Never Before In History Have So Many Readers Bought So Many Books From So Many Authors.

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There have been a number of recent reports celebrating the ‘undeath’ of print, with a reported decline in the growth of ebooks and a growth in print books. It is, of course, total bunkum.

All of the figures breathlessly trotted out to a compliant and all too credulous media are based on sales of traditionally published books by large publishers. America has been wooed by figures from Nielsen which only cover books with ISBN numbers (omitting, therefore, every single book published straight to Kindle), while the UK has been assured that a sales decline among the big five publishers is representative of the market (when it most clearly is not).

It all rather reminds me of the knight who won’t stand aside in Monty Python’s Holy Grail. ‘Rubbish,’ he declaims after his arm’s hacked off, ‘’tis but a scratch.’

Now I, oddly enough, don’t actually care what format you prefer to read your books in. Whether you love the smell of printed books or believe the earth is flat, that’s fine by me. I don’t buy into this whole triumphalism of print over ‘e’. It’s all a bit like the Mac vs PC stuff: too much pointless partisanship. The consumer will, when the smoke blows away, dictate what format of content they prefer.

The greatest danger of all, to my mind, is that the book itself will decline. But the sight of traditional publishers, desperately bobbing about in the sea, clinging to the wooden spar of traditional print, warehouse, sale and return – the model that has sustained most of them through long, long careers - pricing ebooks at unreasonably high levels and then pointing to consumer reluctance to pay those prices as a sign that the format itself is broken, is more than I can bear.

Never before in history have so many readers bought so many books from so many authors. The truth of the quiet revolution taking place is that people who otherwise would never have got their books to market (me, for example) are now able to share their work with global audiences. There are thousands of people out there finding new readers and millions of readers finding new authors whose work they enjoy.

Don’t get me wrong – every lunatic who thinks they've written the best thing since War and Peace now escapes the qualitative filtering process, so there’s lots of rubbish out there, too. But I have never met anyone who could put their hand on their heart and say they haven’t ever bought a traditionally published book that was utter rubbish.

The processes have changed. The filters have changed. As with every aspect of the digital communications revolution, we are expected to take more responsibility for the content we consume and share. We are editors more than ever before, we are the filtration process. It’s not perfect, there’s plenty of room for evolution. But it’s still all very, well, punk and I love it for that.

Never before in history have so many readers bought so many books from so many authors. And almost half of them are independently published by authors or small presses - with the penetration of ebooks in this incredibly diverse and dynamic new market blossoming thanks to low price points that reward readers and, critically, reward authors just as well, if not better, than their 10% share of a printed book's cover price through a big publisher.

Decline. Pfft.

Beirut - An Explosive Thriller And The Dynamics Of Free Vs Amazon Advertising

Warning. Very long post about book marketing.

So here's the skinny. In Mid-March, I dropped the price of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and Olives - A Violent Romance to FREE on Apple, B&N, Kobo et al.

This then forced Amazon's Amazing Algorithms to 'price match' the books and make them free on Amazon. This is not something Amazon lets you do otherwise, only letting you make a book free for 5 days per quarter if it's enrolled in Kindle Unlimited and therefore exclusive to Amazon.

Note, as per my previous post on this, you have to change to the 35% royalty to do this, otherwise Amazon gets shirty.

Amazon's big machines decided to chop Beirut and Olives in the US store (.com) but only Olives in the UK store (.co.uk). The volumes are markedly different: 30 free Olives downloaded in the UK compared to 700 in the US.

As of today, Beirut is now free in the UK store. You can go here and get it. Do please feel free to share the link on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or another other platform where you think your followers, friends and family might enjoy a fabulous international spy thriller packed with guns and bombs and babes and stuff. [endplug]

So what has all this 'free' told us?

For a start, people have found Beirut a lot more attractive than Olives: 3,000 downloads compared to 700. As you can see from the covers side by side above, the title and cover of Olives don't really cut the mustard. Not sure what I can do about that, to be honest. However, it would appear Beirut got a bit of a lift up on some unseen list or another, because its early trajectory was amazing, speeding it to #1 free thriller on Amazon.com for a few halcyon days.

What has the knock-on effect been? A handful of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy sales have been bubbling along, 14 copies in April and so far 4 copies in May. Sales of A Decent Bomber and Birdkill have also slowly started to lift (6 and 7 copies respectively). However, Beirut's downloads have slowly declined, dropping from a relatively steady couple of weeks at 30-50 copies, then a couple of weeks ranging from 15-30 copies and now running at 5-15 copies per day.

There have been a couple of additional reviews of Beirut and Olives alike on Amazon, 4* and 5*, thank you. But the maths is amazing - almost 3,000 downloads to drive 10 book sales and two reviews.

Generally, as my books have got better (IMHO), their sales numbers and therefore number of reviews has declined. Which is wonderful, really.

Amazon Advertising

I've also been running an advertising campaign for Birdkill on Amazon over the past week. This has been interesting, particularly compared to the experimental Twitter campaign I ran. I have kept relatively quiet on other platforms to better isolate and judge the results and impact of the Amazon campaign.

$100 of my hard-earned spent a while ago on Twitter was targeted not so much at keywords as at followers of a number of book promoters, publishers and book recommendation accounts. That resulted in 29,707 impressions and 90 clicks. I think I sold one book, so we're doing better than McNabb's Law of Clicks would have us believe should be the case.

I thought Amazon advertising was likely to be more impactful. Here, you're targeting people at the moment of browsing and purchase and you can target by genre. If you think about it, that's nigh on perfect. It's like being on someone's shoulder in a bookshop with the ability to whisper, 'That one. There. Birdkill by McNabb. Do it.'

Amazon lets you serve up a number of ad formats, placing the ads on other book pages, newsletters, into Kindles and so on. Like Google's Adwords, you bid for your clicks. In my genres for Birdkill, (Literature & Fiction: Action & Adventure; Mystery, Thriller & Suspense: Conspiracies, Mystery, Paranormal as you ask) the bidding was in the range US$ 0.40-0.50. In reality, I had to raise my bid to $0.55 to start getting impressions and eventually raised it to $0.60. My average cost per click has come in at $0.53.

The bidding works just like Google: your bid is accepted above the second highest bid, rather than just topping all bids.

So far, we're not quite done yet, Amazon has yielded 22,057 impressions, 118 clicks and two book sales and we're about 60 bucks into my budget. That's better than Twitter and again better than McNabb's law of clicks, but it's a pretty impressive catalogue of fail - Birdkill is a well packaged book and to see 118 clicks turn into 116 bounces is pretty depressing.

There has been no appreciable impact in the sale (or download) of any of my other titles since the campaign started. Unless you count one copy of Space...

Here are the Birdkill ads in the various formats Amazon supports, all auto-generated out of the base data you supply them - you don't have individual control over each creative:

 245 x 250

Didn't know those paltry two reviews would show. Five stars, mind, which is nice, but not enough reviews really. Funnily enough, that doesn't seem to have affected the CTR (Click Through Rate to you, mate), which has been just over 0.5%.

270 x 150

I like this one best of all. Those reflections are right classy...

270 x 200

300 x 250

402 x 250

980 x 55

And, finally, I is in ur Kindle...

It's worth bearing these in mind when you look at your advertisement format and the text you're planning to use... The 'astounds and horrifies' line did quite well on my Twitter campaign, which is why I decided to re-use it here. Do people want to be 'astounded and horrified'? Who knows? All this stuff is merely trial and error. If it were a science they'd teach it in school.

And so at the end of a two month campaign of experimental free offers and advertising campaigns targeting keywords and followers on Twitter (as well as messing around with a lot of organic Twitter targeting: ads.twitter.com/user/yourusername is a powerful dashboard for measuring the impact of tweets) and a genre-targeting campaign on Amazon, I am none the wiser. Although arguably better informed.

If you know anything wot I don't, or have any new angles on the above, please do feel free to share.

And don't forget to drop an Amazon review when you've read your free books!

Birdkill, Space And Starting Writing

'What started you writing?' It's a question I've come to dread. I want to print out the answer on a sheet of A4 and have it ready to hand it over to the journalist asking that most lazy of questions to put to a writer. It's like when you get married and want to punch the 50th person who asks you what married life's like. And then I feel guilty, because someone asking you questions is a good thing. The alternative, nobody asking you questions, isn't so good for book promotion, capisce?

I love the story of Prince Philip, returning from an overseas trip, who is accosted by a cub journalist who somehow has made his way to the front of the scrum and attracted his attention.
'Prince Philip sir! Prince Philip sir!' Our hero has a recorder held out.
The bushy-browed figure leans down towards his tormentor. 'Yes?'
Our man is rather like a dog chasing a car, in that now he has his prize, he doesn't quite know what to do with it. He gathers himself manfully. 'H-How was your flight, sir?'
Philip smiles. 'Have you ever flown yourself, young man?'
Our man is puzzled. 'Yes, sir. Many times.'
'Well, it was just like that.' Says Philip, turning on his heel and moving on.

I didn't have an idea what I was going to write, really, only that I had a vague notion of spoofing those international thrillers where our man is chased across Europe by a shadowy cabal of evil wrong-doers, saves humanity and gets the girl. The book would be amusing, only because I am easily bored and essentially shallow and so thought myself incapable of writing something literary and nuanced. According to my Amazon reviews for the resulting novel, Space, I'm also incapable of writing a funny book.

And yet it still makes me laugh when I read it today. It's often irredeemably silly, it makes a number of errors I have since learned to spot and remove from my writing and it makes the, in conventional publishing terms, fundamental error of not taking itself - or its reader - too seriously. And yet there's a sort of cry of 'Yahoooooo' about it, think small boy kicking autumn leaves and you're half-way there. The book has energy, ambition and a delightful way of killing off cherished characters that I must admit I have rather retained.

There are a number of high points that still tickle me pink. The police interview with a suburban housewife who has lost the ten inch 'thing' from her bedroom drawer, sold to her by the gorgeous and pneumatic sex worker Kylie - who is without a single brain cell to bother her - still cracks me up (remember I'm fundamentally weak-minded). There's the divorced copper with a perspiration problem and the poor middle-class doctor who is the unwilling victim of 99% of the book's set-ups. The angriest policeman in England is quite fun, counterpointed by Ivan Litvanoff, a particularly evil Russian spy. His encounter with Nigel, a camp MI5 safe-house housekeeper with a Prince Albert, ends with a most satisfying gag. A particular high for me was black leather cat-suited CIA operative Neon Womb, who has a 'moment' every time she kills. She was my female side coming out. Oh, and I'm forgetting the house-cleaning spy from Vientiane, the vengeful Véronique. Not to mention former French resistance fighter René the Horse, the character who featured in the short story that was my first attempt to write a book. He had to have a place in Space, and so he does. Oh! And grumpy handbag-wielding galleon Mrs Bartholdy...

Oh, gosh. There's quite a lot in there, really. It's amazing what you can do with 100,000 words when you put your mind to it...

Anyway, I'm rambling. Space is free on Amazon.com from noon today for the next five days. So if you want a free copy (saving you £0.99, cheapskate) or want to let a friend know they can get a copy, fill your boots. I'm not claiming the book's perfect or representative of my later, more serious work, right? But you can let me know how it went for you by leaving a review and I won't mind at all. Even if you don't think it's funny...

Smash It Up

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For the first time in my book writing career, I have been censored. And it's not by who you'd think it would be.

Birdkill is now available on all platforms, both ebook and paperback. That's Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iBooks and all major ebook retailers. From 1 March 2016 the paperback will be in stock at WH Smith in the United Arab Emirates and available on order from any bookshop in the world by quoting ISBN 978-1523986736.

I use a 'multi-publishing platform' called Smashwords to manage the distribution of the ePub book, which avoids having to deal directly with B&N, Apple, Kobo and all the others. Smashwords has always been core to my distribution, offering as it does an alternative to Amazon which, although I am broadly in favour, does tend towards the Evil Empire a tad too much to make one want to wholeheartedly endorse it as a sole platform.

Imagine, then, my horror when Smashwords came back and informed me last night Birdkill had failed its review process. What was the book's cardinal sin? That it makes mention of the Kindle and other publishing platforms. This makes Smashwords' partners 'uncomfortable', apparently. So in order to pass Smashwords' review process, I had to remove the text at the end that tells readers where they can buy my books.

The wicked words in question:

Please do not link or refer to any other digital download source other than Smashwords. Our retail partners don't want to see links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or mention of the Kindle or Nook.

But hang on a second. That's the content of my book. It's my right to publish what the hell I want, isn't it? Surely that's what all this free speech gobbledegook is about? Who cares what their partners are comfortable with or do or don't 'want to see' or 'mention'? It's a fact the book's available on Kindle and Nook. So you're masking the truth here. It's commercial censorship.

You're insisting I don't mention your rivals in my content. What if I want to have one of my characters enjoying reading a novel on their Kindle? Or having fun shopping on Amazon.com?

Amazon, for all its Dark Empire status, has never for any reason whatsoever asked me to amend the content of one of my books.

The UAE's National Media Council (An 'Islamic' Middle Eastern Arab government 'censoring' my books before they can be printed here in the UAE) has never - despite the books containing plenty of content you'd think they'd find uncomfortable to say the least - asked me to amend the content of one of my books. They have never removed or requested I remove one F, C, drugs or prostitution reference. And the books are liberally laced with those.

It took US 'home of free speech' publishing platform Smashwords - ironically the platform I use to assert my freedom of choice - to insist I amend the content of one of my books. To censor me.

It's an apparently small thing and yet at the same time it's a HUGE thing. And - I would submit - it's not a good thing at all.

Footnote: Just for clarity, we're not talking links here. The offending text in the book was:

Available from Amazon on Kindle and in paperback from Amazon, Book Depository or from your local bookstore on order quoting the book’s ISBN.

Also available as an ebook from iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and other fine online retailers.

And if you can find the line in Smashwords' TOS that says you can't say Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kindle or Nook in your book's end matter, please do put me right. Because I can't...

Authors Bleed For Art

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The BBC ran a neat piece yesterday, exploring the money British authors are making. Pal Taline shared it, which was kind of her. When I had finished wiping the tears from my eyes, I got past the headline and started to read the actual piece.

It's not pretty.

The top 5% of authors earned 42% of all the money authors earned. And they pulled, on average, £100,000 each. That's as good as it gets. The big time. Tickertapesville. Yay.

Now, I'm not saying we should be turning our pretty little noses up at £100k. Far from it, let the 100k's flow like the very rivers I say. But it rather reinforces the warning I give whenever I do book writing workshoppy things: chances are, overwhelmingly, this book writing thang isn't going to make you rich. If you think the road to Scrooge McDuckness is paved with words, you are about to get a gilt-edged wake up call.

I have quoted it so often, I've forgotten the source of the statistic: 98% of books in print sell less than 500 copies. And that - as the BBC points out in its piece - is getting even worse as a flood of thousands of writers washes around in the market. It's hard to build a stand-out position in this tide of relentless 'read my book' imprecation. Only a very few 'break out' - and while the average full-time writer earned £11,000 according to the Beeb, the vast majority self-published authors won't make one percent of that.

For myself, I don't care. I still prefer getting emails from Amazon with royalties to getting cut and past rejections.

But it's another reminder that you'd better be in this book thing for the love of it...

Amazon, Createspace And When Customer Service Goes Heroic

So my third serious novel, Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy is only available online, there's no Middle East edition. Don't you just loathe people who start sentences with 'so'? Me too.

You can buy Shemlan as a paperback from Amazon.com (and the various Amazon dots), Barnes and Noble, The Book Depository or order it from any independent bookshop in the world by citing the ISBN number 978-1493621934.

It's a rather smashing book. I strongly suggest you do one of the above. The kitten might just make it through, see? This here handy link to the buy links for the book shows you where to get it as a paperback, Kindle ebook, Nook, on your iPad or, in fact, as any other ebook reader format ebook. But the paperback can be yours wherever you live, from Alaska to Kamtchatka. The Book Depository even ships it FREE OF CHARGE!

Do it now, you'll feel better. It's okay, I can wait. Here: I'll even do a reminder link.

Right? Great, thanks. Anyway, the reason you can buy Shemlan as a paperback anywhere in the world is because of a clever little Amazon owned operation called Createspace. Createspace allows authors to mount their book online and then prints out books to order using POD technology - Print (or Publish) On Demand. So they put an ISBN number in one end and a printed paperback with a nice glossy cover filled with wonderful words comes out, gets put in a shipping box, addressed to you and arrives a day or so later.

So when you hit that 'buy' link on Amazon or any other serioo book website, Createspace prints your book to order and despatches it to you.

A POD book is barely different enough from a booky book printed on novel paper for most readers to notice a difference. The quality is just fine.

It's all pretty marvellous, really.

However, there's trouble in paradise. People in the UAE hate buying books online - and Amazon hates selling ebooks to the Middle East. So most people don't bother buying the thing, they wait for me to have stock and buy 'em direct from me or just don't bother at all. For this reason - including a couple of upcoming events I'm doing - I bought 20 from Createspace earlier this year. They're more expensive to print than booky books, no surprises there, really, and so cost about Dhs30 a copy landed. That's too expensive to make traditional book distribution make any sense, 'cos disties take 50% and so with a cover price of Dhs60 dufus here doesn't make any money. Not, incidentally, that I have to. But I sell 'em direct and at signings and so on.

My books never turned up. I kept popping up at Sharjah Post Office so full of hope and optimism it was starting to remind me of back in the day when I used to go there to pick up the inevitable wodge of rejection slips. Months passed. Nada.

So I eventually told Createspace about it this week. And within the hour they'd mailed me back, said terribly sorry and promised to ship me a replacement batch out priority. I have to admit, I was impressed.

But that was nothing to how I felt today when DHL rocked up at the office with a box of 20 books. They DHLed them to me! How beyond the call of duty is that? I got my 20 books FOUR days later!

I emailed them to say thank you. They mailed back:

It is because of comments like yours that we strive to be the very best. Thank you for your very kind feedback! Without members like you, we could not continue to provide the service you have come to expect from us.

Your comments are greatly appreciated, and I sincerely thank you for choosing us for your self-publishing needs.  

Best regards,

Abu-Bakr
CreateSpace Member Services

Now you might call me easily impressed, but I'm blown away. Totally. I'm grinning like a Cheshire Cat who's just done a major hit of Amyl and found out in that very instant he's won the Lotto and Kate Bush is coming to tea naked.

If you want to buy a book, BTW, be my guest! Just hit me up at the usual @alexandermcnabb. I'm off to see if I can eat dinner with this grin in place.

BOOK POST: Shemlan and the Big C

Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy is about a man with terminal cancer whose journey into his past  to find the lost love of his life stirs up a hornet's nest that threatens to kill him before the disease does.

I so far have not had, but am fully expecting, the reaction 'But I don't want to read a book about someone dying of cancer.'

I genuinely hadn't given it a moment's thought until I hit the 'go' button on the various publishing platforms I've used. But then I've never really set out to make life easy for myself with this whole book thing.

I can even sympathise with that reaction. I suffered it myself to a certain degree when the book was being conceived.

Jason Hartmoor was born when Barry Cook came to stay with us back in 2008. I posted about his visit on the blog a while afterwards and I do heartily recommend you take a read. Barry had been fighting off cancer for ten years and was desperately ill. I had dreaded the visit - we knew we were going to be playing host to a terminally ill cancer patient and had both steeled ourselves for a pretty hellish three days. We were to be totally blindsided by what happened next.

"I didn't stop laughing, or smiling, for the next 72 hours. Not only were our visitors delightful company, Barry was nothing short of inspirational. Although he'd get the odd twinge of pain in his back and needed to take enzymes to aid his digestion, he was more on top of a disease so chronic that an x-ray of his skeleton showed the cancer was so widespread it was like 'someone had thrown a handful of sticky rice grains at it' than I could ever have imagined. He'd been fighting it for ten years and was still beating it back."

And so was born the Roxanol and enzyme popping Jason Hartmoor. The resemblance ends there, Barry was a charismatic, laughing man with enough charm and twinkle for ten. But I had been building a 'challenged' character and Barry's condition - with its inevitable end - wriggled its way into that character. I think Barry himself crept into Hartmoor every now and then - Jason's lighter, more human moments are probably Barry breaking through.

I've often talked about how authors 'steal' people. This is the ultimate example, stealing a dying man. But blag away I did. My only defence is that it wasn't intentional.

I didn't want to make Hartmoor's condition harrowing or graphic in itself, at least in part because Barry had shown me having cancer doesn't necessarily mean every day is spent recalling your last chemo session or the day you first found out. After ten years, it had settled into a sort of 'business as usual' for him. Hartmoor gets tired: he fatigues easily and has to depend on The Hated Stick more than he would like to - increasingly so as the book progresses. He's frail, his routines are those of a man who depends absolutely on his medication - particularly the painkillers. But his disease has become a fact of life for him, a constant companion he has reached a sort of understanding with.

The constancy of Roxanol, by the way, was the reason I was so taken by the cover image, by Australian artist Gerrard King. But more of that another time...

So I wouldn't let the fact there's a man with cancer at the heart of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy stop you reading it. In fact, I'd rather like to think it was yet another reason TO read it.

The link's to the right of this post. Do it now before you forget...

Book Post - So Wearily To Market

When I finished writing Space in 2002 or thereabouts, the idea of writing a synopsis after having dashed down 100,000 words of prose was really rather horrifying. I staggered duly to my feet and got on with it in the end, but I wasn't happy. Finishing a book should really just be about that. Finishing.

Now, of course, when you finish writing a book it's just the start rather than the finish. Probably as much effort again has to go into finding readers. And they are becoming increasingly adept at not being found, I can tell you.

So rather than putting my feet up and eating my way through the Hotel Chocolat website, I'm sending Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy out to reviewers - a list of a tad over a hundred book blogs being my secret weapon. Several of the blogs that were extant at the start of this year as I sent out review copies of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller are now dead blogs, the bloggers having presumably succumbed under the dead weight of thousands of needy authors sending in their hopes and dreams in the form of ePub and Kindle files. It's worse now, the publishing houses have joined in and now court book bloggers like love-lorn lorikeets.

I'll be dreaming up other schemes, too, of course, including readings and shouting abusive gibberish at any audience that'll have me - I am, once again, popping up at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature as well as booked to appear on radio show Talking Of Books.

As I've said before - it's lucky I'm not shy. I have author pals who are altogether less outgoing and they find this stuff painful to point where it provokes much existential angst. I enjoy it very much. So if you're in a book club, do feel free to hit me up!

Book Post - Populating Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy

Image via CrunchBase

So we pushed the button yesterday, but even in the 'Internet age' these things can take time. We're looking at three editions of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy: Smashwords, Kindle and CreateSpace. Here's what happens when you press 'go' on a book.

Smashwords
Smashwords populates pretty much instantaneously, provided your documents are formatted in the required fashion. Smashwords' own guide to formatting is a free download and reading it will save you time and hassle. I choose not to publish to Kindle using Smashwords but use Amazon's own Kindle Direct Publishing. Once 'Meatgrinder', Smashwords' multi-publishing engine, has done its work, the book is available on the Smashwords site as an ebook compatible with Sony, Kobo, Barnes and Noble's Nook and Apple's iBooks. So you can go to Smashwords here and buy Shemlan.

Smashwords also populates the relative stores - B&N, Kobo and iBooks. But that takes a good deal longer - it's part of the 'Premium Catalog' and requires quality checking by Smashwords before that goes ahead. So for now, it's just Smashwords, not the retail sites. That can take a week or so.

Kindle Direct Publishing
Kindle takes a while longer, promising 12-24 hours but usually beating that quite comfortably. In fact, the Kindle book of Shemlan was up a few hours after Smashwords. So you can go here to buy Shemlan from Amazon in the UK or here to buy it from Amazon.com. There are now Amazons around Europe and even further afield, including Japan, but posting all those links is just too exhausting. I have never sold a book in Japan.

CreateSpace
This is the print edition of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy and takes longest. Createspace is currently still reviewing the book files. Once they've passed the files (an automated check is performed when you press 'go' but they still do a manual check following that), they'll populate the Createspace store, Amazon and then expanded distribution outlets such as The Book Depository. This can take a couple of weeks.

While that's happening, it's down to compiling the list of reviewers/book blogs. And yes, you're all in for a rough old ride because I'm in promo mode now and that means bugging everyone and their uncles to run around screaming 'buy Alexander McNabb's novel Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy now now now!'

It's not about you buying it, see - it's about you getting everyone you know to tell everyone they know to buy it!!!

Book Post - Shemlan Chalks Up LitFest First!

Gerrard King's amazing pill skull image, 

wot graces the cover of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy.

I didn't realise until the dirty deed was done, but my third Middle East spy thriller, Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy, today became the first book ever to be published at the Emirates Airline Festival Of Literature's spiritual and temporal home, the Dar Al Adab.

Today's workshop, part of the LitFest's 'Open Door' series of workshops and writerly things, was for the Hunna ladies writer's group and explored how to publish a book - both getting an agent and publisher and doing it yourself.

As part of the latter bit, I showed how to format, upload and manage a printed edition using CreateSpace, a Kindle book using MobiPocket Creator and Kindle Direct Publishing and also an Epub standard ebook (for Kobo, B&N and Apple among others) using Mark Coker's brilliant Smashwords.

What better example than the book I have just finished editing and proofing?

All three took well under half an hour, underlining how essentially easy and accessible self-publishing platforms are these days.

So Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy is now published - available here right now for your Kobo, Sony or iPad and here for your Kindle.


It's a funny old feeling, actually. Shemlan became something of a project on hold after I decided to self-publish Olives - A Violent Romance and then Beirut - An Explosive Thriller. Shemlan completes the Levant Cycle (three books set roughly contiguously but NOT a trilogy) and comes at the end of a lot of enjoyable but hard work.

I'm wondering what people will make of it, actually. I love it to death (obviously!) and think it sits somewhere between Olives and Beirut. I've already had people express strong preferences for both of those books at the expense of the other, Gerald Lynch appears to be the Middle East espionage thriller equivalent of Marmite and the strength of feeling he provokes from readers can take a chap aback occasionally. It's fair to say his behaviour in Shemlan will do little to dampen down the love/hate debate.

Needless to say, one will be having a quietly celebrative quaff this evening...

Book Post: Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy - The Cover

The cover of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy.

Australian artist Gerrard King created the cover image for Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy. I stumbled across it during a session of frustrated Googling, having found various images that just wouldn't really do the job. I was looking for a combination of pills and death, two themes that run through the book, and you'd hardly find a better themic concatenation than Gerrard's decorated skull - one of a series he created as part of a perhaps worryingly extensive exploration of the artistic potentialities of skulls.

I had tested a tentative image or two with my pals over on the mailing list only to find them definitely 'meh' about the ideas. But this one really does the job - it's got impact, vavavoom and lipstick bullet following kabamm - in my humble opinion.

The image file (1600x2500 resolution both for Kindle and Smashwords, people) is ready to upload, as is the full Createspace cover. I have yet to finalise the .prc format text file for Kindle, the .docx file for Smashwords (all Meatginder-ready) and the Createspace text file. That's today's job.

And then tomorrow I'll be pushing various buttons at the 'How to self-publish a book' workshop at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature's spiritual and temporal home, the lovely and tranquil barjeel-laden Dar Al Adab tomorrow. The Hunna ladies group of writers will be gathered to watch in puzzlement as I wrestle with the various feersum endjinns involved in actually making a book happen in this brave new eworld of ours.

And then, gradually, pixels will pixellate. It's all quite exciting, really...

Book Post - Shemlan On Target

As they climbed up into the hills above Beirut, Hartmoor gazed out of the car window at the buildings around them. No scent of spring for this trip, he reflected, the February rain greying out the scenery. Misty tendrils snaked around the treetops. He remembered his first journey on this road, past the sprawling village of Bchamoun at the foothills then the road winding through the villages clinging to the plunging gorges of the Chouf Mountains. Now, as then, the houses in the villages seemed stacked up on top of each other, densely packed on the steep hillsides.
To the side of the road ran a concrete storm drain that crossed the tarmac as the camber and direction changed, the grating covering it clanging under the taxi’s wheels. The taxi hit a pothole hard, the engine note jumping and a dark cloud left behind as the driver changed down a gear. The rosary hanging on his rear mirror jangled.
They passed the village of Ainab, Hartmoor marvelling at the number of new stone-clad villas, gated developments and building sites overlooking Beirut spread out far below. A blue sign proclaimed ‘Shimlan.’ He leaned forward and asked the driver to slow down, ‘Shway, Shway.’
From Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy

The mornings and evenings this week have been a tad hectic, with proofreader Katie Stine chucking up no less than 230 line errors (where the hell did THEY come from?) in her edit of the MS of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy and my last editing round, performed using a Kindle, now almost over.

Its amazing that after so many edits, beta reads, a professional edit and a professional proof read (Katie's VERY good) that I'm still chucking stuff up but that's the way it goes with books. You can do a lot with 85,000 words, including word repetitions, lazy adjectives, little touches to clarify points, better word choices, filters (he saw the shiny spoon = the spoon shone) and more.

I'm giving a follow up workshop for the Hunna Ladies Writer's Group on Saturday at the Emirates LitFest's home, the Dar Al Adab - on how to self-publish a book. Last time we looked at how to write and edit, so now we're going to complete the exercise and look at how you can use POD and ebooks to make your work available to a truly global audience. What better example to use in the live demos than Shemlan itself? So I'll be publishing the e-book on Saturday.

That doesn't mean you'll be able to get your hands on it Saturday. Amazon Kindle takes 12-24 hours to populate, Createspace for the paperback can take longer (including the Book Depository which can actually take a couple of weeks to bring up a title) and Smashwords' Premium Catalogue (iBooks and the like) can similarly take a while. I reckon by my 'official' target publishing date of November 5th you'll be good to go and the links can go up.

Book Post - A Week Of UBER-AWESOME Freebies

Okay, so here's the deal. this week (starting today, ending Friday 12th July) I'm giving away ebook copies of Olives - A Violent Romance AND Beirut - An Explosive Thriller. Have I gone mad? 'course not.

Firstly, you get an epub (iPad, Nook, Kobo, Sony Reader, any Android tablet) ebook of Olives - A Violent Romance when you sign up to my mailing list (using the wee red form to the right of this very text). That commitment means you get an email from me every few weeks when I remember to get around to it with interviews, book freebies and other stuff as and when they come up. It's far too informal to be an email marketing programme (I do that in the day job so really don't want to do it in my spare time) but is a way of collecting people interested in my books and books, writing and authors in general. I have, I realise, quite a few interesting writer friends! You'll get to meet them on the emailer. Think of it as a Tufty Club for intelligent adults who enjoy good, original fiction.

You can take a few seconds to sign up now, in fact. It's okay, it just takes a name and an email address. I'll wait, no problem. Yup, just over there on the right, the red sidebar thingy.

Secondly, I'm giving away a FREE ebook copy of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller (100,000 words of mad, testosterone-soaked international spy thriller the Huffington Post called "a gripping, fast-paced exciting book...a must read" and Khaleej Times called, "an unputdownable read for its sheer force of action, violence, and elaborate, lavishly colourful characters...") for this week only.

All I ask in return is that you share the good news with ten friends - just email them with the coupon code I give in response to your signup to the emailer and they, too, can get free copies - as long as they get moving and use that code before Friday 12th July.

If you can't be arsed with emailers but still want to to play the free ebook game and are willing to share the good news with ten friends (by email, Facebook, whatever), then the coupon code is VG69L and you can go to this here link to use it to get your free ebook. So, I cheated. Sue me.

I'm clearly hoping the Aristotelian principle works here - if a few of you do this and a few of your friends do this, I should start gathering new readers from around the world at an exponential pace - a chain letter that's got a week to grow and meet my target of seeding a thousand ebooks out there. And then we'll see what you all think - whether I get hard sales on the back of it by generating word of mouth, reviews on Amazon, letters from little old ladies whose lives have been saved by reading Beirut and so on.

Sadly, if you have a Kindle, I can't give you Beirut for free -the only way I can do that is by forsaking other e-reader formats and joining Kindle Select (as, indeed, I did with Space which is a Kindle only book). I'm not comfortable with doing that, so I've reduced the price of Beirut on Kindle to $0.99 or £0.77 this week from its usual $4.99. You can just go to Amazon.com here or Amazon.co.uk here and buy it for a snip. I'd still appreciate if you could share that amazing ohmigod once in a lifetime discount brilliant book news with ten friends and invite them in turn to share it with ten friends and so on.

That's all folks! Enjoy!

Fake Plastic Souks - The Glory Years

Yes! It's the book of the blog! As I mentioned in one of last week's traffic-destroying booky posts, I was giving a workshop at The Archive's 'Day of Books' (nice to see HH Sheikh Mohammed dropping by and commending Safa Park's finest book haven and café) on how to use self-publishing platforms.

Trouble was, I didn't have a book to use as a sample. And then it hit me - pull the blog into a book format. It took a tad longer than I had anticipated, but resulted in the best bits of my first two years of bloggery being poured into a nice booky book shaped mould. So now you can buy Fake Plastic Souks - The Glory Years as both a print book or ebook.

I found the whole process fascinating. For a start, going back over stuff you dashed down five years ago means quite a few surprises - I enjoyed myself reading over posts from that time when Dubai was overheating like a lunar capsule re-entering earth's atmosphere and then noting the transition to abandoned cars and vicious, clueless articles in the UK's media about the Downfall of Dubai. I think that period of turbulence is quite neatly documented (but then I would, wouldn't I?).

For the workshop, we uploaded the book to Createspace - which means you can buy a printed paper booky book of the Blog from Amazon for £8.99 with next day free shipping. It then went up onto Kindle Direct Publishing, which means a Kindle book can be yours for £0.77 (Amazon's minimum price). And then we uploaded the files to Smashwords, which supports the important ePub format (Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Sony and iBooks), again pricing the ebook at $0.99. All in about 90 minutes.

One interesting learning for me was that the Kindle Direct Publishing people came back to me as a result of their validation process because they had found the content in my book was already available on the Web. They wanted to know why - and that I owned the rights to the content - before they would proceed with publishing the book to the Kindle store. They were the only one of the three platforms to do this.

I might play around with the booky book price a little, but you can quickly see how the production cost of a paper book forces the price into the stratosphere compared to ebooks. It's one reason why I now refuse to pay publishers the same price for a Kindle book they charge for a paperback. They're just being greedy and lazy. As most will know, Amazon pays a 70% royalty if you charge between $2.99 and $9.99 for your ebook, but otherwise (from $0.99 to $2.98 and $10 to $200) it pays only 35%.

It all goes to show something frequently overlooked, but actually, IMHO, quite important. You can create an ebook out of almost anything - content can make its way into peoples' hands in seconds flat and archive material, as long as it's of interest to someone, anyone, out there can be turned into a globally distributable and available asset for an investment of pretty much nada up front.

Anyway, you can now buy a bit of this blog to put on your mantelpiece or wherever else you display precious things. If I sell more than ten, I'll do a sequel!

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Smashwords

Book Post - Beirut - An Explosive Thriller Formats

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Someone just found out they could get Beirut - An Explosive Thriller on Kindle. Whaaat? How could anyone in the world not have known that? I really have been under-doing the promotion, haven't I?

Here for your reading pleasure are the formats Beirut is available in - and, for attendees at last nights fab (if somewhat café-noisy) Umbrella Series workshop at The Archive, my reasoning for making these formats available.

Paperback

First and foremost, Beirut - An Explosive Thriller (as well as Olives - A Violent Romance) is available in paperback from all good UAE bookshops, including Kino's, Magrudy's, Jashanmal and book counters at supermarkets, including Carrefour, Abela and Spinneys. Virgin prefers not to stock my books.

Internationally, you can buy Beirut in paperback from Amazon.com for $15.99 or if you want you can buy a copy for just over $30. This is a side-effect of bookseller algorithms going mad.

You can buy Beirut in paperback from Amazon.co.uk for £8.99 with FREE shipping anywhere in the UK. You can also buy it from Amazon across Europe. Alternatively, if you're based somewhere windswept and interesting, The Book Depository will sell you a copy of Beirut in paperback for just £10.34 with free delivery worldwide. Not, ironically, including Lebanon...

If you prefer to support local bookshops, you can order Beirut - An Explosive Thriller from any UK or US bookshop by quoting ISBN: 978-1477586594.

Ebook

Beirut - An Explosive Thriller is available as a Kindle ebook from Amazon.co.uk and amazon.com. You can also get it from other Amazon stores for your Kindle.

If you own a Nook e-reader, you can get Beirut from Barnes & Noble here. Alternatively, if you prefer Kobo, that's linked here. If you want a copy of the book for your iPad or any Android tablet, you can buy the ePub format ebook from Smashwords at this here link. Alternatively, a quick search of Apple's iBooks will yield a gloriously buyable copy of Beirut for your iPad.

Formats

With the above formats, there's no way you can avoid Beirut - An Explosive Thriller - a paperback delivered anywhere in the world, an ebook delivered to any reader anywhere in the world. All with the flick of a few switches. You can now happily let friends and family know where they can get this most thrillsome of books delivered to them within a few days for paperback or a few seconds in any e-reader format. Or even better, you can go crazy and buy them as gifts! :)

If you'd like to browse more formats and 'where to buy' links or generally find out more about Beirut - An Explosive Thriller, the book's website is linked here. There's background info and stuff. And don't forget, you can sign up to my email list using the box above and get free books, updates, info and other wonderfulness.

Free Space

Ben Jonson is a doctor in Richmond, London. Life is peachy, perhaps the only cloud on his horizon being the problem of communicating with his incomprehensible housemaid. And then a roast chicken appears out of nowhere.

Ben Jonson never wanted to save the world. But with no warning, no final demand and certainly no invitations issued, Ben finds himself racing against time, the Russian Mafia and spooks aplenty. Driven to near-insanity by auto-manifesting incongruities, Ben is launched into a journey across Europe in search of the source of his problems by the charismatic Lysander Cullinane, the head of a shadowy government agency that specialises in telling awful lies.

Enter a catsuited blonde bombshell with a death fetish, a life insurance salesman on the run and some wickedly nasty Russians with very big guns. Add the world’s most effective computer virus, an imperious old lady with a gimlet eye, England’s most evil-tempered policeman and a dead man with a number of highly developed personality disorders. And then pop in a splash of sex worker with legs all the way up to the bottom of her basque.

The body count rises hourly and Ben’s on the run. But you can’t escape space… 

My first attempt at writing a book resulted in a silly spoof caper called Space. It was quite badly done, but enormous fun - and has since had a bit of a spruce up to make it at least semi-presentable: possibly even readable. It's FREE on amazon through to Friday this week, so do feel highly pressured to not only download it to your own Kindle or Kindle for Android or iPad but also to tell friends, family, passers-by, whoever. Share the link, tweet it - stick it on yer facebook. This is, after all is said and done, a total freebie! And we all likes a bit of it free, doesn't we?

GET YOUR COPY OF 'SPACE' HERE

It still makes me laugh, but its first amazon review says it's totally unfunny. The second one says it IS funny! You be the judge - and do feel free to leave your own amazon review too!

Platforms For Self Publishing

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sorry, long involved book publishing post warning...

The final edits to Beirut - An Explosive Thriller are done now that editor Robb Grindstaff's comments and changes have been incorporated. A few tweaks here and there, a few last squealing adverbs eliminated and we're on the home straight. I must reiterate here, you HAVE to get a professional editor - budget $1,000 to $1,500 for one. But don't for one second think you can self edit your way out of this one, buddy. And no, your talented friend who is a magazine editor/writer/English teacher won't do.

What platforms will I be publishing on? The plan is pretty much the same as for Olives - A Violent Romance, although there is a question mark over a UAE print edition, not least because the parcel containing the MS I sent to the National Media Council to obtain my Permission To Print in June has gone missing and nobody can find it. Which is not helpful.

Just in case you need a reminder, BTW:

The Olives - A Violent Romance website

The Beirut - An Explosive Thriller website

And yes, I would recommend you do a book website!

Olives was published on Amazon.com's KDP, on CreateSpace and Smashwords. Space, which I published more as a bit of fun than a serious novel, was only published to Amazon's KDP Select, of which more below.

Managing multi-platform publishing.

Things can get out of hand pretty fast with file management and so on, so I suggest keeping a separate folder for the core MS and a different folder for the files required for each platform (Kindle, Smashwords, Createspace, Print etc). One hard-earned tip here; DO NOT spin the files out from the core MS until you are 1001% sure you're looking at the last version you will ever create. You really don't want to end up making line corrections across four or more different sets of files for every niggly thing you missed. It's time consuming and, perhaps more importantly, dangerous - you've got four or more multiplications of that invitation to Mr Cockup.

You'll also have to change the copyright page on each version to reflect the ISBN or identify the edition. Do NOT, by the way, use your print book ISBN across other formats/editions.

Those folders can also contain the different versions of your cover - again, each platform will have a subtly different cover requirement.

Polish that blurb!

Before you start thinking about uploading books to platforms, make sure you're ready to start. Finished, professionally edited MS, clear idea of what you've got (is it a thriller, historical romance or what? And what tags would you put on it to make sure it's searchable?)? Got a GOOD cover that'll work as a thumbnail and still stand out? And have you polished your blurb so it DOES NOT contain ONE silly error, reads like a dream, is short and crisp yet will make people want to dip into your work and, gasp, even buy it? Then let us proceed!!!

Publishing to Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing)

Uploading books to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing is pretty easy, assuming your MS is in Word. You need to download a natty little piece of software called Mobi Pocket Creator (MPC, just to save my fingers). Here's a link. Now you export your Word file to an HTML, Filtered format file and then add it into MPC. You can also upload your book cover to MPC - note it should be a colour file to fall in line with Kindle Fire capabilities. Cover art works best for Kindle as 2500 pixels high by 1600 wide or thereabouts.

When you're working on MPC, don't forget to add the metadata - blurb, BISAC category and keywords. These all help to make your book more discoverable.


You can add inline images, glyphs or other logos and picture content by embedding a link to the file in the text, the image file should be copied to the same directory as the source file. Use the img src HTML tag, the image file needs to be in the same folder as the text you're linking from - the syntax is <img src="filename" middle /> - the 'middle' centers it, of course.

Correcting formatting glitches (pages that kick over, that sort of thing) will involve getting lightly involved in editing HTML, but nothing too daunting. The most helpful simple HTML tags for this sort of thing (all tags are enclosed between < and> are:

<br /> inserts a paragraph break

<b> at the start and </b> at the end bolds it - <i> for italics </i> but don't forget to close the tag or your whole book from that point on will be bolded.

<mbp:pagebreak> inserts a pagebreak. Note this is not 'proper' HTML, but a Kindle specific tag.

You can now connect your Kindle to your PC and upload your book file to view it and make sure it works fine and dandy. Just drag and drop your built book file into the 'documents' folder on the Kindle (Windows sees a Kindle as a memory key).

The rest of the KDP process is pretty straightforward - follow the prompts on screen. When you get to book pricing, note the different royalty rates - and note unless you enroll in KDP Select, you'll only ever get a 35% royalty out of India, irrespective of how you price your book (The 70% royalty doesn't apply below $2.99 or above $9.99).

Amazon has a program called KDP Select, in which you only upload your book to Amazon for a duration of at least three months (and not to Smashwords, iBooks or anyone else). This way, you get to give your book away for up to five days in that period and also qualify to share in the monthly pot of money (currently $600,000) shared between authors depending on how many times their books have been borrowed by subscriber to Amazon's Kindle Prime service. Space, for instance, has been enrolled in Select and I've so far run two giveaways, which have resulted in hundreds of books being downloaded. I have to say, that hasn't resulted in hundreds of reviews.

I won't be doing Select with Beirut - An Explosive Thriller as I consider Smashwords to be an important additional platform. As I shall explain below.

Publishing to Amazon Createspace

Createspace is Amazon's POD (Print On Demand) platform and it's pretty smart - it means anyone, anywhere in the world, can buy your work as a printed book. There are a number of considerations to using Createspace, I'll try and deal with the 'biggies' here, as it's a relatively straightforward service to use.

Creating a file to upload is simply a matter of formatting your MS to suit the size and format of book you pick. I found the most sensible (and smallest) to be the industry standard 5" x 8". You can download the standard Createspace templates and then run your MS text into it. Before you do, make sure your MS is sensibly formatted - 0.5cm para indents, bar the first of each chapter, 1.15 line spacing and text set at 9 points is a good start. When you've run your text into the template, you can start to experiment with fonts. At the basic level, stick to a nice 'standard' font like Garamond (my choice), Palatino or Times. POD printing is slightly different to offset printing and fonts will reproduce slightly differently. If you know what you're doing with fonts, you can obviously make your own choices, but POD books set in Comic Sans are really something the world doesn't need.

You can play around with margins, but note Createspace is very picky about gutters and the usable type area as POD printers are less accurate about stuff like trim sizes than offset. If you significantly alter the margins from the Createspace template, you might fail file review and have to go back to the drawing board.

You can buy your own ISBN or you can opt for a Createspace assigned one. I go for the Createspace one. Some things you must know about ISBNs include the fact they are purely a stocking code and give away no rights or other attributes. The ISBN is unique to this edition of your book - if you produce another format, even size of book, you'll need a separate ISBN. If you opt for Createspace's expanded distribution (It costs a few dollars, but just do it), anyone will be able to go into a bookshop, cite your ISBN and place an order for your book.

Your book cover will require a little skill and may well be worth outsourcing. I'm lucky in that I have long used graphics software, so I do my own with a little help from talented artist friends for the images. You'll need to create a single image file with your back cover, spine and front cover all in one. The spine is sized depending on your pagination - Createspace gives you the relevant multipliers depending on the paper you decide to use. Createspace will also generate the barcode for your book or you can create your own (using one of many websites that offer free barcode creation) and integrate it into your artwork.

Your files then go through automated review and then a manual check. At this stage you can order your proof copy. Although you can skip this step, I recommend strongly that you do not. It'll take a few days (one of many reasons why Aramex' Shop n Shop service is cooler than cheese), but you'll get the chance to physically check the product you'll be selling to people. Now you're good to go. Select your book pricing (you get to see how royalties and so on work at different price points) and take the expanded distribution option (just do it) and about five days later, your print book will be on sale at Createspace.com, amazon.com and then over coming weeks other outlets and vendors including, importantly, the Book Depository which will sell and ship books affordably and internationally.

Publishing to Smashwords

Smashwords is important because it supports spinning your book out into multiple e-book formats and publishing to a number of important platforms including Barnes and Noble's Nook, Kobo and iBooks. Smashwords is relatively simple to use and powerful. Founder Mark Coker has written much sense on the topic of ebooks and I do strongly recommend reading his excellent 'secrets to epublishing success'. Another must read document is the Smashwords Style Guide - you really need to digest this so you get your head around the requirements for Smashwords' 'Meatgrinder'. Meatgrinder is the engine that takes your Word file and multicasts it to Kindle, ePub, PDF, .txt and other formats - you can pick which formats you want, but the ePub one is vitally important as this is the format for Nook, iBooks and Kobo as well as many other outlets/readers.

Basically if your MS is sensibly formatted to begin with (Times 12 point double spaced, 0.5cm para indents and no use of spacebar to create tabs), you should have no problems. Meatgrinder does NOT support text above 18 points and will reject any document that contains more than four concurrent paragraph returns (you can check your MS using the 'show document formatting' button in Word).

Double check you choice of tags on Smashwords - Olives - A Violent Romance was filed under Theatre on iBooks because I used a 'drama' tag on the book - remember, Smashwords is populating multiple platforms with your work, so you have to be super careful to get it right - an error means updating could take weeks.

And that's it for now. Beirut - An Explosive Thriller is uploaded and sites are populating pages even as we speak - we're on track for that October 1st launch date now.

In the meantime, if you have any platform questions, I'll try and help if you pop 'em in the comments. And I'll try and put up a 'Olives one year on - what I learned' post soon. For now I'm off to carry on polishing up my book blogger lists and get those review copies of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller out there. Wish me luck! :)