands more before I'm through. I've enjoyed every single one of them. I would have had to invest just as much as if I had signed with a publisher but suspect I'd have enjoyed myself a great deal less.

The Hachette memo leaves the most important part of nurturing a publishabl project to last:

We offer marketing and publicity expertise, presenting a book to the marketplace in exactly the right way, and ensuring that intelligence, creativity, and business acumen inform our strategy.

In today's crowded publishing world, where literally tens of thousands of voices are clamouring for attention out there, publishers are finding their efforts at 'traditional' marketing are ever less effective - more onus is being put on the authors themselves to get blogging and Tweeting as well as meetin' an' greeting. It's a world where social networks, word of mouth and content are driving traffic and conversation that defines the success or failure of a project - big budget advertising campaigns aren't cutting it. Not that publishers ever launched those unless it was to support a book already proven to be so wildly successful you could argue the campaign was in any case a redundant move.

Looking over the Hachette memo, I can see they offer me nothing at all I can't get for myself - and that with the confidence I gain from making my own decisions and knowing I am working with the best people out there in every case where I need partnerships.

And I am glad.

(The picture above is another odd milestone - seeing a 'real' price sticker on my book!)

Meeting The Sales Team

2011-12-08T07:04:00.001+03:00

Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday morning saw me loitering around Mall of the Emirates at the ungodly hour of 8.30am - I had an appointment to present Olives - A Violent Romance to the sales team at Jashanmal's - the company responsible for taking my book and putting it on sale - not only in their own outlets, but in stores like Spinneys and Virgin Megastores. This isn't by any means an automatic process, and actually requires effort and sales skills. Bookshops don't stock all books publishers push at them by default, but only those they believe they can sell. And getting onto those booksellers' shelves can be hard - even in the Middle East. In the UK or US, it's so hard as to seem almost Sisyphean.

Author friends have frequently commented on how important this process is to a book's chances of getting anywhere. You can advertise and promote a book to death, but it needs to be there in front of people's eyeballs. Sure, your book's great, your blurb is catchy and your cover looks wonderful. But if it's not in the bookstores, nobody will ever see it. The sales team can define whether a book lives or dies and, all too often, new authors and those consigned to the 'mid list' (ie: they do quite well, but never quite as well as JK Rowling) are introduced later on in the sales team's pitch and are neglected. Which means they don't get on display, or are put in that dusty corner at the back, while some glitzy piece of schlock by a witless semi-celebrity gets front of store billing. It's no wonder authors get bitter.

So the chance to actually present to a sales team - to share what the book's about, what made you do it, why you think it will sell and who it'll appeal to - is a rare and wonderful privilege and opportunity. I took it gratefully, gave my chat and answered questions, shook hands and exchanged smiles. Now it's up to them.

Saturday will see the 'official launch' of the book on the first night of TwingeDXB - the first Dubai Urban Arts Festival. I'll be talking a bit about what makes Olives 'tick' and doing a reading from the book. I'll be helped in this by Irish poet and Man of Mystery Frank Dullaghan, who'll be reading Gerald Lynch for me. Lynch, the somewhat brutally inclined spy in Olives, is from Northern Ireland and while I can usually mug up a reasonable 'Norn Oirish' accent for a phrase or two, I just don't have the consistency to keep it up through dialogue. Frank does the twisted vowels brilliantly.

You can find out more about TwingeDXB, including the link for live streaming if you live outside the UAE here on the official TwingeDXB website. Other highlights of the 'Praise for Prose' evening on Saturday include Frank reading from his own work, the second birthday bash for the Twitter Book Club, a talk from Emirati author Sultan Darmaki and a display by free book initiative blog, The Book Shelter.

Copies of Olives will be on sale (Jashanmals is sponsoring the evening) and I'll happily sign them, although I do warn you that the rarity value of an unsigned copy is currently considerable.

TwingeDXB goes on all week, by the way, it's not just one night. There are events spanning poetry, music, comedy and more - the website's well worth checking out.

Territorial Book Rights - An Unnecessary Evil

2011-12-05T07:01:00.001+03:00

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I have had a number of potential readers of Olives - A Violent Romance point out to me that they are unable to download the Kindle ebook, getting a message from Amazon that the book is not available to readers in the Middle East.

This answers one particular burning question for me. In the past, when I have asked why Amazon won't serve content to the Middle East, People Of Knowledge have sagely rubbed their chins and told me it's a question of rights. As the rights holder to Olives, I specifically checked the option on my Kindle Direct Publishing dashboard that opened up distribution to the entire world. There is no rights related reason why my book should be blocked from Middle East based readers. We can infer, therefore, that the reason Amazon is blocking other content from the Middle East - particularly self-published content - is also not necessarily related to rights.

Amazon, Apple and Google are effectively retarding the development of a vibrant and innovative content market in the Middle East. None of these three organisations support the distribution of paid content to the region. They are culturally bombing us back to the dark ages. While the US, UK, Europe and Asia are migrating to e-readers and reader-based content of increasing richness, the Middle East is unable to buy books, content or apps from any of the 'marketplaces' these companies operate.

However, while it's not about rights in my case, it certainly is with traditional publishers - they're holding on to the old territorial models with a tenacity that would almost be admirable if it weren't so fundamentally idiotic.

The idea of territorial rights in publishing comes from the 'old' model of print and distribution, with a little language slung into the mix and some price-fixing to boot. The world can be carved up into a number of relatively neat territories, for instance the US and Canada, UK and Commonwealth or Middle East. Each of these has a common language, can be served by a single print run and distribution/marketing push and network and each can be allocated a price tag that suits the market. (The print run stuff is subject to some cost dynamics - depending on the size of the run and shipping costs, it would likely make more sense to split the run, but it's not something set in stone. The broad target is a 'landed cost' of around 10% of cover price.)

So when, say, a US publisher buys the rights to a book, they take on the cost of print, distribution and marketing. Other markets will also take on translation costs, which are significant. This outlay on a book means that territorial rights are defended vigorously in the traditional publishing world. But it also means that rights have a value - and publishers will pay significant amounts of money to secure the rights to a successful book or a book they believe will be successful.

The Internet has, of course, blown that model wide apart. I can now write a book in Dubai and sell it in Boston, Beirut and Bogota. Interestingly, Amazon gives me the option to set different prices for my book in different markets - and, fascinatingly (well, to me at least) will change the displayed price I see where there are disparities in my pricing. For instance, Olives costs marginally less in the US than it does in the UK (blame the UK government's insane insistence on charging VAT on ebooks) but when I, as a UK customer, visit Amazon.com, the site displays a dollar equivalent of the UK price rather than the dollar price I set for the book in the US market.

Amazon's getting quite good at supporting this type of price fixing - you just need to look at how the Kindle costs $79 in the US and $133 in the UK. They say Amazon is subsidising the cost of Kindles in the US, but to me it looks more like the rest of the world is subsidising them.

So when a 'traditional' publisher creates an ebook and puts it up for sale on Amazon.com, two things happen. The first is the author only gets 20-25% of the price, even though Amazon pays a 70% royalty on Kindle books and there is virtually no cost of print and distribution (about 60% of the cost of a booky book goes on these two). The second is the traditional publisher applies the traditional idea of rights and won't put the book up for sale globally.

Which is insane. The very thing that makes the Internet tick as a platform for e-books is its scale. I can reach readers all over the world with a few clicks, I can sell my book to audiences based on their interests, not their location. The whole idea of the long tail, the concept that makes Amazon possible, is based on scale. Why would a publisher restrict sales of an e-book to a limited home market when it could reach all of humanity for not one penny more?*

The answer is rights - and the publisher's hope that one day it could sell rights to other world markets. And in order to keep that potential asset, the publisher will restrict the market an author can address whilst basing its decisions on arbitrary assessments of what a market will or won't buy based on little more than 'experience' and 'knowledge' rather than trusting us all as consumers and just letting us decide whether or not we want to buy a book about rubber planters in Malaya, geishas in Japan or bullfighters in Spain.

* I'm not factoring in translation, I know. But the opportunity is the same - an Italian book, say, can now be available to everyone in the world who speaks Italian.

Olives - A Book in Print

2011-12-04T07:04:00.001+03:00

I keep passing milestones I hadn't expected to be milestones. I had barely finished reading my first (and thoughtful, thanks 'Big Dave'!) review of Olives on Amazon.co.uk when I found myself down in Dubai's Al Quoz industrial area picking up two boxes packed with fifty books. In the moment when Tony from Raidy Emirates handed over those boxes, Olives - A Violent Romance was 'published' in the true sense.

If you remember, I had been holding out for 'proper' booky book paper and getting nowhere. I have had so many arguments with people about Kindles and the 'feel of curling up on the sofa with a good book' that I decided there was to be no compromise. Books are printed on a special grade of paper called novel paper - it's a lightweight, high bulk paper. If you pick up a paperback by the spine, it doesn't flop. Most 'books' printed in the UAE are printed on standard grade 'wood free' art paper, which is way heavier. If you pick up one of those by the spine, the weight of the paper makes it flop over. It just doesn't feel right. Olives had to printed on novel paper. The decision has cost me, literally, weeks of delay as my journey to find anyone who stocked the paper (or, indeed, even understood what I was on about) led me into blind alley after blind alley.

Every printer in the Emirates was quick to assure me that yes, they did have the paper I was talking about, each one greeting me at journey's end with the inevitable idiotic, drooling grin and a swatch of copier paper. The thinking seemed to be that I'd settle for whatever they had once I'd driven across town to them. One fool actually quoted me for news print. I finally decided my only option was to print in Lebanon, Egypt or Jordan where you can actually find novelists and, therefore, printers who can print real books. I asked heart-rendingly talented Lebanese cartoonist Jumana Medlej for a recommendation and she came back, quick as a flash with 'Raidy, silly. I knew you'd finally realise Lebanon's the only place to print.'

The whole idea rendered my weeks-long quest for 'permission to print in the UAE' worthless. I was going to print overseas after all. I reconciled myself to the fact and got in touch with Raidy, who returned my query. Yes, they could print on novel paper but I might like to give the job to their Dubai based subsidiary, which also stocks the paper. Hallelujah!

Another milestone this morning - signing my first copy of Olives. How do you sign a book? Surely not with your 'real' signature! You can imagine the Nigerians having a field day with that one, queuing up with 'Could you dedicate it to "Please transfer the amount of" if you don't mind?'...

And to top off the start to the week, the SEO is beginning to kick in and 'Olives' now appears on the first page of results if you search books on Amazon.co.uk (although the results on amazon.com are still pretty poor). You wait, one day I'll knock those smug bastards at Crespo off the top spot...

Olives - A Violent Romance launches at TwingeDXB - the first Dubai Urban Festival on the 10th December where I'll be doing a chat and reading thingy, along with poet Frank Dullaghan and Emirati writer Sultan Darmaki. The book will be available in Jashanmals stores and other major UAE outlets from then onwards.

If you can't wait, or if you're based outside the Middle East, you can get a print copy of Olives at amazon.com, linked for your clicking pleasure right here. And if you have a Kindle, you can buy it here in the UK or here in the USA. If you have another e-book reader (from iPad through to Kobo), you can buy ebooks here at Smashwords.

40

2011-12-02T19:05:00.001+03:00

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Happy birthday, United Arab Emirates!

We've had our ups and downs together, the UAE and me, but I've got no complaints about the past 18 years since Sarah and I sat looking at each other over a green and beige covered table in the President Hotel and asked each other what the hell we thought we were doing. It's been 25 years since I first came to this country to visit and yes, the journey has been phenomenal.

We're staying in tonight. There's little point in trying to get anywhere through the slow-moving motorcade that every road in Sharjah has become. All you can hear outside is hooting and excited jabbering. The local 'cold store' has packed its counter-tops with silly string and flags. It's going to be a late night for everyone - let's just hope it's a safe one, too.

Fakhr El-Din Restaurant Amman - The Update

2011-11-30T18:22:00.001+03:00

It's a fascinating exercise in SEO wot I posted about earlier today. Amman's classiest and tastiest (IMHO) Arabic restaurant, Fakhreddine, has long caused major search-derived traffic hereabouts because, in fact, the restaurant is properly called 'Fakhr El-Din'. and its 'proper' website is http://fakhreldin.com/. The restaurant, part of the ATICO group, has had to face standardising the English version of an Arabic name - so you could call it Fakhr El Din or Fakhr Eddine or Fakhr El-Din or Fakhreddine (the popular spelling at the time I first blogged about the restaurant) or any other combination of names.

The conundrum is which spelling you plump for - and which misspellings you include in your SEO efforts. The most popular (as I say, at the time, 'Fakhreddine' was the 'defacto' name of the restaurant in English) ones can be easily hijacked or cause frustration, so the trick is working out what they are and re-routing them to your 'real' spelling.

Arabic is wicked like that. Are you Ali Alhashemi, Ali Al-Hashemi or Ali Al Hashemi? Perhaps Ali Hashemi? All four are essential SEO targets. What's more, it gets even more complex as you 'drill down' into search.

But for now, let us consider Fakhr El Din to be the name to click on. It's a GREAT restaurant. The Fat Expat review says it all, really: It's linked here!

Fakhreddine

2011-11-30T08:01:00.001+03:00

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I flew to Jordan this week to speak and also gave a workshop on digital communications at the MediaME Digital Summit. In my humble opinion, MediaME - together with ArabNet and Click - is one of the region's critical digital events and this year's conference featured some great speakers (present company etc etc) and much thought-provoking opinion and debate.

It was slightly odd to be back in Jordan after having hit the 'go' button on the Middle East print edition of Olives (A Violent Romance) - somehow the book has become solid, concrete now. The King's Highway (the road from the airport to Amman, but also the Kingdom's core arterial route from Amman to Aqaba) is being rebuilt and is apparently to become a privatised toll route. The new airport will be ready by summer next year. And Amman nightclub Nai has been refurbished and rebranded. Just as well, after the incidents recounted in Olives! Did I mention you can now buy Olives as a printed book at amazon.com, BTW? I did? Ah, okay then...

During the workshop at MediaME, I used this silly wee blog as an example of SEO, pointing out how mad it was that I 'owned' Amman's delightful Fakhreddine restaurant on Google. If you Google 'Fakhreddine Amman' you don't get the restaurant itself (as you rightly should - it's a must visit if you're staying in Amman and want to eat some of the best Arab food the Levant can dish up), but you do get me.

This is not a good thing. It's a compelling reason for the restaurant to invest some money in SEO and grabbing back its ownership of its brand.

I got a comment from the audience - "Actually, we're their agency and if you Google just 'Fakhreddine' you get our client!

No you don't. You get Fakhr Al Din, various Fakhreddines, the restaurant in Broumana (Lebanon) and me. You don't get Amman's famous Lebanese/Arabic/Levantine (delete as your preference dictates) restaurant Fakhreddine. If you Google 'Fakhreddine restaurant' you get Fakhreddine Broumana, London and me in that order. You don't get Fakhreddine Amman. And that's mad, because the place is famous and generally celebrated for its excellence.

I wish I'd stopped the workshop to look it up then and there. If Amman's Fakhreddine had a website (if it does, I can't find it), I'd do a post specifically to right the wrong and redirect hungry Googlers to the right place, because I really do appreciate and support this most excellent of restaurants and wish it nothing but the very best.

But it does, like so many Middle Eastern businesses, need to get smarter about its online presence and search parameters.

Olives - The Book Goes To Print

2011-11-26T17:42:00.001+03:00

It's an odd feeling, there's a strange finality sending my novel Olives to the printers. I've sent dozens of magazines, yearbooks and other projects to print over the years, but nothing quite equals sending something so personal off to print. And a book's somehow different to a magazine - a 'literal' in a magazine is an annoyance, but usually something that you live with because it's transitory. I once printed a yearbook with the immortal words 'Midddle East Buyer's Guide' across two pages in 24 point print and it was two years before anyone noticed. I put this down at the time to the SEP field (first proposed by Douglas Adams, the SEP field renders objects invisible by the sheer scale of the incongruity they represent, therefore making them 'Somebody Else's Problem. In Adams' case, a spaceship that looked like an Italian bistro).

But it's different with a book. A book is graven, as it were, in stone. This particular book, Olives, has been edited to death. It's had structural edits, line edits, readers' edits, a professional edit and then I finally got my author's proof from Amazon's Createspace and, to my horror, managed to dot said proof with little red line corrections. Quite a lot of them. Sloppy writing, slapdash phrases, clunky bits. And a few honest to goodness literals in there, too. How did they get through?

But that's it, now. If you buy a copy and find a literal, I don't want to know. I'm done changing it. This is the finished product. This is my statement.

The Middle East edition of Olives launches at TwingeDXB - the first Dubai Urban Festival on the 10th December. It'll be in UAE bookshops from then onwards and I'm working to get it into Lebanese and Jordanian bookshops as soon as I possibly can after that.

If you can't wait, or if you're based outside the Middle East, you can get a print copy of Olives at amazon.com, linked for your clicking pleasure right here.

Olives Book Pricing Thinks

2011-11-25T09:04:00.001+03:00

Image by epSos.de via Flickr

How do you put a price on a book these days? Many authors are selling Kindle books for $0.99, many others $2.99 but mainstream publishers are putting prices at $5.99 and more - all of Iain Banks' books will cost you $8.02, for instance, while Jeffery Deaver's Carte Blanche will set you back a cool $16.05 - his backlist is set at $8.02.

Amazon pays publishers/authors either a 35% or a 70% share on sales. The 70% share only applies to books priced between $0.99 and $9.99. So the mad thing is that while you pay double for Deaver's Carte Blanche compared to his back list, the publisher only gets the same as selling it for $8.02. Go figure.

So how do I price Olives the novel wot I have writ? I decided on $5.99 for the e-book, equivalent to £3.99, which is the UK price (and €3.99 for Europe). I actually make less from a US sale than a UK or European one because of the withholding tax. How did I decide on that price? Purely on an average price of novels I scanned that were from published authors. I can't really say that I'm in this for the money, although it'll be nice to break even. But I'm not selling my work for less than the cost of a couple of pints or a t-shirt. It's worth more than that. And this is really where my pricing strategy is at.

Other writers have proper strategies. Poster child for Kindle success Amanda Hocking, for instance, sells each book in her trilogies for different prices with a low entry level, typically $0.99 rising to $2.99. Interestingly, now she's signed to a publisher, her new books seem to be priced at $8.99 - I've seen no sign of any great outcry about that yet, but would expect one to come!

Finding out book prices in the Yankee Dollar isn't as easy as it first appears, BTW. Amazon works out you're an Amazon UK customer and 'games' the dollar prices to make them equivalent to the Sterling prices - super sneaky, huh? This must at least in part be due to the appalling disparity in Kindle prices - the entry level Kindle in the USA costs $79, while in the UK it's an unjustifiable £89 ($133!!!).

The same is true of the international print edition of Olives- the amazon.com price for the printed book is $15.99, which is about equivalent to average book prices for this type of work as far as I can tell. With the Amazon edition of Olives the booky book, I make varying amounts of money from each copy sold depending on the platform its sold across. And again, I lose 30% to Uncle Sam. This is painful to me as a resident of the gloriously Tax Free UAE even though, as I say (and will keep saying until everyone believes me), it's not about the wonga.

The Middle East Olives book price is based on the Amazon price and again is based on an average price on the back of books, with slight reductions for Jordan and Lebanon based on anecdotal evidence of street prices for books there (I asked pals on Twitter, in other words).

And that's it. The whole brilliant Olives the book pricing strategy laid bare.

Permission To Print

2011-11-24T12:13:00.001+03:00

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It always reminds me of the Black Adder sketch in which George is requesting 'Permission to speak' with increasing desperation, said permission denied by the wily Blackadder.

Permission to print is something I bet few writers have to seek on their road to publication. Here in the UAE, it's a must-have - no printing press here will touch a book that doesn't have a Permission, much as no garage will touch a crash repair without a police report.

The permission is granted by the National Media Council, which has to read the work. I was extraordinarily lucky in that the gentleman who manages the English language section of the Media Control Department was very struck with Olives - A Violent Romance and actually went off leave to go into the office and sign off the MS and grant me that all-important go-ahead. It's taken until now for the news to trickle up the Abu Dhabi highway to the NMC offices in Dubai so today I went off to pick up my Permission.

There's a fee of Dhs25 to pay, which I slid onto the desk of the Relevant Person. 'Ah, no, you have to have e-dirham.'

You're kidding me. For Dhs25? Oh yes, she said, handing me a gnarly-looking form with all sorts of requirements, labour cards, passport copies, authorisations, countersignatures by authorised persons. Worse, you have to go all the way to the Ministry of Finance in Bur Dubai to apply in person. For a Dhs25 fee? Yes, this is mandatory.

I left the NMC after vain protests, my head in a spin. I looked at the e-dirham website and found there was an easier way - you can pick up a pre-paid e-dirham card at any branch of a number of banks! Yippee!

A number of banks later, I realise this is total bunkum - the banks at the immigration department have these cards, one chap told me. Sure enough, they did. I dashed back to the NMC all eager and happy. They were having a reception for their colleagues from Abu Dhabi and the place was filled with plates of food and oudh was being burned - so much it set the fire alarms off.

Despite the carnival atmosphere, my own little firework display was to suffer the fate of micturation. She wouldn't take the e-dirham card. 'Only this card from Ministry of Finance I can take.' But it's the same card, look, e-dirham, it's precisely the same card, it just has a different picture and doesn't have my photo. 'No.'

That's when I lost it. I'd printed out two 280-page manuscripts and given them to her, I'd printed a third and sent it to Abu Dhabi, I'd been back and forth to the NMC and the Ministry of Youth and Culture. And now, at the end of it all, I was being made to jump through even more hoops for Dhs25!!! I asked for the mudhir. But he, of course, was closeted in a meeting room with the guests from Abu Dhabi. My gatekeeper managed to mask a look of triumph, but I knew it was there anyway. I left in a high old temper and dragged my way down to the Ministry of Finance.

Who were wonderful. Friendly, smiling and bright, young Buthaina had me sorted out in a few minutes, even transferring the balance from the pre-paid card I'd bought to my new photo ID card. It all certainly lightened the old mood as I set off once again to the NMC, my new e-dirham card sparkling in my pocket.

The long and the short of it all is that I have my Permission to Print in my sticky little fingers. So now I'm going to do just that: print Olives!

Rejection. An Author's Guide

2011-11-23T07:21:00.001+03:00

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The very nice piece about me in The National last Sunday did contain one or two teensy-weensy mistakettes, one of which was that Olives - A Violent Romance had been passed up by 250 agents and 12 publishers. That's not actually the case, that's my total rejection count, not just those notched up by Olives.

It's mostly my fault - for the first few years I pursued my writing goal in secret and flung myself repeatedly against the same wall, the Dunning Kruger Syndrome coursing through my veins. I'd send off batches of manuscripts, four or five at a time, convincing myself that all sorts of things were possible. That it was a numbers game. That agents further up the alphabet would be easier. That this edit was the one that'd make it through.

My first rejection was from an agent at big agency Peters, Fraser and Dunlop (PFD to you), who had made a big noise online about how he loved to help new authors. I remember cursing and shaking my fist at him (from 4,000 miles away) as his form rejection showed me how little he, in fact, cared for us unsung geniuses.

I've already said several times that I now consider my first book, Space, was badly written. It was funny, but really lacked the technique to cut the mustard. I realised that in 2007 when I finally 'came out' and made contact with other writers. I was still 'shopping' Space then, hopeful that whatever quality had got it to the 'Editor's Desk' on Harper Collins' peer-review site Authonomy would be seen by someone who would take it on and get it a nice editor. It was not to be. I had finished Olives and started submitting it to agents before then, but Olives too had been notching up rejections from agents, some of whom had said odd things like 'The British public isn't interested in the Middle East' and 'We see enough bombs in the world without wanting to read about them.' I took these statements seriously at the time, but have since learned not to - literary agents and editors alike will cast around for the nearest glib phrase to decorate a rejection, these aren't thought-through guidance, but a brush-off. They do an awful lot of rejecting, they reserve their time and effort for the stuff that gets through.

So Olives must have racked up another 100-odd rejections (in batches, in between major editing runs and re-writes) before one request for a 'full read' came back with 'it isn't dramatic enough'. I stomped off with gritted teeth and the determination to give them dramatic if they wanted dramatic. Beirut, an insane, pumped up international spy thriller on crack, the result of that particular temper tantrum, was certainly dramatic.And it was also rejected time and again before a cheeky correspondence with the very kind agent Andrew Lownie resulted in my getting a professional reader to look at the manuscript - his advice taken, I resubmitted to Robin Wade and it was Robin who signed me up and took Beirut to 12 of London's Finest.

Who all rejected it.

It's certainly a remarkable tale - 250 rejections is quite a tally. Many of these are completely my own fault - for going it alone, for thinking this was a numbers game, for sticking with it and for beating my head repeatedly at the same wall. But a good number of them are the fault of an industry in its death throes. Agents are gatekeepers for publishers, filtering out anything they don't believe is a dead cert winner. Agents get paid 15% of authors' revenues and like nothing more than a nice, fat advance. If you can land a £100,000 advance once a month alongside some strong residuals, you're in the moolah, no? So there's a strong trend to support the well-trodden path, to be mainstream and not take risks. Added to that, the sheer number of hopefuls submitting to agents means manuscripts will be rejected for the most arbitrary reasons - bad formatting, an unconventional beginning, a difficult topic. And then there is the faddishness of safe publishing - if African Memoirs are this year's Big New Thing, then they're not going to be too open to a Sweeping Russian Drama. Sorry, Leo.

In the UK today, books are going straight to paperback and straight to discount - 3 for 2s and half price deals stacked up in supermarket bins as publishers try to find new ways to hit the popular pocket for money as they struggle with a public becoming ever more indifferent to full length linear narrative. People today are consuming so many streams of content and entertainment in such easily digestible media - and of course, e-readers are now part of that world, which rather confuses those used to thinking of the dynamics of publishing in terms of percentages of the hugely inefficient wodge of dead tree that is a booky book. E-book sales are going through the roof as the prices asked for by authors are going through the floor - publishing is finding it ever harder to map out its relevance in this scenario. And so only the very safest, most obvious decisions get made.

I'm sure someone in publishing will drop by and say, no, that's not the case - we just back quality. But I don't think the protest will carry much conviction these days.

So how can an author today handle rejection? First, remember it's not personal. Second, take any feedback as a hugely positive thing (remember, they're focusing on the stuff that gets through, so if they spare you a comment or two, they've done you a big favour). Third, don't let 'em pile up to 250. If you notch up just ten of those nasty little photocopied slips, assume the next ten won't be any different and get your ass off to www.kdp.com and sign up to Kindle Direct Publishing.

Because that, my dears, is where the party is.

So You've Written A Book. What's It About?

2011-11-22T11:21:00.001+03:00

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The first question anyone asks you when they find out you've written a book is 'What's it about?'. This is a natural byproduct of human curiosity, but comes with a built-in conundrum. You have about fifteen seconds before their eyes glaze over and they suddenly remember they had to be somewhere else like really fast.

How do you sum up your 80,000 words of lovingly crafted prose in a few seconds? You can't just read them the blurb (you could maybe have it printed onto index cards to give to people. Hmmm, that might be an idea), but you need to find a way of getting the scheme across to them because if writing books does nothing else, it transforms us from thieves into salesmen.

Thieves? Yes, everyone wot writes books steals moments, traits, expressions and gestures from the people around them. The biggest act of thievery in Olives, for instance, is Northern Irish spy Gerald Lynch. He's got a hangup about being called 'Gerry', it's always Gerald. He's spent twenty years escaping from being Gerry Lynch. That, for instance, was stolen. Someone said it to me in a meeting and I couldn't wait to get away and make that phrase into a new character. Believe it or not, the spy in Olives used to be a fiftyish, gingery fellow called Nigel Soames. Gerald Lynch, born of a theft, replaced him that very evening and has gone on to be the central character in my two subsequent books.

Salesman because all I want to do is sell you my book now. When you ask me what it's about, I'm going to take the chance to tell you enough to make you want to pick it up when you see it in the bookshop, beguiled by Naeema Zarif's stunning cover art, and take it to the cash counter. I want you to click on the book cover on the right, go to the the Kindle store and send the data flying over Whispernet to populate your reader.And I want you to be curious enough to click the 'Olives - A Violent Romance' link on my blog and find out more about it so you can be ready to buy it when it comes out in December. At least you know what's deep in my black little heart now, the next time we meet. And don't think it stops there, by the way. I want to talk you into reviewing it on Amazon and GoodReads too. I've become quite shameless.

And, as you ask, Olives is about a young British journalist called Paul Stokes who goes to Jordan to live and work who becomes attracted to a Jordanian girl. He's blackmailed into spying on her family by British intelligence, who claim the family's involved in funding terrorism and he has to try to work out quite who the good guys and bad guys are as a series of massive bombings go off around him that seem somehow tied to his movements. With each decision he makes, things just get worse until he finds he has to betray everyone around him to survive.

Crazy Apeshit National Day

2011-11-21T08:16:00.001+03:00

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It's already clear the United Arab Emirates is going to go crazy apeshit over the 40th National Day. Flags are decorating many of the bigger houses around and the race is on to see who can drape the biggest flag possible on their building. Pennants are fluttering in the warm winter breeze, sparkling lights are festooning hotels, tower blocks and residences and there are a growing number of cars in evidence wrapped in stick-on National Day themed patterns.

It's not even happening for another ten days. UAE National Day takes place on the 2nd December each year, but this year's celebration of forty years of founding of the nation - as well as independence from ze Breets - is clearly going to be very big indeed. Cynics might say the government is pumping things up a little - a touch of patriotic loyalty is only to be encouraged in this year of the 'Arab Spring', but this will be my 18th National Day and I can assure you the nationalistic pride and annual displays of fealty by crowds of UAE Nationals parading, celebrating and generally hooning around going mad with silly string and klaxons are truly heartfelt.

It's going to be interesting to see massive crowds taking to the streets in an Arab country in support of the government and the nation - a unique sight in the Middle East this year, for sure - actually, come to think of it, probably in the world. People all over the place have been taking to the streets to protest governments, from Athens to Oakland we've been feted with images of police pepper-spraying and baton-charging their people. I have to confess at being struck by the incongruity of governments lambasting countries like Syria for attacking protesters at the same time as their own police are beating the crap out of citizens peacefully demonstrating just down the street.

However, even the civil defence folks here in the UAE are undoubtedly preparing for problems - last year's celebrations saw a great many people charging around high as a kite on the excitement of it all and there was even talk of banning the parades because of the risk to life and limb that such a widescale and fervent celebration represented.

It'll be interesting to see whether the fact that the vast majority of UAE Nationals are proud to be Emirati and proud of their leaders comes through in the international coverage of the event, or whether we'll be hearing phrases like 'government sponsored celebrations' that will attempt to give 'balance' to what people on the ground know to be a true, if rare, display of genuine love by a people for their young Arab nation.

(Yes, I know, I'm going soft. And yes, it's a non-writing post. Back to talking about books tomorrow, don't you worry)

Reading

2011-11-20T10:01:00.001+03:00

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I'm giving my first ever reading tonight and although I do lots of speaking at conferences and other public stuff, it's still a daunting prospect. Luckily it's to a smallish audience - the Community Corner at the Sharjah International Book Fair is a physically compact area, although it punches way above its weight on Twitter and other social platforms, a constant stream of updates, information and news on the #SHJIBF are available from @ShjIntlBookFair.

It falls, by chance, on the day The National did a very generous piece on me and the journey to Olives - A Violent Romance. It's linked here if you really need to see any more of me than you already do.

We've sort of dubbed it "Two Worlds Collide" because I'll be sharing the session with self-published Emirati author Sultan Saeed Darmaki, whose book 'Under My Black Halo' is available at the Fair.

Selecting a reading is not easy. You want something that presents the book, but it also has to be a relatively short passage (people start dying after four minutes) that has a sort of beginning, middle and end - it can't be just any random lump of book.

I sort of settled on the 'rain dance' scene, purely because it's how the book started and it falls physically (for no good reason, it was just an accident) slap bang in the middle of the book. I started writing Olives after listening to George Winston's 'Winter into Spring' made me think of a girl dancing in the rain - Winston's stunning piano compositions have a trademark 'double tap' that is quite distinctive and the percussive waves of 'February Sea' and 'Rain' are redolent.

I woke up the next morning with Olives in my head - all of it, laid out like ley lines. I have since changed a great deal of that original manuscript, but the central idea of Olives remains as it was that morning, George's arpeggios echoing in my mind...

"Two Worlds Collide, an evening with Sultan Darmaki and Alexander McNabb" takes place from 7pm tonight at the Community Corner at The Sharjah International Book Fair.

I'm A US Taxpayer

2011-11-19T10:25:00.001+03:00

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Of the many strange pathways that this writing thing has opened up, perhaps the strangest is that I am to become a US taxpayer. 30% of any money I make from selling the print copies of Olives on Amazon.com will be paid as a 'withholding tax' to Uncle Sam, because I am resident in the UAE.

As a UK resident, I could have filled in a mountain of forms and qualified for the 0% tax rate that applies across both countries, but then I would of course be liable for UK income tax.

I must admit, the very concept took quite a lot of sinking in. I'm not terribly used to this tax malarkey, living as I do in the tax-free paradise that is the UAE. And I'm not sure I will always approve of how the US government intends to spend my money. But there's little I can do - the tax applies to any monies made on the US mainland.

Meanwhile I've found out that although Amazon.com will sell my book, Barnes and Noble won't. To use the company's PubIt! service (to upload books to B&N), you must have a valid US bank account, credit card, tax ID and address. That's pretty comprehensive, then.

I am increasingly furstrated at how US-centric this online bookery business is - particularly at Amazon.com refusing to sell copies of my book to people logging in from the Middle East. It's something of a puzzle to me as I specifically opened up international rights to the book when I uploaded it - I had always assumed that Amazon won't sell to the region because publishers haven't granted rights, but in my case I have specifically allowed for international rights so there's no earthly reason, other than an arbitrary restriction imposed by Amazon, why the book shouldn't be available to Middle East readers.

How To Self-Publish In The UAE

2011-11-18T15:14:00.001+03:00

Image by saraab™ via Flickr

Here's your own guide to the process, just in case you decide to write and self publish your own book. And before you start with all yer 'yeah, right, like that's going to happen', don't write the idea off. It can all be quite cathartic, believe me.

1) Write a book.
This is generally considered to be a good first step in self publishing. Of course, if you're self publishing a picture book, or a collection of your watercolours you'll have to approach things slightly differently but I'm going to concentrate on the novel form for now.

2) Get a professional editor.
I use Robb Grindstaff. I've always heard good things about Bubblecow but have never used 'em. You need a professional edit for two things - a structural edit and a line edit. The structural edit looks at your story and how you've put it together, aiming to cut redundancies, tighten things up and keep you basically on the straight and narrow. The line edit gets rid of all those stupid little errors that litter every manuscript, no matter how hard you search for 'em. People like Robb are born with strange compound eyes that pick these up in a way we normal mortals can't aspire to emulate.

3) Make sure you understand what you've written.
That sounds daft, doesn't it? But you're going to have to sell the thing all by yourself, so you'd better have properly scoped out the subjects, topics and characters of your book and sifted through them to find the best angles to promote, the things that are going to engage people. You'll need a strong blurb, too. More posts on this later, I'm sure. (Are you guys okay with all this book talk or are you longing for me to go back to whining about HSBC and stuff?)

4) Decide on your platforms.
It's essential to be on Amazon's Kindle and for that I used Kindle Direct Publishing. To support other e-reader formats, I went to Smashwords. I also put together an edition using CreateSpace, which lets me offer a printed book through Amazon.com. Of course, e-reader adoption in the Middle East is still low because Amazon doesn't sell either Kindle or content to the region, which really doesn't help us writers, I can tell you. Because of this, you're going to have to print your own booky book for the Middle East market.

5) Apply for permission to print from the National Media Council.
In order to print a booky book in the UAE, you have to have permission. Importing a book is different and requires a different level of permission, which any distributor will sort out. But printing one here means you have to get this permission. How? By going to the NMC in Qusais (behind the Ministry of Culture building) and lodging two full printouts of the MS. One of these will stay in Dubai as a reference copy and one will go to Abu Dhabi to the Media Control Department, where it will be read and approved or not for production in the UAE.

6) Realise that Dubai is going to take its sweet time over this and send another copy direct to Abu Dhabi yourself by bike.
I am so very glad I did this.

7) Obtain your permission to print
I got mine in an unreasonably short time thanks to a very nice man at the NMC taking pity on me and accelerating his reading of my book. It helped that he loved the book, which delighted me more than you could possibly imagine.

Update here - getting the actual document was a tad harder than getting the verbal go ahead!

8) Get an ISBN
This is actually a doddle. You nip down to the Ministry of Youth and Culture in Qusais and give 'em Dhs200 and a filled out form that gives the title of your book and some other details and they send you a fax (A fax! How quaint!) with your UAE ISBN number. By the way, ISBN numbers mean very little, they're a stock code and do not have any relationship to copyright or any such stuff. You need one to sell books, but that's as far as it goes.

9) Go mad trying to find novel paper, then give up and go to Lebanon.
By now you will have already got a quote from a printing press - all they need to actually print the thing now is that little docket. It's about here you'll finally make the decision that you don't want to use the 'wood-free' paper all the UAE's printers want to print your book on, but to actually use real book paper. It's actually called, wait for it, 'novel paper' and is a very bulky, lightweight paper. Pick up a book by the spine and it will tend not to 'flop', while a book printed on wood-free stock will.

Nobody's got it. It's as if nobody in the UAE has ever published a 'real' book, just books printed on copier paper. I'm not having it - I'm going to all the trouble and expense of producing my own book, it had better look like a book, feel like a book and, when you pinch its ear, squeal 'I'm a book!'.

So one goes to Lebanon - or Egypt, or Jordan. People write and publish books there all the time, so you'll find printers and novel paper abounds. Which means you never needed that permission to print at all, as now you're importing a book. Bang head repeatedly against brick wall and do Quasimodo impersonations.

10) Delay the UAE edition launch to the TwingeDXB Urban Festival, taking place on the 10th December 2011, where you're doing a reading and stuff.
I could have made it in time for the Sharjah International Book Festival if I'd settled for the other paper, but I decided to delay instead and get it done properly. So we're launching the online edition at Sharjah, with an open mic session where I and self-published Emirati author Sultan Darmaki will be doing readings and Q&A and stuff. That takes place this Sunday, the 20th November, at the SHJIBF 'Community Corner'.

On Kindles and Olives

2011-11-17T06:47:00.001+03:00

Cover via Amazon

When I first started out on this whole book writing thing, to my ever-lasting regret, I kept very quiet indeed about what I was up to. It was to take five years before I told anyone I knew that I had written a book, let alone that I was submitting it to agents in the hope of finding a publisher.

Why? Simply because I have always loathed people who announce they're writing a book. If it ain't in print, it ain't worth a damn, was the way I thought at the time.

Although I had shared the MS of Space with a couple of close friends by the time I found authonomy, I had stuck to my guns. When I finally let the cat out of the bag, I was shocked by people's kindness and supportive response.

Not as shocked as I was by the goodwill and support from everyone around me yesterday. The day started on a high when I heard from the National Media Council that I have the go-ahead to print Olives in the UAE. The team at the NMC have been wonderful - quite the opposite of my experiences of their predecessor, the wittily named Ministry of Information.To come out of that process having won fans for the book was a complete and welcome surprise.

This means I can provide a Middle East edition of the book for all those here who can't easily get on Amazon (because Amazon doesn't support the Middle East). I have distribution sorted out for the UAE, Jordan and Lebanon. All I need do now is finish my quest for a printing press that has stocks of the right grade of paper (booky books are printed on a particular type of lightweight but bulky paper) and I'm on track to be in the shops for the beginning of December. My first job this morning is to go to the NMC building in Qusais and get me an ISBN number for the UAE edition.

But yesterday really hit its stride when I tweeted the link to the Kindle Edition of Olives. My heartfelt thanks to everyone for the messages, congrats and the like. Putting the book on Kindle was the first thing I did when I made the decision to self publish - there's a natty piece of freeware called MobiPocket Creator, which I've posted about before, that renders the process pretty simple. You then sign into Amazon as an author and select your preferred distribution channels and then it's pretty much hey presto!

Get the Kindle Edition of Olives (UK)

Get the Kindle Edition of Olives (US)

Now all I need to do is sign off my CreateSpace proof (winging its way to me thanks to Aramex' natty Shop and Ship service) to get the print edition up on Amazon and pack the UAE edition off to the printers.

I cannot begin to tell you how liberating it feels to finally get my work out there. I can't say I regret not doing it sooner, because I think we all have to take our own paths to things. But I'm very glad I've done it now.

Olives – A Violent Romance

2011-11-16T07:09:00.001+03:00

This is the cover art for Olives - A Violent Romance, my first published novel. It's quite a high-res file so you can click on it and get it nice and big if you like. It’s by Naeema Zarif, a lady whose work has long enthralled me. Naeema is responsible for the iconography of GeekFest, her work on the various GeekFest posters increasingly taking on the style of her own art – a distinctive series of images consisting of a range of juxtaposed elements creating a whole that makes your eyes flit around trying to decipher what’s going on in the resulting melange. There’s often a great deal of wit, subtlety and game-playing, but Naeema is a natural tease and likes to leave the viewer to try and sort it all out rather than giving the game away.

My own cover for Olives, designed back when I needed one to post an early version of the manuscript up on Harper Collins’ Authonomy, consisted of a photo of some olives together with the word (wait for it) 'Olives' in my favourite typeface of all time, Gill Perpetua. I have long admired stonecutter and typographer Eric Gill, who combined being a darling of the Catholic church with a singularly robust sex life involving most of the women who ever met him.

Naeema’s art for Olives, when it arrived, blew me away. It’s utterly not what I expected, and yet seems so, well ‘right.’ It also, critically, works well as a thumbnail – today’s book cover needs to work as a booky book cover, a Kindle book cover (in colour as well as mono, BTW - don't forget the Kindle Fire!) and also as a thumbnail for Amazon.com and other sites.

It’s no surprise the cover of Olives consists of a number of elements. It’s a mash of images that come from Naeema’s reading of the book, there are elements resonant of multi-theism – Amman’s citadel is in there (look for a shape a little like ‘in’ at an angle across the cover), there is the earth the olives come from, the land and its importance are such an important part of Olives. The blues of the Mediterranean sky and the water are there, too. And so is parchment, a symbol of the unravelling peace the book is wound around. You’ll be hard put to find ‘em, but there are even some olives in there. Together, these things all speak to Olives – to the fundamentals that underpin the book. And behind the title, in faded characters, Mahmoud Darwish’s famous words – which form the frontispiece to Olives: “If the Olive Trees knew the hands that planted them, Their Oil would become Tears.”

It’s a remarkable piece of art and I’m very proud to have it grace and represent my work

Being able to select who designs my cover is, of course, a huge privilege open pretty much only to self published writers - publishing companies don't consult authors about their covers, that's a marketing decision and one not to be made by a mere scribbler (or 'content producer'). I suppose you get an option once you sell your first million copies or so, but I know a number of published authors who were told, 'This is your book's cover, matey', which was the beginning and end of the conversation. I'd always hoped if I landed a contract they'd let me at least pitch Naeema's hat into the ring, but I sort of knew that was a forlorn hope. But now I'm in control, I get to have my cake and eat it.

And it tastes just dandy...

(Literary) Agents of Doom

2011-11-15T08:58:00.001+03:00

Image via WikipediaA writer friend of mine, a rather posh one, once cheered me up on the topic of literary agents. “Don’t worry, Alexander,” he said. “Literary agents are like eunuchs in the Ottoman court. They know it’s done, they see it done all around them, but they’re damned if they can do it for themselves.”

His words did, indeed, lift my spirits at the time. Agents had been rejecting me, something of a habit on their part.

Literary agents are the gatekeepers to editors. Editors are beings of pure energy who have the ability to take your manuscript to Marketing Meetings, if they so desire. But they will only look at your MS if is attached to a recommendation from an agent. There are exceptions to this, but they are relatively few and far between.

Literary agents in the UK receive something between 40-100 submissions a day from authors – it’s more in the US. Even the language used is a give-away – ‘submission’. We’re talking the full-on crawling on your stomach as a Cuban Heel is inserted insidiously between your buttocks and the lash descends.

A submission is a package of your first three chapters (50 pages) in Times New Roman (I have always wanted to be a literary agent just so I can request manuscripts in Comic Sans), twelve point, double-spaced with a 5mm paragraph indent. This would be accompanied by a compelling pitch letter and a synopsis of your whole work. Nothing less will do. When I started out in this game, that whole kit and caboodle had to be slide-bound, packaged up in the post with a self addressed envelope and an international reply paid coupon. Any deviation from this requirement results in getting your MS trashed without the option.

These days most agents, not all mind you, will accept an e-submission, which takes a huge burden off authors but makes it easier for them to spam agents. To be fair to agents, who often appear an appallingly stand-offish lot, authors will behave in extraordinary ways to get manuscripts across to them and will whine, spam and imprecate without any compassion for the target of their unwanted affections.

Fifty pages of book weighs quite a bit and costs about £10 to mail from Dubai to London. I reckon I have mailed about 180 such packages over the nine years I’ve been writing, editing, submitting, editing and submitting again. Never a week went by when I didn’t pop by Sharjah post office to find envelopes I’d printed out waiting for me. These frequently contained a photocopied rejection slip inside saying they were sorry but this wasn’t quite for them, apologising that the weight of submissions meant they couldn’t reply to me personally but wishing me the best of luck with my career in writing. Occasionally, a note would be scrawled in the margins with an observation, but this was pretty rare.

e-submission hurts less than physical submission, but only marginally.

As time went by, I got the occasional nibble. A nibble from an agent means a request for a ‘full read’. And then one fine day earlier this year, I landed me an agent. Robin set to right away, shopping my second novel, Beirut, at the London Book Fair. Twelve editors asked to see the MS. And, seven months later, twelve editors passed.

I’m glad to still have Robin on board, despite my decision to self-publish. But looking back on it, I do rather regret having spent so much time, effort and money on trying to sell my books to literary agents. With the changes in today’s publishing industry, the disruption of Amazon and e-books, the role of a literary agent to an author is no longer as critical as it was when I first started on this road. In fact, it’s never looked so dangerous – agents are starting to tread on publishers’ toes as they try to redefine their role in a world where authors are increasingly choosing to ‘go direct’ to readers. Publishers are also trying to see a clear path to the future.

Of course, there isn’t one. Unless you’re amazon.com...

The Book Slog Blog

2011-11-13T07:20:00.001+03:00

Image by vial3tt3r via FlickrActually writing a book is easy as pie. You just take 75-100,000 words or so and put them down on paper. The order in which you place them can be a bit of a bugger, but the principle’s simple enough.

Most writers will knock up an average of around 1,000 words a day, so that’s a good three months to crack off a novel. Allow for procrastination, cunctation and a few other ations and you could easily (and advisedly) take 5-6 months to finish the first draft of a manuscript. You can work faster than that – I wrote the original MS of Olives in just over four weeks, but I’ve been seven years in editing it. Some people will write their book in four weeks and create a work of tear-jerking genius without having invested a second more. These are not, you understand, people to whom I talk.

Having finished the MS, in my case usually with the reward of a snappy Martini or two, you can breathe a sigh of relief before getting down to the real work. Because actually spending months writing a book is nothing. The real work starts when you’ve finished the damn thing.

First off is the editing. Dashing down 80,000 words of story is all great fun, but then you have to review it and make sure you’ve spelled everything right, avoided awful continuity errors, remained consistent to your characters, maintained your storyline and honed your writing so that the dialogue works, the action fizzles and the moments when two people go ‘ping’ actually go ‘ping’ and not ‘splot’. There have been whole books – a great deal of them, in fact – written on this subject. Writer’s forums constantly buzz to questions of POV (point of view), the passive and active voice (oh, puhlease!), characterisation, plot elements and all that sort of stuff. And we haven’t even started talking about sentence structure, ‘showing rather than telling’ and the myriad elements that stalk the furrowed brow of the harried writer editing his/her manuscript (or MS, if you want to use ‘the lingo’).

Now, don’t forget, you’ve just written tens of thousands of words – editing them all over again is a real trial. By the time you finish, you sort of hate those words. The bastards have no right to be so demanding, so imperfect. But finally you’re done. The MS looks good to go. (It rarely is at this point, but let’s not pee in the firework box too early, hey?)

Now you have to write a synopsis of your book. This is a one or (at most) two-page summation of what your book’s about, what actually happens in the thing. Any agent or editor wants to see a synopsis to find out if the thing makes sense as a whole. So your synopsis not only has to represent the key movements of the plot, it should ideally show your ability to write as well. This is a hellish thing to ask someone who has just written a book, then edited it to shining perfection, to do.

But it must be done.

What happens to your character? Who influences the development of the storyline and who is just there for colour? Chances are, by the way, if you can cut a character out of your synopsis, you can cut him/her out of the story and are better off doing so. The synopsis is a straight story-line, a compelling narrative from a to c that validates quite why b was ever involved. Take your story down to five pages, then halve the word count, take it down to a little over two pages. And then you can start playing hardball with those cowering little words. Eliminate, and do it like a Dalek with a really bad hangover.

It’s like swimming through molasses with 10lb weights tied to your bits. It’s an awful, sorry slog of a task.

And we’re not done with you yet, matey. Now we want a ‘blurb’.

A ‘blurb’ takes your synopsis and hones it down to under 400 words or thereabouts. Here’s the blurb for Olives:

[BlurbStart]

When Paul Stokes runs out of choices, his only path is betrayal.

The fragile peace is holding. Behind the scenes, the Israelis are competing for dwindling water resources as Jordan and Palestine face drought. Daoud Dajani has the solution to Jordan’s water problems and is bidding against the British for the privatisation of Jordan’s water network.

When journalist Paul Stokes befriends Dajani’s sister, Aisha, British intelligence agent Gerald Lynch realises Paul offers access to Dajani - the man threatening to drain Israel’s water supply and snatch the bid from the British. Blackmailed by Lynch into spying on Dajani, his movements seemingly linked to a series of bombings, Paul is pitched into a terrifying fight for survival that will force him to betray everyone around him. Even the woman he loves.

[EndBlurb]

That’s not the only blurb for Olives, but let’s not complicate things. Note it’s not a contiguous description of events in the book – it’s a summation of the action and points of action that are intended to evoke interest in what the work’s about. (You can judge whether it works in the comments, and please be my guest!)

Now you have a ‘blurb’ you can work it into your ‘pitch’. A blurb and pitch are two different things, although they are necessarily interrelated. The blurb is the text you’d slap on the back of a book. A pitch is what you’d say to a top London literary agent if you got one minute of his/her attention. The best way to do this is crash their lunch at the Athenaeum holding a Scalectrix controller wired to a lumpy belt around your waist and screaming ‘I’ll take you bastards all with me’ before you start pitching. This might seem extreme, but don’t worry. Agents are used to authors doing this. The worrying trend emerging is agents are now doing this to editors as the world of conventional publishing slowly collapses into itself like Michael Moorcock's Biloxi Fault.

Not even the Athenaeum, it must be said, is a safe haven these days...

Anyway, now you have a book, a synopsis, a blurb and a pitch. You've also likely got RSI and a rocky relationship. Next comes the hard bit. I'll come on to that tomorrow...

Olives - The Book

2011-11-12T19:28:00.001+03:00

I might as well apologise now. I'm going to be posting about books and writing all through the Sharjah International Book Fair.

My thoughts are pretty much focused in that direction, so I'll be sharing my path to publishing my own work, what it takes to self-publish from the UAE and Olives, the book I'm finally unleashing on an unsuspecting and unprepared general public during the Fair.

Writing posts usually destroy traffic to the blog. But what the hell. It's my book and I'm proud of it...

Taking The Self Publishing Plunge

2011-11-10T18:00:00.000+03:00

It's been a long road. I first set out to write a full-length novel in 2002 odd, the result being the highly amusing but - in my opinion - unpublishable novel Space. This was to be the start of a very nasty writing habit indeed - I had decided, for reasons I have mostly forgotten, that I wanted in print and that was to that. I'd keep slamming into the brick wall until I got what I wanted.

It doesn't quite work like that, of course.

Space was undoubtedly funny, but agents kept saying things like 'We don't get humour' and 'Humour is a hard sell', whilst universally acknowledging they found it highly amusing. Which is, you have to admit, funny. So I set out to write a serious book and that became Olives, my first 'real' book. Olives is about being a foreigner, a tourist who becomes embroiled in the events we all see on the TV when we're sitting down comfortably. It's about love and betrayal and it's set in Jordan, a Jordan where the good guys and bad guys are really hard to tell apart and where the next lie is just around the corner.

Olives is a book very close to my heart indeed. I followed it by writing Beirut, a testosterone-soaked spy thriller with thousands of sizzling gypsies, which landed me an agent (after something like 250 rejections) and a chance to get my work slid under 24 of London's most editorially respected eyeballs at the London Book Fair this year. They all came back with variations on 'no' - a process that took an incredible, destructive seven months to wrap up. No the British reader doesn't understand the Middle East, no we don't feel this will sell in supermarkets, no it'll take investment to break, no it's not quite for us, no we don't do war zones (Jad, get that certificate ready!) and so on.

All of this has been happening as the world of publishing is being not only transformed, but torn apart by the Internet. The Kindle alone has driven a stake right into the heart of 'traditional' publishing and I have long resisted the blandishments of friends like revolutionary barricade-manning author Dan Holloway even as I watched authors turning to new formats to find their audiences as traditional publishing invested minimally in supermarket-friendly romcom slapped out in trays of 3 for 2 deals. I held out. I wanted the validation and scale traditional publishing could give me.

Except as I have travelled further down this road, I have come to realise not only do I not need either of those from traditional publishing - they're not on offer in any case. On the validation front, getting an agent to sign me up was validation enough - but it goes further than that. Today, self publishing isn't vanity publishing, it's not the exclusive preserve of unreadable memoirs and books by nutters (although, let us be clear, there are plenty of those out there). It's not only part of the mainstream, it's driving millions of sales. There has never been so much choice for consumers, so much so it's actually a challenge to work out what's good, bad or ugly out there. Validation comes not from being picked by the gatekeeper (let us not forget, over 98% of books in print sell less than 500 copies) but from selling books to people who like them. If I'm truthful with myself, I don't need a publisher to do that any more. I can do it, as Celine Dion tells us (repeatedly and to my invariable irritation) all by myself.

As for scale, I now know enough published authors who have found they are forced to market themselves because their publishers are putting them on the backburner, who have trudged weary miles to earn back their paltry advances and who are bitter, dejected and generally pissed off with the whole demeaning and disempowering experience that publishing in the Age of Fear has become. I know authors who have been completely disassociated from their work, who have given up any ownership of the look and feel of their hard graft only to find the result, crass and unimaginative, has been shunned by the book sales team because there's something sexier in that month's basket. And the book sales team is what puts you on shelves, not editors.

And, actually, when it comes down to it, I want my cover to be designed by Naeema Zarif. I don't want to give that up. And I want that 'difficult' scene left in. And I want to let my work speak for people, not pander to their vanities.

So Olives is finally (seven years after it was first written) going to be a tale that gets told, not a manuscript locked in a dusty filing cabinet. Whoever buys it, however many people read it, it'll at least get the public airing traditional publishing denied it. And if just two people read it, that's two more than would have read it otherwise.

I'll be documenting the road to self publishing as we limber up to the launch of the book, just because it's been quite fun to self publish in the UAE. Olives, a violent romance, launches at the Sharjah International Book Fair on the 20th November 2011 with an evening event at the Fair. More on that later. For now, I'm busy working to try and get multiple editions ready for multiple platforms, including a 'booky book' print edition for the Middle East which has been made necessary by the fact Amazon et al won't sell us content online. That alone has been a story worth dining out on, I can tell you.

Oddly, this has all meant that I have once again become a publisher, having joyfully escaped the world of publishing some fifteen years ago...

Gulf News - See No Evil

2011-11-03T07:52:00.001+03:00

Image via WikipediaGulf News ran an Associated Press story on the front page of its business section today on the report issued by Transparency International on bribery. That report's findings are linked here.

GN tagged the piece, a highly edited version of the AP file (the AP piece is linked here for your listening pleasure), 'The Power of Money'. The piece is not available on the GN website, but does point out that China and Russia are the countries most prone to bribery in TI's report.

What it fails to point out is that the UAE ranks fifth most likely to bribe in the report, which surveyed 3,000 businessmen on how often firms from the various countries they deal with resort to bribery. The report lists 28 countries - the UAE ranking fifth worst (joint fifth, to be fair - we rank alongside Argentina, which is in itself something of an indictment) and Saudi Arabia seventh worst. The rest of the Middle East isn't included in the report, which is probably just as well.

TI's report found that 'no country was found to be wholly clean' and also that the construction sector was most likely to bribe its way into business, with the real estate sector coming in joint second worst. Which may go some of the way to explaining the UAE's ranking. This is, by the way, the first time the UAE has been included in the index.

The question is, did GN just paste up an AP file to fill some space without bothering to check if the UAE featured on the index or did it know and let the fact pass it by? If the former, we're looking at awful, sloppy no news-sense journalism - a half-boiled intern with learning problems would have Googled the index to see if the UAE featured (as I did, being a half-boiled intern). If the latter, GN could arguably justify the omission by claiming it's an AP file and as AP didn't highlight the UAE's position, GN didn't see fit to overrule such a respected international news source. Which is hardly tenable, but is probably preferable to admitting you're a bunch of craven, drooling morons who could no more serve the public interest than play Für Elise on a chocolate banjo.

The National ran the piece front page business, too:"UAE companies debut with 5th place in bribery global survey" as opposed to GN's "China, Russia most prone to bribery."

Spot the difference...

Editing Book Manuscripts With A Kindle

2011-10-31T07:07:00.000+03:00

Image by Eye - the world through my I via FlickrAmazon's Kindle e-reader is the most amazing editing tool for writers you can imagine. It's totally, brilliantly, portable and the keyboard Kindle lets you annotate text, inserting comments simply and quickly and then allowing you run through those notes afterwards, jumping back to the point in the text where your note resides - effectively 'playing back' your edits as you transfer them back to the master copy of your MS.

It's all the more effective as an editing tool as it has effectively the same 'form factor' as a published work - you're reading the text as your readers will see it, not as a double spaced MS on screen or print and as a consequence I find myself picking up many more pieces of clunky writing or gawky style than I have before - even on a manuscript that has been extensively - and professionally - edited.

How do you make your MS into a Kindle book without uploading it to Amazon? Simple as pie!

First go here and download this natty piece of software. It's called Mobipocket Creator and it's a simple and powerful little utility that packs together the files you need to create a Kindle book - including cover files and the like, by the way.

Now you need to export your MS - I'll assume you're using Microsoft Word as an editor. Take the 'Save As' option and find 'Web Page, Filtered'. Give it a nice, distinctive file name and save it somewhere sensible, for instance a folder called Kindle Book.

The 'filtered' option cuts down on (but doesn't totally obviate, tragically) Microsoft's bloated HTML. Mobipocket Creator will import a Word file, but the HTML import option cuts out on more SNAFUs and the like. Once you've imported your HTML file, take the 'Build' option from the menu at the top. When you've completed the build you'll be presented with a screen giving you an option to 'Open folder containing e-book'. Take this and plug in your Kindle.

You'll see the Kindle appearing under 'My Computer' as an accessory, much as you'd see a memory key which, in fact, is all the Kindle is as far as Windows is concerned. Expand the Kindle's folders and you'll see one called 'Documents'. Take the e-book file Mobipocket creator has made and drag and drop it onto this folder and hey presto! your MS has been transformed in a couple of seconds into a Kindle book ready for you to take on the train to work and edit at your leisure.

Amazingly, the above steps represent pretty much 90% of what you'd need to do to create a professional e-book file to upload to Amazon. I'll post about that process a little later.

(This is one of a large number of writing and book posts that will undoubtedly decimate traffic to this blog over the weeks leading up to the Sharjah International Book Fair.)

Tim Horton's Coffee. Yum. Not.

2011-10-27T07:36:00.000+03:00

Image via WikipediaCanadian coffee chain Tim Horton's has opened up in Dubai to much applause. It was thus that I found a colleague tucking into a cup of 'Tim Horton’s French Vanilla Cappuccino'. It is, according to the tin, "Rich and delicious". Curious, I flipped the tin to read the ingredients label and this is what I found:

Sugar, coffee whitener [corn syrup solids, partially hydrogenated coconut oil, sodium caseinate (a milk derivative), dipotassium phosphate (E340i stabiliser), sodium tripolyphosphate (E451i), mono and diglycerides (vegetable), diacetyl tartaric esters of mono and diglycerides (E472e), sodium silicoaluminate (E554), artificial flavour], nonfat dry milk, instant coffee, artificial vanilla flavour [dextrose, maltodextrin, artificial flavour, tricalcium phosphate (E341iii)], artificial vanilla flavour [maltodextrin, artificial flavour, silicon dioxide (E551)], silicon dioxide (E551 anticaking agent), cocoa (processed with alkali), salt, carboxymethyl cellulose gum (E468 stabiliser).

The headlines are as follows. One cup of this product contains ONE FIFTH of your recommended daily intake of saturated fats, something like four teaspoons of sugar - the ENTIRE recommended daily intake of added sugar for a woman according to the American Heart Association and contains not one vanilla seed. It's also got no French in it. It does pack a neat punch of trans-fats, corn syrup and artifical flavourings and preservatives.

Let's take a look at that rich and delicious mixture in a little more detail... The ingredients in caps are the main ingredients, the ones just bolded are sub-ingredients of the main ingredient above.

SUGAR
The largest ingredient by weight in this product is not coffee, it's sugar. A lot of sugar. In fact, over half the content of that tin is sugar - 20g for each 35g serving. The tin's nutrition label cleverly dumps the sugar content together with fibre (0%, how could you expect to find fibre in something this processed?) under 'carbohydrates' which means it's only 8% of your recommended daily intake. Quite apart from the fact that almost a tenth of your recommended carbohydtate intake is provided by one cup of hot drink, this prestidigitation with labelling avoids telling you that this drink contains 100% of a woman's recommended daily intake of added sugar and 50% of a man's recommended intake (the recommendation comes from the American Heart Association). Not bad for one cup of gloop, is it?

COFFEE WHITENER
This contains: corn syrup solids, partially hydrogenated coconut oil, sodium caseinate (a milk derivative), dipotassium phosphate (E340i stabiliser), sodium tripolyphosphate (E451i), mono and diglycerides (vegetable), diacetyl tartaric esters of mono and diglycerides (E472e), sodium silicoaluminate (E554), artificial flavour

Deelicious! A brief examination of those yummy looking ingredients!

Corn Syrup Solids
So the largest ingredient in the whitener is, you guessed it, more sugar. Corn syrup solids are made by removing the water from corn syrup. As you'll know from previous posts, the majority of corn in the US is genetically modified and corn syrup (high fructose or otherwise) is ubiquitous in American processed foods.

Partially Hydrogenated Coconut Oil
Also known as a trans fat. Oddly, the tin's label proclaims 0% trans fats, but they're definitely in there - coconut oil is a saturated fat to start with, but when treated with hydrogen bubbles to thicken it, ('hydrogenation') it becomes a trans-fat, a man-made fat that suppresses your body's use of 'good cholestrol' and adds to its stock of 'bad' cholestrol.

Sodium Caseinate (a milk derivative)
This is an odd ingredient, as it is permitted by the US FDA to be an ingredient in 'non dairy' creamers, and yet is, as it says on the tin, a 'milk derivative'. Casein is a protein found in milk and this ingredient, which is a thickener and adds a 'dairy taste' to products, is obtained from fresh and/or pasteurized skimmed milk by acid coagulation of the casein. The mix is then neutralised using sodium hydroxide and powdered.

Dipotassium Phosphate and Sodium Tripolyphosphate
The first is a stabiliser, the second a preservative and moisture retainer.

Mono and diglycerides (vegetable), (E472e), diacetyl tartaric esters of mono and diglycerides (E472e)
Mono and diglycerides are fats, used to extend shelf life, add a creamy flavour and help to bind other ingredients together. There's a lot of debate about them as they have appeared on food labels in place of hydrogenated oils, although they're a sort of new name for an old friend as they are, themselves, hydrogenated in the production process. The latter ingredient is sometimes referred to by the more friendly acronym DATEM.

Sodium Silicoaluminate and artifical flavour
The first is an anti-caking agent, the second is artificial.

NONFAT DAIRY MILK
Funny in a highly processed product packed with fats that they'd choose to use 'nonfat' powdered milk. Just out of interest, powdered milk contains higher levels of oxysterols, cholestrol derivatives that have been associated with the depositing of fatty materials on artery walls.

INSTANT COFFEE
What it says on the tin.

ARTIFICIAL VANILLA FLAVOUR
There are actually TWO artificial vanilla flavours in this product. Both contain processed sugars (dextrose and maltodextrin), tricalcium phosphate (also charmingly known as 'bone ash') or silicon dioxide, which are both anti-caking agents. And both contain 'artificial flavour'. This is a product that has never seen a vanilla pod and probably wouldn't recognise it if it did.

COCOA
Don't worry about the (processed with alkali), it's a process used in many cocoa drinks and just balances the natural acidity of the cocoa.

SALT
Quite a lot of it - 6% of your recommended daily intake (10% if you're over 51 or black).

CARBOXYMETHYL CELLULOSE GUM
A thickener.

So there we have it, a delicious drink in which no single ingredient has not undergone processing, which packs together artificial flavours with various ingredients designed to artificially trick you into thinking you're drinking something lovely when in fact what you're drinking is a cocktail of dubious fats, artificial flavouring agents and thickeners - and so much sugar you're likely drinking a whole day's recommended intake in one cup.

Enjoy!

Phished or Hacked?

2011-10-26T09:51:00.001+03:00

Image via WikipediaIt's yet another very odd story coming out of Dubai Courts and I'm not sure whether that's because Dubai Courts are an odd place or because the journalism itself is odd. Gulf News reports today on a woman whose account was "hacked by a phishing syndicate". The story's here.

It's a very confusing story indeed - her account is variously described as having been hacked into and she as having been victimised by a phishing syndicate. Well, being hacked is one thing, being phished is quite another - and the core of the story, surely, is whether one or the other situation applies. If she was phished, she willingly gave away her account details which then would have been used by a criminal to access her account - no hacking involved. If she was hacked, someone illegally accessed her account by manipulating the bank's security systems.

And where did a 'syndicate' come from?

The story also makes mention of a mobile notification service which didn't kick in until four days after the transactions, but not why the service didn't kick in. Are we saying that all banks now have to notify all clients of all transactions or face liability for any fraud howsoever caused?

The court brought in an expert, a banker. I wonder why it didn't bring an expert on security in to clear things up a little? The whole report left me with a great deal more questions than answers - and that's not what journalism is supposed to do, is it? It's supposed to give us 'context and analysis'...

Ministry

2011-10-25T10:44:00.001+03:00

Image via WikipediaBack in the distant mists of time, I published magazines as a day job. It's what originally brought me out to the UAE in 1993 - I set up a publishing operation based out of pals' offices (and under their trade license) in Ajman.

I produced a computer magazine which was something of a pioneer - it was a reviews magazine, something the region didn't have at the time. We brought PCs, software and other IT equipment in from international and local companies alike and speed tested them, prodded them and otherwise evaluated them for the elucidation of a grateful readership.

We used desktop publishing to produce the magazine. This meant that I brought a PC with me out from the UK and was able to write, do all the make-up and prepress work then just spin the whole lot out to camera-ready pages of 'bromide' at a bureau. Even 'bleeding edge' DTP users (and I was one: I can tell you I spilt a great deal of blood) hadn't got the hang of colour scanning back then, so the printers still had to scan the images into the ready-made areas defined on the pages.

This meant that I had, quite literally, a publishing house on my desktop. This was to cause a great deal of consternation when the Ministry of Information shut us down.

We arrived at the office one morning to find it sealed with official tape. We'd been closed down by the Ministry! We high-tailed it down to the Ajman MoI offices (which at the time were near where the Kempinski is now) only to find it wasn't on their account - it was a request from Dubai. So off to Qusais to the Ministry of Information building there to try and find out what it was we'd done to deserve getting closed down.

We'd reviewed a computer. Not any old computer, a really bad local OEM job. It was an unserviceable unit when it arrived with us and we had (with charming naiveté) said so in the magazine. Trouble was, the bloke that owned the computer company had a relative who was a Big Bug at the (you guessed it) Ministry of Information. We were in very, very big trouble indeed.

I remember the meeting I had with the first of a succession of Men With Very Big Desks, my nose pressed against the edge of a glass-topped expanse the size of an aircraft carrier as I was served gallons of zaatar and fruit teas in custard glasses. He wanted to know where was the editor and I told him it was me. And where was the publisher? It was me. Where did we publish? From the office. But what about staff? Erm. Me. And my ad sales guy. What about graphic artists and journalists and editors and men to do layouting and typesetters? Me. He was fascinated. Publishing without a publishing house was something he just couldn't get his head around.

I realised, with growing glee, that the bookshelves lining his office were stacked with Forbidden Fruit. Jackie Collins featured in the collection in a big way, Erica Jong and Molly Parkin tucked up alongside her.

We worked from home as the problem was thrashed out, our sponsor being relatively floppy about the whole thing until someone from the other side insulted him personally. He suddenly turned into a whirlwind of epic proportions, a Tasmanian Devil on crack with a revenge fixation that made Charles Bronson look like the tooth fairy. The whole thing was sorted in seconds flat after that.

I found myself in Qusais again yesterday and today, entering the same building as I had all those years ago to have sentence pronounced on me and my publishing company on a desktop. This time around it's a great deal more pleasant in there, lighter and more airy, the people smiling and helpful. It's called the National Media Council now.

The lady I talked to yesterday looked with mild horror at the memory stick I held up when she asked for my book. Mildly incredulous and laughing embarrassedly, she pointed out that they needed two sets of printouts on paper.

A book on a memory stick! I mean, whatever next? A publishing company on a desktop?

I delivered tottering stacks of manuscript this morning, a step necessary for those seeking 'permission to print' a book in the UAE. Let's see what happens now.

Court Confusion Continues

2011-10-24T08:34:00.001+03:00

Image by s_falkow via FlickrI'd hate to be the presiding judge over this one. Gulf News reports on the ongoing 'Facebook slur' court case currently being heard at the Dubai Court of First Instance. The funny thing is it doesn't really involve, well, Facebook...

It's a real 'he said, she said' case, defendant NF is accused of sending a threatening text message to Emirati AM, threatening to 'humiliate and dishonour him and his family' by uploading his and his family's photos to Facebook. None of the coverage of the case states that these photos are in any way lewd or compromising - and without that angle, we're really talking about the crime of doing what over 800 million people do pretty much every day.

NF's lawyers say that AM, having lost 11 cases to NF regarding the conduct of their business relationship, had maliciously bought a mobile SIM card and sent the messages to himself. He had allegedly used an old copy of NF's passport to do this.

So there was actually no 'Facebook slur' at all - GN's sub-editors once again using a Möbius strip to distort reality to make a better headline. There was the threat of uploading images to Facebook, which doesn't really count as a slur, does it?

This case is actually more about texting - did the accused send these texts and is their content actionable under UAE law or did the accuser apply for a mobile using a woman's passport? We're told AM is Emirati and must assume NF is not - so it's interesting to think that Etisalat would sell a SIM card to an Emirati man using a foreign woman's passport who is no relation to him, but presumably the court can get to the bottom of that one quite quickly.

The case would actually have been a great deal more worrying to contemplate had it involved a 'Facebook stur' - it's harder for a court to judge what went on here as content can be uploaded and deleted quite quickly. Facebook is a closed shop, so you can't use Google caches, for instance, to look at archived content (unless it has been posted using Facebook's 'public' setting). You could take screen grabs of the offending material, but screen grabs can be faked relatively easily. And you'd have to depend on specialists to weigh in on that type of issue. Facebook itself can be pretty obtuse when it comes to responding to user complaints - the abuse button isn't a sure-fire way of issuing a take-down notice and much of the 'policing' of Facebook is automated, so the interwebs are littered with the voices of frustrated users who have issues with fake pages and the like.

As it is, this is only one of two fascinating stories regarding texting in today's press. The other one has an Indian man sending a text to a major in Dubai police threatening to bomb the Burj Khalifa and attempting to extort $1mn, released after four months in jail after his 'friend' boasted to a barman that he'd set the whole thing up. The 'friend' is now in court himself. You have to wonder what on earth was going on in his head.

You're also left wondering what would happen if a truly complex case of Internet fraud or identity theft did come up...

Shiny Satisfaction Survey

2011-10-23T13:15:00.000+03:00

Image by Tracy Hunter via Flickr"Hello. I'm calling you from Dubai Ltd. We're conducting a satisfaction survey. As you likely know, 82% of customers are happy with Dubai.ae according to Khaleej Times and we just wanted to know if you're satisfied with your Shiny too."

"Well, as you mention it..."

"That's great, well thanks for your feedback, we'll just add you to the 'totally delighted' column and then we won't need to bother you again."

"But I didn't say I was delighted with my Shiny."

"But you are now, aren't you?"

"Well, actually-"

"See? I mean, who could want for more, eh? Sun, sea, sand. The cooler weather and dusting off the barbecue, the woman of your dreams at your side and an iconic lifestyle where you can dare to dream and come back for more."

"Well, yes, but-"

"Secure and safe, well paid, fat and coddled in a nice warm cocoon of feelgood. So well off you'd almost feel guilty about whingeing about the downsides..."

"True, but..."

"Look, I tell you what. I'll put you down as "pretty delighted".

"What are the other categories?"

"Umm, fairly delighted and delighted."

"And what about rising visa costs, greedy developers sucking me dry with insane maintenance charges, negative equity and an electricity bill that defies quantum physics?"

"We've got Modhesh. Brand equity like that doesn't come cheap, me bucko. Come on now, time is money."

"Sigh. Put me down as delighted then."

"Nice to talk to you. 'Till the next survey, then."

"Bye."

Nostradamus

2011-10-19T08:52:00.000+03:00

Image via Wikipedia"A Facebook group on the conflict between the army and Fatah Al Islam in Lebanon grew a membership of 8,000 in a single week: an average of two new members every minute. The movement of people, of opinions and debate in the new social networks can take place with incredible rapidity. This debate is taking place in a region where public debate, assembly and the mass publication of opinion have traditionally been discouraged. There is a new egalitarianism in the air and it’s a heady scent for many.

A flash survey of 100 Middle East based Facebook users tells us that 93% of them are using broadband connections. And 89% of them have laptop computers. 73% of those Facebook users are between 25 and 35 years of age. The survey took less than 1 hour to conduct.

There is a strong and growing Arab community using broadband technologies to move video content across the Internet, often as part of participation in social networks. The video featuring King Abdulla II of Jordan produced by the One Voice organisation, calling for peace and understanding between Palestinians and Israelis, has drawn over 279,000 views in Youtube. Video clips on Lebanon have consistently drawn above 150,000 views, while other topics and productions from the Arab world have consistently driven between 60,000 and 1 million views. Few FTA channels in the region could claim such viewership.

Social networks, the core aspect of the thinking that has been characterised as Web 2.0, are driving the adoption of broadband services in the Middle East. Perhaps interestingly this is not a technical audience of technology early adopters. That the growth in adoption has not been stronger is almost undoubtedly a product of prohibitive pricing strategies among the region’s operators."

That was all written early in 2007. Not bad, huh? I recently had reason to revisit a white paper I'd written together with Spot On bright spark Mai Abaza to support my presentation at the Arab Advisors Convergence Conference in Amman. The above text is part of the argument we were making that regional telcos needed to bring down the price of broadband and stop considering it a service for shifting big files and start looking at it as a way for many people to shift many files quickly.

I recall asking the conference how many had heard of the phrase Web 2.0 or social media and getting a show of eleven hands from an audience of hundreds of operators. That's telcos for you.

Re-reading this reminded me there's a line that connects Nahr El Bared with Occupy Wall Street - those Facebook groups that sprang up contained debate and discourse we had never before seen in the region - passionate and sometimes violently abusive, the adoption rate of these groups and the way they brought people together were stunning to watch. Of course, Mai and I were so busy examining the implications for the broadband market we missed the wider implications that here was a new platform for discourse and organisation that would grow to have the ability to bring down governments.

Those groups showed people in the Middle East, for the first time, that they could not only talk to each other, but broadcast opinion to tens of thousands. It took four years' growth in adoption, but the seeds sown as the Lebanese army blasted the Nahr El Bared camp using helicopters carrying bombs in home-made cradles would lead to something a great deal bigger...

IBAN Numbers For The UAE. Be Scared...

2011-10-18T08:15:00.000+03:00

Image by ~Aphrodite via FlickrThe news made me shudder. The UAE is introducing IBAN codes for all bank accounts. By rights, this should cheer me up no end as the IBAN number has long been a mainstay of electronic payments to my real bank in the UK. But it doesn't. It makes me very, very afraid.

My fear is unreasonable, I know. HSBC has a nice, reassuring letter on its website, It even has a 'generate your IBAN' application that lets me key in my twelve digit account number and see what my IBAN number would be.

Let us for a moment skip over the wisdom of an application that asks me to input sensitive personal information without any attempt at security or validation. I am sure any reasonable, competent bank wouldn't encourage its customers to give away account numbers and so on in a way that could lead them to give such information away on, say, a phishing website.

The IBAN number is actually nice and easy. It consists of a two letter country code (AE), a two digit checksum and a three digit bank identification number (HSBC's is 020). Then you have a 16-digit number which consists, in HSBC's case, of four leading zeroes and your 12 digit HSBC account number.

It's nice to see HSBC so keen to use IBAN numbers. This is the bank that didn't have a field on its web-based transfer screen to enter IBAN numbers into - and then charged the currency losses resulting from the rejected transaction back to the customer.

So why do I think they're going to screw this up? Well, in part because over the 18-odd years I've banked with them there has been no aspect of banking that they haven't at one stage screwed up for me, so I don't see why this should be any different. And in part because I bank with an institution stupid enough to get its customers keying their bank account numbers over open connections with no security or validation. But also because we're all going to need this new system working like clockwork come the end of November.

Why? Because the deadline for implementation of this new numbering system is the 19th November - and any electronic payment made into a UAE bank account without a valid IBAN number after that date will potentially bounce back and incur addtiional charges. And that includes the payment of your salary - the UAE's wages protection system (WPS) will require employers to use IBAN numbers to make salary transfers. If that causes any problems, we'll be rightly banjaxed as most people are paid at the month's end - and the end of November (the first test of the new system) segues neatly into the UAE's National Day holiday. This year the UAE celebrates its 40th year as a nation - it's going to be a biggie.

Maybe it will all go wonderfully. Maybe I'll be proved wrong to be so suspicious and cynical. We'll see...

The Emirates Identity Card: A Fresh Fandango

2011-10-17T08:25:00.000+03:00

Image by P Shanks via FlickrIt was with infinite weariness I started this post. I've resisted commenting on the various announcements made by the Emirates Identity Authority for some time now, having just taken it as read that whatever they say will be corrected or clarified at some stage in the future, then recanted or re-clarified, changed or just turned on its head. I've been following the whole sorry saga since November 2008 and it's not been pretty, I can tell you. For a convenient glance at the whole backstory, you can follow this here link.

In this rather grumpy post, I called the whole thing a fiasco. And I do think I was justified in that.

As a communications case study it's quite without parallel - a remarkable track record of unclear and frequently unsustainable announcements that our media has done very little to clear up. The newest moves, reported in today's Gulf News (the other lads seem to have missed the story), are as impenetrable as the fog sitting on the ground during this morning's drive to work. Gulf News has two stories today, this one on its front page tells us that you now need to be fingerprinted at an Emirates ID Centre while undergoing medical tests to renew your visa. This flies in the face of the recent announcements that those renewing would not have to be fingerprinted. Asked why by the fearless bastions of the fourth estate over at GN, a spokesperson responded: "It is for security purposes."

Apparently preventative medicine centres (PMCs - you know, the places where we're herded around in shuffling lines to be dehumanised and then stabbed in the forearm by a licensed butcher, leaving a nasty bruise for days that never happens when a hospital takes a blood sample) are now being linked to the EIDA system. Quite why this means we have to be fingerprinted again is anyone's guess. This process was originally announced to be completed by 2010.

Reporting inside the paper, Gulf News tells us there is now an absolute deadline for expatriates to register for their Emirates ID cards of March 31st 2012.

The original deadline for the ID card was, as those with long memories will recall, January 2009. This deadline was extended in an announcement that said the deadline was not being extended, which I posted on here. It was subsequently extended to the end of 2010. Interestingly, the original deadline for UAE nationals was 31st March 2009, although as of today there doesn't appear to be a deadline for nationals at all.

So, three years later, we have a real deadline ("We're serious this time, we're telling you!") with a fine to be imposed upon those not complying, of Dhs20 per day up to a maximum of Dhs1,000. The real deadline is December 1st 2011 in Fujairah, Ras Al Khaimah, Umm Al Quwain an Ajman, February 1st 2012 in Sharjah and March 31st in Abu Dhabi. Dubai gets until June 1st 2012.

Quite who is going to administer the application and collection of these fines in each municipality with different deadlines applicable is a question GN doesn't address. One suspects this is because the whole fine thing is just another pronouncement of negligible substance from a source that has given us so many.

I just can't wait for the inevitable story that the EIDA folks have been awarded for bringing the project in on time, under budget and to quality...

Ancient Geek Reprised

2011-10-16T13:55:00.002+03:00

Image via WikipediaI had reason today to look back over the series of 'Ancient Geek' posts I put up a couple of years back and I quite enjoyed them. In the unlikely event that you would feel similarly, here they, arranged in chronological order for your viewing pleasure.

Ancient Geek
Encounters with punch cards and HP mainframes.

Ancient Geek V.2.0 (Beta)
How to crash IBM's MAPICS software running on a System 3X minicomputer

Ancient Geek V. 2.11 (Service Pack 2)
Making sweet music using the Apple IIe.

Ancient Geek V.3.0 Professional Edition
How I ended up working for Tandy/Radio Shack and getting sent to Saudi Arabia...

Computers certainly have a lot to answer for...

ENOC: It's About Time

2011-10-16T08:59:00.000+03:00

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeThe Emirates National Oil Company, or ENOC as it's popularly known, has issued a statement to local media that claims it will lose Dhs 2.7 billion this year because of the cost its is having to bear to sell fuel at the subsidised oil prices currently mandated in the UAE.

You may recall, this is the petrol company that stopped supplying petrol, a slightly ironic situation given it is located in one of the world's richest oil producing nations. I posted about it all at some length, particularly with the PR mismanagement case study aspects of the story in mind: ENOC's spokesperson chose to be mildly mendacious regarding the reason why its stations had stopped pumping fuel and the company then clammed up like Sammy the Slamshut Clam in response to a constant slew of media and widespread public inconvenience.

ENOC is also, just in case you're interested, the proud owner of a deeply woeful website - including a media news section last updated in 2006, which gives you an idea of just how important the company considers its media relations to be.

The newspapers have slavishly covered yesterday's statement, despite the fact it contains no element of news whatsoever. Even the figure of a Dhs 2.7 billion projected loss isn't news, it was contained in the company's statement following its board meeting in May of this year.

It's also oddly timed. The National ran a story three weeks ago quoting a top ENOC official in which the Dhs 2.7 billion figure and the tale of woe about subsidies was highlighted - in fact, the National's story actually contains a great deal more information than the statement GN and KT have so obligingly covered today. Even enfant terrible 7Days ran with the statement. Quite why the company has broken its silence now remains to be explained, but one is left with the strong feeling that there's something behind the timing of it. I suppose we could ask ENOC, couldn't we?

Or perhaps not. Gulf News' piece contains the amusing snippet: "A spokesman for Enoc declined to elaborate on the company statement when reached by Gulf News."

It's GITEX Time Again...

2011-10-09T08:24:00.000+03:00

Image via WikipediaAs The National points out today (very kindly quoting me babbling on about the show) in its GITEX story, this will be my 23rd GITEX. I should really stop counting... I've done ancient geek reminisces about GITEX posts before, like this one right here, so I'm not going there again.

This year is the show's thirtieth birthday. There was much talk about GITEX being 30 last year, but they jumped the gun a tad. The miracle is that it's still with us at all - all the other great horizontal computer shows barring Hanover's CeBIT have tanked. Comdex is no longer with us, the Which Computer show died years ago, along with many others. Why have CeBIT and GITEX survived?

One part of the answer is that both are essentially government owned shows that have a wider agenda than just filling exhibition space. GITEX also fills pretty much every hotel room in Dubai and acts as a great showcase for new companies looking for a Middle East base or to expand their sales/distribution network to the region. That government support also means not necessarily having to face the grim realities of commercial pressure quite as much as a private sector organiser - particularly over the past three years when, like CeBIT, GITEX had lost a number of large, high profile exhibitors. But both shows have seen a return to form this year, in GITEX' case thanks to a concerted effort by the organising team behind 'GITEX Technology Week 2011' to package things up attractively for exhibitors as well as to add stronger vertical elements that made it more interesting for companies to attend.

There's also the resurgence of technology in business to thank. The IT industry had grown stale, innovation was no longer compelling companies to invest in technology and the great rollout of technology as we all bought our little slice of the internet had slowed. IT vendors discovered that slapping a new number on a CD in a box didn't make us all rush out to buy the New New Thing.

Now, buoyed by mobile, tablets, the cloud, social media and other innovations, technology is becoming sexy again. People are looking at new stuff and, what's more, investing in new stuff. Dubai has always been the regional centre for the technology industry and has always been very much the 'shop window' for sales organisations targeting the Middle East. It's been that way ever since technology companies first started to open up regional offices - generally, the decision on location was taken by the person handling the region who was often the person who would have to come out here to live. Given the options, virtually to a man they chose Dubai as the most pleasant place to live. And so the technology industry came here - a process that took place some ten years before Dubai Internet City was conceived and launched. When DIC came along, they just all moved up the road.

When I first moved to the UAE, my old pal Bob Merrill, the GM of Ericsson Saudi Arabia, told me (in his Southern drawl), "You're going to Dubai for three reasons, son. Golf, women and hooch. Why, I could take your Dubai and put it here in Sitteen Street Riyadh and we wouldn't even know it was there." He had a point, although I think you'd notice Dubai if you plonked it in Sitteen Street these days!

Many of the companies who set up shop here first encountered the region through either attending or exhibiting at GITEX. If you were obsessive enough, you could trace the process and see how many exhibitors have stuck to Dubai over the years and added technology to the city's list of re-export businesses. How many executives, in fact, who have turned up to the multi-hall extravaganza that is GITEX - a show, if the truth be told, that has always been bigger than its market - taken one look around and said 'We gotta be in this market, boys'? Over the years I have personally witnessed a great number of them.

GITEX is good for Dubai, which is why they'll never let it die. This year will see whether the re-invention of this most venerable of computer shows will provide the right mixture of showcase and meeting point to drive it forwards. And whether the new found burst of innovation in the technology industry will continue to make it relevant once again.

Steve Jobs. Tossing A Pebble

2011-10-06T07:41:00.001+03:00

Image via CrunchBaseThis will get lost in the ocean of comment on Steve Jobs. It's almost pointless writing it, but sometimes you just have to jot the moment down.

There's little doubt Steve Jobs was an arrogant bastard. I've never met him (the closest I've got to true techristocracy was Ballmer) but the absolute certitude shone through in everything he did. Yet his drive and utter self-belief drove the people around him to create some wondrous things. I first encountered The Apple IIe microcomputer when I went to work for a startup computer music company back in the UK. That machine, the fruit of Jobs and partner Steve Wozniak's early 'home brew computer club' innovation, helped to create a revolution. It brought millions of people into the information age - it was the first 'proper' personal computer system. In 1981, Apple was to welcome IBM to the desktop computer age with its cheeky and iconic advertisement, followed soon after by the iconic Macintosh, launched with Ridley Scott's iconic TV spot.

It became all about icons. Jobs saw the work going on at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) and immediately grasped it was world-changing stuff. Xerox, in a moment of monumental knuckle-headedness, didn't and closed the lab. Jobs hired the talent - and so did Gates. The two were each others' nemeses, both utterly driven men who knew they were right. It's just that Jobs ended up being righter. But now he's dead, so it really doesn't matter, does it?

PARC was where the WIMP (windows, icon, menu, pointing) interface was developed. Before PARC, all computing was text based. The world of mice and arrows brought a graphical way of interacting with computers and Jobs was the first to realise the significance of this new approach. Apple released the cludgy Lisa and then the stunning Macintosh. I remember my first encounter with a Mac, the little box with a screen in it happily reciting 'Simple Semen met a peeman' for me. The early text to speech software was not always brilliantly successful. But, again, Apple was way ahead of its rivals in even supporting such technologies.

Oddly, for a company that has always shunned any direct involvement in the Arab world, Apple was also a massively influential company in Arabic language computing and graphics. It would be years before Microsoft matched Apple's Arabic language capabilities - and by then, every publishing house and graphic design studio in the Arab world was Mac based. It wasn't to last: the Mac's strong domination of design and desk-top publishing was eroded by the sheer weight of the Microsoft/Intel alliance and the IBM PC architecture. Scully came, Jobs left and Apple started its long, inevitable dive towards the heart of the chapter eleven sun.

Cast into the wilderness, Jobs pursued his certitude and created NeXT, a high-end workstation system with its own innovative operating system. Too expensive, too 'out there' for its time, it failed and yet the NeXT operating system was to be acquired by Apple and form the heart of the Mac OS X. Incidentally, the World Wide Web was developed on a NeXT system by Tim Berners-Lee, the man who put the hole in the toilet seat that was the internet.

In his forty days in the wilderness the graphically-obsessed Jobs also acquired the animation studio that was to become Pixar, selling it on to Disney for a cool $7.4 billion. He was many things, but our Steve was rarely hard up. You can perhaps start to understand how he got by on that famous $1 salary as Apple's CEO.

But his crowning glory was his return to the company he co-founded. Jobs' triumphal return to Apple must have felt like the ultimate vindication to the man who had all the answers all the time, but the company was on the very brink. In 1997, Apple was the Sick Man of Computing and it was arguably Steve's old enemy Bill Gates who saved the day when he pumped $150 million into the seemingly lost cause that was Apple Computer Inc.

And then Jobs did something wonderful. He turned Apple into the world' most successful company. Starting with the iMac, going on to create the iPod and then the iPad, Jobs' mania for graphics and design were translated into products that were to revolutionise the way we consume what used to be called culture and today is called content. The iPod decimated the music industry, taking Apple from being a computer company into the mass consumer market. The iPhone toppled Nokia. The iPad has redefined the way millions of people consume information and entertainment. From a no-hope bankrupt, Jobs turned Apple into a company so successful its cash reserves eclipsed those of the US government.

The man who popularised icons, first with the Mac then with the iPhone and the iPad, Steve Jobs was himself an icon. His increasingly gaunt figure, wearing his trademark black turtle-neck sweater and jeans, became synonymous with smart, funky, minimalist innovation. I truly believe he is one of the most influential figures of the last century, a man whose impact on our society and culture will be felt for many years to come.

But I still think he must have been a total git to work with.

The Daily Mail Blows It. Big Time.

2011-10-05T09:26:00.002+03:00

The UK's Press Gazette gleefully reproduced yesterday the screenshot of the year. The Daily Mail, the right wing conservative UK newspaper, ran the Amanda Knox verdict story on its website. Except it ran the wrong story. Knox was, of course, acquited.

The Press Gazette story is linked here. I do commend it as rather fun.

The Mail realised its awful mistake and took the story down after a couple of minutes but the internet she do not forgive lightly. The botched story became a news story in its own right, with even the Washington Post weighing in and enjoying the Mail's humiliation. As it happens, The Sun also blew it but nobody mainstream seems to have got a screen grab before the piece got taken down. These guys did, though.

So how could such an awful mistake happen? Well, as the Press Gazette piece points out, newspapers do prepare materials in advance - obituaries are written for celebrities while they're still in rude health, waiting for the day they peg it. And papers will also do 'yes' and 'no' pieces for highly anticipated events with only two possible outcomes, such as high profile trials. They're called 'set and hold' pieces. It's one of a number of journalistic practices that are not widely known and would cause some concern amongst a reading public used to depending on papers to tell the truth and deliver... are you ready for this... context and analysis.

Sure, but all the same, why were they in such a rush to push the button? Well, I rather suspect there's a new pressure on them, the pressure of social media. The first word the judge uttered was 'guilty' but that was to the charge of slander. The second word was actually the one the world was waiting for. The Mail and The Sun, under the pressure to show it they are still relevant as a news source online, both leaped into action too soon - the very thing that makes journalists get sniffy about Twitter.

We're being told all the time we can trust mainstream media. That's ever less the case as dubious practices come to light and as that media scrambles in an undignified rush to try and beat all of us eyewitnesses to the punch. They're better off not trying - but cleaning up their act and truly delivering added value to the voices of the people who are there at the time.

Of Books

2011-10-04T09:29:00.000+03:00

Image via WikipediaThere have been a couple of recent moves in the Wonderful World of Publishing that may be of interest. Bloomsbury has launched its own e-book and POD imprint, 'Bloomsbury Reader', while in the US, publisher Perseus Books has launched a new company to publish e-book and POD editions for agented authors called, snappily, Argo Navis Author Services.

The main difference is that Bloomsbury is only targeting out of print books where the authors' rights have reverted, while Perseus is definitely more focused on the living.

Bloomsbury, JK Rowling's publisher, has done a deal with The Rights House (made up of mega-agency PFD and Rights House Talent) to publish a number of titles and launches Bloomsbury Reader with some 500 titles on Kindle, with other platforms to follow. The biggest name in the first tranche is Edith Sitwell, although Evelyn Waugh's brother Alan features (he was a scandalous bestseller in his time). Just in case you thought you were in for some quality bargain reads, by the way, think again - the books will be priced at $8.99. That's stiff for an e-book of an out of print work, in my humble.

The Perseus move is perhaps more relevant to today's authors. The company will be offering an e-book and POD service, publishing to multiple e-book platforms and offering marketing and distribution support while only taking a 30% cut. In the Argo Navis model, the author remains the publisher while Perseus is the distributor. Perseus has already signed with agency Janklow & Nesbit, is talking to Curtis Brown (according to the New York Times) and is in discussions with a number of other agencies.

So what does this all mean? Well, in the Bloomsbury case, we have a traditional publisher reviving a number of classic out of print works and making them available using the new efficiencies of e-books and POD. That's only a good thing, although you'd wonder why more publishers haven't gone this route already. With agents and publishers alike (Don't forget Ed Victor has already launched a 'reverted rights' e-book and POD imprint) looking to backlists and out of print titles, we're going to see an awful lot of 'old' books flooding the 'new' platforms. It's already hard enough for authors to stand out - it's about to get an awful lot harder.

It's perhaps interesting that with the future of publishing being so crammed with uncertainties, so many publishers and agents are looking to the past.

The Perseus move is much more interesting. In focusing on agented authors, the company brings a qualitative guarantee of sorts to the books being offered by its service. The percentages on offer are certainly eye-catching ('traditional' publishers are offering 20-25% of e-books, which most agents are arguing should be 50%) at 70% in the author's hand (less, presumably, the agents' 15%). But the platform is reportedly offering a 'basic' marketing service for free and will offer more advanced marketing services at a fee. In this, Perseus is going to have to do a lot to justify quite what value it offers authors over services such as Lightning Source and CreateSpace.

Meanwhile, Amazon has just announced availability of the most basic Kindle (Note NOT the 'Fire') in the UK at a whopping £89 - at today's rates that's $138!!! It's $79 in the US. How they can justify that is truly beyond me...

Strange Searches

2011-10-03T10:20:00.000+03:00

Image via WikipediaEvery now and then I take a peep at Sitemeter to dredge up some of the stranger search terms that have landed people with a moist 'plop' in the middle of this soft, bloggy piece of ground.

Search fascinates me, and not just because it's becoming an evermore important part of the old day job. It's the little wrinkles in search I find amusing - and not the least of these is the way in which 'do no evil' Google prioritises search for its own products - a Blogger blog gets way better results than other platforms on Google, but less so in Bing, for instance.

By the way, give this a try: http://www.duckduckgo.com - it's an alternative search engine I got turned onto after reading a post on Narain Jashanmal's blog on how he's managed to go Google free.

Because of the Google Treatment, I sometimes find this potty little blog hits way above its weight in search. In a few instances, I'm very glad indeed - many thousands of people have read my posts on what's inside Pringles, Subway's 'wholemeal' bread and Aquafina water, and that's pretty much down to search.

So here are a few recent 'oddities'...

how much is a 1 gb data from etisalat
Dhs 249 per month, mate. No problem, a pleasure.

what is the use of emirates id
When you find out, dear searcher, please do drop me a comment and let me know...

is food labelled in the emirates
For some reason I imagined this searcher, from Norway, is thinking about exporting his moose paté to new markets and has a very long way to go indeed before he 'gets' the UAE market...

how to pronounce gitex
This search led to this here post where I carefully, albeit with a mildly worrying obsessiveness, show readers how to pronounce GITEX. It's JEE TECKS by the way.

cows aorta
It is a source of some pride to me (surely there's some sort of badge you should get for this) that in all the world's Internet, thanks to this here post about the Dubai Sustainable Transport Award, I 'own' this phrase. Yes, folks, out of 174,000 possible search results, Google thinks I'm the most relevant of the lot. And they are terribly, tragically wrong...

subway bread plastic
This is one of those posts that has been read by many people. Again, it qualifies for a Tufty Club badge, because it's number one in search. If you want to know why Subway's wholemeal bread contains rice, caramel and an ingredient that would have you imprisoned for 15 years if you used it in Singapore, you too can click on this here link.

Is it any wonder people have it in for bankers?
I'm not sure what's more wonderful - the fact someone googled this phrase or the fact it led them to li'l ole me and this post about why I hate my bank - its call centre in particular.

dorothy miles choueifat
I try and post reminiscence posts as scarcely as possible, but the past sneaked into this one about using Nokia Maps. We'd decided to name the GPS NufNuf after Dorothy Miles' dog (she was the director of the International School of Choueifat, Sharjah) so now if you googles dotters, you get this slice of total irrelevance.

Pringles Controversy
Third search result - it's amazing how powerful consumer voice can be on the internet - I mean, this is hardly the Huffington Post, is it? It's an out of the way backwater blog by somebody of no particular interest to the vast majority of people. This search leads to this post about what they actually make Pringles out of (Don't click! Don't click!). But it doesn't take you to Pringles. Oh no...

Schematic Bicycle
This is an interesting one. It's an image search hit - I use a smart doohicky called Zemanta which searches for copyright free images based on the context of posts and lets you paste these into your post (it also does some other clever stuff around tags and links). So I linked to this Wikipedia image for this here post about why I hate my bank's awful radio ads and now on image search I 'own' the image and searches come to me. I don't know how or why this works, but hundreds of people looking for the Book of Kells have been bored by my views on publishing instead. Similarly this search for 'IBM minicomputer' gives very high ranking to this blog rather than the original image (linked in the post) to IBM's actual archives. Image search is, I guess, just that much harder to figure out!

World’s Worst Web
This is actually fair do's - I'd assert that some of the sites in this post would be global worst practice contenders...

Lebanon: Will The World's Worst Web Get Better?

2011-10-02T08:24:00.000+03:00

Gulf News filed a Reuters report today on moves to improve Lebanon's internet access. The headline alone made me laugh, "Lebanon unveils faster, cheaper internet amid political bickering'. That's one of those 'Man found dead in cemetry' headlines. Nothing happens in Lebanon without political bickering.

Lebanon, as those who know it will attest, is a beautiful country of rich soil, glorious countryside and home to a fascinatingly diverse people capable of great cleverness. Beirut can be sophisticated, sexy as hell and enormous fun. It is also home to crushing poverty. And it's all strung together with public infrastructure that sometimes defies belief. From the rocky power grid (power cuts are still commonplace) through to the state of the roads, you're often left wondering quite how so much physical, intellectual and financial wealth sits alongside such tottering examples of failed governance.

Listening to the Ministerial addresses to ArabNet is helpful to reaching an understanding of this, I find.

Lebanon's internet is cited in today's story as being the 'world's worst... the country is always much lower down the rankings than many less developed nations such as Afghanistan or Burkina Faso.' The story goes on to recount, in shocked tones, how a 1 Mbps connection in Lebanon costs Dhs 279!!!

Errr. Hello, GN? That's about what we're paying here in the UAE. A one meg DSL line is Dhs249 a month, 2 Mbps costs a whopping Dhs349 a month and you'll pay Dhs549 for a 16 meg line. If you want the highest available speed from Etisalat, you can get a 30 Mbps 'Al Shamil' line for a mere Dhs699 a month. That's $191.5 to you.

I'm not even going to mention that the Japanese home gets an average 60 Mbps line at a cost of $0.27 per megabit month. Not even thinking about going there. Oh no.

Now the promises being made (because the story is, tragically, predicated on a promise not an actual physical delivery of service) are that Lebanon will get a minimum access speed of 1 Mbps for $16 per month. That would bring it in line with markets like the UK. I genuinely hope the promise (made to Reuters by Lebanese telecoms minister Nicola Sehnawi) comes through - although Ogero might have something to say about that - for two reasons. First and foremost so my friends in Lebanon can stop gnashing their teeth and throwing laptops against the wall in frustration. The selfish second reason is that it would add pressure on the TRA to finally act and bring down the ridulous broadband prices here in the UAE - prices that are undoubtedly a key factor contributing to hindering the adoption, use and the growth of the economic opportunity derived from technology in the UAE today.

(The image at the top of the post is one of my favourite things, BTW. It's the first sketch of 'the Internet')

by

A Holiday In Estonia

2011-09-30T16:43:00.000+03:00

Sorry it's taken a while to get around to this, but I've been busy/coming painfully back online after the summer.

We decided to go to Estonia this summer for a few days by ourselves. We've been married twenty years (cripes!) and reckoned we deserved some 'us' time. Unusually, we didn't bother to research it or in any other way look into where we were going. We had the vague notion it would be something like Prague (a city we both love lots) and just, well, booked it.

One of Sarah's parents very kindly gave her a coffee table book on Estonia. We didn't even open the cover until we'd got back.

So you can see we richly deserved to end up somewhere awful. Instead, we ended up in a city we will always look back on with fondness and delight. Tallinn is truly, wonderfully, jaw-droppingly glorious.

Estonia was, of course, part of the Soviet Union, until the people took to the streets in 1991, held hands and sang. The 'singing revolution' ended up with an unbroken line of people stretching from Estonia through Latvia and Lithuania. The Soviets took one look at the whole crazy lot of them and threw up their hands, said 'sod this' and went back to Russia. One of Tallin's quaintest museum ideas (sadly quite badly executed, but still worth a wander) is 'The Museum to Soviet Uselesness'. It's a marvellous revenge

We stayed at the Telegraph Hotel in Tallinn's old town. The walled medieval city is a UNESCO Heritage Site liberally dotted with museums, craft shops, galleries and restaurants. The Telegraph is very funky indeed, although lacked a decent bar/lounge/guest area. That and the fact they hired out their garden to a corporate gig, which rather meant guests had nowhere to go that day but the restaurant or the scattered seats in the lobby that forms the only 'bar' area - I did find that an odd decision. The restaurant, the 'Tchaikovsky' is pricey by Estonian standards, (You'll pay about 160 Euro for two with drinks) but the food was tremendous.

Happily installed in our Shrine to Funkiness (well, apart from the awful plastic 'old fashioned' phones in the room), we set out on what would be four days of just walking around Old Tallinn, dropping into churches (the most secular nation in Europe, most of them have been deconsecrated. One of them is now an 'Irish' pub!), walking the medieval walls, shopping and mooching around museums.

We were left with the impression of Estonians as being a rather endearingly potty people. They seem fiercely individualistic and proud of their own quirkiness. Something like 60% of the country's population lives in Tallinn, the rest in a country that appears given over mostly to forest and agricultural land. The food we had was never less than excellent, whether we ate lunch in cafe bars on the street (Beer at a couple of Euro a pint. Brilliant. And Estonians don't know what a 'measure' is - I had some of the largest Martinis of my life there).

We also came across a business that had us both in awe from the first time we encountered it: Olde Hansa. This is a medieval eatery in the Old Town, a tourist trap with added tourist trap. It's tacky - medieval style dining with set menus of 'feasts' as well as an a la carte menu rendered almost indecipherable by the gaudy, medieval- style illumination. The staff are all decked out in medieval uniforms, there are no potatoes on offer and everything is spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and so on. They have stalls that make 'medieval style' coated almonds. They have their own honey or cinnamon flavoured beers. It's all as tacky you'd like, aimed directly at the thousands of tourists that throng to the old town (two million of 'em, last year).

We decided to go there for dinner.

A reservation is a must, the multi-storied restaurant is often packed out. It's got the big fireplaces, the long tables, the beams and all that. Again, the staff are all dressed in smocks and frocks, bringing drinks in heavy earthenware pots or roughly blown coloured glasses. The food was fine, oddly enough, big bold and hearty stuff and enjoyable for all that (you get spelt instead of spuds, all in keeping, see?). The service was cheerful and friendly. And the music was provided by players using medieval instruments and playing medieval airs. They're all music students, of course, but by golly they made a fantastic job of it. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves without even one moment's guilty feeling. We ate in a tacky tourist trap and we loved it.

The Olde Hansa girls cooking, bagging and selling an awful lot of nuts.

Olde Hansa also operates a shop in the old town selling its glass, spice mixtures, calico things, soaps and the like. It's very well done indeed - and the way the business is managed and promoted had me taking off my proverbial hat. So much so that I was curious enough to take a gander at their website to find out about the people behind the business. Not a thing - the website's entirely 'in character'. When we opened our minifridge in the hotel to store some of the chocolates, elk sausage and other danties we'd picked up, the nuts were Olde Hansa nuts. It's a remarkable enterprise - and they even have an online shop (I highly recommend the soaps) to catch those tourists again once they get home!

The other two evenings, we ate at the restaurant next door to our hotel, Ribe.Less pricey than the Tchaikovsky (about 120 Euro for aperitifs, dinner, drinks and coffees for two), it offers fine dining that Dubai would find hard to match - and for a fragment of the cost. Here, take a gander at the menu. They delivered on this stuff, perfectly, consistently and with charm. If you ever find yourself in Estonia, eat here. You can thank me in the comments. Chatting to the waiter, we happened to mention Olde Hansa and how we admired the slickness of the operation. 'Yes,' he said cattily, 'but they use microwaves.' Oh, the horror!

The death-defying shot of the British Embassy...

I had decided to build an Estonian angle into the book I'm currently working on, something I'd dreamed up I think before we even made the decision to go. So this meant we had to walk across town to the British Embassy, just to 'case the joint'. Sarah has an odd aversion to letting me photograph embassies and military installations for research, but I got what I needed nonetheless.

Comfits

It's four hours from Beirut (Air Baltic flies there, I believe) and 40 minutes from Copenhagen (Emirates had just started flying there when we passed through). Even Ryan Air flies there (we flew on an Air Estonia Bombardier and that was fine) - Estonia has many a bar and more than a few dodgy-looking nightclub-cum-cathouses. One thing that amazed us was the thousands of purple-rinsed dears and their doddery parmours being trailed around Tallinn by brolly-wielding tour guides - the Baltic cruise business is big and Tallinn's a popular stop-off. One lot were even wearing stickers with their tour numbers on, presumably in case they wandered in their insenility. Sarah and I made a pact, if we ever get to the stage where we'd consider a cruise, we'll put each other out of our misery.

(And yes, the title of this post is indeed a play on the brilliant Dead Kennedys song and, yes, this was a holiday post and so, yes, I am going soft in the head.)

Who's Afraid Of The Kindle Fire?

2011-09-29T08:46:00.000+03:00

Image via WikipediaIt hardly seems worth adding to the squillions of words being written about Amazon's Kindle Fire announcement last night. Engadget's real-time updates were fascinating enough, but this morning pretty much every gadget blog and site is looking at 'what you should know about the Kindle Fire' and analysing what this new thing means to us all. The papers (the serious ones, I mean) are all busily providing their much-vaunted 'context and analysis'.

It's all a bit of a kerfuffle.

Personally, I've been flirting with the idea of a tablet since last year, when I decided to go Kindle. At the time of its release, Amazon's e-reader certainly had its detractors - all of them making like the wide-mouthed frog right now. The Kindle has not only been a brilliant success, it has transformed the publishing and writing world and continues to do so, injecting a great deal of fear and loathing into an industry that has been shaken out of its cosy leather armchairs. At the new $79 price point, it will only continue to do so. The Kindle touch, at $99, adds a touch screen, although it's not a 'full' touch screen, you tap it to move a page rather than swipe it. Which is a shame, as every person I have ever handled my Kindle to has first tried to swipe it to turn the page.

But it's the Kindle Fire that's really got people, well, fired up. The Fire is undoubtedly the one tablet device that is going to challenge Apple's dominance of the tablet market. Not because it's a really cool physical product (although it is), but because it's linked to the world's largest content repository. Amazon not only has millions of books, films and pieces of music to sell us, it has our credit card numbers (and our trust), our addresses and frequently the addresses of our friends and family too. With Whispernet, it is already delivering instantaneously accessible content to millions of people around the world. The Kindle Fire is the device that can access that content, as well as the services Amazon is building around it.

Sure, you can get stuff on Kindle for the iPad, but it's not the same. The Kindle Fire is integrated into Amazon. We're couch potatoes - we'll go for the easy stuff every time. For everyone who doesn't have an iPad right now, the Kindle Fire is a no-brainer at $199.

So where does that leave our, now age-old, argument about wanting to curl up with a good book rather than a slab of electronics? Well, Kindles just became a load cheaper and more accessible. And, at the high end, they got a whole load sexier. That means new consumers, new readers who can choose to download our work as e-books. We've already seen that American 'core readers', those who buy more than twelve books a year, have in the main migrated to e-readers. Now there are pretty compelling reasons for the mass market to follow in their footsteps. It's increasingly the case that in order to reach a wide readership, a writer needs to have an e-book.

It's not very good news for traditionally minded publishers. And it further cements Amazon's unbearably tight grip on the publishing industry. Amazon pretty much dominates the business of distributing books now, between the physical book sales and the e-book market. It is set to expand that dominance exponentially.

Sadly, those of us not born in the land of the free and home of the brave will have to wait a while for our new toys to arrive. Available on November 15th in the USA, the Kindle Fire cannot be shipped anywhere else in the world. And, of course, here in the Middle East we cannot sign up to download Amazon content. Yes, of course there are ways around that - but you're missing the mass market when you're making people jump through hoops like that.

Which is frustrating. As the world migrates to e-readers, the Middle East is left behind in the Paper Age simply because the biggest, most dominant players in the content reader device and distribution businesses, Apple and Amazon, do not give a hoot about the Arab world. And likely never will. Tragically, every move as brilliant and innovative as the Kindle Fire in this industry just widens the gap.

Foiled!

2011-09-28T17:50:00.000+03:00

Image via WikipediaYou might remember my bright idea some time ago, of bankrupting HSBC by using the free valet parking service that comes with their credit cards.

I am sad to report I have been foiled. I got a text last week from them, telling me that valet services at MoE, DCC and MCC have been 'discontinued with immediate effect'.

Not so much as a 'sorry', you'll notice, for simply taking away one of the 'many benefits you can avail' when choosing their Visa card.

I'll find some other way of getting them, don't you worry...

The UAE Goes To The Polls

2011-09-25T10:57:00.000+03:00

Image via WikipediaThe elections for 20 seats of the 40-seat Federal National Council took place on Saturday using a high-tech voting system that meant the vote was done and dusted by midnight and the new members duly named. I had wondered what the turnout would be like and, using Gulf News' figures on the number of votes cast for each candidate (a total of 19,939 votes cast by the 129,274 eligible voters), the turnout was about fifteen percent.

Voter turnout was higher than expected, Gulf News tells us.

The seats are distributed between the emirates, four respectively for Abu Dhabi and Dubai, three respectively for Sharjah and Ras Al Khaimah and two for Ajman, Umm Al Quwain and Fujairah. The least votes were cast by the voters of Ajman, with fewer than 600 making it to the polls.

The votes were cast at 12 voting centres around the country. "Most of the voting process was smooth and there were no major glitches at the majority of the centres" Gulf News' cover story tells us today, which means there were major glitches at a couple of centres. This cynical reading of the doublespeak is borne up by the quote from the Ministry of State for FNC affairs, who tells Gulf News on page 9, 'The process worked well in general, though we suffered from some technical troubles."

Caviling apart, there appears to have been much widespread happiness at the successful conclusion of this young country's experiment with voting.

Two Year Residence What?

2011-09-25T10:44:00.000+03:00

Image by Jakob E via FlickrGulf News' page three story today, "Two-year residence visa rule only applies to private sector workers" is another masterprice of clarity, containing - as it does - the statement from the Ministry of Interior, that 'the residency department has not reduced the length of the visa and it is still three years for everyone'.

Glad that's cleared up, then.

The move was originally mooted as being 'on the anvil' by Gulf News for implementation in January (in this here story here) and will see expatriates' visas cut from their current three year validity to two years along with the validity of labour cards. Apparently. Perhaps. Pending clarification. I posted about it at the time of the original announcement, which claimed the move would save everyone money rather than cost 33% more (the cost basis of the new visa rule remains to be explained). That statement went unquestioned by GN at the time, although today's story does include some mild whingeing from divers commentators about the increase in cost.

But it's not really about the money. The move means, presumably, that we can all look forward to the Dehumanising Blood Test Ritual with increased frequency. That's the bit that has me gritting my teeth...

Sugar and Spice

2011-09-23T13:39:00.000+03:00

It took four months in the end. We were originally scheduled to hold GeekaFest - One for the Girls in June, but put it back so that construction of the New Shelter could finish. That slipped to late July and it didn't seem worth doing as August and Ramadan coincided.

So last night was something of a memory test - would anyone remember what a GeekFest is? (if anyone has a nice, glib answer to that question, I'd love to know) More to the point, would anyone manage to find the New Shelter? The answers were respectively yes and no.

There was much 'I can't follow the Shelter map' chaos, with successful arrivals talking lost friends in. GeekaTalker and notable Emirati film maker Nayla Al Khaja got awfully lost, sending me a stream of increasingly infuriated Tweets as I was busily selling my old (and unloved - it's the phone I finally flung at the wall when I went Android) Nokia N86 for a princely Dhs450 to the nice chaps from Jacky's.

That was a hoot, I can tell you. The Jacky's guy told me the price and misinterpreted my incredulity. He was still defending the price when I managed to get through and tell him I wasn't complaining, I was truly stunned that the steam-driven anachronism was worth more than a few pennies. By the way, if you missed these guys at GeekaFest and want to get shot of any old laptops, phones, MP3 players or consoles, you can still pop along to Jacky's and Do the Deal.

Locational challenges aside, the New Shelter turned out to be a great venue, although the open nature of the space meant the talks took place in a background of hubbub. The workshops upstairs were packed and seem to have been a stunning success, so we'll be doing that again, won't we?

Blog posts have been posted - Aida's linked here, Divena's linked here and Mohamed's linked here. I'd be interested in any feedback on the evening, particularly ideas for the future.

By the way, the next GeekFest will take place at The Sharjah International Book Fair on the 24th November, so mark your diaries. I think we might just put in a bit of an effort this time around and pull something very different indeed out of that hat.

In the meantime, a huge thanks to everyone who contributed so much to GeekaFest, from our talented iconographic angel Naeema Zarif through the speakers and workshoppers, to Debbie for pulling together the small business showcase (and the businesses that came along and gave us their time) and, of course, everyone at The Shelter, Lochal Archade and TechnoCases PickaPic and Jacky's.

GeekFest TechnoCases

2011-09-21T09:25:00.000+03:00

Image via WikipediaSorry about all the GeekFest stuff this week, but it's a really packed event and stuff keeps happening. Normal service will be resumed next week, promise.

We’re joined at GeekFest this week by two TechnoCases, Pickapic and Jacky’s Electronics.

Pickapic is a Dubai-based startup with a smart service that lets you download their software and use it to create an album of your photography and then print it as a one-off, printing press quality, hardback book. You can take a look at their website linked here if you can’t wait for Thursday!

Jacky’s is using the opportunity to introduce people to its EcoExchange initiative. EcoExchange is a program that lets you take your old GeekJunk to Jacky’s, where they’ll offer you a price for it (where it’s worth anything!) and then either sell it on or dispose of it to ISO standards. There’s a good post on the program here on the Jacky’s Electronics blog. So you can bring any of your old gadgets (details of what they'll accept below) along to GeekFest at the New Shelter this Thursday and trade it in for Jacky's vouchers!

I must say, the whole scheme looks excellent and rather piqued my interest, so I thought I’d throw a few questions about EcoExchange at Jacky’s head of retail marketing, Manish Arora.

So will my old phone be worth more with the box, manual, CD and charger?
The products are usually recycled or re-furbished if in a usable condition. the box, manual, CD and charger therefore doesn’t fetch direct value. However, during the evaluation if the Battery, battery back cover and antenna (if applicable) are available then this results in better value

What sort of products can you recycle? Old PCs? Games consoles? Headphones? Printers?
Currently Laptops, tablets, mobiles, cameras, Mp3 players and gaming consoles are accepted for recycling under the program.

What wouldn’t you take to recycle?
TVs, Appliances and accessories.

What sort of price could I get for, say, an old iPhone 3G? Or a Nokia N86 in good nick?
This would depend on physical evaluation, working condition and age of the product.

Can you recycle stuff like cable? Old PCBs?
Currently we accept only the above stated items.

What price would you give me for a used IBM 3090 600E?*
This would depend on physical evaluation, working condition and age of the product.

Where do you do your recycling?
Jacky’s has partnered with Technocare, a company offering RMA programs to end of life product recovery and recycling solutions. Technocare is an award winning ISO 9000/14000 certified company backed by professionals with more than 15 years industry experience.

Am I right in thinking you’re unique in doing this in the UAE?
We were the first one to start the program, it has been followed by some of the other retailers.

Why did you start this initiative?
Owing to the responsibility that lies with us as a Retailer, in not only providing best in the class of products and services but also to provide appropriate end of life solutions for the products we sell.

GeekaFest - One for the Girls takes place Thursday, the 22nd September, from around 7.30pm onwards. You can get more information on Facebook (linked here) or Twitter (@GeekFestDubai). There's a Facebook event page, too, linked here.

(* I confess, the IBM 3090 600E question was me being a smartypants meanie - it's a bloody big old mainframe)

GeekFest Workshops - GeekShops!

2011-09-20T10:46:00.002+03:00

So you want to start your own business?

New to GeekFest and made possible by Shelter's funky new layout, which includes a closed off meeting room upstairs, we're hosting a series of three workshops for the more serious minded geek - this time around, they're focused around starting up your own business - you can get inspiration from the women who make up the Geeka Showcase (see yesteday's post)and then join in one of the three workshop events taking place upstairs from 8pm onwards. If you want to guarantee a seat at these (space is limited to an estimated 10-12 people), you should probably get in touch with one of the workshop leaders fast - their contacts are below!

8-8.30PM
Public Relations for startups
Mita Ray (Market Buzz Public Relations - @mita56)
Building public relations and communications into your startup plan is essential, but few startups feel they can afford professional communications. Mita has some solutions...

8.30-9PM
Human Resources - making those first hires

Ash Athawale (Senior Executive Consultant for IT, Reed Global)
From your first hire to world domination seems a long way, but how do you manage those first appointments and grow your team? Our team of HR specialists have some crucial answers to help you make probably some of the most crucial hiring decisions you'll ever face...
(Ash will be joined by Carolyn Bartz, Executive Consultant for HR at Reed Global. You can email Victoria.Wilcox(at)reedglobal (dot)com to ensure your name's on the door!)

9-9.30PM

So you think you want to start a company?

PK Gulati (Angel investor - @pkgulati)

Among other things the man behind The Indus Entrepeneurs in the UAE, angel investor and serial start-up fosterer PK Gulati looks at what you really, really need to know to make the decision to create a startup and then how to make it work. If think you've got an entrepeneurial bone in your body and want to do something about it, you'll need to be at this workshop.

Volunteers to run future GeekShops on topics close to your hearts are more than welcome to get in touch! Hit me up at @alexandermcnabb.

GeekaFest – The Skinny

2011-09-19T09:14:00.000+03:00

Wow.There’s going to be a lot going on over at the New Improved Formula Shelterthis Thursday as GeekaFest powers into girl-talking action! Please note the theme doesn't mean a women only event - those of the male persuasion are most welcome as, indeed, are those who remain uncertain...

In noparticular order then:

BOOKS

Pleasedo bring any unwanted old books with you as @devinadivecha and @tdallonsy arecollecting books for their fund raising drive for the Manzil special needsschool in Sharjah. They’re targeting 10,000 books collected and they’recurrently at 7,000 so you could really help with a box of those unwanted potboilers!!!

STUFF

Thenice chaps at Stuff Magazine have arranged to have free copies for everyone atGeekaFest! Doesn’t that make you feel all warm and fuzzy peach? Altogether nowahhhhh!

GAMEFEST

Onceagain powered by Bonkers Gamer Website Lochal Archade, GameFest will feature Team Fortress 2 and, forthe gentler-spirited Geeka, Child of Eden. There's a really cool area upstairs at Shelter that's just perfect for the Gamers to do their thing, too!

GEEKSHOPS

New to GeekFest and made possible by the funky new layout, which includes a closed off meeting room upstairs, we're hosting a series of three workshops for the more serious minded geek - this time focused around starting up your own business - you can get inspiration from the women who make up the Geeka Showcase (see below) and then join in one of the three workshop events taking place. If you want to guarantee a seat at these (space is limited to an estimated 10-12 people), you should probably get in touch with one of the workshop leaders fast!

8-8.30PM
Public Relations for startups
Mita Ray (Market Buzz Public Relations - @mita56)
Building public relations and communications into your startup plan is essential, but few startups feel they can afford professional communications. Mita has some solutions...

8.30-9PM
Human Resources - making those first hires
Ash Athawale (Senior Executive Consultant for IT, Reed Global)
From your first hire to world domination seems a long way, but how do you manage those first appointments and grow your team? Our team of HR specialists have some crucial answers to help you make probably some of the most crucial hiring decisions you'll ever face...
(Ash will be joined by Carolyn Bartz, Executive Consultant for HR at Reed Global. You can email Victoria.Wilcox(at)reedglobal (dot)com to ensure you're names on the door!)

9-9.30PM

So you think you want to start a company?

PK Gulati (Angel investor - @pkgulati)

TECHNOCASES

We’re joined at GeekFest this week by two Technology Showcases, Pickapic and Jacky’s Electronics.

Pickapic is a Dubai-based startup with a smart service that lets you download their software and use it to create an album of your photography and then print it as a one-off, printing press quality, hardback book. You can take a look at their website linked here if you can’t wait for Thursday!

Jacky’s is using the opportunity to introduce people to its EcoExchange initiative. EcoExchange is a program that lets you take your old GeekJunk to Jacky’s, where they’ll offer you a price for it (where it’s worth anything!) and then either sell it on or dispose of it to ISO standards. There’s a good post on the program here on the Jacky’s Electronics blog. So you can bring any of your old gadgets (details of what they'll accept below) along to GeekFest at the New Shelter this Thursday and trade it in for Jacky's vouchers!

GEEKATALKS

Inpossible order of appearance, starting at 8pm and kept to their 15 minute timeslots by the gentle ministrations of Monsignor Rupert Bumfrey, we have:

AmazingWomen

Knownto many as @amazingsusan, Susan Macaulay is a feminist, writer, speaker, coach,blogger, expatriate Canadian, citizen of the world, wannabe geek, humbletraveler, sometimes rabble rouser, self-proclaimed amazing woman AND socialmediapreneur.

Frombeing a self-proclaimed ‘blog virgin’ in 2008, she nowsinglehandedly (virtually), runs AmazingWomenRock.com (55,000 uniquevisits/month), three Facebook pages (combined fanship: 26,000), and threetwitter accounts (total following: 30,000). Find out how she did it, take awalk through the new amazingwomenrock.com and find out about @shequotes, her newestventure!

Film, culture and stuff

NaylaAl Khaja (@naylaalkhaja) possibly needs no introduction, but here we go anyway. Nayla Al Khajais the first woman film producer in the United Arab Emirates. The CEO ofD-SEVEN Motion Pictures and D-SEVEN FZ LLC, a marketing and design agency thatoffers full Media campaign and corporate branding services, Nayla has secured areputation for creating films that explore topics that skate close to thecomfort zones of Emirati culture – her latest award winning film, Malal (bored)looks at an Emirati woman whose honeymoon reveals the pressures of arrangedmarriages.

Thestate of autism in the UAE and fighting for change

Areporter working on Commercial Interior Design & Middle East Architectmagazines, Devina Divecha (@devinadivecha) is a keen photographer, food blogger and sci-fi fan. She’sinvolved in driving a series of initiatives to help people with autism in theUAE – a personal project with her autistic brother, fund raising for specialneeds education and a project to help families with special needs children. Andthat’s precisely what she’ll be talking about!

Steppin'the Heels of an Emiratiya blogger

Ajournalism graduate, Aida Al Busaidy’s official career began in 2003. A wellknown figure, Aida (@AidaAlB) has worked in TV, newspapers and communications and currentlyis a columnist with The National, as well as blogging ataidaaalb.posterous.com. She’ll be looking at the challenges and successes ofcommunications as an Emirati, as well as quite how your life is changed whenyou put it all online!

THEGEEKA SHOWCASE

Allwell known online, these nine small businesses have one thing in common – theentrepreneurs behind them are all female. They’ll be available to talk aboutwhat they do, sell you stuff, give tips on starting your own small business andall sorts! More details with links and all that good stuff over at GeordieArmani’s Blog linked here – many thanks to her for co-ordinating this smashing collection of talented and interesting entrepreneurial types!

Houseof Colour Dubai

Debbie and partner in colourful crime Janet Small willbe available to answer all your questions related to colour and personalimage. We offer services for both the male and the females of the speciesso don't be shy, come along and have a chat. We will also be showcasingour hand-made jewellery and a selection of fab hairslides and other bits andpieces.

FinancialPlanning in the UAE

Keren Bobker, the bestFemale Financial Advisor in the UAE, passionate about women's rights, writer ofOn Your Side Column in the National, regular contributor on the airwith Dubai Today, Night Line, and various other written publicationsin the UAE.

SimplyIrresistible

Mehnaz Anshah and her wonderful range of home madecakes, were they made with women in mind? Possibly but let's face it the menall love cake though some won't admit it, looking foward to seeing her range ofdelicious delicacies

Teezers

Mahjabeen Umar, a Mommy by Day a designer by night, with herfabulous iron on transfers, a great way to transform a plain item of clothing.

Spagenie

Simply the best Spa deals in town!

Mamavents

Public events news views and competitions for women andfamilies

Elan InteriorsLLC

Ratna Dutta will be showcasing her design studio and fit out business with the ability to create and implement entire concepts forInteriors.

MyExwardrobe

A fabulous new initiative for selling on your goodquality 'pre loved' clothes

TheEnglish Tea Party

Original vintage crockery available forhire for tea parties, established in the UK in 2006 and now available in theUAE.

NEWS

We’llalso have a surprise announcement or two to make on the day!!!

EATS

As usual, The Limetree will be doing 'the business'!

MORES

GeekaFest takes place Thursday, the 22nd September, from around 7.30pm onwards. You can get more information on Facebook (linked here) or Twitter (@GeekFestDubai). There's a Facebook event page, too, linked here.

Election Fever

2011-09-18T07:31:00.000+03:00

Image via WikipediaIt's been an interesting couple of weeks following the outdoor circuits of the UAE, as candidates for the twenty publicly elected seats of the 40-seat Federal National Council have been trying to get word out that they deserve to represent the people in the national advisory assembly.

This is the first time we've ever seen quite so much public brouhaha - there are some 468 candidates and, although they have a mandatory Dhs2 million ($550,000) campaign budget cap, it is hard to see how some haven't been overspending. It's certainly been the salvation of the outdoor advertising industry, which has been reeling ever since the real estate collapse tore the guts out of the overheated medium. The Arabic papers are filled to the brim with ads from candidates, many are expensive half page colour spots, others have been putting up election tents. Some have Facebook pages, others are advertising their BB Pins. Suppose at least it's better than scrawling them on cassette boxes and hurling them at women.

We're not exactly talking universal suffrage here: the UAE's electorate will consist of 129,274 people (59,991 are women), picked by the rulers' courts of the seven emirates. That's up from 6,600 people who participated in the last FNC election, held in 2006. While they will select 20 candidates for the advisory FNC, the other 20 will be directly selected by the rulers' courts.

And yet while the winds of change have been busily gusting around the region following the events of the 'Arab Spring' (a phrase, incidentally, I am coming to mildly dislike), there appears to be little appetite for that sort of thing around these parts. Speaking of his experience with voters (the 'electoral college') with Gulf News, Dubai candidate Abdullah Abdul Majeed Al Hajiri was quoted by the paper as saying: "Most of those I manage to talk to were either unaware of the FNC or have no burning issue for someone to represent them in the decision making process."

Gulf News' editor in chief, Abdul Hamid Ahmad, in an editorial published by the paper today, points out that not all of the Dubai candidates have been active. "They do not have the motivation and the drive to reach out to the people," he thunders.

Perhaps that's because the people are hunky dory and don't actually want their babies kissed or people making them outrageous promises that never materialise?

The voters go to the polls on the 24th September. It'll be fascinating to see what the turnout's like.

GeekFest Dubai and the New Shelter

2011-09-15T11:49:00.001+03:00

Here it is! The New Shelter is on 8th Street, behind the Spinneys Warehouses and Al Tayer Motors, in a big compound of grey-walled, blue-roofed warehouses.

The contact details are:

The Shelter
Warehouse 30, Al Serkal, Al Qouz
Phone: 043809040
Fax: 043809041

And GeekFest is taking place next Thursday, the 22nd, from around 7.30pm onwards. You can get more information on Facebook (linked here) or Twitter (@GeekFestDubai).

Security Scare

2011-09-13T12:28:00.002+03:00

The story linked here popped up in one of my feeds, not sure which. I read it with growing horror - a half-Arab, half-Jewish woman and two Indian men were reported for 'behaving suspiciously' on a flight that had landed in Detroit from Denver.

Note it had landed, not that it was waiting to take off.

The plane was moved to a secure area and all three were removed from it by armed officers. They were cuffed, searched, held in cells for hours, strip searched and interrogated. I do heartily recommend you follow the link above and read her account - it makes for frightening and depressing reading.

Given my own recent experiences with airport security, it once again made me wonder quite why we are all putting up with this. Totalitarianism and terrorism must not be allowed to dominate our societies, and yet with this type of 'security' that's just what's happening.

GeekaFest Cometh!

2011-09-12T10:26:00.001+03:00

GeekaFest 'One for the Girls' is to take place at The New Shelter in Al Quoz on Thursday the 22nd September. I've been there a couple of times now and I have to say I'm excited. The building is quite, quite mad - a wooden barn constructed inside a warehouse!!! It's a fabby space, ideal for GeekFest and a significant upgrade from dear Old Shelter.

The 'One for the Girls' theme is mainly down to the nature of the GeekTalks - all four talks will be by wimmin - more details soon. We're dreaming up some other stuff, so any suggestions, volunteers or brilliant schemes are more than welcome! There's loads of space at the New Shelter, so we can accommodate most madcap schemes!!!

GameFest will once again be powered by LochalArchade and the good news here is that the New Shelter has a much bigger area with lots of power sockets and seats to support an expanded scheme.

We also have rather grandiose cupcake plans, but the LimeTree will once again be providing of its finest!

There's also a dedicated workshop room and we'll be using this to host a series of workshops on small business technology, part of an ongoing scheme of workshops that Shelter has dreamed up, being run by Bon Education. If you'd like to run a workshop, do get in touch (@alexandermcnabb on Twitter is probably best!) - we're looking at three 45 minute sessions aimed at helping people to implement websites, build better SEO, monetise activism and other impossible things to do.

Where IS the New Shelter, you ask? It's behind Al Tayer Motors in Al Quoz - you basically turn right before you get to Al Tayer, left to head towards the Third Line Gallery and The Courtyard and hang a right just after you pass it - take the next right and turn into the warehouses directly on your right. There's a one way system inside the compound, so follow that to the end of the first alley, turn left and then turn left again and the Shelter is on your right. See? Simple!

Don't worry. We'll work on a map.

The Dubai Speeding Festival

2011-09-11T10:32:00.000+03:00

Image by Camera Slayer via FlickrDubai Police have finally clarified the traffic fine discount story and confirmed to The National that a 30% discount on all motoring violations will be available for the coming three months to December 11th.

You have to pay all your fines at once and, you'll note from the story 'Police are working with the Ministry of Interior to allow people in other emirates to get their discount when paying Dubai fines' - or, in other words, quite how this will work if you live in Abu Dhabi and want to get your discount.has yet to be quite worked out.

I have to confess to being a tad puzzled by this one. Cars here have to be registered annually, with a road-worthiness test and a registration process that involves you paying all outstanding fines. So if the police are giving a discount to encourage people to pay their outstanding fines, that must surely mean people aren't actually registering their cars (because you can't avoid paying the fines if you do register your car).

But then surely you just look out for people who aren't displaying the up to date registration stickers on their car bumpers and nick 'em if they've got no registration and outstanding fines. Even better, look up people who have registered vehicles and who haven't renewed their registrations and then pay 'em a house visit with a Black Maria in tow.

Anyway, the discount will reduce the 'entry level' traffic fine of Dhs700 to Dhs490, so you might as well make hay while the sun shines and cough up.

If this is successful we could maybe look forward to having an annual event. You could have fireworks and things, even raffle off a Lexus every day. Hell, you could even have a mascot! Speedhesh!

This looks like Beirut!

2011-09-05T11:20:00.001+03:00

Image via WikipediaI have long been meaning to post this but for one reason or another the timing has never seemed quite propitious. Today, the omens augur well.

I follow an awful lot of blogs around the region. I don't always comment as often as I'd like to (comments are always nice, they let people know there are eyeballs out there), but I'm usually pretty diligent at dipping into Netvibes and seeing who's been updating.

One of my favourite treats is Jad Aoun's blog, Lebanon: Under Rug Swept. A great highlight for me is Jad's one-man campaign to stop people using the cliché 'Looks like Beirut' to describe any given scene of destruction or degradation. Apart from finding the mildly obsessive spirit of Jad's endeavour attractive (he snail mails a 'looks like Beirut' certificate to offenders, as well as outing them on the blog), I'm amused by how, over twenty years after the end of the civil war, people are still using the phrase.

It's something I have encountered in my writing life, an oddly jaundiced Western view of the Middle East in general and certainly of Beirut in particular. I have had agents rejecting the manuscript of my second serious novel, with the rather over-complicated working title of Beirut, based on the fact that people don't want to hear about war zones. (I am currently represented by Robin Wade of Wade and Doherty, who is shopping Beirut around various London publishers) The book's about an international hunt for two missing nuclear warheads and is set in Hamburg, Spain, London, Brussels, Malta, Albania, the Greek Islands and, last but by no means least, that most sexy of Mediterranean cities, Beirut.

I love Beirut. I always look forward to visits with anticipation and excitement. I don't live there, so I don't have to experience the city's everyday frustrations (and they are legion) - I can just drop in and fill myself up with wandering around the streets, enjoying Ottoman architecture and the vibrant street life. I wander around stealing locations for books or snapping vignettes, exploring the fascinating diversity of the place, from the flashy shopfronts of Hamra and Verdun to the labyrinthine ethnicity of Bourj Hammoud. The city sparkles and jostles, stretched out from the long corniche along the splendid Mediterranean up into the mountains, all presided over by the great white-capped bulk of Mount Sassine. At night it lights up, bars and restaurants serving a constant tide of laughing, happy people - Gemayzeh no longer quite the place to be it once was (and Munot before it), while Hamra is becoming busier. It feels good to be there.

So I am always pained to get reactions to Beirut like 'This gritty and realistic novel is set in a war torn city' or 'We don't think the British public would be interested in a conflicted city like Beirut'. The first comment made my blood boil even more because the book is most certainly not based in a war torn city. It's based in a sexy, modern city that fizzles with life. (The fact that much of its infrastructure teeters just to the right side of disaster just adds frisson...) The comment just showed the reader had, at best, skimmed a few bits before spurning me like one would spurn a rabid dog. What made it worse was the reference, twenty years after the fact, to the place being war torn.

In fact, thinking about it, I may well just refer any future perpetrators directly to Jad!

Trapped

2011-09-04T12:02:00.000+03:00

Image via Wikipedia
We are blessed in Northern Sharjah in that we are surrounded by ADNOC and Emarat petrol stations - the closure of every EPPCO and ENOC station in the Northern Emirates has hitherto had no practical affect on our lives.

Until I left Dubai yesterday with no petrol. I didn't realise until we'd hit 'murder mile', the road that links Dubai to Sharjah. We had travelled 30km with the petrol light on (I always zero the trip when it comes on so I know I've got 30km to get petrol in), which was not good news. I have once travelled 32km without petrol but I'm far too scared of running out to ever push it further than that.

There are two reasons why running out of petrol is a major fear factor. My first, and principle, reason is that I could never live with myself for running out of petrol whilst driving in one of the world's major oil producing countries. The second is that running out of petrol means getting a taxi and then finding an open petrol station. Now, in the UK I know they all sell nice red fuel cans. I have never seen one on sale here and don't know where I'd get a suitable container from. I've seen petrol sloshed into all manner of odd containers at petrol stations, but I've never seen an actual petrol container used. The prospect of having to dance around trying to find a spare container at least marginally fit for purpose doesn't fill my heart with stuff.

I have only run out petrol once before in my life, and that was on purpose. The publishing company I worked for in the mid-eighties had gone bust following an acrimonious boardroom putsch and The Evil Receivers had demanded the prompt return of my company car. They got it too - empty from driving around the building and coasted nicely to its parking spot after the engine had died. (I still have the cheque for 67p from them in settlement of hundreds of pounds of outstanding expenses).

Of course, southern Sharjah is the land of EPPCO and ENOC. Driving around, pricked by increasing desperation I started to realise just how this whole closure thing must be hacking a load of people off - the odometer kept ticking as we tried to head towards where we knew there was an Emarat station (but which I had no hope of reaching before the inevitable cough of a dying Pajero was heard). 34km, 40km and by now my hands were sweating. I have never seen so many EPPCO and ENOC stations in my life. They seemed to be around every street corner. And then, at last, at 43km, an Emarat station hoved into view, with cars cascading down onto the street as they queued and jostled for fuel.

It did rather leave me wishing fervently that ADNOC would hurry up and take 'em all over...