'Olives - A Violent Romance' And Flirting With FREE

Olives - A Violent Romance is now FREE on Amazon, iBooks, Kobo, B&N et al

I've been playing around a bit with this here FREE thing and so Olives - A Violent Romance is now available across ALL ebook platforms as a free ebook. That's right - you can now download my first, acclaimed thriller novel for nothing. Nada. Sifr. It's all yours. Fill them boots.

While this is nice and easy to do with Smashwords (which populates iBooks, Kobo, Barnes & Noble and so on), Amazon doesn't support free books unless you've enrolled in KDP Select, which limits you to selling only on Amazon. So - this is a million dollar question for authors - how do I make my books free on Amazon for Kindle without enrolling them in KDP Select?

Here goes:

First you pop over to Amazon and set your royalty rate to 35%. This is important, because at the 70% royalty, you undertake to Amazon that you won't sell elsewhere at a different price. So when you start messing about with prices on other platforms, Amazon can (and has every right to) get a bit tetchy. At the 35% royalty, there are no such restrictions.

Now you set the price to zero in Smashwords and wait for that change to impact iBooks and the other stores served by the multi-publishing marvel. Amazon picks this change up and at its discretion will match its own price to that of iBooks, Kobo and Barnes & Noble. If Amazon's price crawlers don't pick it up after a few days, there's a little button against the book's page on Amazon that allows you to request a price match by providing a link to the competitive store where the other pricing (ie: free) is offered. Note it doesn't work if you provide a link to Smashwords. It has to be a retailer.

My first, silly, book Space is, and always has been, enrolled in KDP Select simply because I wanted to play around with the platform. KDP Select allows you up to five days' free promotion every three months but does have that terrible drawback of only letting you sell via Amazon. And only five days' free promotion isn't quite enough to really make an impact, in my humble opinion. Olives is now perma-free so I can provide a sampler to an increasingly skittish and wary book buying public. And if they like that, they can buy Beirut - An Explosive Thriller for $0.99 and Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy for just $1.99!

Does 'free' work? Well, in the first 24 hours, I've shifted over 500 books. Will it win me readers, reviews, accolades and plaudits? We'll see. I'll let you know how it goes if you sign up for my occasional freebie, hints and stuff emailer... See what I did there?

Oh, by the way, A Decent Bomber and Birdkill will still cost you a reasonable $2.99. You ain't getting them for free...

PS: Amazon also picked up a momentary blip on Beirut's pricing as I was playing around and made THAT free too in the US, although not the UK. For some reason, downloads of Beirut have massively eclipsed Olives and it's now #2 in the Thrillers & Suspense, Espionage listing of the Kindle store. Which is nice...

Pre-Orders, Book Marketing And, Ahem, A Decent Bomber

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Quinlan passed out; a merciful release.

He should have expected them, should have seen the signs of quickening interest in his daily movements. The tailing moped; the sallow, bearded fellow he never saw before and then glimpsed all too often.

They came when Deirdre took the girls for a sleepover with their wee cousins. He had just poured a whiskey when the doorbell rang. His hand flew back from the latch as the door burst open. Their silent, brutal assault buried him under a flurry of expertly dealt blows. They pinioned his hands with nylon ties.

The torture was methodical. Quinlan shrieked himself hoarse, flailing around tied to the kitchen chair until he hurled himself to the floor. They righted him and beat him as dispassionately as they’d pulled out his thumbnails.

And not one word. Not a question. It made it all worse, to think there was nothing they wanted he could give them to make it stop.

They started on his fingers. He called to God, he called to his dear, dead mother. He begged them. Dear Jesus, how he begged. They beat him again to shut him up. His mind slammed down to buy him respite.

And so starts A Decent Bomber, my fourth serious novel and the first not set in the Middle East. I've been making a wee fuss about it being on pre-order and (sorry if you follow, know or are somehow linked to me. It'll go away if you buy the book, honestly) will continue to do so for a while.

Why am I so bothered about pre-orders? Because on the 5th November, when the book publishes, every pre-order will count as an order on the day. If you collect enough pre-orders, the book rockets up the sales charts and comes to the public notice. Briefly, probably not in a chart topping sort of way, but nevertheless in a more attention-getting way than shouting 'buy my book' from Dubai will do.

Book marketing in general is something of a nightmare for the self-published author. And, actually these days, for publishing houses, too. There's a lot of noise out there with all this self-publishing lark and a lot of people trying to find ways of getting their book in front of people. As the 'traditional publishing' model breaks down (catalogues and sales teams knocking on bookshop doors to flog this season's new offerings), even quite large publishers can be found on Twitter retweeting every time a reader says a given author's book is quite nice. There's a hint of desperation in the air.

It's hard to get horses to water and drinking, especially in today's online world. McNabb's Law of Clicks refers - thousands of impressions don't necessarily mean sales. Book bloggers have 'To Be Read' lists stretching for months ahead. It's amazing how many go out of business, breathless blogs with 'I love to read' in their headers shuttered and strewn with cobwebs, that aspiration to share great reads submerged in tottering piles of desperate authors pushing their dubious wares. Tracking coverage in Middle Eastern 'major media' shows a distinct lack of correlation between media coverage and book sales - even rave reviews in national media.

One challenge in marketing A Decent Bomber is that the book is set in Ireland and the UK. Without a Middle Eastern angle, its target market is really in the Western world - where I am not. Anything I can do to get people in the UK/US talking about the book, sharing it, recommending it or otherwise focusing their attention long enough to click on an Amazon link to swap $2.99 for 350 pages of mayhem will be considered.

Funnily enough, you can help. Tell the folks back home about it. Encourage them to tell their friends and family about it. Share a link to the book on Facebook. Let's face it, the sooner you do, the sooner it'll go nice and quiet around here again...

Publishing A Decent Bomber

Perpetua (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For what it's worth, I've been embroiled in a last minute flurry of edits and changes, a lot of book formatting and layout and quite a bit of uploading.

It's all quite exciting. For a start, I find layout therapeutic, a load of rote tasks performed with the assistance of a glass or two of Bombay's finest and some quinine-laced fizzy stuff. Page down, change headline to 22 point Perpetua, body font Palatino Linotype first para no indent, second para 0.5cm indent.

I've been messing around a lot with font sizes, templates and margins and think I've got quite a good combination going now, so I'm trying to reformat all of my print books to meet the new grid. Slightly more space and a slightly larger font/leading. After much soul searching, Garamond is going and Palatino is this year's body text bikini model.

Like people give a hoot? Yes, I think easy on the eye is good if it's unobtrusive and the reader finds it more comfortable. Do I care too much about type? Oh, yah. Seriously. Perpetua, and I'm sure you'll think I'm odd saying this, is my typographical Musar; the Orrefors of the world of letters. I have long admired the odd life and achievements of eccentric stone cutter (and enthusiastic rutter) Eric Gill - the William Morris contemporary who gave us the London Underground's typographical identity, which persists today, as well as WH Smith's logo - and Perpetua was, to my mind, his finest lifetime achievement. Seriously.

Sorry. Sidetracked again.

Check spellings, get annoyed at Microsoft's daft blue-lining of things that are patently right. Catch SNAFU, wince, change.

Then the MS, updated to reflect my Createspace edits. Lose all the italics in the book, damn, spend an hour replacing them using the Createspace file as a reference. Fine. Review some of those itals and lose a couple. Find an awful literal sitting there in the text snarling at you like a drugged-up bullfrog. Excise the bastard like one of George Bush's colonic polyps. You'd have thought I was experienced enough not to have to deal with these things. Oh no.

The manuscript is now complete and uploaded to Createspace, Amazon KDP and Smashwords and so A Decent Bomber is available for pre-order from Amazon as a Kindle book, from iBooks, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and many other brilliant, decent even, ebook platforms. It publishes 'officially' on November 5th, but every pre-order means another heave up the rankings on that day, so I'll be irritating everyone I know between now and then to pre-place their orders. The Createspace book, the paperback, will go 'live' sometime in the next week.

I won't, once again, be doing a conventional print run. It's simply not worth it. Olives took five years to make back its Dhs15,000 investment and I still don't have a final report from the distributors, despite the book having sold out before last year's Emirates Airline Festival of Literature.

But I'm happy. Truly happy. Two years in the writing, albeit with very many breaks and stops, A Decent Bomber is now a novel I can say has merit and personality enough to be a readable thing.

Which is nice...

Dubai Foodie Fashionistas Unite!

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I got an email this week from somebody announcing they were a 'Dubai-based foodie fashionista' and letting me know they were starting a blog if I needed any publicity.

I get a lot of random emails from people wanting publicity because I'm on a list operated by a company called Cision, which offers a subscription based service to PR people. Cision is quite a powerful tool, but often lazily used by PRs, who just blanket mail everyone they can find, rather than using Cision's segmentation tools. So, although I'm on Cision as a 'blogger', I'll frequently get 'Dear Editor' emails or invitations to 'cover' someone's event, job move or new self-adjusting dimplex.

Actually, I also often get 'Dear,' emails. And now and then, in moments of solid gold, 'Dear blogger'.

What, dear flak?

I also get emails hoping I've had a lovely weekend from people I don't know who don't seem to think that strangers hoping you've had a good weekend - or are having a great day - sound perhaps just the teeniest, tiniest tad bit insincere.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have an issue with this email thing. It's occasionally quite interesting. I get emails telling me about new wireless routers, carwashing 'solutions', touristic events in Abu Dhabi and hotel launches. I get a large number of press releases written by people who are clearly witless, drooling clowns on behalf of clients who are wasting good money with bad marketing, poor targeting and communications that shouldn't be tolerated beyond primary school. I am often amused by these, in the dark way that the Darwin Awards are amusing, or someone dying horribly while using a selfie stick. I know, I know. You couldn't make it up, could you?

But a Dubai foodie fashionista trolling me for freebies (which is what 'foodie fashionista' is secret code for) is a new departure. The very idea of a bloated Mr Creosote in a rose-patterned tea dress is enjoyment enough. Not, you understand, that my idea of fashion is a rose-patterned tea dress. My concept of fashion, as Sarah would gleefully inform you, is far, far worse than that.

That someone would self-identify as a Dubai-based foodie fashionista is glorious. What do you do, then, Bill? Oh, I'm a welder. Why, what do you get up to? Oh, I'm a Dubai-based foodie fashionista. Oh, right. Nice, if you can get the work...

Anyway, I deleted the email.

Press Release

I was sent this press release today. After some reflection, I thought it best to share, verbatim and - necessarily - without comment.

Enjoy.

A Star Called Lucky By Bestselling Author Bapsy Jain

The beloved, spirited Lucky Boyce from the novel Lucky Everyday returns in the sequel A Star Called Lucky to solve a captivating mystery of global corruption, deceit blackmail and revenge. 

Bapsy Jain’s newest novel, A Star Called Lucky, picks up in present day New York City, where Lucky Boyce has reinvented herself as an unconventional yoga instructor following the lessons learned in Lucky Everyday.  She is on a mission to change the lives of prison inmates through an innovative education program when her life takes a sudden turn.

Lucky is catapulted from her peaceful, balanced routine into a chaotic, transcontinental pursuit to bring down a corrupt businessman and politician. He blackmails Lucky into using her talents and connections in India to bring him the mysterious ice mushroom to boost immunity and increasing longevity. Once Lucky realizes his desires are evil and based purely on personal gain, she embarks on a mission risking her life both in India and the US.  A young, awkward computer savant and mysterious Buddhist monk add to Lucky’s bag of tricks as she tries to combat the power of corrupt politics.

The novel poses important questions about the inherent goodness of human nature. To maintain balance, Lucky continually turns to yoga and the voice of her friend to stay centered, recalling teachings like, “When the world goes upside down, you need to stand on your head.”

Jain’s prose Lucky Everyday has been heralded as a “must-read and a bestseller.”  This sequel once again captures the heart of fans as they follow the latest adventures of Lucky Boyce, whose name is an ironic reflection of what luck really means in today’s chaotic world.”

“I want everyone in the world to read this masterpiece!”  Bikram Choudhury, founder of Bikram Yoga.  

“The prescience of this novel is stunning, when you consider that it must have been at press before the most recent Ebola pandemic and ensuing medical controversies,” commented Alesa Lightbourne, Ph.D, author of award-winning The SALSA Solution and named in Who's Who of International Writers and Who's Who of American Women.  "I was also fascinated by the way the author wove together plot elements from genetics, computer science and yoga — an ambitious undertaking.  It’s a very unique book, as was its predecessor, and represents an interesting intersection between genres. You have to marvel at the author’s continuing inventiveness.”

“As a computer enthusiast, I found the plot of A Star Called Lucky to be chillingly real. We watch characters confront jaded politicians, a terrifying disease, and computer viruses that leave you wondering what your co-workers might really be typing into their keyboard,” said Kurt Ramin, MBA, CPA/CFE and internationally recognized author of books on technology, business and accounting.

“Bapsy Jain is a master at combining the exotic and curious traditions of India with the fast-paced reality of the United States, making readers look at the world more holistically and question daily coincidences,” said James T. Vallas, an avid reader of mystery books.

“This captivating story encourages us to find hope in life’s biggest mysteries,” noted Dr. J. Anthony Gomes, author of Mirrored Reflections, Professor of Medicine and Director of Electrophysiology /Cardiovascular Services at The Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. 

“I was inspired watching the story unfold,” said Raymond Lavoie, retired senior vice president of Medtronic.  “Seeing a yoga instructor struggle to solve a life-threatening mystery and still finding a way to trust the universe makes me believe.”

The latest Lucky novel prompts thoughts of hope and trust by reminding readers to look beyond the challenges of the moment. If Lucky Boyce can overcome the traumatic events that spiral her life into a whirlwind of deceit and corruption, we can all look a little deeper to find the strength in our own inherent nature.

A Star Called Lucky is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and iBooks.  For more information, please visit www.astarcalledlucky.com.

Media Contact : Liann Correia | ( 971) 4 429 1234 ext. 147 | liann.correia@spjain.org 

About the Author

Bapsy Jain is a best-selling mystery author noted for the international success of her debut novel, Lucky Everyday (Penguin, 2009). Originally from Calcutta, she graduated from the Sydenham College of Commerce and Economics in Mumbai, and continued her studies in finance in the UK.  She is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants (England and Wales) and serves on the Board of Trustees for many international charitable organizations. She and her husband established the S P Jain School of Global Management (Dubai, Singapore and Sydney). She is passionate about yoga and spirituality. 

Free Space

Working on my new, luscious and totally yummy author website today, I realised I'd enrolled silly thriller spoof Space into Amazon's 'Select' programme and yet totally neglected to do any promotions at all for months.

So Space is free for your Kindle over the next 72-odd hours. Free? Yes! Free!

Tell friends, family, acquaintances, dogs in the street. Tweet it, Facebook it, Pin it. Let the world know. They can save $0.99 for the next 48 hours by seizing the moment and, well, just acting.

Just think about this.
YOU can save the people you LOVE good money and give them JOY.

I know, I know. It's pretty damn tremendous news. Take a few deep breaths. Okay? We're good.

More about the book here. 

Free download from Amazon link here.

Enjoy! And if you do, leave a review! :)

If you loathe it, hell, leave a review anyway!

Web Strategies For Authors

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ugh. Even the title of this blog post makes me want to heave. But, like it or not, as a writer you're going to need to work out how you define yourself on The Tangled Web. Remember that one - when the marketing nongs who gave us 'the cloud' and 'the Internet of things' coin that as the next bigbig thing, you can all queue up to give me the credit for inventing it.

Suit: "We're defining the solutions that will make sense of TTW and simplify the muddle of the interconnectedness huddle."

Lesser mortal: "Sorry, TTW? What's that?"

Suit (smugly): "The Tangled Web. Duh."

Wow. I haven't said a thing yet and I've already managed to completely derail myself.

So. Authors. Websites. Basically, you're going to have to work out what you do about websites and the like. For myself, it was all nice and simple. When I published Olives - A Violent Romance, I started a blog of the book and a book website. At the time I worried a little about whether that was the right move, or whether I should have an Alexander McNabb site that had the books in it, but I was greedy for SEO, in part because Olives is such a pants title for a book (long story) and in part because it doesn't really matter what you do for a day job, you're too close to things when it's your own work.

The blog of the book was a clear content-led promotion play and launched in January 2012. I kept it going until around May 2013, by which time I was so exhausted by book promotion I could barely look at an Olive, let alone write about the blasted things. The blog was basically an ongoing discussion of the book's content, quoting bits of book and discussing the ideas, concepts and situations behind each quote. In total it's pulled about 24,000 page views and is still averaging a little under 400 views a month. That's not bad, really, but when you take McNabb's Law Of Clicks into account, it's not a very big hill of beans.

The book's website was nice and easy to do: I used Blogger as a CMS (Content Management System), because it's the Barney of CMSs (Wordpress is immeasurably more powerful, but complicated. Blogger is all primary colours and simple steps) and the introduction of multiple pages meant it was just fine for simple sites. I had a little help from +Derrick Pereira who knows more about the under the bonnet stuff than I do - other than that, it's simple enough for an averagely connected person. The website's pulled about 17,000 views since December 2011 when I launched it, which isn't actually much as it was the landing page for most of my Tweets and Facebook posts - but it's nice to have somewhere to send people to get more information on your book before you launch them at Amazon to close the deal.

The Beirut - An Explosive Thriller website launched a year later and has pulled about 14,000 views, while Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy has a measly 4,000 - a reflection on how increasing weariness has negatively impacted the amount of book promotion I've been doing, really. Perhaps interestingly, particularly as a test of the previously mentioned Law Of Clicks, Olives has seen 2,000 clicks on the 'buy Olives' page, Beirut has pulled a tad more (but possibly that's Lebanese politicians who thought someone else might be selling the city cheaper than they are) and Shemlan 1,000 clicks. Those clicks on the 'buy the book' pages have not translated into an equivalent number of book sales, believe me.

I decided on a simple common naming convention, olivesthebook.com and so on. Clearly I wasn't getting Olives.com or Beirut.com. And, of course, I put the address of each website into the books themselves, alongside alexandermcnabb.com.

Alexandermcnabb.com was originally just a redirect. I snaffled the domain (from whois.com, where I do all my web stuff) but didn't really get around to doing anything with it except redirect the URL to this here blog. After a while I bit the bullet and put up a simple, five-page site using Whois' Sitebuilder, which is a very simple to use but really quite powerful website template manager and CMS.

That 'strategy' has now run its course. I can't go on launching a new website for each book, apart from anything else it's costing me $9.98 a year in domain registration fees for each site. So over the weekend I pulled the primary content from each book website and put it all under alexandermcnabb.com, giving myself a 'proper' author website by taking Whois' 20 page package, rolling up my sleeves and structuring the site to be very book-centric. There are now six books up there (including the appallingly neglected, some would say justifiably, Space) and there's room to add more without increasing cost. The content is just as searchable as it was in the book sites and I'm not losing millions of links into those sites with the move.

If I could do it all again knowing what I know now (bear in mind that back in 2011 I had no idea I was going to go on to write and publish more books), I'd have gone straight for an author site with the books under its aegis. It simply makes more sense, introducing readers to other books I've written and giving a core property to link to. The Whois Sitebuilder product is actually pretty powerful and includes multimedia, social links and even a shopping cart if you're minded to go down that road.

I wouldn't have bothered with the Olives blog, either. I'd have abused this blog more and built links from it to alexandermcnabb.com rather than the Olives website.

If discussing all this has helped you to think through your own web presence as an author, I am glad. If it has bored you senseless, sorry about that but remember no refunds. If you want to pop over to my shiny new website, it's linked here for your listening pleasure. Please do remember to wipe your feet before you go in.

Book Post - Promotion And All That

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I've just been working on slidesets for next week's series of workshops on how to write, edit and publish books. In the last of the three, I look at getting an agent and also self publishing. And that invariably leads to the knotty issue of book promotion.

It's something of a conundrum, this promotion thing. I threw myself into promoting Olives - A Violent Romance like a particularly relentless lunatic, taking every opportunity to make a fuss, create content, repurpose, share, link and generally hoon around. Given the day job, I had a relatively good go at using my platforms and reach to nag, annoy, bully and generally beseech anyone who had ever come within my relatively wide ambit.

I did interviews, LitFests and ran a very extensive online reviews and outreach campaign. I published the book in October and by the following June was so exhausted with the whole thing I never wanted to see another book blogger again. Ever. Even the words 'I love books' used to bring me out in a cold sweat.

Picking up the energy to promote Beirut - An Explosive Thriller was a big deal. I never really managed it that well, beyond a cool launch event and some interviews/workshops and other stuff. I simply didn't have the energy left. And one thing that was becoming clear was there was a law of diminishing returns at play here - social media wasn't having the same impact it used to.

Everyone talks about getting an 'author platform', but what happens when those outlets become jammed with authors abusing their platform to promote books? Or when that platform is no longer seen as crucial or important to the people using it? What if everyone's just, you know, moved on?

I really haven't promoted Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy that much. IMHO it is by far the best of the three books but hasn't even drawn ten Amazon reviews. Because I haven't printed an edition in the UAE as I did for the last two books, it's not being bought by its 'core audience' in the main because Amazon doesn't serve the UAE, the adoption of e-readers is generally miles behind in the Middle East and few people seem to be buying books online.

Book bloggers, who used to be relatively accessible, have TBR (to be read) lists stretching ahead months. A lot of book blogs have just ground to a halt, are no longer accepting self published books or simply aren't taking on more reviews. It's getting harder and harder to get your voice out there and have it heard.

And when you do, McNabb's law applies. You have to kiss an awful lot of frogs to get one buyer. And even then, they probably won't read the damn thing for months.

It's starting to get problematic. There HAS to be better way to get good books into people's hands (and no, it's not blasted GoodReads) than this trilling and primping on social media - because that's simply not working.

If you know the answer, clearly I am more than interested in your views. Because I, for one, don't...

Book Post: Meeting The Great Unwashed

Olives for Sale! Who IS this Andy McNab,
anyway? (Photo credit: Bibi)

I'll start off with a huge thanks to the expatwoman.com team, who were kind enough to suggest I came to their 'Big Day Out' event at the Arabian Ranches Polo Club and flog my books. I confess at some considerable trepidation about the whole stunt and last night was - something I don't often experience - genuinely nervous.

I've never before sat behind a table full of my books and attempted to sell them. It was a very odd feeling indeed to begin with. I mean, what do you do with yourself? Do you stand to attention and appear keen and approachable? Do you take a seat and finish rereading John Le Carré's excellent and vastly underrated 'The Night Manager'? Do you ignore people and let them select what they want or leap on them and punch them until they buy the damn books?

It felt like a reality show challenge. What a great idea. Take a bunch of people who've written books and then hone their authorial talents until one of them wins through. Like Authonomy with a real prize at the end sort of thing. One of the challenges would surely be to man a stall selling your books for a day.

I got mistaken for Andy McNab twice. The first one was the funniest. He was clearly someone's dad out for a winter break.

"You were on the radio the other day, weren't you?"
"Yes, I was."
"Funny that, you not being able to read until you were twenty."
"What radio station were you listening to?"
"LBC."
"No, I'm on Dubai Eye. You're thinking of Andy McNab, aren't you? The SAS bloke?"
"Yes."
"That's not me."
"Who are you then?"
"Move on before I punch you."

I watched people passing all day, the way they scanned the books. Brits in particular are scared to catch your attention, eye contact makes them nervous and defensive until they've decided they might be interested. Once I'd finished my Le Carré and actually started talking to people I was feeling better about the whole thing and making sales, but every single sale of the day's 25-odd was a 'sale' rather than a 'this looks interesting, I think I'd like to buy it' approach. I worked hard for every man Jack of 'em. Imagine in a bookshop where I'm NOT there to bug them!!!

I'd do my POS differently next time and have a big sign saying I AM THE AUTHOR OF THESE BOOKS AND WILL SIGN THEM IF YOU BUY THEM. I might even have to wear it instead of my 'Doesn't Mary have a lovely bottom' Father Ted T-shirt which did, however, attract great attention. It's amazing how people don't make such small cognitive leaps.

People scan across the covers of books as they walk by, a clear 'I'm not in the market for a book today' decision going on. The vast majority of people simply walked by without a glance or darted a cursory gaze of absolute disinterest. Maybe if I'd coated the bloody things in chocolate.

I had a single copy of Shemlan, which the vice-consul from the British embassy in Abu Dhabi bought early on. They were, incidentally, doing a great job of outreach - the idea being to inform expats of the legal 'issues' here before they fall foul of the law. "Excuse me, are you a Brit? Do you have a liquor license?" We chatted a bit about dips and the scandalous Tom Fletcher, Our Man In Beirut. (whose mission I have so mischaracterised in my books!)

Most of those who stopped ended up buying and most of those bought both Olives and Beirut. A few preferred Kindle, but most were paperback addicts. All of the Lebanese required some sort of assurance that I lived in Lebanon or knew it. Magda Abu-Fadil's Huffpo review to hand, I was able to quell their unease quickly enough.

"The author has an uncanny understanding of the country's dynamics and power plays between the belligerent factions, post-civil war of 1975-1990.... Beirut is a gripping, fast-paced exciting book that may well jar Lebanese and others familiar with the city and its heavy legacy. But it's a must read.

Magda Abu-Fadil writing in The Huffington Post 

See what I mean? It's a neat answer to 'but how can you write about Beirut if you're not Lebanese or haven't lived there?' Glad I had that printed out along with some other choice reviews.

Nobody haggled. It was a binary decision. I want to buy a book or I don't. Everyone wanted them signed. Everyone was kind, interested and genuinely surprised to meet an author together with his books.

Beirut attracted the most attention, the body language the same every time there was a double take and a move towards the book - everyone picks and flips, the blurb is SO important once your cover image and title have done their job. But that high impact cover image, the lipstick bullet, together with the strong all-caps title. You could see it was clearly hitting people in a way Olives doesn't.

As they flip, so I start talking. They're on the hook and need to be landed. I was amazed at the flip - something I have catered for in my covers and blurbs (since Olives, which was self indulgent of me but I still love the art of it, while recognising it's not a 'commercial' cover - I'm actually on the hunt for a new cover image that'll fall in line with the 'look and feel' of Beirut and Shemlan), practised and evangelised in workshops but never actually observed in large crowds.

Recounting a summay of the story of Olives gave people more pause for thought than Beirut - Beirut was an easier book to characterise and 'get across' to people. But a few were more than taken with the idea of a 'violent romance' which was nice.

I would suggest this to every and any author - traditionally published or self published alike. Do this. Spend a day in a market selling your books. Initially daunting, it's an amazing way to meet people and see how they react to books and the idea of books, how they approach buying books and what makes them tick in that process. And what it is about YOUR books they like!

Weary, sunburned and clutching a Martini (natch), looking back on the day, the wealth wasn't in the little wad of money in my wallet. It was learning about those annoying carbon based lifeforms we depend upon to buy our books - the Great Unwashed. And bless 'em, one and all!

Oh Noes! More Bookery!

English: The second generation Amazon Kindle, showing the book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's all about books this week, but then it's London Book Fair week, so why not?

Not least of this week's book news is I'll be publishing a new book over the weekend and it's not quite what you'd expect. more below.

Meantime, I've been tweaking the MS of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy as feedback comes in from beta readers, with quite a bit of work to do over the coming week or so. I've had to shelve it because of other commitments, of which more below...

I spent a happy 45 minutes cackling, screaming and talking in tongues in front of a mildly horrified audience of about 40 people at Dubai's More Cafe last night. I talked about books, writing, publishing and creating narrative and enjoyed myself thoroughly, as usual. The audience didn't throw things, which is always a good sign.

As I mentioned the other day, I'm trawling my way through Edward Rutherfurd's 'Paris' in readiness for my co-hostin' slot on Dubai Eye Radio's Talking of Books this Saturday. I can't say I'm getting to grips with it terribly well, but it's probably me. It's odd having to read a papery booky book rather than my preferred Kindle format - and I'm finding the whole bulk of the thing rather unwieldy to tell the truth.

And, of course, Saturday afternoon I'm giving two booky workshops at The Archive's 'Day of Books' event. Just in case you're interested they are, respectively:

3:00pm-4:30pm – ‘How Not to Write a Book’: So you’ve written a book, or you want to write a book. What DON’T you want in there? What needs to come out? How can you self-edit your work? What can you avoid ever putting in there in the first place so you don’t have to bother taking it out? Alexander McNabb guides you through a bunch of useful self editing tips.

5:00pm-6:30pm – ‘How to Publish an E-Book Step by Step’: Putting an e-book online in print and electronic formats is as easy as pie. Alexander McNabb takes you through the process step by step using a practical MS file to book example!

Here's the event link again - there are workshops by writers like Kathy Shalhoub, Frank Dullaghan,
Zeina Hashem Beck and Rewa Zeinati all through the day, with kids' stuff in the morning, more grown up stuff in the afternoon and 'readings under the stars' into the evening. Do come by!

The 'practical MS file to book example' in that second workshop I'm doing, by the way, is a compilation of my favourite bits from the first two years of this very blog. It's the easiest way I could find something at least vaguely practical or viable to publish as an e-book. Going back over the Fake Plastic archive was quite fun - it reminded me of a number of moments in the past I'd simply forgotten - it's not a bad record of that odd period when Dubai was at the height of its property-boom fuelled madness, throwing itself pell-mell at materialism, consumerism and all sorts of other isms before it smacked into a brick wall like Tom chasing Jerry as he makes it to the mousehole. That transition from quaffing bubbly to scrabbling for pennies is quite nicely covered.

I'll be publishing Fake Plastic Souks - The Glory Years for pennies on Amazon, so do look out for it! :)

What Earthquake?

Iran: Caravanserai (Photo credit: Erwin Bolwidt)

And... breathe.

It's odd to be back. It always is. There's a surreal quality to it all, wrenched away from the sunny cold of the unseasonably late UK cold snap and the bustle of family and friends back to the warm air and glitter of glass.  As usual, I didn't sleep at all on the 'red eye' flight, watching The Hobbit (quite fun) and Jack Reacher (woeful) instead.

We got home, unpacked and turned in. And proceeded to sleep through what was, today's media breathlessly assures us, the biggest earthquake to hit Iran in fifty years. The 7.8 magnitude quake shook the UAE, causing buildings to be evacuated - Gulf News found an expert who estimated the tremors that shook the UAE were equivalent to a 4.5 quake here, which does seem rather implausible, but an expert's an expert.

On the Pakistan/Iran border, near the city of Zahedan, the quake is said to have killed and injured many in both countries, although official figures appear sketchy (Iran says anything between zero and fifty dead, depending on who you listen to, while Pakistan says between four and thirty-five killed). Twitter was all a-flurry, of course.

Not that we cared, all we felt was zeds.

Meanwhile, I'm catching up with emails and clients (the day job) and contemplating tonight's 'More Talk' taking place at the Dubai International Financial Centre's More Café. Saturday is going to be busy, too - I'm doing two workshops and a reading as part of The Archive Dubai's 'Day of Books' all-day event as well as appearing on Dubai Eye Radio's 'Talking of Books' programme.

That upcoming radio appearance explains why I found a copy of Edward Rutherfurd's forthcoming novel 'Paris' on my desk when I got to work (the building was, I was glad to see, still standing). I can't say the sight filled my heart with stuff - my last 'Talking of Books' read was Jack Whyte's appalling 'Rebel', 600 pages of awful cod-Scottish dialogue and pointless meandering plot that I waded through with a black heart and weary eyes.

It's not just earthquakes I'm good at missing. Being back in the UK I managed to miss last week's TOB broadcast, which is a shame as Beirut - An Explosive Thriller was their 'Book of the Week'. I can only hope it didn't cause the programme's reviewers the pain having to read 'Rebel' caused me.

Now I've got Rutherfurd's 670 page epic to digest in a little over two days. Worst of all, the book's not published yet, so I can't get a Kindle copy. I've got to read it as a papery thing. What larks, Pip...

Marketing And Promoting Books

Writing a book is just the start of the journey to publication, whether you’re self published or taken on by a publisher. More and more people, including agented and published authors, are taking to self publishing as Internet-enabled tools to create and distribute books lessen the value of a mainstream publisher's contribution to the process. We’ve seen this process before, it’s called ‘disintermediation’, when an intermediary is removed from a process by the Internet. And Amazon is a great disintermediator.

This means I can find my readers anywhere in the world and get a book to them without having to physically create and distribute tens of thousands of books. It also means anyone who has written a book can now get on the Web and promote it. Including the lunatic on the bus who has an atom bomb in a corned beef tin, the author of a dreary memoir of life in Tuscany and the deluded nincompoop who’s penned a trilogy about a dystopia where dolphins are smarter than people. Oh hang on a second...

That clutter means authors – all authors – have an awful lot of noise to cut through. And we face readers increasingly barraged by needy wails of ‘buy my book’. And yet you need to get your book out there.

As they say here in Dubai: What to do?

There are a lot of people out there ready to help you in this endeavour, for a few dollars. I tried a couple but I never really believed in them and I was right. The recommendation of someone who sells recommendation is worthless. Honest reviews are gold dust, but only part of the formula. Social interaction is good, but you really have to balance promotion with content – some would argue I got that balance wrong with Olives – A Violent Romance, but I’m happy with myself overall.

The one critical lesson I’ve learned about book marketing is the lesson I learned when I first took a sales job in the early 1980s. AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. People don’t just buy books. They have to have their interest piqued in some way – something has to catch their eye. And that something has to evoke enough curiosity for them to want to look under, literally, the covers. What they find has to make them want the book, because only then (and I have been amazed at how much pushing it takes to take the horse to water) will they actually click on that link to Amazon.

It’s worth looking at each of these four cardinal rules of sales:

ATTENTION

Your cover is critical. I love the cover of Olives, it’s a point of considerable pride that I could pick my own cover artist and that the talented Naeema Zarif brought her unique style to the book’s cover. But compare Olives to Beirut and you’ll find I was being self-indulgent. Appropriate to the book? Yes. Artistically valid? Yes. But that’s not what it takes. It takes immediate, in your face whambam.

As I pointed out in my workshop at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature on book promotion and marketing, you need a ‘book hook’, something that makes the book stand out and attract attention. In Olives it was water rights and the drought gripping the Levant. Lead with this, build your content around it – and get that content out there.

Traditional media is key. Radio, TV, newspapers, magazines. Features about you and your book hook, reviews. Do signings, book clubs, conferences, book fairs, workshops, readings. Take every chance you can to get out there. Recruit supporters whenever you can. This can be exhausting, but it’s necessary. Build a media database and send out review requests to as wide an audience of reviewers as you can. The more you’re in front of people, the more attention you’re getting.

If you can’t bear the thought of all that attention, I’d consider whether you want to do this book thing. I fear in today’s world all authors are being forced blinking into the spotlights to face the audience and ‘engage the community’. And yes, that includes the conventionally published.

Talking of communities - I cannot over-emphasise the importance of communities in promoting books. If you're an active and contributing member of an online community, their help can get you off the ground in no time.(Anyone out there remember the deep joy of Klazart gaming Authonomy?)

A website for a book is critical – it’s somewhere you can point people (Twitter is great for attention, but you need to trigger a click somewhere – and that somewhere has to build interest) and tell them more about the book. The Olives website is probably too busy and contains too much information. The site’s not there to celebrate or justify your work – it’s there to trigger a link to ‘buy the book’. You also need to bear SEO in mind – the site is a discoverable asset: when I search your name, your book or even the topics your book is based around, I should find YOU staring at me.

The Olives website is hardly the Huffington Post – in the year it’s been around, it’s pulled 4,200 page views - some 340 visitors clicked on the ‘Buy Olives’ link. The majority of visits have been from the UAE and USA. However, it’s also been somewhere I could post some of the many positive reviews of the book, giving me credibility – particularly with book bloggers who can be resistant to self published writers. And good reviews are critical in building attention and desire.

The Olives blog has been a much bigger traffic draw with over 10,500 page views (about 500 of these were for the Olives is blocked in Jordan post – a wee whiff of controversy I refused to capitalise on and fan into flames. Looking back, I rather wish I had now).

The blog was intended to create a stream of content that was, again, discoverable and also to engage potential readers with the book, taking excerpts from the book that touched on some of the issues it’s built around – the water conflict in the region, nationality and identity and the Palestinian story. It also discussed issues brought up by book clubs and reviewers – including the book’s treatment of alcohol and sexuality in the Middle East. It also gave a steady source of content that went beyond ‘buy my book’.

The Beirut- An Explosive Thriller website is, by the way, much cleaner and faster to get to the point.

INTEREST

So you won the click. Now you can sit back and enjoy yourself. Not a bit of it. Now you have to build interest. I’m interested enough to give you my consideration, how do you hold me? In today’s world, when every movement of our online eyeballs brings a new skateboarding dog or man with five nipples, that’s a big ask.

The big tool here is your ‘blurb’, the summary of your book’s content that graces the back cover. Writing blurbs is a skill in itself – what do you leave in, what do you take out? How do you describe your story enticingly and draw the reader in? I’m not about to write a piece on how to write blurbs, it’d turn this already long post into a book in itself. But précis, précis, précis is the key. And, as in your writing, try and make one word do the work of ten. A quick example from the blurb for Beirut – An Explosive Thriller:

Michel Freij is about to become the next president of Lebanon.

One of the feared Grey Havens Gang suggested:

Michel Freij is poised to become the next president of Lebanon.

See? That one word is so much more dramatic. It’s detail like that has to go into your blurb. And you should learn it off by heart, because when people ask you ‘What’s your book about?’ you have their attention, your answer will dictate whether you have their interest.

The content you create, including the content of your book site, should build on interest, deepening people’s engagement with your work. This is desire at work.

DESIRE

I was attracted by the cover, liked the sound of the book and enjoyed what the author said about it/what I read on the book’s website. I think I’d like to read some more of it. The extract made available by Amazon (you MUST enable sampling on Amazon, Smashwords et al – and have a sample, say an opening chapter, on your website) was well-written. Hell, I’m going to do this thing.

This is desire.

For most of us, desire is tempered by price. I’ll give you an excellent and personal example. I am re-reading the paperback of Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Scoop’. I’ve had that book for years, this was the first time I notice Penguin hadn’t bothered re-setting the book – the margins are massive and if that had been my book, people would have complained to me. Whatever, I simply can’t settle down with paper these days so I tootled off to Amazon to get me a Kindle copy. £7.99. I couldn’t believe it. The Kindle version of a 1938 book is £1 MORE than the paperback.

I really want to read Scoop on my Kindle, but I’m not paying a greedy, stupid publisher (listening, Penguin?) £7.99 for it. It’s simply not happening.

Book pricing can make you or break you. And that’s another post right there.

ACTION

It all leads to this. The click on your 'buy my book' link, the click through to Amazon or iBooks or wherever else your book is available from. It goes without saying that each site needs to be well populated with good, well-edited content, properly tagged and your author pages etc available and updated. Don't shrug this advice off - Olives was filed under 'theatre' in iBooks for almost a year because I tagged it in Smashwords as 'Fiction - Drama'. I only found out after my Mum bought me an iPad for my birthday!

It doesn’t end with action. That click to buy your book is a chance to engage your readers as components of your marketing campaign. Encourage reviews, seek feedback, enrol evangelists. Now, if readers are telling you your book sucks, there’s valuable input for you. It might hurt, but thicken up your skin and suck it up – if you need to improve your game, there’s no better way to do it than listen to your customers. If multiple readers have a problem with a character or point out a flaw in your dialogue, you’d be mad not to re-evaluate that work.

There’s no more powerful marketing tool than third party endorsement - if readers like your work, get them to tell others. Encourage reviews on Amazon, Goodreads or Shelfari. Repost these to Twitter (not in a constant stream, mind) and host them on your book blog. Post ‘em to Facebook. Get the good news out there. Because you won a click on ‘Buy with Whispernet’ and now the eternal, Sisyphean cycle starts again. A happy reader buys you attention. A happy reader makes you interesting. A happy reader builds desire. A happy reader can provoke action.

I love happy readers.

(You can become one too, by clicking on this link to the website for Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and then wandering over to the 'Buy Beirut' section!)

If you want to talk books and have a drink or three, the celebration of the launch of Beirut takes place tonight at Billy Blues in Satwa, Dubai. The invite's here.

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.

Fake Book Reviews. A Confession.

books (Photo credit: brody4)

I have to confess to being unsurprised at the 'established authors create fake reviews' furore. Authors are not gentlemen.

The latest head to fall, apparently, is crime writer RJ Ellory. The whole thing was started by novelist Stephen Leather, talking on a panel at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival. He crowed, idiotically, about the way he creates 'sock puppets' - alternative Internet personae - to big up his books, including creating false reviews and *gasp* tweeting false praise as well as dissing 'rivals'.

What annoys me is the line sniffily taken by mainstream media commentators such as The Independent's Terence Blacker, "You'd expect this from self published writers, but surely not established authors".

Would you now?

As traditional publishing has struggled, and largely failed, to come to terms with the challenges of the Internet Age, publishers have wasted no time in pushing their authors to blog and tweet in promotion of their work. That many authors aren't very astute users of the Internet should come as no surprise - the poor darlings mostly like to sit in sheds and write fantasies, not leap about Twitter dressed in a silver lame thong and squealing 'My book, read my book!'.

I have myself spent much of the preceding decade dealing with the infuriatingly analogue types known as literary agents (only latterly would they accept submissions online and there are still die-hards who won't look at email). A chummy, clubby and massivly analogue industry mired in a business model predicated on massive inefficiency, publishing has struggled to redefine itself, and largely failed. As more focus is drawn to the industry, we start to see more of the underhand, self-serving behaviours of 'big publishing', including authors writing blurbs for unknowns to please powerful editors and agents. A practise little better than sock puppetry, IMHO.

As it happens, not one of my reviews for Olives - A Violent Romance, is me in disguise or any friend or family member I have pressed to write positively. Many reviewers have encountered me online or at a conference of some sort, part of the reason people buy books. Many have been sent my book for review, the clear deal here is you get an independent review of your work. I am very proud of the very many positive reviews Olives has garnered and can see no reason why I should jeopardise that by cheating.

Besides, I'm not even totally sure about the value of reviews. I can trace no discernable impact on e-book sales resulting from any one review of Olives, although I do think there is huge value in a collection of positive - thoughtful - reviews of a book being available to readers. The trouble is now, they can't be entirely sure whether those reviews are the 'real deal'. This is where reputation - as so often it does online - comes in as an important factor. And that reputation has to be earned - it can't be faked for long.

So You've Written A Book. What's It About?

Image via Wikipedia

The first question anyone asks you when they find out you've written a book is 'What's it about?'. This is a natural byproduct of human curiosity, but comes with a built-in conundrum. You have about fifteen seconds before their eyes glaze over and they suddenly remember they had to be somewhere else like really fast.

How do you sum up your 80,000 words of lovingly crafted prose in a few seconds? You can't just read them the blurb (you could maybe have it printed onto index cards to give to people. Hmmm, that might be an idea), but you need to find a way of getting the scheme across to them because if writing books does nothing else, it transforms us from thieves into salesmen.

Thieves? Yes, everyone wot writes books steals moments, traits, expressions and gestures from the people around them. The biggest act of thievery in Olives, for instance, is Northern Irish spy Gerald Lynch. He's got a hangup about being called 'Gerry', it's always Gerald. He's spent twenty years escaping from being Gerry Lynch. That, for instance, was stolen. Someone said it to me in a meeting and I couldn't wait to get away and make that phrase into a new character. Believe it or not, the spy in Olives used to be a fiftyish, gingery fellow called Nigel Soames. Gerald Lynch, born of a theft, replaced him that very evening and has gone on to be the central character in my two subsequent books.

Salesman because all I want to do is sell you my book now. When you ask me what it's about, I'm going to take the chance to tell you enough to make you want to pick it up when you see it in the bookshop, beguiled by Naeema Zarif's stunning cover art, and take it to the cash counter. I want you to click on the book cover on the right, go to the the Kindle store and send the data flying over Whispernet to populate your reader.And I want you to be curious enough to click the 'Olives - A Violent Romance' link on my blog and find out more about it so you can be ready to buy it when it comes out in December. At least you know what's deep in my black little heart now, the next time we meet. And don't think it stops there, by the way. I want to talk you into reviewing it on Amazon and GoodReads too. I've become quite shameless.

And, as you ask, Olives is about a young British journalist called Paul Stokes who goes to Jordan to live and work who becomes attracted to a Jordanian girl. He's blackmailed into spying on her family by British intelligence, who claim the family's involved in funding terrorism and he has to try to work out quite who the good guys and bad guys are as a series of massive bombings go off around him that seem somehow tied to his movements. With each decision he makes, things just get worse until he finds he has to betray everyone around him to survive.

When Silence Ain't Golden

Image by keira-anne ♥ via Flickr

Well, I was having a nice quiet start to the day when I got a call from La Swann wanting to talk on air about the Burj Khalifa elevator incident and how the communications aspect had played out.

Crisis management takes many shapes and forms, but generally is called for when something happens that is deeply regrettable in some way. Managing a crisis these days is about getting as much dependable information out as you can - fast. By being communicative, you earn the right to get your story out in full - to mitigate the hard facts with some explanations.

I've seen my fair share of these, from explosions and deaths through to recalled products and political screw-ups. Everyone's first reaction is to stick their fingers in their ears and shout lalala until all the nasty people go away. When you've endangered lives, when you've attracted the attention of the world's media, sadly, that's simply not an option - and no professional PR practitioner would consider it as an option for one picosecond.

So what do you do?

In minor and/or simple issues, you'd tend to be 'reactive' - you'd answer questions when they're asked, typically with a prepared statement. Where you've got a major problem on your hands (any issue involving danger to human life being a Great Big Red Flag), you get out there and communicate.

Typically, you'd want to say what happened, how and why it happened, what you've done to ameliorate the effects and how you're working to ensure it won't happen again. Critically, if there has been danger to the public, you have the opportunity to express regret and concern for those affected - and what you're doing to help them deal with the consequences.

Trying to get by with issuing a statement that does not recognise the facts is a short term fix that will rarely, if ever, work - particularly these days when everyone with a mobile is a TV crew. Rather than getting one hard hit with your side of the story told alongside the unpleasant facts, you're begging for a drip feed of stories that are wholly negative.

If you preserve your silence while that negative coverage is breaking, you are effectively positioned as arrogant and uncaring. News expands to fill a vacuum, so your silence encourages investigative reporting which will tend to be negatively skewed precisely because your silence ensures that your side of the story is not being told.

Because today's world is a fast-moving little place, news can globalise in minutes flat. That means having a sound crisis communications plan in place. This starts with imagining the unimaginable, planning for the very worst (including the unthinkable. It's funny how often the unthinkable happens) and then answering the million dollar question - how would we react if this happened?

There are a lot more questions to answer, too. Questions like who do we care about? What are our policies and procedures? Who owns this problem?

You actually need to put procedures in place, define reporting and escalation paths and have a team assigned for the unthinkable. You need to have 'dark sites' in place - websites that can be cut in to replace your standard home page so that relatives, friends and other concerned people can get access to information. You need to be able to scale quickly to respond to requests from media - local at first, but very quickly global. You need to have statements in place, at least in draft, so that you can minimise the time you spend wondering what on earth to say. Where appropriate, you need to have advice lines up fast and other facilities to help people deal with the incident and the concerns it raises with them.

For me, the most valuable part of this whole extensive (and, yes, expensive) exercise is forcing organisations to actually think about the unthinkable - and how it could be avoidable. If more organisations went through this structured process, I believe that more of the unthinkable could be avoided. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to get people to take this whole process seriously, by the way. Until, of course, they get that phone call...

Warned

Aren't blogs funny? It never rains but it pours. Some days you've got nothing at all to add to the world, some days things you want to get out of your system just come tumbling out.

Some people read this post. I'm sure quite a few more read it when it ran on Arabian Business. Some even heard me blithering about it on the radio (and were kind enough not to complain).

But, surely, this poor berk wasn't among 'em - otherwise he'd have thought twice about the way he tried to handle disappointed consumer Moryarti when he posted his 5th September grumpy blogpost about a hotel Ramadan tent that failed to live up to expectations. Yes! Cue relentlessly positive comments from someone quite obviously working for the hotel in question. And then some rather... acid responses from the Moryarti himself... a fun read!!!

They can't say I didn't try to tell 'em, can they? >;0)

A New Blog is Born!

Today is a momentous day, as it marks the launch of a new Blog dedicated to broadcasting the lunatic babbling of not one but two blogging types to the world. Yes, myself and HalfManHalfBeer are collaborating on a new Blog designed to indulge our shared unhealthy and obsessive interest in all things food-related.

The Fat Expat will contain regularly posted recipes, articles about food, restaurant reviews and more. More? Yes! More!

We’re aiming to have a great deal of fun with the format, including special promotions, cook-offs, recipe competitions and, I hope, an increasingly off-the-wall selection of content. There are already over 100 recipes posted up there in the archive, more than yer average cook-book, and we’re hoping to add loads more, together with bringing more contributors to the Blog.

So if you like Arabic food, pies, barbecues, eating out around the world, reading cranky restaurant reviews or prefer to dabble in a delicious assortment of Asian splendours then drop on by to the The Fat Expat!