Olives - A Violent Cover

This is the new cover for Olives - A Violent Romance. You can go here to buy it, as well as my other books. No, no need to thank me. It's a pleasure.

Why on earth would I want to change the cover, five years after publishing the book in the first place?

It seems more like a million years than five, I must say. A great deal has changed since then for me, personally and professionally. If you'd asked me back then if I thought I'd end up writing six books, I'd have laughed at you, hollowly. 'Ha ha', or something like that. Maybe just 'Ha.'

I'd turned my back on the endless round of submissions and rejections that had characterised my life as a writer up until then, finally accepting if I was going to go anywhere with this writing thing moving forwards, it was going to have to be on my own two feet.

I started looking at publishing platforms, stumbled upon Smashwords, wrangled with Amazon's strange idea of HTML to get a Kindle edition up and running and downloaded Createspace templates and started playing with book formatting.

Before long, I realised I needed a cover and I lost no time turning to Lebanese designer and graphic artist Naeema Zarif, whose clever and compelling work I had long enjoyed and who had also provided the 'visual identity' for GeekFest (although it was brother in law @deholyterror who came up with the initial logo for GeekFest 1.0, just to give credit where it's due!). Sadly, her website appears to be no more.

Naeema created that blue and beige cover, a superimposition of the Mediterranean sea and sky, the soil the olives grow from, a peace treaty and the edges of leaves. It's how her art rolls, layers of imagery super-imposed to create a series of visual 'jokes'. There's a bit of Amman's Citadel in there, too. It was just the ticket and I was pleased and proud to have her art illustrate the cover.

But that was then, this is now. The old cover is much admired, but is very, well, Arabesque. And my other covers have taken a very different direction, tending towards that very stark white space with a single illustrative element; Beirut's lipstickbullet, Shemlan's pillskull and now the two new books look like they'll have iconic emblems on the covers.

You can see all my book covers arrayed together tastefully here.

Olives ended up just looking odd and out of place, so I decided a long while back to update it. That's the lovely thing about publishing online, you can do that sort of thing. The UAE print edition, clearly, was going to stick with the old cover!

I've cast around for an image for Olives, to no avail. It's a very bad title for a book (I've had it confirmed by a top professional that my book titles suck lemons. That's sort of okay, it's the way things have ended up and I probably wouldn't have it any other way) at the best of times and a cover image is hard to think up. What do you do? Some olives? A crushed olive? I found a nice image of some olives and a skull, but it wasn't quite right. I've asked artist/designer friends, but nobody seems to have been able to come up with an image that 'does the trick', so I've finally invested a few days in finding some things that might work. The result is certainly impactful.

Amazon et al have been updated. So if you bought the book with the old cover, you now hold a limited edition print in your hands, one of about 2,500. There'll never be another one. I rather think, and hope, that'll amuse Naeema.

The old cover. A limited edition of 2,500 prints with a free book.

So there we have it. A new website, new cover and two new books. Golly, it's all change around here these days, isn't it?

Fact From Fiction

I thought long and hard before posting this, but I think there are some issues around it that really strike to the heart of our region and some of the attitudes that shape it.

A lady has taken exception to the use of the family name Dajani in my novel Olives, which is set in Jordan and which deals with some of the issues faced by many people of Palestinian origin. This has also been a reason cited to me by distributors in Jordan who have declined to handle the book.

Olives is a novel, a work of fiction. It features a number of characters who are Jordanian and all have 'real life' Jordanian names. It would be patently ridiculous to give them Scottish names, but you would expect to see Scottish names in, say, Monarch of the Glen. And, in fact, we can see that indeed Archie MacDonald, a Scottish name, is the main character's name.

The MacDonalds are a great old Scottish family, or clan. As, indeed, are the McNabbs. But I think we can all accept our names could well be used for characters in a Scottish fiction. My own has been used, in fact, as a pseudonym by another author, a certain 'Andy McNab'. For the record, McNabs, MacNabs and McNabbs are all the same thing. It's just we're a particularly dyslexic clan. Most of the clan chieftans have been called Archibald over the years, a particular disappointment to me when I found out.

There is no malice in the act of naming characters in a book and no intent to harm or defame. It's simply something you do in the process of creating your fiction. Each and every book published in fact carries a piece of text standard in the publishing industry that asserts the fictional nature of the work which neatly hedges against a mild-mannered librarian somewhere called Hannibal Lecter taking it personally.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

 
And that text duly appears in Olives. Because Olives is fiction.

There is no intent to malign or otherwise slur the name of Dajani or cause any harm or hurt to the name or anyone who bears it. Because Olives is fiction. There is no reflection of my personal view of the probity, decency or indeed history of the family. Because Olives is fiction. It features a lawyer called Emad Kawar, a spy called Gerald Lynch (an Irish name for a Northern Irish character) and other Jordanian names - Arafi, Mchouarab and Shukri, for instance. I could make up 'alternames' for the characters, names that sound like Jordanian names but aren't, but it'd be a rather silly book for it and still wouldn't guard against coincidence.

I picked Dajani because it sounded right for my characters. It's a Palestinian name and the family is spread throughout the Levant (and, indeed, world), so it's common enough for this particular fictional offshoot of the family to avoid being identified as any particular 'real life' Dajanis. Because I had considered that, something that few other authors elsewhere in the world would have to give two seconds' thought to. And yet for them to 'live' in the fiction, they have to be realistic, they have to have a history like so many other Palestinian families, they have to have suffered loss and tragedy, because that's what Olives is about. Many, many families have suffered like the family depicted in Olives. Because it's about all of them, not one family's name. And.it.is.fiction.

The thing that struck me more than anything else was the objection was lodged before the lady had read the book. That, with so many forms of censorship and repression, is so often the case. It's the very idea of it all that's bad enough to call for a cry of 'down with this sort of thing'.

Olives On Sale In Beirut

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

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

And I am glad.

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

Amazon Book Pricing Fun

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

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

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

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

In other words, Amazon is actually undercutting me!

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

Olives - The Blog

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

It's linked here for your clicking pleasure.

Amazon Remittance - I Am A Wealthy Man

Image by Ethan.K via Flickr

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

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

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

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

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

Olives and The Book Club

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

That sounded ominous...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5)No, I don't identify with Paul

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

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

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

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

An Olive Update

Image by jurvetson via Flickr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks, George Winston!

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks, George!

Olives - UAE Group Buying WIN

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

It's linked here!

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

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

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

I Am Glad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I am glad.

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

Meeting The Sales Team

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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.

Olives Book Pricing Thinks

Image by epSos.de via Flickr

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


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


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


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



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


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


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


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