Croutique. Books. Gifts. What's Not To Love?

Croutique is a sort of Middle Eastern Etsy, a place for crafters to sell their crafts to people who value something a little off the usual beaten track of marble malls and shiny brands. We're talking individuality, personalisation, a splash of quirkiness and perhaps even a dash of difference.

It's a CRafters bOUTIQUE, really. Croutique. Geddit?

The site comes to us thanks to the marriage of global expat community website ExpatWoman.com and their acquisition of deal-tipping site Cobone, which added transactional capabilities to one of the region's most successful pure-play web publishing sites. ExpatWoman has always been strongly about communities and long supportive of the UAE's 'crafter community'. Sounds a bit hipster, like a mad sort of tax-free Amish, doesn't it?

As a vendor, Croutique lets you easily set up a web store within their store, with easy to build pages that let you sell items with varying degrees of personalisation and choice. I should know, I've built one myself. Yes, you can now buy my books - signed and dedicated as you fancy, and have 'em delivered to your home anywhere in the UAE without even letting go of your beloved mouse. And all for a mere Dhs17 above the retail cover price.

The link's here. 

No more Christmas present dilemmas! Have a book dedicated to your loved one and signed by the author! Get the whole Olives/Beirut/Shemlan trilogy for a never-to-be-forgotten gift. Or A Decent Bomber for your father in law who's interested in Ireland and that sort of thing.

Or Birdkill for anyone who likes reading really quite screwed up psychological thrillers. Or, better, for that over-sensitive aunt you loathe who suffers dreadfully from her nerves.

Requests for 200,000 word dedications beginning 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times' will clearly not be considered...

These could be yours, as unique seasonal gifts, signed and dedicated personally by the author to your loved (or hated) ones and delivered anywhere in the UAE. 

If you'd prefer global delivery, that can be done, too. Only without a signature. 
Just click here! :)

Book Marketing And McNabb's Theory Of Multitouch

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I clearly want to tell the world about A Decent Bomber. This is perfectly natural, it's my latest book and took two years to write, in all. It's taken a lot to get it 'right'. A little shouting from the rooftops is therefore perfectly in order.

I would dearly like people to buy it, read it and - ideally - enjoy it. And then I would like them to pester their friends to buy it, read it and enjoy it. By repeating this process, a number of happy people will, in turn, make me happy. It's a virtuous cycle.

There is, however, a large, green-skinned and particularly gnarly troll-thing in the way. Book Marketing.

How do you get people to buy books? It's a problem I don't have a single, elegant solution to. This has surprised me a little, because marketing and communications are very much a part of the day job, so you'd have thought I'd have some clue. And I don't. Any more than publishing companies do. And, believe me, they're pretty much utterly clueless. It used to be nice and easy, but their world has changed. The seasonal catalogues and sales reps thing is no longer the force it once was. I'd shed a tear for 'em, but you know how it is...

Over the years, I have come to realise that books aren't sold with a single 'touch'. Rarely do we see a review of a book and go 'Gosh, I really must have that book right now!' In fact, I can trace the immediate results of reviews reflected directly in my Amazon sales the day they 'break' and I can assure you positive reviews in national media or on popular book review websites result in not one direct book sale. Dittoes for interviews. As for 'book blog tours' I shudder at the very thought of the device, let alone would I consider undertaking one. Like promoting books on writer's sites, it's the blind screaming at the blind.

So all is lost, then? Well, not quite. It's not that reviews are useless per se. They're part of the wider picture. A reader sees a good review, then hears about that same book from a friend, gets caught by another mention of the book and then, ideally, either is persuaded to click on a link or views the book in a physical location. That could be a bookshop or another book-buying opportunity such as an author event - a signing or some such. I have come to believe that three to five 'touches' are needed, ideally one having some form of call to action, before a book sale takes place. I have often said, the last 'touch' should ideally be from me in your ear as you're standing in a bookshop wondering what to do next.

This is not easy to accomplish. Believe me, I've thought about ways you could do it and, reluctantly, drawn a blank. A halfway house would be ensuring that I 'feed' that positive review back into my marketing channels. What you may find depressing is that if you are in any way connected with me, you have just become a 'marketing channel'. So if I haven't stolen your runaway nasal hair or braying laugh to use in one of my characters, I've abused you at the marketing end of the process. One way or another, if you know me, I'm going to use you. And the fact I have not lost one wink of sleep over this tells you what an irredeemable shit this whole book writing thing has made me become.

So, existentialist angst apart, how do you scream 'buy my book!' at someone five times without them punching you?

That's the million dollar question. Clearly, I've been following a 'content strategy' in building awareness of A Decent Bomber. I've done this to a degree with all four books, although Olives got far more attention, including a 'blog of the book'. While this was enormously time consuming, it did have an impact on overall awareness and therefore a smaller but discernible impact on sales. The amount of effort invested vs returns in terms of sales was ridiculous, one aspect of occupying a small market where scale doesn't really count. And McNabb's Law of Clicks applies, depressingly.

So we have reviews out with reviewers (the first one's already in, in fact: "The plot is complex. You must pay attention. You will reap a lot of enjoyment if you do. This is a great story... I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Most readers will jump on the thrill train and get the ride of their lives. In this genre, who could ask for anything more?") and posts about the book and its 'book hooks' (Bombs, the IRA, things Irish, new terror vs old terror. That kind of thing) have been appearing here on the blog. Occasional reminders have gone out to the mailing list and we're building up towards launch. Blog posts get pimped across to Facebook and Google+, Twitter is, as always, a great link-pointing machine.

We are, in short, ticking all the boxes, using a content-led approach to gain your permission to witter at you and wear you down until you resignedly pop off to Amazon and click on that A Decent Bomber pre-order link. Once that pre-order date is past, the book has to generate buzz and recommendation from people - it has, in short, to stand on its own two feet.

What amazes me, to be honest, is how I've found the energy to do all this again. It's Sisyphean, it really is. But found it I have and as a consequence you, you poor thing, are being subjected to new levels of outrageous book pluggery...

The link's here. You know what you have to do...

An Embarrassment Of Books

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's not my fault I've ended up with two books. The Irish Farmer took a year to write, the newnew book has taken a tad over a month, having possessed me in the spirit of something Steven King would think up. I've been haunted by a book and it used me as an unwilling channel to create itself.

So now I'm in the odd position of having one book still being rejected by literary agents as I start to shop the second one around. Even beta readers haven't finished sending me their comments and feedback on the Irish Farmer. Some of the poor darlings have ended up with TWO of my books in their inboxes because they weren't fleet enough to get rid of the Irish one. I'm keenly aware my beta readers, kind enough to agree to being part of my book development process, are being soundly abused right now.

So now I have two unpublished manuscripts clamouring to become real books with titles and covers and Amazon pages and everything.

The question is what to do next. Assuming the result of sharing the newnew book with agents will be the usual round of smug, platitudinous form letters...

Sorry, but we're going to pass on this one. It's a tough market right now and we didn't feel enthusiastic enough about this to take it forward. However, this is a subjective business and others may feel differently, so don't be dispirited.

...I will then face self publishing two books, both set in the UK and so with limited appeal for a Middle Eastern audience. Do I print them as I did Olives and Beirut? Certainly, not printing a UAE edition of Shemlan had a major (negative) impact on the book's sales - but then I really don't have the time to go around chasing up bookshops and trying to chivvy up a charming but ultimately flaccid distribution chain. Doing that for the first two was exhausting.

And Shemlan didn't leave me out of pocket to the tune of a Dhs 15,000 print bill. Every copy of the book I've sold has been profit and while it all hardly amounts to a hill of beans, it seems to make more sense to be in the black than in the red. Call me old fashioned.

Fair enough, having sold out both books' print runs means I'm not technically out of pocket, but I'm hardly laughing all the way to the bank - and back at square zero anyway, because I'm certainly not about to order a reprint and start all over again. So if you want to buy Olives or Beirut today, you'll have to go online same as you do for Shemlan.

I tried to resist, honestly I did, but it's no use.

You can buy Olives - A Violent Romance here.

You can buy Beirut - An Explosive Thriller here.

You can buy Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy here.

I can order smaller runs from Createspace, getting them delivered here to the UAE for a little over Dhs30 per book. This means I can sell them to people at events and so on, but makes traditional distribution unworkable (the disty takes 50%). People here generally seem happy to buy a book that's in front of them but very averse to buying print books online. In fact the online habit, including ebooks, is pretty nascent around here.

But, for a self-published author, online makes so much sense it's not true. So the decision's pretty much a no-brainer: no big print runs, we'll be going with Amazon, iBooks, Createspace et al.

The next big question is timing. Giving agents another month to finish rejecting the Irish book takes us into July and Ramadan and Summer. And editing takes 4-6 weeks. So we're looking at October publication. Should I hold back on the newnew book and publish it to coincide with the LitFest in March next year? That would seem to make sense, but I can't for the life of me see how I can sit on a book for six months without bursting. Especially the newnew one, because I am very, very excited about it.

So I'm going to have to mull that one over. There are no easy answers. Any smart ideas gratefully received...

Book Post: Submissions. Oh joy.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A Simple Irish Farmer, which I am assured is the thriller working title from hell by people who know better than I, is going out for a round of submissions to UK literary agents. Here's a handy Q&A for anyone interested in the whole area of novels and the process of submission. And no, there's no BDSM stuff going on here beyond perhaps a slight queasy feeling of impotence and pain the whole process engenders.

Why are you submitting your novel to agents?
Most publishers worth talking to won't talk to an un-agented author. If you want to get your work in front of an editor, the person who decides to take a book on within a publishing company, you'll need an agent. Agents are also useful further down the line for things like contract negotiations and a number of other things that make them worth the 15% of your income they'll charge.

No, I mean why are YOU submitting your novel to agents?
Mr Self Publishing, you mean? I've always sent my novels to agents. About 100 rejected Space, about another 80 rejected Olives - A Violent Romance, another 80 or so rejected Beirut - An Explosive Thriller before one signed me up and then 14 publishers rejected that book. Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy was sent out to a small number of agents, 3 or 4, including my own. When HE rejected it, my own blasted agent, I terminated our agreement. And when the others did, I self published it. Believe me, I am very, very good indeed at rejection. I can, we can safely say, handle it.

Why only a few agents for Shemlan?
I was weary then, (and I'm even more weary now) and was pretty much going through the motions before self-publishing the book. Shemlan didn't even get the promotion it deserved because of that weariness, which is a shame because it's probably (IMHO) my best work so far. I reckon if you pick up 10-25 rejections, you're self publishing or sticking it in a desk drawer.

Submitting to three million agents won't change your chances. Don't ever waste your hopes and talents on a desk drawer. Self publish. Hell, what have you to lose? Amazon, Smashwords et al don't cost a penny and if you earn $10 from that book, it's a) $10 more than you had b) been enjoyed by several more people than it took to write.

So you want a publisher?
Yes. I need a UK publisher to get some scale and traction into that market and beyond. With Olives and Beirut selling out their print runs in the UAE, a very small market, and all three books getting positive reviews from media reviewers as well as Amazon and Goodreads I still haven't managed to drive any scale. I need help to do that.

What if they all reject you?
Self publish. I've said this all along at workshops and things: don't do what I did and collect 100 rejections. Submit to a number of agents who are open to submissions and willing to look at work in your genre. If they all pass on it, self-publish rather than get caught in iterative Sisyphean loops of polishing the work and resubmitting it. In my experience the issue isn't necessarily quality.

What is it, then?
Serendipity. Is your book the kind of thing they're looking for? Does it press the right buttons? Does it deal with issues they don't think the market will buy, either for reasons of squeamishness, sensibility or ignorance? Is it in a genre that's selling, with a clear standout 'hook' that makes it a powerful book to market? All these things are commercial decisions agents take.

Being able to write well doesn't mean your book will sell well and knowing what will and won't sell is where agents pretty much stake their livelihoods. 15% of the author's 10% cut of the cover price of a book that doesn't sell is hardly going to send young Clarence and Philomena to Repton, is it?

What do you send them?
A query letter that clearly states who you are and what your book's about, a synopsis of the book as a one page document, a bio of yourself and 10 or 50 pages of the manuscript, depending on their guidelines.

It's very, very important to visit each agency's website, make sure they're working in your genre and that you identify an agent who would be interested in you. Make your submission to that agent, ideally explaining why you think you might be interesting to them. And then you sit back and wait, for anything up to a couple of months.

Do they ever give you helpful feedback?
Almost never. Getting feedback from an agent is quite a deal. An average UK agent gets about 40 submissions a day, an American one anything up to 200. Nobody in their right minds is going to give 40 free writing a book sessions every day. And if they did, they wouldn't be in their right minds for long.

A high percentage of those submissions will be way off the mark, so the winnowing is quite harsh. Very few will have enough spark to merit a closer look and a read of that 50 pages. And very, very few will get through to the next stage, which is a request for a 'full read'.

I've heard that term before. What's a 'full' vs a 'partial'?
There are three stages, really. A query, which is a letter saying I've written a book in this genre, it's about this and that, do you want to take a look? If they say yes to that, they'll ask for a partial read. Many will take the partial as part of the original submission package and, if the book's in a genre and has a hook they can see is commercial, they'll dip into the writing sample you've sent.

A 'partial' as I noted above is a sample of 10 or perhaps 50 pages which demonstrates to the agent that a) you can string two words together b) your plot and characters are developing as per the synopsis. Now, if they think your book's in a commercially viable genre (and they don't already have full complement of writers already working in that genre/area) and stands out within that genre AND you can write and your book seems to be delivering the goods, they'll ask for a 'full read' - that's the whole manuscript.

At this stage you'd better really have finished the manuscript and not be winging it in case someone says yes to it. You send 'em the full MS and they will read or, typically, pay a reader to look at it. Very few get through to the 'full' stage precisely because at this stage an agent is putting a lot of time or a little bit of skin in the game.

So you're almost there!
Yes, you are. But not for sure. I've known full reads come to nothing (and yes, it sucks), so don't go getting all puppyish about it. If the agent thinks the whole thing smells of roses, they'll sign you and go on to represent your books to the publishers they deal with. In an ideal world, loads of publishers will fight to get their hands on your brilliance and the agent will conduct an auction, getting your book into the hands of the highest bidding publisher.

Sounds exciting!
It doesn't happen so much these days, although it does still happen. Large advances are not so much a part of the publishing landscape. Agents like advances, because they pay for Tuscan holidays in nice, satisfying single transactions. Authors have to earn back their advances, so it's a bit like having a mortgage.

Can you play one agent off against another?
No! If you get an offer of representation, take it. Don't go playing silly B's at this stage, just take it. If you have two offers, take the agent you think you can work with - who will do the best job for you and with whom you could bear working. Sign and then sit back and let them get on with selling your book.

If agents aren't buying the kinds of book you're writing, why not write what they do buy?
I'm not really very interested in writing to order. I write what I do because the situations, locations and characters interest me. As a life-long voracious reader, I like the idea of different, intelligent thrillers. And if nobody's buying Middle East thrillers, or editors don't like books about people with cancer or retired IRA bombers, that's my tough luck. That's what interests me - and in my experience so far - has interested readers. I can't write Scottish romances. Not only would it bore me to death, I'd probably be really bad at it.

So what happens next?
You sits back and you waits to hear from 'em. You NEVER ever call 'em up. Just leave it with them. Welcome to your first taste of the passivity of the book industry...

Gerbil Arlee

Dramatic Gerbil (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was once chatting to an American gentleman who insisted he was going to Gerbil Arlee. It took a couple of repetitions for me to work out what the hell he meant. Ever since, the lesson in pronunciation has haunted me.

It's not often, living in Northern Sharjah, I get to visit Jebel Ali Village. Tomorrow gives me that rarest of things - a reason to do so. For tomorrow, ladies and gentlemen, is the Jebel Ali Village Festive Family Market and I have once again been talked into destroying any scant Serious Thriller Author Mystique I might have by old poo pants and am sharing a table with her to flog a handful of books to an uncaring and disinterested public.

This time I've got no 'get out of jail' card. I'm in it for the duration. And the good news is if you wanted to get your hands on a nice, freshly minted paperback copy of Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy I have copies for sale. You'd otherwise have to buy 'em direct from Amazon or The Book Depository, while you can get Olives or Beirut from most reputable UAE bookshops.

It's on from 1-5pm. There are lots of stalls there, a tombola and other stuff. There may well be a goat stuck in a Ferris Wheel. You turn off the SZR at Junction 25 and sling a left at the second roundabout as if you were going to the Mövenpick Ibn Battuta Gate Hotel and the car park is to your right behind the ENOC station. Look, here's a Google map an' everyfin'.

Do by all means swing by and say hello or register your complaint or disappointment. No refunds given.

A Day In The Life

English: Ian Dury in concert. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Please note: this post is best read from the bottom up.

6.30pm
What happened?

Setting out to live blog a day when you're clearly in the poo for time and have a brand new Samsung which you don't know how to use and haven't yet downloaded key apps for was never going to be quite the breeze it appeared at 9am. Boy did I time out.
We had starters, mezze thingies and hot fatayer. I love mujaddara. Just saying.
Main course was a rich North African style lamb thingy with couscous and vegetables. I couldn't tell Rachel this for obvious reasons, principally the fact she had a cold shawarma at her side when I finally got back to her at 4.30 just as the ExpatWoman Festive Family Fun Fandango was shutting down for the day. She'd been too busy to eat lunch.
After the main course Lara got up and moderated. Liz talked. I talked. We answered questions from the audience. People bought books and asked us to sign them. I sold out of copies of Shemlan which was kind of nice.
For my part I talked about MECAS and Shemlan, the magic of Beirut and the shittiness of sectarianism, both in Beirut and in Northern Ireland, where my next book is set. And where Gerald Lynch the evil spy is more than comfortable because he understands the sectarianism that binds these two magical countries.

It was late in the afternoon as Gerald Lynch hopped along the uneven paving that lined Gouraud Street, the heart of Beirut’s bustling Gemayze area. He wore jeans and a leather jacket against the chill spring air, his hands in his pockets as he squeezed between the parked cars.
Gouraud’s bars, as ever, welcomed those who wanted to party and forget the woes of a world where violence and conflict were a distant memory but a constant worry. Orphaned by Belfast’s troubles, Lynch appreciated Beirut’s fragile peace and sectarian divides, the hot embers under the white ash on the surface of a fire that looked, to the casual observer, as if it had gone out. Lynch scowled as he passed a poster carrying Michel Freij’s smiling face, encircled in strong black script: ‘One Leader. One Lebanon.’

From 'Beirut - A Deadly Thriller'

So, what with eating lunch and all that talking, the afternoon flew by and I abandoned Rachel like the low cur I am. I rushed back to the Ranches, but it was too late. We had a chat about our respective afternoons and wandered our respective ways home. We're doing it again at Repton, but more about that later. I missed The Goat, but appreciated his kind gesture in leaving behind a security camera picture of him emptying my cash tin.
I finish by driving home, exhausted and elated. Raucous: Blur's Caramel, Kaiser Chiefs' In My Life, Chili Peppers' Californication.
It's very odd to spend a whole day rushing around talking to people about your books and then taking money from them. But it's one of the best ways of spending a day I know of.
So a heartfelt thank you to the ExpatWoman team for hosting the Author's Corner and to Jane Northcote and the team at Dubai World Trade Club - and Lara, the moderator with the mostest.
And now to a Djinn and Tonic...

1.10pm
Going in for lunch now. It's all glittering tines and starched white linen around here. Chattering, unsuspecting audience members are having drinks poured. I'm trying not to think of the blazing sun and poor old Rachel flogging books to the hordes. I'm dealing with it.

12.25pm
Oh wow. Placebo's Bulletproof Cupid and Foo Fighters Burn Away seeing me on the pell-mell dash from the Ranches to the Dubai World Trade Centre. Dury's Apples still haunting the edge of what passes for my mind. Got here on time, bit sweaty and over-excited but I'm good and the calm, monied halls of the World Trade Club are taking the edge off the Hunter Thompson vibe.
Rachel's got a wee stock of signed books and I actually feel sorry for her (now I've sold a tranche of books) in the sweltering heat while I loll around talking to the leisurely classes in the air conditioned luxury of Dubai's oldest members-only club.
It's going to be fun getting back to the Festive Fair, it was packed as I left, parking spaces only available out as far away as Studio City.
And now to lunch...

11.40am
I have to dash to Trade Centre now. Books have been flying out of the door, which is lovely. I've been teasing Rachel about how much more money I make per sale than she does and she's pointed out that she only has to write 35,000 words to finish one of hers.
I'm working out how to do for her. Seriously.

11am
Golly but it's hot. The sun's out, the smell of BBQs in the air and the crowds are out, people milling around and much chatter. The catering's a disaster, grinning staff who don't understand the words tea or sugar makes for an interesting service experience. Dhs 10 for an Aquafina, 18 for a coffee. Rachel's sold thousands of books, I haven't sold a thing. I hate her but have to be nice to her because she's looking after the stall at lunchtime. When I get back this afternoon I'm going to kill her and hide her body behind the clubhouse.

9.30am
Guy at the gate stops me. I announce I am an Expat Woman but he doesn't crack a smile. He tells me there are new rules and I can't have pets or feed the horses. That's fine, then.
I meet the team behind Eva Lilly and the Three Toed Snooch. They have t-shirts. Rachel has brought a big yellow pop-up stand with The Case Of The Exploding Loo on it.
I feel I am building well on my positioning as a serious author of Middle East spy thrillers.

9.15am
I'm on the road, having wiped out ADNOC's cash reserves by emptying their ATM and then buying a bottle of Masafi. They're going to go bust now but I've got a cash float and I don't care. Spiritualised's Broken Heart helps to erase Dury's Apples but it's going to take more than that. Feeder and System of a Down, Placebo and then Blur. That's done the trick. The MBZ road is clear and I'm flying along - I'd allowed an hour for the drive and I'm at the Ranches by 9.30.

9am

The idea of noting down the day comes to me. I've got Ian Dury's 'Apples' in my head and Sarah has just handed me a tin cashbox. It occurs to me that I'm actually going to handle money today. True to form, I've double booked myself. I'm selling and signing books at the ExpatWoman Festive Family Fun Fair AND I'm doing a literary lunch event at the Dubai World Trade Club. Kids' author Rachel Hamilton asked if she could pitch in a couple of weeks ago which was fine by me. And then I realised about the double booking thing, which made her my lunchtime stand-in. For two hours or so today she gets to be me and speak all gruff.

ExpatWoman Festive Family Fair Fun

I might have forgotten to mention this (I didn't? Oh, goodie!), but kids' author Rachel Hamilton and I will be on the Terrace at the ExpatWoman Festive Family Fair this coming Saturday (the 8th November) over at the Dubai Polo and Equestrian Club.

Let's face it. This is the only way a polo club is going to let the two of us in.

I'll have bright new freshly printed copies of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy there, as well as Olives and Beirut in case you've been living in a box for the past three years. Rachel will be signing copies of her nuanced, piquant investigation of human folly and revenge, The Case of The Exploding Toilet.

Between us we intend to have a great many laughs and sell you all some books. Rachel clearly one for the kids, me clearly one for mum and dad. That's, like, four books for each average family.

We are going to CLEAN UP, I tell you.

I'll be skipping for lunch 'cos of that Dubai World Trade Club Literary Lunch fingy I've been batting on about. I'll have to owe Rachel for looking after things.

Mind you, she'll probably nick the takings, her...

Virgin Is Now Stocking Alexander McNabb Books. And I Am Glad.

When Olives - A Violent Romance first started to infest bookshelves around the UAE, the sales team at distributor Jashanmal making their rounds and proposing booksellers stock this finest of novels, it failed to appear on the gorgeous red displays at Virgin Megastores.

A few disappointed tweets from potential buyers down the line, I got in touch with Jashanmal who seemed to hint at a whiff of sulphur, something odd about the relationship between them and the Virgin book buying team. So I hit up Virgin directly and they said they'd stock the book but nothing appeared and more disappointed tweets followed. As the saga went on, between one thing and another, I had the feeling that the books team over at Virgin weren't particularly interested in being nagged by novelists. My emails eventually went unanswered and, frustrated, I finally threw it up as a bad job.

Beirut - An Explosive Thriller came and went, still failing to sully the carmine shelves of that most mega of MegaStores. When the Virgin books people tweeted for ideas of novels set in Jordan they could stock for a promotion, something like 80 people tweeted them about Olives - A Violent Romance. I sent them an email pointing this out and proposing they stock the book but still nothing happened. By now I accepted it was never going to happen.

Until a wee while ago when I was chatting with Virgin Megastore Middle East President Nisreen Shocair about something completely different. "By the way, are we selling your books?" she asked. I poured my heart out to her and she was as baffled a president as I've ever seen. "That's daft. The books team has changed since then, anyway. We'll fix it."

And so she has. I can confirm that if you wander into any Virgin Megastore over the weekend, Dhs60 clutched in your eager hand, you can buy lovely paperback copies of both Olives - A Violent Romance and Beirut - An Explosive Thriller.

Hell, push the boat out, buy one for a friend. Buy them as gifts for the family. Your Facebook followers. Go to town!

Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy, you still have to buy online - paperback or ebook alike. But you never know - as the wee saga above shows - anything can and will change!

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: 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 - Stuck

(Photo credit: NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center)

It's an odd place to be in. Having finished Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy, I'm having the odd potter with the manuscript, tidying a sentence here, clearing up a point there and adding little dashes of colour where that seems the right thing to do.

But if I tell the truth, I'm sort of marking time. It needs to go off for editing now, but I'm still waiting for one agent's feedback before I give up - again - on 'traditional' publishing. I'm reconciled to the fact that Middle Eastern spy thrillers are not going to sell to a UK publisher.

Which begs the question, what to write next? It's probably not going to be a Middle East spy thriller, given events so far. It's been great that loads of people have enjoyed Olives and Beirut, but 'loads' is relative and it hasn't added up to more than break-even with the project so far - and certainly isn't going to pay to have Shemlan printed. I'm still down a few thousand dollars on the deal. In fact, the only people who've made money so far have been the editors, printers and distributors.

Which makes one of us pretty dumb. And there are no prizes for guessing who's wearing donkey ears around here.

So what to write next? I know I will write a new book - it's already killing me that I haven't started. I've got a number of projects jostling for attention. A retired IRA bomber who's blackmailed out of his rest by modern day terrorists. A psychological thriller based around a damaged woman with amnesia, a whistleblower and a battlefield drug trial that's gone horribly wrong. And, oddly, an allegorical comedy based around a logical man's battle with authority are among the candidates that are banging around in my head like dodgems in a power surge.

The result of which is I'm stuck. I literally don't know what to do next. I've never had writers' block, but now I've got something worse - book block.

The answer might be to start on a romantic comedy or a vampire fantasy or something more 'commercial'. Trouble is, of course, neither I nor the publishing industry really knows what's 'commercial'...

In the meantime, I guess I'll just carry on tinkering.

Sold Out

Mars (chocolate bar) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What?

Have I sold out? What's going on? Adwords on Fake Plastic Souks? What kind of swine would keep his blog ad free for five years and then sell his soul to Goog?

Me, that's what kind of swine. I've been playing around with Google AdWords quite a bit lately and thought I'd do some experimenting with the other end of the horse.

There's very little money in AdWords for yer average blogger, so I'm not about to give in the day job (in fact, it's the day job that's driven much of this interest) - with my traffic, I might buy a Mars Bar every month out of it if I'm very lucky. But I'm interested in the dynamics of things. And sometimes the only thing to do is pull the tyrant's nose and see what happens.

If you really want to know when I've sold out, it'll be when there are Amazon affiliate links on here to buy my books...

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

The Umbrella Series At The Archive

The Umbrella Series - four workshops on the creation and distribution of words - takes place at The Archive on Wednesdays throughout February. They're being held by The Archive in conjunction with The Emirates Literary Group, with the intention of providing information and guidance for budding writers on the process of collating words into complete works, how to create books out of them (either through the 'traditional' process or self publishing) and how to sell and distribute them. With that in mind, the four workshops feature a known idiot, a poet and the head of a book distribution and sales company.

The idea is that attendees will walk away from these with a reasonable basic understanding of the whole process that will stand them in good stead as they undertake their own journey to publication. It's the workshop I wish I'd had being held in a funky work/art-space around the corner from me as I started out myself.

By the way, in doing these I'm not claiming I'm Stephen King or that I am anything other than a marginal, self-published writer selling handfuls of books. I'm just sharing some of the lessons I learned the hard way, so you don't have to.

Each workshop session will last a couple of hours and take place from 6-pm. Attendance is free, but The Archive would appreciate if you register to guarantee a place.

How to write a book 
Alexander McNabb
February 6th
I'll be looking at the miraculous process of arranging 26 letters variously into 100,000 words and how you go about doing that without wasting time, effort and money. We'll look at things like plotting, dialogue, structure and editing.

How to write poetry 
Frank Dullaghan
February 13th
Published and widely respected poet Frank Dullaghan will be guiding attendees through the world of poetry - looking at different poetic forms and styles and how to use language to create evocation, to bring rhythm and metre together on the page so the words create an emotional experience for the reader. He'll also be looking at finding outlets for your poetry.

Routes to publication (How to find an agent or self publish your book) 
Alexander McNabb
February 20th
Luigi Bonomi gave an excellent - and popular - workshop at the Emirates LitFest last year and will be repeating it this year. He is a top London literary agent and a very nice chap indeed and his excellent advice is well worth heeding. So do book for that session, but feel free to come along to this one as well. I'll be giving an author's-eye view of the agenting and publishing process, from how to format your manuscript through creating a stellar synopsis, blistering blurb and killer query. I'll also be looking at how you can chuck all that up and do it yourself, from picking platforms through to getting reviews and promoting your work.

Book distribution and sales in the UAE 
Narain Jashanmal
February 27th
If you want to understand how publishing 'ticks', who better to talk to than an industry 'insider'? It's amazing how many of us set out to put 100,000 words on paper without ever thinking about what's actually going to happen to them at the end of the process. Narain Jashanmal is GM of Jashanmal Books and will take you on a roller coaster ride through the worlds of distribution, sales and retail. What do the public want? How do they get it? What makes people buy (and not buy!) books? What can you do to maximise your chances of success and give his sales team a nice, easy job when it comes to actually getting your books out there into peoples' hands? And where is publishing going - and where should we as writers be going as a result?

So there you have it - a series of what promise to be enjoyable evenings for anyone interested in writing and publishing as we embark on the run-up to the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature - the link will take you to my sessions at the LitFest. :)

For the Umbrella Series Workshops, please let Librarian Sarah Malki know which sessions you'd like to attend. You can drop her a mail at sarah@thearchive.ae or phone The Archive on 04 349 4033. If you want its location, pop over to www.thearchive.ae or this post if you want to find out more about The Archive.

Beirut - An Explosive Thriller. Launched.

Dubai (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dubai's not really the kind of place you'd expect to find an apres-ski joint, but sure enough, funky evening spot Apres overlooks the indoor ski slope crowning that most packed of shopping malls, the Mall of the Emirates.

I can never go there without thinking of Louis, the small child in Sarah's class whose hand shot up as the class was naming the seven emirates of the UAE, claiming to know an eighth emirate. Puzzled, Sarah duly fell for it and asked what the eighth emirate might be. "Mall of the Emirates!" Louis pronounced with pride.

So Apres was where we ended up after the launch of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller. Welcomed with a glass of bubbly laid on  by the nice chaps there, we stayed chatting and drinking until well past our bedtime. Earlier, I had been helped to launch Beirut by a stellar cast - poet Frank Dullaghan took us to Gerald Lynch's Irish boyhood, rapper Jibberish took a car chase through Chatila and turned it into a rap, which was pretty cool, to be honest; actress Dana Dajani introduced us to smoky siren Marcelle Aboud (ably helped by Frank with the Irish accompaniment) and orator Kevin Simpson replayed Michel Freij's great speech in Martyr's Square. Enjoyed by the audience, the performances were a revelation to me - it's odd to hear your words re-interpreted, acted and declaimed in those different voices.

Mr Siju and the nice chaps from Jashanmal's laid on the support, Apres laid on the bubbles and many people kindly came along and laid on their support, which was wonderful. Books were duly sold and signed and that, as they say, was that.

So now Beirut - An Explosive Thriller has been launched, you can go here and buy a print copy or ebook anywhere in the world, but in the UAE you can now go to any Jashanmals or Spinneys bookshop and get your very own print copy. In the coming couple of weeks, other bookstores will also be ordering and stocking Beirut. Which is nice.

Self Publishing Workshop Alert

English: Open book icon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Rather to my surprise, the workshop on publishing and promoting your book I gave at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature earlier this year was a sell-out. Given that tickets cost Dhs200 (about $55) a pop, I was impressed at the level of interest - it points to a larger coterie of would-be novelists out there than I thought existed.

I'm doing another one at the Sharjah International Book Fair. on Monday 12th November at 7pm. This one's free.

So if you want to know how self publishing works, if it makes sense compared to beating your head against the bastions of 'traditional' publishing, how to format a book for publication, which platforms to choose for ebook and print book editions and why, how to design a cover and how to negotiate the red tape of creating a book in the United Arab Emirates, come on down. It'll be about an hour of frenetic brain-dump that should answer all your questions and even some you hadn't thought about yet.

If you're Dubai based, don't worry. The traffic's not as bad as you think (but, yes, you will spend 30 minutes in the queues unless you decide to pitch up at about 4 or 5-ish and have a mooch around the exhibition halls before the workshop, in which case the traffic's fine), dragons and spiny tailed bandersnatches don't actually wander the streets of Sharjah eating unsuspecting maidens despite what you've been told and no, you won't catch diphtheria by contact because Sharjah's unclean. Incidentally, the exhibition halls are packed with publishers and books, with a strong turnout from international titles and there is literally something there for everyone.

Book Post - Shopping Beirut

Part of my list of the fourteen London publishers Robin shopped 'Beirut'  

to - pretty much a 'who's who' of publishing. One by one, I got to cross 'em off...

I started writing Beirut - An Explosive Thriller in late 2009, just after a reader working for British literary agent called Eve White rejected Olives - A Violent Romance after a ‘full read’ with the comment that it wasn’t dramatic enough. Right, I thought. If you want dramatic, mate, you can have it. It wasn't until I'd done with the book that I realised I had created precisely the type of novel I'd set out to spoof with my first attempt at a book, the amusing Space (although I have to point out that Space's first Amazon review cites the book as almost entirely unamusing!).

I finished in June 2010, but it wasn’t until spring 2011 Beirut was picked up by literary agent Robin Wade, who signed me on the strength of it.

Now, for the uninitiated, getting signed by an agent is quite a deal. Step one is typically a query letter which may lead to a request for the 'first three', which is the first fifty pages of your book and a synopsis. If this pushes more of the right buttons, an agent will ask for a 'full read' - by this stage you're very close to the top of the slush pile - let us not forget agents in the UK will receive something like forty brown envelopes full of someone's hope a day. If an agent signs you, you're bloody well made. They're not charity cases, these boys, they're running businesses with that most admirable of objectives in mind - making money. An agent signing you means they think you have commercial potential in the 'competitive market' they all remember to mention in their rejection letters.

I can't begin to tell you how much hope was packed in my heart as Robin touted Beirut - An Explosive Thriller around the London Book Fair. But I was giddy with it - 250 rejections from agents later, I was actually in with a chance here. Robin faithfully reported back on the reactions he got back from each editor. To a man, they rejected it. What's more, it took them seven months to get around to it! The rejection that hurt most praised the book’s qualities but noted the editor in question ‘couldn’t see it selling in supermarkets’.      

"There are lots of elements to it that I like – there’s an austere, almost Le Carre feel which I like and the author can clearly write. The dialogue and plotting stood out for me in particular. I’m afraid though that it is – for my purposes – a bit too low-key; the ‘commercial’ bit of my job title requires me to pick out titles which are going to appeal directly to supermarkets and the mass-market, and I feel that this would be too difficult a sell in that context. "     

It was that reaction pushed me over the edge into self-publishing. "Low key"? The book's an adrenaline soaked catalogue of machismo lunacy and violence! Caviling apart, there was clearly a major change – and massive contraction – taking place in the world of ‘traditional’ publishing and it wasn’t favouring a new author writing hard-to-peg novels about the Middle East.I was clearly wasting my time at the gates of Gormenghast castle. It was time to pack up my motley collection of carvings and take them to market myself.

The whole process had wasted a year. I lost little time in getting Olives into print in December 2011, with a view to following with Beirut the next Spring. In retrospect, this was silly - the whole wearying cycle of promotion sucks down time, as does editing and polishing - publishing Olives taught me an awful lot, not the least lesson being that there are readers out there. I'm not kidding - up until that point it had been about me and my books. Now it was about them and my books. Meeting readers, talking about the characters, their motivations and feelings with complete strangers changes the way you write, it really does. And then Beirut went off for editing and I started getting permissions, readying different files for print, Kindle, and ePub formats.

It's all taken pretty much a year. but a year better spent than one waiting around for publishers to think of new and inspiring ways to say no.

So on December 1st, at 7pm, the Middle East print edition of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller will launch at Jashanmal's book store at the Mall of the Emirates, Dubai. If you can't wait, or you're not in the UAE, you can buy your very own copy from the outlets listed here. The launch is going to be a lot of fun and I'll share details as I confirm things, but do mark the date in your diary!

A Mountain Of Book Reviewers

English: Open book icon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Honestly, you've no idea how many book blogs there are out there. After trawling through them for a few hours, they start to morph together into a plastic gloop of Blogger and Wordpress templates, a putty of garish backgrounds and glittering widgets that eventually goes the way of school plasticine and turns into a dull, brownish purple.

Yes, we're in promo mode...

I missed a trick with Olives - A Violent Romance, in that I didn't focus early enough on the global online community. That's partly because I had a printed edition of the book which was targeted at the UAE. Later on, I shifted focus from 'traditional' and Middle-East focused online media to book bloggers and reviewers and had compiled a sizeable database of sites after a while. For Beirut - An Explosive Thriller, which will launch as an online-only book (both ebook and print), that online community is even more important. In fact, it's crucial.

That means trawling through, literally, hundreds of book review blogs to find appropriate reviewers. What makes a book blog appropriate? Here's Alexander's handy ten point book blog selection filter:

1) Is the site well formatted and readable?
Purple 6 point text on a cyan background with ebulliently serifed fonts, illustrations that 'crash' on the page and thousands of buttons, awards and widgets? If you find it hard to read, so will visitors. It just takes a quick check for 7) before we move on.

2) Is it updated?
If the last post was in July, we move on.

3) Is it well written?
I'm not talking about the odd literal, but you're putting your work into someone's hands and accepting their review of it. If they clearly aren't able to express themselves, it's not going to be as smart an investment in time as finding someone who - even if they don't like your work - can effectively reason a conclusion regarding that work. The vast majority of book blogs don't fall into this bucket, avid readers tending to be literate, but there are some that do and I choose to avoid them.

4) Does the site review in your genre?
If the last ten reviews have young men with eight-packs on the covers and titles like Love in Wyoming, I can't quite see Beirut floating the reviewer's boat. Olives was easier in this respect as it did wander into romance crossover territory, but Beirut is a pretty hardcore international spy thriller. A nip into the 'Review guidelines' to check the reviewer's preferences and we can both save ourselves some time.

5) Is the reviewer accepting reviews?
Closed to submissions means just that. Quite a few blogs have put this up as the reviewer drowns in the weight of eager, breathless little books scratching away at their skin. Ignoring it just wastes everyone's time. You can always put these in a separate list to check back in a couple of months. Often you'll find 5) and 2) signal that the blogger has decided to go back to reading for enjoyment rather than being hassled 9-5 by authors shrieking 'review my book!'

6) Does the reviewer accept ebooks?
I can't stress enough how much time and hassle is avoided by reading the review guidelines - and conforming to them. And when a reviewer says no ebooks, they mean it.

7) If not, does the site have significant reach?
For about $8, I can put a review copy in anyone's hands, anywhere in the US and Canada. For about £9.99 I can cover much of the rest of the world via the Book Depository. Now the question becomes how many of these outlays do you want to/can you make? And then, when you have a budget defined, where is it wisest to spend it?

How do you tell whether a blog has reach? That's  whole piece in itself, but comments and followers are a start. Bear in mind these days that Twitter and Facebook form a part of any site's 'reach', but as a rule of thumb few followers, lacking likes and a quiet blog are probably not where you want to spend your bucks.

8) Does the site have reach?
Does it matter? Unless you're eking out your print promo budget because of 7) above, you're looking at the cost of an email or two and a Kindle/epub file. If the blog gets 50 visits a day, that's 50 more people that knew about your book than yesterday. A hundred emails will take you a couple of days to send out, but net you 5,000 eyeballs. Anything above that is bunce. Many book bloggers also post to Goodreads and Amazon, so there are also signficant multipliers there. And, of course, you can share the review with your own followers. So reach be damned!

9) Is there a clear review policy?
Most book blogs have clear review policies that are straightforward and common sense and generally my submission package would conform to these. Where this isn't the case, it's important to reflect the policy and make changes. A personal touch is always appreciated, of course. In a few cases where I've come up against stringent and onerous review policies (such as extensive online forms) I've passed.


10) What's the TBR like?
Most book bloggers have a very long To Be Read list and it's not unusual to see reviews three or even six months out. So the sooner you get out to them, the better.


And what about paid reviews, listings and other services? I avoid 'em like the plague and will continue to do so unless I get some very clear recommendations from writer friends that a given service has worked. And so far I haven't.

If you've got a blog and you'd like a review copy of Beirut, BTW, do just leave a comment or ping me @alexandermcnabb.

Reading

I'm doing a reading tomorrow - and for a change, it's not from Olives!!!  Dubai based editor Meghna Pant is launching her first novel in the UAE. The book's already been a success in India, where it was published by Westland Books. It traces the story of Amara, an Indian girl struggling with modernity and tradition through a move to America and the collapse of her marriage to millionaire stock market man Prashant and her return to India to struggle with the conflict between modern independent-minded thinking and the duties of tradition.

Do pop along to the launch and join us -  it's tomorrow at Jashanmal in Mall of the Emirates at 6.30pm.

On Kindles and Olives

Cover via Amazon

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get the Kindle Edition of Olives (UK)

Get the Kindle Edition of Olives (US)

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

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