Book Post - What Price Reviews?

So I've started Beirut - An Explosive Thriller's review programme. It's reasonably wearying, tracking down active book blogs and websites, flicking through them to see if they're interested in broadly the type of book I'm getting up to, finding out what their review submission guidelines are, then emailing them with pitches, vouchers or attached book files. But, as I've said before, if every review is 10 readers, 100 emails is a thousand pairs of eyes.

Of course, getting heavier hitting media is great, but the competition for those platforms is both fierce and, all too often, restricted for self-published authors.

Which is why the review of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller in the Huffington Post had me doing Little Dances Of Happiness when it dropped late last night.

Alexander McNabb outdid himself in his second novel, Beirut, An Explosive Thriller, another adventure-filled story loaded with intrigue, espionage, love, murder, international hoods and plenty of violence.

Okay, that's a good start. This next bit, for me, was the jaw-dropper. The writer is an important Lebanese media figure, former AFP and UPI staffer and was one of the Monday Morning team, so knows what she's on about:

The author has an uncanny understanding of the country's dynamics and power plays between the belligerent factions, post-civil war of 1975-1990.
McNabb seems to have amazing insight into Lebanon's convoluted, sectarian political system.
He masterfully merges people from the Maronite Christian community to confuse readers, with snippets of character descriptions that would fit any or all of the current leaders and former/remaining warlords.
His very expressive narrative has an eerie resemblance to the current status quo with all of Lebanon's dysfunctional problems.

Oh wow. I think she just gave me too much credit but I am most certainly not going to complain. The review goes for a showy finish, a little like a great chef putting a touch of 'English' on the plate as he presents it to the pass:

Beirut is a gripping, fast-paced exciting book that may well jar Lebanese and others familiar with the city and its heavy legacy. But it's a must read.

You can read the full review by Lebanese journalist Magda Abu-Fadil here.

I'm still grinning today. Now, let's face realities. Not all reviews will be like this. Some people out there will hate Beirut, or just go 'meh' (the worst reaction, actually. I'd rather vilification than indifference. At least the former cares about you!). But, as Oscar Wilde tells us, there's only one thing worse than being talked about - not being talked about.

My experience with Olives - A Violent Romance taught me some stuff about how people approach buying books, and it's been something of a surprise. Reviews are important, as is word of mouth recommendation. But it actually takes quite a lot to make someone buy a book. It's not a case of reading a good review and rushing to Amazon to click that all important click. People seem to need quite a few triggers pushed at once. I'd personally rather book buying were a more, well, male process. But it ain't.

So it's going to take more than a few reviews out there. It's going to take a lot and that means a certain degree of relentlessness in the whole business of promotion. Being creative and not just repetitive will help to ease the pain, but to all of you I'd like to say sorry in advance. I'll try not to be a PITA, but you know the best thing you can do to shut me up.

Yup. Buy the book. :)

Beirut, Bombs And Chaos Theory

Rafic Hariri beirut 2 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I follow the #Beirut hashtag (Tweetdeck's multiple columns are a wonderful thing) and so it was that I had just finished putting up Friday's guest post by Micheline when I caught the first tweets from Achrafieh as people reported a loud explosion, some asking 'What was that?'.

The tweets quickly became more specific, Ashrafiyeh pinpointed and a large blast. People close by talked of the ground moving, while an increasing number of tweets mentioned Sassine Square - a busy area of restaurants and cafés. There was a sense people were holding back from saying it was a bomb, perhaps a gas cylinder. Anything, in fact, but a bomb. Nobody wanted to admit it could be that.

The first twitpics showed a black cloud above the city. Now tweets talked of a bomb, people linked the location to the headquarters of the March 14 movement - the anti-Syrian coalition named for the date of the last such bombing in Beirut - the massive car bomb that killed Rafiq Hariri.

News started flowing thick and fast. A car bomb, very big. People were reporting casualties. The first images from the scene came in, confirming what people had feared - a massive explosion in the busy area. The phone network was down but 3G was still working. Mainstream media reports were mentioned, LBC first to the news. The volume of retweets was going up as mainstream outlets were quoted. Some outlets ran with graphic images of body parts and pools of blood. Reports of deaths from mainstream outlets, one dead said one outlet, two said Reuters, three said another. The UK's Guardian was quoting tweets and showing twitpics on its website, many people cited Reuters' reports. Twitter started carrying calls for blood from the hospitals, queues built of up people volunteering to donate. One Lebanese news channel was reporting it wasn't a car bomb, another that the bomb was actually in a bank.

Joining in the fray, reporting at Twitter speed, mainstream outlets were helping the confusion as they posted information without confirmation and certainly lacking the 'context and analysis' that have been so often cited as a reason for their relevance. The volume of retweets was very high now,  voices from around the region joining what had been a very local conversation.

It was horrible to watch. So many friends in Beirut and here, worried for loved ones who lived or worked in the area and then, as the news sank in, so much bitter disappointment that once again the lives and hopes of ordinary people are to be sacrificed, that the optimism was to be ground out of everyone and replaced by fear. Waking up the next day to the headlines confirmed that yes, this was an assassination, that a key member of the March 14 movement was dead, along with seven others and tens more had been injured.

As so many times before Twitter looked like a Lorenzian water wheel. Initially it efficiently carried eye witness reports, the first news breaking and confirmed by multiple sources and twitpics. With the huge increase in volume comes retweets and second generation shares, the water wheel starts to become more erratic and it becomes harder to filter the information.

What I found interesting was the sight, the first time I have noticed it, of mainstream media sources getting right in there and posting flows of unconfirmed information, reprocessing tweets and posting 'breaking news' with clearly little attempt at filtering the raw data. People quickly quote mainstream sources because we have so long been told we can depend on them, yet the information they were providing was of no different quality to that being shared by eye witnesses. Mainstream media were retweeting witnessesx. I thought it a dangerous precedent.

Beirut - I Got It Covered

Isn't this all exciting? So the final edit of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller is back from proofreading and ready to be formatted for CreateSpace, Smashwords and Kindle. I promised Jordanian tweep John Lillywhite a post on platforms for self publishing, so I'll do that later this week as I work on putting the book into its different formats.

In the meantime, here's the cover. It's a wee bit more stark than Olives, isn't it? I'm also now looking at a refresh of the Olives cover to come into line with this style. It ticks my boxes for a cover, which are as follows:

Thumbnails
A book cover these days needs to survive as a thumbnail. While the real estate of publishing in the age of the bookshop was shelves (and spines were vitally important), these days an idle click on catchy icon is what you seek.

Impact
Your book will rarely be presented alone on a screen, so if you can make it thoroughly eye-catching, so much the better.

Mono
On an e-paper Kindle, it'll display in mono, on a Kindle Fire or other tablet, colour. (It has to work in a 1.6 to 1 ratio and be 2500 pixels high for a Kindle cover) So, ideally, it should also work in mono.

Sell the book
This is where I had huge problems: many of the cover treatments I had considered just reinforced the annoying and outdated 'Looks like Beirut' syndrome - choppers over the mountains, revolvers et al just brought 'war' to mind. So I was looking for a cover image that was cleverer than that. I came up with a crude lipstick  bullet, but art director pal Jessy came up with this much more sophisticated image. It's supposed to make you do a mild double-take, to resolve clearly as lipstick and bullet. It's about sexy and violent, which are two words I would definitely pin on Beirut. And Beirut, come to think of it!

Print
It's got to be sensible as a print book cover, too - that means for POD like Createspace, a clear 5mm around all page edges for trim, unless you're 'bleeding' (material that's designed to run over the cover edge), in which case you need a 5mm margin all around.

It also ticks a rather esoteric little Font Nazi box for me - it uses Eric Gill's stunning Perpetua, a true serif 'stonecutter's font' and a true design classic by that most fascinating of typographers and artists.

For those who care about such things, the slug's a 9mm parabellum, which would be nicely compatible with Lynch's weapon of choice, the versatile Walter P99. The lipstick is a... just kidding.

I also tested the cover with quite a few people to guage reactions - I'd love to know yours, so do feel free to drop a comment!

Beirut, Beirut and GeekFest Beirut

The Salim Slam tunnel is arguably the most polluted place on earth. Well, apart from the Aral Sea. It's a brilliantly designed long road tunnel that crests a hump and has no ventilation so the concentration of exhaust fumes literally forms into billowing, choking clouds of noxious grey gases. I'm stuck in the back of a hot taxi with cracked leather seats, no AC and the windows open as we hit the traffic jam. As usual, I held my breath as we entered the tunnel, a 47 year-old man playing an eight year old's game of holding my breath until we get to the other side. As we draw to a halt, I realise I'm about to fast track my way to a powerful hit of carboxyhaemoglobin. And I don't care. I'm back in Beirut.

Catching up with friends, wrangling with Virgin (who, like Virgin in Dubai for various reasons of their own devising, won't sell my books) and generally mooching around the city take up my time, but I still have time to finish editing the last few pages of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and send it off to its editor. I hadn't planned to finish Beirut in Beirut, but it's worked out that way and I am glad. I'd just like to say thanks to the Ministry of ICT for the awful Internet, which went down totally for a day and more. A nation offline, but a man with nothing to distract him from editing!

Sara, Eman and I went for lunch to one of my favourite places, the Cliffhouse restaurant in the tiny village of Shemlan up in the Chouf overlooking Beirut. The traffic in Hamra is broken and we spend an hour in hot, snarling lines of lane-swapping, jostling cars and vans. More mad traffic on the Saida road and then we're free, breaking upwards into the cool, clean mountain air. We're much later than we'd planned, but never mind. A seat by the open window and sunny warmth, beige stone walls and the sound of music, chattering and argileh soothe. A quick toast to absent Michelines and we start to tuck into the plates of food pouring out of the kitchen in a tide of riotous colours, the dark red muhammarah, the creamy houmous piled up around little pieces of grilled lamb, the fattoush. Ah, you know.

Then sitting back with chai nana (and an argileh nana for part time caterpillar Eman) and full stomachs, enjoying the breeze and the sight of Beirut turned golden by the waning afternoon sun. It really doesn't get much better.

GeekFest Beirut in the evening. I love The Angry Monkey, from its daft logo to its wireless internet. The Alleyway is literally that and the peeps at the Online Collaborative have set up a stage there. Something like four hundred people pitch up, a big cheery crowd of lively, chattering geeks spilled out onto the busy thoroughfare of Gemmayzeh, Rue Gouraud. The talks are talked, the fashion show is catwalked - both are enjoyed by the crowd, hands in the air clutching mobiles to snap the occasion. It's all impeccably done, if a tad hot out there. Four hundred beaming geeks is a lovely sight...

I take refuge in the air-conditioned Angry Monkey where later on the bands excel themselves, combining with pints of 961 to induce a warm, happy perma-grin.

GeekFest Beirut 5.0 was the most ambitious, diverse and stunningly put together event that has ever been held under the GeekFest name. Darine, Mohammed and the team produced something wonderful, a community-driven event that was slick, diverse and gloriously exuberant.

And so to home. I do so very much like Beirut...

GeekFest Beirut 5.0

I have a confession to make.

GeekFest Beirut started because I had to find a reason to go to Beirut in order to research Beirut - An Explosive Thriller, my second novel. Although I've been travelling to that most sexy of cities since 1997, I hadn't been back in a few years and needed to get to grips with the city again before filling it with my characters and their antics.

So I called the delightful Alexandra Tohme and said 'GeekFest Beirut - what about it?' - the rest, as they say, is the rest. Since then, Alex, Naeema, Lilliane, George (and the Maniachi) and many, many others have been responsible for putting together GeekFest events that have been arty, gamesy (boozy!) and generally suffused with that Yahooooo! sound that is Beirut having fun.

GeekFest Beirut has never been less than fabulous. And its fifth iteration, UNorganised by The Online Collaborative, looks set to be the most amazing GeekFest of all time. It's all built around the twin themes of Fashion and Music and was the brainchild of Darine Sabbagh and Mohammad Hijazi.

The Online Collaborative is an organisation centred around AUB, containing a number of very lovely folk (including HM Ambassador and my favourite funky lecturer, @LeilaKhauli)  and dedicated to the promotion of digital citizenship. To be fair, they have actually organised GFB5.0 rather than UNorganised it - it's set to be one heck of an event, with music and comedy performances, fashion shows and all sorts of things going on, as well as the traditional talks. It's even got sponsors and logos and things!

Oh, the shock of it!

GEEKTALKS

Maya Metni
Le Geek, C’est Chic! How to dress like a Geek? A practical guide
Maya is a visual communication consultant. She gathers her musings & inspirations in her blog www.mayametni.com  @mayametni

Toni Yammine 
Crowdsourcing Music Videos – Meen the Band
Toni is a Lebanese musician/director. He likes chocolate  and knows how to count very well in both Lebanese and English. He also has an RC plane and tweets on @toniyammine.

Hind Hobeika
Smart/tech clothing and where that’s all heading?
Hind is an engineer, swimmer and a self-tracking geek at its most!

Beshr Kayyali
Making Arabic Indie Music Popular Sawt.com
Beshr is a true Geek through and through. He has worked on many successful web projects for geeks apart from his day job as a developer.

Bassam Jalgha
Live Demo How to Build an Audio Synthesizer in 10 minutes Using Open Source Information
Bassam is a maker by heart. Always high on solder fumes, he works with electronics, build robots. He is into the DIY cult and tries to annoyingly spread it among his entourage. Check him out on www.depotbassam.com.

Elie Habib
Tools that allow developers to build Social features on top of Music
Elie is the co-founder of Anghami.

Loryne Atoui
Fashion for a cause
Loryne is a graphic designer impassioned by a crusade against breast cancer as well as travel and photography.

FASHION SHOW

Using real people and geeks as models!

Fashion for fundraising – Bras for a Cause by One Wig Stand 
Up & Coming Lebanese and Middle Eastern Geeky/Urban fashion Designers staged by Fishy Nation
An Online Collaborative line designed by our own Joseph Maalouf
Geeky Tshirts by Maya Zankoul
Looks from top Lebanese Fashion Bloggers
Geeky Tshirts by NOBRAND
DJing the show is DJ Beats

GIG

Alternative Rock Performance by Near Surface
Special Vocal Performance by Hiba Kadri
Acoustic Cover Performance by John Nurpetlian
A Stand Up Comedy Performance by Malek Teffaha
House Music by DJ G. Real Party Time featuring a DJ set by Underrated
And more...

STUFF

There's an ongoing art show. There are swag bags. There are other things happening. There's a posh dinner menu or a 961-fuelled bar snacks package. There's REGISTRATION!!!

Go here to sign up and reserve a place and a 'formula' at The Angry Monkey or Couqley or just reserve a place at GeekFest. If you've got any questions, hit up @geekfestbeirut or get 'em on Facebook!

I'll see you there!

Free Olives

The iBooks logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I've stuck pretty well to keeping the Fake blog free of Olives posts (or 'spam' as some might term it), using The Olives Blog instead as a promotional platform/repository of reader/book club notes. But here's a wee book update post.

I've been working on securing reviews of Olives - A Violent Romance, mainly from US based book bloggers. As a result of that activity, I've created a 'coupon' on Smashwords that lets reviewers download copies of the book for review. If you've got a blog (it doesn't have to be a book blog) and would be willing to review Olives, then pop over here for details and a link to the free book - it's available on Kindle, Nook, Sony, iBooks and any other major e-book platform, including PDF. The coupon's only valid for a few more days, so I'd get nippy about it.

Most book bloggers also post reviews to GoodReads and Amazon.com, where I am delighted to report Olives is currently scoring just north of four stars out of five. That's pretty good going and I'll be interested to see if it keeps up.

In the meantime, my next book, Beirut, is out being read by a number of 'beta readers' and then it goes off for editing. I've been through considerable authorial angst over the title as it's as stupid as Olives is from an SEO standpoint. As well as being the name of a relatively famous city and the title of an excellent history of that city by Samir Kassir, it's also the name of a pop band. Coming from a man who tells his clients with considerable rigour that discoverability is everything, that's pretty rich but I can't help it - the books have always been called that and, despite having recruited friends to try and find an alternative title, Beirut is the one that's stuck.

[EndBookPost]

Lazy Words

Words have a power all their own (Photo credit: Lynne Hand)

One of the things you have to try and avoid if you have a nasty writing habit like mine is becoming a Word Nazi. When words become so much a part of your life, it's hard to maintain your sense of perspective I can tell you (in fact, this whole post is probably proof I'm losing mine!).

It's amazing what a difference they can make to our understanding of a text and, indeed to our emotional response to text. I spoke recently at a two-day seminar at the UAE University in Al Ain on narrative and was fascinated to hear of the projects being undertaken by two members of the Humanities faculty in the cognitive impact of words.

I'm currently editing Beirut, the step before unleashing it on 'beta readers' and then on my long-suffering editor, Robb Grindstaff. And I've just been doing a search and replace on the lazy words in the text. What are 'lazy words'? They're the words you use when you haven't really thought about the text, the words you dash down as you rush to get that scene on paper (well, storage) while it's still fresh and vibrant.

Take, for instance, 'looked'.

Lynch looked up into the hills, the sky above bright blue above the dusty foothills dotted with gnarled trees. The clean air smelled of heat, an unseasonably warm Mediterranean spring day.

How about:

Lynch stared into the hills, the sky above bright blue, the dusty foothills dotted with gnarled trees. The clean air smelled of heat, an unseasonably warm Mediterranean spring day.

Looked up is common too. They're hills, of course you'd look up into them, so you can lose the up. You can usually find better words or ways of communicating that he walked, stood, went, came and sat, too.

Some lazy words point to a bigger problem than just finding a better descriptor and lead to a sentence or two actually being cut or changed drastically to make the point better. Realised and remembered are two good examples, both are words that often point to a lazy 'tell not show' sentence, as does understood. Comprehension dawning is so rarely mundane as 'he understood'. The daddy of them all is 'suddenly' - there's a word that almost always points to a sentence that needs rethought.

Most sentences can be improved by exterminating that. It's remarkable how much we use this word and how little we actually need to use it. It's the gluten of vocabulary.

the keys to a political career that Michel had lost no time in developing.

the keys to a political career Michel had lost no time in developing.

Try it. You can get rid of a lot of that's before finding that you actually need one.

None of these are by any means hard and fast, but they're good words to search out and reconsider. Does your sentence really fizzle or does it just 'make do'?

As I'm on the subject, I'm also struggling with the book's title. Like Olives before it, Beirut has always been called just that and I'm finding it very hard indeed to find any other name for the book. Which is a shame, because there's not only already a book called Beirut (Samir Kassir's excellent history of that fine city) but a reasonably popular band too. So Beirut's SEO is going to suck.

And I fear there's little I can do about it...

Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It's Off To ArabNet I Go!

Two years on from the first ArabNet Digital Summit in Beirut and the world has changed. I don't know that ArabNet can take the credit for that, but organiser Omar Christidis can certainly take credit for knowing when to start a serious regional digital conference with a focus on startups and 'the digital opportunity' in the Middle East.

As I posted at the time, the first ArabNet Digital Summit in March 2010 was something of an eye-opener. With low expectations confounded by a very high standard of event, ArabNet showed that there was undoubtedly a flowering of talent, innovation, interest and investment in the region's digital industries. The second ArabNet a year later cemented that, although a daringly expanded event did expose a couple of organisational weaknesses. That didn't really matter, the highly ambitious agenda was expanded to include a developer day event, the two day core conference and a community day. The ArabNet team went on a road trip around the region, literally taking a bus from country to country and arranging presentations, workshops and the like with the aim of uncovering, even fostering, the region's potential startups.

This year, the ArabNet Digital Summit is a five day event - the popular Developer Day has been expanded to the plural, the two day conference remains at the core of the event. There's a one day 'Industry Day' (taking place concurrent to the second Developer Day), which aims to examine how digital technologies are transforming a number of vertical industries in the region. It's a smart idea, because it means taking an approach to technology that is necessarily made relevant to each of the industries the day serves, which include healthcare, banking, travel, education, and government.

Then we have the two day ArabNet conference, the 'Forum Days' which include a number of keynotes, panels, workshops and the much-loved 'Ideathon' (pitch a startup idea from the stage) and 'Startup Demo' (Startup pitches its work and seeks funding) competitions. There's a third competition, as well, for agencies to case study their digital campaigns.

As usual, I'll be there causing trouble. I'm moderating a session on Industry Day, 'Social Media and Customer Relationship Management' and then during the main forum, I'll be presenting on how companies can, in fact need to, 'Take back your content' - how companies are going to need to plan and execute content strategies in this world of 'discoverability' we're carving for ourselves. Then I'll be moderating a panel on 'The Future of News' which will be, if I have anything to do with it, a real bunfight.

Apart from the stuff I'm doing from the stage, I'll be doing the usual at ArabNet - meeting smart and interesting people, learning about what's happening around the region and soaking up information and best practice from the speakers onstage.

See you there!

Here's the Spot On ArabNet page, BTW!

Got Any Lebanese LIRA?

Pound for pound, the Lebanese LIRA is the daftest regulation you'll see in quite a while. It's yet another example of a government trying to define the role of online media as it struggles to manage the potential of unfettered human thought and opinion being freely shared, following hot on the heels of the American near-disasters we know so well as SOPA and PIPA. Once again, it shows legislators are hopelessly out of touch with the dynamic of that shifting, changing thing we know as the internet.

The Lebanese Internet Regulation Act requires owners of websites to register with the government. interestingly, the draft law was proposed at the start of a month where the region's most vibrant and important annual forum for the online and digital industries, the ArabNet Digital Summit, is to take place in Beirut. Debate on the regulation has been postponed for further discussion by the Lebanese cabinet, giving the public time to make its views known (not that anyone will be listening, I conjecture).

LIRA attempts to take the Internet and squeeze it into a square peg shape so it'll fit the Lebanese press law shaped hole. Any owner of a website would have to register with the Information Ministry and websites would be governed by the conditions imposed on journalists, media and broadcasters by the Lebanese press law, the law specifically mentioned in the new regulation is Press Law 382/94, which is the audiovisual media law - a law that, as far as I can make out, merely modifies and re-ratifies the existing 1962 press law. It does seem like a very lazy way of saying "See the press law? It holds true for the Internets as well, people" which, as we all know, simply won't cut it.

That's about it. There's absolutely no attempt to understand the dynamics of the Internet, let alone even defining what a 'website' is - does this law apply to blogs? Only to owned domain-hosted websites? Mobile Apps? Facebook pages? Twitter?

It'll be interesting to see if Lebanese information minister Walid Daouk will speak at ArabNet and, if he does, how he'll be received. There has been a very lively hashtag, #STOPLIRA, pinging around the Twitterverse for a few days now and it's likely quite a few of the 1,500 digital innovators, specialists and leaders who'll be attending will have some helpful hints and tips for the minister. As it is, the ArabNet organisers turn off the Twitter wall for the keynote session in which ministers traditionally like to tell the audience of web-heads how the Internet and youth are important to our future. You wouldn't want to be reading what Twitter says about that kind of thing, you really wouldn't...


A translation of the Arabic language regulation is to be found on Joseph Choufani's blog here.

Olives On Sale In Beirut

Two of my favourite places come together today as Olives - A Violent Romance (a book set in Jordan) goes on sale in bookshops across Lebanon.

You'll find it at Libraries Antoine stores (as well as at Antoine Online linked here!),El Bourj, Way In, Librairie Orientale, Librairie Internationale, Malik bookshop and other good book stores.

And I am glad.

A big thank you from me to Therese Nasr and the team at Levant.

Rejection. An Author's Guide

Image via Wikipedia

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.

This looks like Beirut!

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!

GeekFest Beirut 2.0

As some may already know, GeekFest Beirut has been taken over by that most feared group of online types, Beirut's anarchistically inclined honchos, the Maniachis. There are GeekTalks aplenty and TechnoCases from Nokia and Telephone.com - more details on the website at www.geekfestbeirut.com! There's a whole load of other stuff going to be taking place, too - it's going to be a packed night, for sure.

For an update you can see this interview featuring the Maniachis on Future TV's MEGA with Chadi Abou Nohra,  explaining GeekFest Beirut,  which will be taking place from 8.00pm on the 29th May at Beirut's very funky Art Lounge.

A million thanks are due to Alex Tohme, who started the whole GeekFest Beirut ball rolling. It looks like it may well now be set as an ongoing treat in Lebanon's online/offline scene. Which is nice, isn't it?