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

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Decline. Pfft.

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

Warning. Very long post about book marketing.

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

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

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

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

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

So what has all this 'free' told us?

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

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

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

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

Amazon Advertising

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 245 x 250

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

270 x 150

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

270 x 200

300 x 250

402 x 250

980 x 55

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

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

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

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

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

Books - A Journey

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is all totally irrelevant to anyone, anywhere, ever, but I thought I'd take the chance to document some stuff now I've finished another book and have a little time before I can face editing it.

My first completed novel was a rather silly affair called Space, which I reckon I started back in 2001, but probably only really started in the spring of 2002. The oldest archive files I can find for the book only date back to 2003.

The oldest book files I have are actually a backup of an unfinished novel called Booze - those date back to September 2001, so I must have started Booze then put it to one side to work on the the less controversial Space.

When I'd finished Space and shopped it to agents, being rewarded with a remarkable tally of rejections (by the time I gave up, I had over a hundred), I started back on Booze, a rather scurrilous tale about a Kuwaiti buying a monastery that holds the recipe to an aqua vitae that tastes like angels' tears and is as addictive as crack cocaine. I began to get messages back from agents that said things like 'Humour doesn't sell dear boy' and so the work in progress that was Booze got shelved and, indeed, lies gathering dust even now.

I'll finish it one of these days, it was great fun. Let us remember that I still think Space is funny - it made me laugh enough, re-reading it after all these years, to put it up on Amazon for sale at a princely £0.99. Its first review on Amazon pointed out that "...it just isn't very funny."

It's linked here for your cheap Kindle read buying pleasure!

So I wandered off and decided to write a serious book. The result, Olives - A Violent Romance, was originally written in September 2004, pre-dating - I always thought rather presciently - the 2005 Amman bombing by a year. However, the bombing in the original manuscript was a dream sequence.

The original MS starts...

The first day of my new life started out in the dark, dreary sodium wetness of Heathrow Airport and ended in a cell. Let’s just say things didn’t go according to plan. Now, months later and looking back to the start of my time in Jordan, I wonder that I stayed there at all. Part of me bitterly regrets not leaving the second I was released. But there’s a tiny glimmer of hope in me that won’t go away, although now I’ve run out of choices and the consequences of my actions are written in the wreckage around me. 

And was considerably improved by the large amounts of editing and rewriting that went on between then and 2011 when it was finally published. Most of these took place post-2007, when I discovered Harper Collins' Authonomy and met other writers who taught me how to write better books, principally Australian Italian novelist Phillippa Fioretti. Other than that, the whole Authonomy experience was, as I have documented extensively in earlier blog posts, pretty pants.

Beirut - An Explosive Thriller was started in Autumn 2009 after the 'reader' for an agent called Eve White, who had requested a 'full read' of Olives had finally responded that it was all 'A bit too low key' for them. I was in a fury. The book's crammed with spies and bombs and shit and it's too low key?

That was it. The final straw. I was going to write a mad book and it was going to be based in Beirut. The first versions of Olives had Paul moving to Beirut, looked after by Gerald Lynch (who at that time was called Nigel Soames, a character who nagged at me because he wasn't 'working'), who felt guilty at the way things had panned out for the feckless young journalist. Beirut just made all sorts of sense as a location. I chucked Prague, Hamburg, Spain, Malta and the Greek Islands into the soup mixture just to be sure.

Work on Beirut - An Explosive Thriller actually started with 'The Muezzin Cried', a short story I posted here on the blog, derived, as usual, from a dream memory.

By December 2009 I had realised I was actually going to have to go back to Beirut if I was going to pull this one off. I had been travelling there since the '90s, but hadn't been back in a few years. I needed to refresh my memories and impressions of that sexiest of Eastern Mediterranean cities.

At the time, I had been involved in running a social un-event for online people in Dubai called GeekFest. I called a friend in Lebanon, Alex Tohme, and asked her if she'd be up for running GeekFest Beirut? Of course, she was totally up for it. And so I had my ticket to Beirut sorted!

On the 6th February 2009 GeekFest Beirut took place and I spent a few halcyon days striding around the city often in the company of old friend and partner in crime Eman Hussein. Thanks to GeekFest, I had 'my' city in the 'can'. I went back again for ArabNet with colleague and friend Maha Mahdy, discovering Barometre in the process thanks to geek and blogger Roba Al Assi. And again for GeekFest 3.0. And again, and again. The gorgeous Paul Mouawad Museum, the model for Michel Freij's own private museum, I discovered for myself.

It was with Maha that I went in search of Shemlan, the village nestled high in the Chouf that was home to the 'British Spy School' MECAS - The Middle East Centre for Arab Studies. I was to go back time and again, with the lovely Micheline Hazou and then also with friends Eman and Sara Refai. This village and an inspirational gentleman called Barry were to combine in the person of one Jason Hartmoor, the anti-hero of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy.

Work on Shemlan actually started back in 2011 but was postponed because I decided to self-publish Olives and that took 110% of my time, back in November 2011. Beirut followed in September 2012.

By early 2013 - having visited Estonia, the location of the book's finale - I restarted work on Shemlan and it went like a rocket. I raced to the mad, climactic and rather unusual end of the book, propelled by death metal and much musical mayhem. I sent it off to my agent and when he responded, weeks later, that he wasn't even going to try shopping it to publishers, I terminated our relationship.

Boy, did that feel good.

Shemlan was published on 1 November 2013. I didn't publish a book in 2014, I spent the year wrestling with A Simple Irish Farmer and quite a lot of existential self publishing angst. Olives and Beirut have sold quite well, but Shemlan - easily the best of the three books - was plagued by the fact I didn't do a UAE print run and was too exhausted by the whole farrago of promotion to actually get out there and market the thing. Shemlan has been terribly - and unfairly - neglected as a consequence.

Seriously. I can't even look at a book blog now. If I see the words, 'I love books and...' one more time, I'll burn the puppy. Big brown eyes or no big brown eyes...

I've written a screenplay for Olives since. I just don't know what to do with that, so it's in a desk drawer. It was fun to do!

So here I am, fifteen years into my journey as a writer of books. I have one more book now finished, being steadily rejected by a number of agents. That's taken, as I have documented earlier, a year to write. And I have another new book to edit now, which took about a month to write. If traditional publishing turns both books down, as I confidently predict they will, I shall self publish them in September this year (A Simple Irish Farmer) and March next year (the newnew book) to coincide with the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature.

And after that, I reckon, I'll be hanging up my literary shoes...

Fake Plastic Souks - The Fear Returns

I've gone and done it again. I couldn't help myself. I've published another collection of 'best of' posts from years passim of this marginal, silly little blog. At the time I did the first volume as a test file for a self-publishing workshop, I joked that if I sold more than ten copies I'd do a second volume. And the first volume has, amazingly, sold significantly more than ten copies. It might even run into the twenties.

The cover image of Fake Plastic Souks - The Fear Returns is taken, as the blog's header and the cover shot of the first volume are, in the Aleppo souk. If you ever doubted Jarvis Cocker's wisdom - everybody hates a tourist - you can see it reflected in the faces of these gentlemen, interrupted in their centuries-old ritual of making fatayer by me and my trusty EOS. I wondered, working on the cover file, what had happened to them and whether they had survived the destruction of that glorious old souk. If you want to get a taste of the timeless alleyways of the C14th Ottoman labyrinth, you have to go no further than buying a copy of that most excellent Middle Eastern spy thriller, Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy.

The book starts off well, with the story of an Irish building worker whose mobile falls into the hands of police. Trouble was, he'd forgotten taking some spoof shots of him and his mates hooning around with a replica AK47. So plod had him followed around Europe for two weeks as they waged war on terror and our hero just went on an adventurous and boozy holiday. It's a true story, too!

2009-2011 sees us finally realising there's a crisis and the British press ganging up to sling mud at Dubai while it's good and down. Shiny posts crop up as everyone starts to realise the difference between usufruct and freehold, while various inane pronunciations are made then inevitably clarified. I share more of my love for banks and call centres, including a most amusing spoof of 'ten tips for call centres' which the bloke I was parodying was kind enough to not only acknowledge but link to! There's quite a lot of Gulf News slappery, more than I remembered doling out, including the results of deploying my rather fetching Dhs19 weighing scales bought from Lals when I realised GN was looking decidedly Kate Moss these days.

All in all I found it a great deal more amusing than I can remember it being at the time - certainly funnier than the rot I'm posting these days. If you fancy a trip down memory lane and the odd laugh, you can part with £0.77 at this handy link here and have it on your Kindle or your Kindle for iPad app within seconds. If you're in the US and would rather spend $0.99, it's linked here.

If you're in love with paperbacks, that's coming but it takes a few days to populate the Amazon paperback story. Similarly B&N, Kobo and iBooks.

And, yes, if this does over ten copies (making me a princely £3.50) I'll do volume three...

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 - A Week Of UBER-AWESOME Freebies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's all folks! Enjoy!

Platforms For Self Publishing

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sorry, long involved book publishing post warning...

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

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

Just in case you need a reminder, BTW:

The Olives - A Violent Romance website

The Beirut - An Explosive Thriller website

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

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

Managing multi-platform publishing.

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

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

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

Polish that blurb!

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

Publishing to Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing)

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

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


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

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

<br /> inserts a paragraph break

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

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

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

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

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

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

Publishing to Amazon Createspace

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

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

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

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

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

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

Publishing to Smashwords

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

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

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

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

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

Break Out The Freebies!

Once again, ladies and gentlemen, you have the chance to acquire a lovely fresh copy of my first, funny, novel for free. That's right, not one penny will it cost you from around 12 noon Gulf Standard Time right through to the same time tomorrow - 24 hours of untrammeled freebiness with a dollop of free ebook on the side.

All you have to have is a Kindle or the Kindle reader for PC, iPad or any other device.

You just click on this here easy to use YES! I WANT A FREE COPY OF SPACE link to Amazon.co.uk. Or if you're in the US or India you can CLICK HERE for amazon.com!

And that's all there is to it!

Why should you want a free copy of Space? Well, for a start it's free. Secondly it's funny (if at times a little risqué, not a read for the faint hearted or easily shocked, you have been warned) and comes with a laughter guaranteed or your money back promise. As I have explained before:

Space spoofs a genre that I have come to call the ‘airport novel’; that comfortingly large slab of silliness that you invariably turn to when you have to survive a seven-hour flight. Just like the Avian Obsession and the Maltese Balcony and those other man-in-race-against-time-against-unfeasible-odds-to-save-the-world-against-shadowy-cabal-led-by-megalomaniac books, Space is a fast moving page-turner filled with baddies and secret agent babes. Unlike the majority of them, Space is also intentionally and successfully funny.

Main character Dr. Ben Jonson is transformed from being a happy middle-class GP into a wilful killer, chased across Europe by police and various intelligence agencies. His odysseyette (it is so a word. I looked it up on the Internet) brings him together with a psychopathic CIA agent in a catsuit, a sex worker from Weybridge and a devastatingly effective computer virus that causes widespread societal breakdown. It all ends up with American bombers, the police and army, the Russian Mafia and a number of highly eccentric octogenarians coming together under a stone circle somewhere in Southern England.

In Space, the baddy spends most of his time with his hand up his pneumatic secretary’s skirt, the good guys are kooks and MI5 safe houses are staffed by pink-haired camp people. The book darkens a little when the action starts moving, but it never stops being irredeemably daft. By the time we’re ready to resolve things at the end, there’s lots of slightly strange sex going on. I always find that strange sex is so much more interesting than ordinary ‘boy meets girl and gets it on’ which, lets face it, has been done before.

 The offer comes to you courtesy of Amazon's Kindle Select programme,  which means I can only sell Space over Amazon for three months, but can give it away for five days within that period. This is the second giveaway day of my five. It's a bit like having three wishes, except there are five of them and they're not wishes. And if you're a Kindle Prime subscriber in the US, Space is permafree!

Do share the news far and wide. The more people who download Space free, the happier I'll be! If anyone fancies leaving a review on Amazon, that'd be just lovely but there is no obligation so to do whatsoever.

Content warning - Space is published in the US and UK only and does have a number of rude bits in it. So if you're easily offended, please don't read it!

Is This Space Free?

From around about now, you can download your very own copy of the Kindle edition of my first novel, the highly chucklesome manic romp Space, for free.

That's right. 270 pages of scabrous madness can be yours for no remuneration whatsoever. Free. Nothing. Nada. Sifr. For 24 glorious hours, this most silly of books is, as Lynrd Skynrd are wont to tell us, as free as a bird.

Download Space from Amazon.com in the US here.

Download Space from Amazon.co.uk in the UK here.

Space will make youi laugh - guaranteed (or your money back). I posted about the book and my decision to hit the 'publish' button the other day, so I won't bore you with more detail. But I'd very much appreciate if you could share the word and encourage friends, family and followers to grab their bit of Space while it's still a no-risk buy. Tweet like canaries on crack. Let the world know. This Space is free!

Space - A Literary Lacuna

I sat down to write a book sometime in 2002. I'd given up smoking and it was annoying me. I reckoned I'd just dash down the first thing that came into my mind and London's literary scene would fall at my feet. Shockingly, they not only failed to fall as predicted, they rejected me. A lot. In fact, Space went on to pick up well over a hundred little photocopied slips that said something along the lines of 'Not for us, thanks'.

Space spoofs a genre that I have come to call the ‘airport novel’; that comfortingly large slab of silliness that you invariably turn to when you have to survive a seven-hour flight. Just like the Avian Obsession and the Maltese Balcony and those other man-in-race-against-time-against-unfeasible-odds-to-save-the-world-against-shadowy-cabal-led-by-megalomaniac books, Space is a fast moving page-turner filled with baddies and secret agent babes. Unlike the majority of them, Space is also intentionally and successfully funny.

Main character Dr. Ben Jonson is transformed from being a happy middle-class GP into a wilful killer, chased across Europe by police and various intelligence agencies. His odysseyette (it is so a word. I looked it up on the Internet) brings him together with a psychopathic CIA agent in a catsuit, a sex worker from Weybridge and a devastatingly effective computer virus that causes widespread societal breakdown. It all ends up with American bombers, the police and army, the Russian Mafia and a number of highly eccentric octogenarians coming together under a stone circle somewhere in Southern England.

 In Space, the baddy spends most of his time with his hand up his pneumatic secretary’s skirt, the good guys are kooks and MI5 safe houses are staffed by pink-haired camp people. The book darkens a little when the action starts moving, but it never stops being irredeemably daft. By the time we’re ready to resolve things at the end, there’s lots of slightly strange sex going on. I always find that strange sex is so much more interesting than ordinary ‘boy meets girl and gets it on’ which, lets face it, has been done before.

It was a popular book on Harper Collins' Authonomy peer-review website, but never even garnered a 'full read' from an agent. Having taken a look at the original MS and edited some of the worst flaws out, I found myself rather enjoying reading it. I'll tell you one thing, it's damn funny.

So I've eventually (and with mild reservations) decided to publish it as a Kindle only book for $0.99 (or 79p to you). You can go here to buy it from amazon.com or here to get it from amazon.co.uk. If you've got Amazon Prime you can borrow it instead. If you haven't got a Kindle or Kindle software for your tablet, you're going to miss out, sorry. I'll plug it a couple of times here and there, but I'm not going crazy promoting it. If you enjoy it, you can do that for me. If you hate it, please feel free to leave a review on Amazon or a comment on this post! I won't mind, honestly!

I'd get it while it's cheap. If I sell more than a few copies or start getting good reviews, the price is going up faster than you can say 'nmkl pjkl ftmch'...

Warning - Space has got a number of rude bits in it. So if you're easily offended, please don't read it.

Olives - A Book in Print

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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