BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS

I can justify that headline. A man called Books reserves his, Books', books of books. There.

Meanwhile, adding to yesterdays frankly amazing news about Birdkill going on promo and being FREE yes FREE for the next four days (it was five days but you wasted a day dawdling), I can now reveal that A Decent Bomber is ALSO FREE for the next five days.

Get Birdkill FREE here.

Get A Decent Bomber FREE here.

And if that weren't already enough, Beirut - An Explosive Thriller is ALREADY permafree. So now you're looking at getting THREE of my novels for nothing.

AND now Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy is on promo for £0.99 with a deal through free/bargain books promo website manybooks.net!

I mean, gosh, it's like a bargain book basement around here!

Let your friends know. Hell, let your enemies know. Here be free books aplenty!

Birdkill And Book Promo MADNESS

Of all the reviews on Amazon for my books, my favourite of the lot is for Birdkill: 

"This is a cynical negative, depressing book. Everyone decent died. I'm sorry I read it."

Well, it's been a very long while indeed since I did anything about promoting books around here. So I might as well make up for it with a mad raft of book promotions all taking place at the same time.

Why?

Well, no particular reason other than I've neglected things over the past couple of years. Beirut - An Explosive Thriller is 'permafree', which is driving a steady wee trickle of sales of the other books and generating the, very occasional, odd review or so on Amazon. These are generally very positive, occasionally sorta negative but, overall, customers have been provided with satisfaction. But it's generally a wee bit quiet and I'd like it to heat up a tad. SO...

For the next five days, psychological thriller Birdkill is a FREE ebook, saving you the trouble of parting with $4.99, the usual asking price.

You can get Birdkill FREE by clicking here!

Birdkill is about a teacher, Robyn Shaw, who suffered a massive trauma while she was at a school in Lebanon, in a town up in the mountains called Zahlé - it's a very lovely town, home to - among many other things, the very lovely wines of the Chateau Ksara.

Robyn's mind has shut down and she remembers nothing of the events at Zahlé, but she nearly died up there and goes through extensive physical and psychological rehabilitation in the UK. Back on the road to recovery, she gets a job teaching at a research institute for exceptionally talented children and it's there things start to go pear-shaped and Robyn's mind appears to start unravelling.

She realises she's losing her sanity and in desperation calls journalist friend Mariam for help. Mariam has to rush to uncover the hidden secrets in Robyn's horrific past before her friend loses her mind.

"McNabb's story of weaponized children and disastrous drug trials astounds and horrifies.."

"Has a visceral effect on you after having read it, the imagery is so vivid and real."

That sort of thing from the reviewers, thank you very much. So why wouldn't you a) download it FREE NOW for your own delight and b) TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT IT!!!

You might have guessed b) is the payoff line. Do it now before you forget, there's a good thing. Tell them all before it's too late...

ithankyou

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

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

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

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

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

The link's here. 

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

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

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

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

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

Blooming Brilliant Book Buyer's Bonza Bonanza

My books are now ALL on sale at WH Smith branches across the UAE in paperback. As of now, they're all in stock. I'm reliably informed Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy is listed as a best seller at the WHS branch in Abu Dhabi International Airport.

So a big fat 'Yay' for that...

WH Smith, as eny fule no, was the official bookseller of the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature 2016 and so I imported a whole shedload of books for 'em to sell there. The unsold balance they were going to put on sale in their retail outlets, but needed permission to distribute three of the titles in the UAE.

Olives - A Violent Romance and Beirut - An Explosive Thriller already had that permission in place. I had never bothered applying for the other three titles, preferring instead to sell 'em only on ebook platforms or Amazon for paperback. I'd bring a few tens in for events like the ExpatWoman Festive Fun Festival or LitFest author appearances. So WHS, armed with a 'no objection' letter from me, went and got the permissions. They never did tell me, despite a whole bunch of emails, that it had all gone through. It took a pal flying out of AUH to notice the books were on sale.

So why weren't they on sale anyway?

Well, Olives has sold out its conventional print run, as has Beirut. This left me with an online-only sales strategy, limiting my reach to my 'home' market quite considerably. The UAE is still overwhelmingly the land of the paperback, assisted in no small part by Amazon's refusal to service the Middle East market. They're not alone - B&N, Kobo and the rest can't be bothered, either.

It does mean, though, you can buy the sparkly new edition of Olives with its spangly new 'on brand' cover and many corrections to minor errors in the text. And Beirut is now similarly corrected. Shemlan is the 'author's edition' - I have restored some 20,000 words my editor excised because I want to. So the copy of Shemlan you'll get from WHS is 'my' Shemlan, the way I wanted it.

Now anyone can just schlep on down to WHS and pick up a copy of any of my five books - including the latest two, which aren't even set in the Middle East but set in Ireland and the UK. With perhaps a hint of Middle Eastern connection in each of 'em.

You can find out more about them all using this here handy link. Do feel free to buy them for yourselves, spouses, friends, family, strangers and passers-by. The more the merrier.

IF you have a Kindle, or a friend who has a Kindle, do remember both Olives - A Violent Romance and Beirut - An Explosive Thriller are currently FREE on Amazon in the US, UK, Germany, France et al!

So there you go. Easy to access paperbacks, special editions never before seen in the wild AND free ebooks. What more could you possibly want to get from a blog post?

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

Warning. Very long post about book marketing.

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

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

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

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

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

So what has all this 'free' told us?

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

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

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

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

Amazon Advertising

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 245 x 250

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

270 x 150

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

270 x 200

300 x 250

402 x 250

980 x 55

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

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

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

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

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

'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...

Twitter Ads, Book Sales And Promoting Birdkill

You know I've got a new book out, right?

Right.

I've been playing about a bit with analytics and Twitter ad campaigns. I'm a big fan of Twitter and thought it would be interesting to see what I could get up to in terms of promotions and generally try a couple of things out. I've run Google adwords campaigns in the past and was particularly interested to see how Twitter stacked up against Goog.

Twitter offers a pretty powerful set of dashboards allowing you to analyse your tweets, as well as run promotions to audiences you select. There are a number of ways of slicing and dicing this, by behaviours, interests or contextually based on actions. You can also target other people's followers, which is a bit 'Google' - at the same time mighty handy and also a little creepy.

Generally, book promotion tweets invite lower engagement rates unless they mark real milestones or events or contain some element of wit, news or opinion. Nobody would be surprised to know that 'buy my book' doesn't really cut it.

Timing is also... everything. First thing in the morning, elevenses and evening tweets tend to do better. And so do book tweets that follow a wider non-book tweet, typically an interesting content share.

I ran a campaign over the past weekend which targeted a range of key words, principally 'read' and 'book'. I limited it to the UAE, US and UK and ran it over two days with a total budget of $100. The campaign was based around two tweets and two 'cards', which are a graphical element with a link displayed. Here are those very cards:

Each card graphic is 800 x 320 pixels. So each ad gives you a call to action opportunity with a tweet, a graphic and a clickable link. It's quite a neat wee package. The above turned into the below when I'd finished with 'em:

 The above got $79.29 of my spend, generating 25,970 impressions and 126 clicks.

This one got just $20.71 of my spend, but generated 13,690 impressions and 35 clicks.

Both ads performed similarly, costing around $0.60 per click. So in total my two-day campaign generated 39,660 impressions and 163 clicks to my Amazon page.

What happened? I hear you asking. How many books did you sell over this period?

One.

And I can't even be sure that one came from Twitter, because Amazon doesn't offer the same sort of analytics to authors. It shouldn't really come as a surprise, it's pretty consistent with McNabb's Law of Clicks actually.

I'm running a second campaign now, which targets a number of local UAE handles connected to reading, literature and culture with a much wider selection of creatives. That's costing more per click but getting more clicks per impression. Generally, I found Twitter easier to get my head around and more diverse than Google, but to be honest I'm not really a dashboard kind of boy...

And I'm clearly just playing around here, but there's room to explore a great deal more, leveraging different routes to find, attract and convert readers. That all costs money, of course, and at $100 for one book sale, I can see the route to bankruptcy is not only paved with gold, but also quite comprehensively greased.

Are the messages wrong? The creatives goofy? The targeting atrocious? These are all subjective and yet the dashboards available mean you can refine these, testing what is working and what isn't, increasing your success rate with each iteration. What fascinates me is how 163 people clicked on a link to Amazon and didn't click on 'Buy now'.

Anyway, it's been interesting and I'll continue to play around with it all. I hope the above is useful to someone, somewhere. And if you have any comments, views or insights, you know where to find me: @alexandermcnabb...

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.

Fear And Loathing In Jebel Ali

Brownian Motion on a Sphere. The generator of ths process is ½ times the Laplace-Beltrami-Operator (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Bring your own shade, said the email from the Jebel Ali Festive Market people. What it didn't say was you'd end up humping a two-ton umbrella base up a sandy assault course for mile after relentless mile. Well, a couple of hundred yards, but you know what I mean.

Our garden umbrella was too big, even if the base came in handy, so I nipped down to Carrefour and picked up a cheapie. I came to hate that umbrella as the afternoon wore on. It spent the day poking people's eyes out, twisting in the base or being blown over - anti-tank grade concrete lump notwithstanding.

I got sunburnt.

Talking children's author, mother of two and borderline lunatic Rachel Hamilton in was a fun start to the afternoon. She was, of course, lost. Her Brownian sense of direction is compounded by a complete inability to translate simple instructions into anything other than the complete opposite of their intent. Most people stopped setting up their stalls to gawp as I wandered around, screaming into the mobile like a parody of Dom Joly's parody of people screaming into mobiles. "NO, TURN LEFT AFTER THE SPINNEYS THEN LEFT AGAIN." Finally she hove into sight, her car resolving from the shimmer above the tarmac like a TV presenter doing the visual for the voice-over intro to a documentary about the Serengeti.

She brought the blasted pop-up again. This, of course, spent the afternoon billowing and swooping around like a malign spinnaker and needed every bit of equipment we had to pin it down. The nice chap on the stall to our right lent us some bricks to try and curb its most wayward tendencies. Always handy to have a few bricks with you, I say. Every now and then I'd be chatting pleasantly to someone then hurl myself to the right behind a flapping canary yellow banner, shout foul abuse and appear to be wrestling with a warthog. By the time I'd reappear, tousled and sweating, they'd usually either wandered away or gathered a crowd of speculative types gambling as to whether the warthog would win out.

Hamilton is, of course, above all this. I watched her trilling and cooing as she prised money out of small children's hands, the heart of Cruella DeVille disguised in the persona of Elsa From Frozen. Children can't resist. I watched them glimpse the bright coloured cover of her book and get drawn in as the evil hag cackled and gibbered. They're helpless, their eyes wide and their souls already on the trash-heap. By the time they've whispered 'The Case of the Exploding Loo?' and started giggling, she's gathered in the billowing mists of darkness and turned into Beloved Children's Author Rachel Hamilton, crooning about how she could sign their book for them if only they'd let 45 dirhams come to a new home where they'd be cared for with unicorns to play with and everything.

I'm stuck with people holding a book splashed with BEIRUT on the front cover asking me what it's about while Hamilton dances widdershins around her cash tin, children now queuing up to send their Dhs45 to the Happy Unicorn Place.

Hamilton finally has to brave the single chemical toilet. A small girl wanted to know where Much Beloved Children's Author Rachel Hamilton was because Hamilton had been performing an act of mass hypnosis at her school and the book was all she wanted for Christmas. 'She's in the loo,' I growled at her. 'And I hope it explodes.'

Don't you hate crying children?

I'd just finished patching it up with the parents by the time old poo pants got back. By now the heat's searing and a car park with no shade in Jebel Ali is not somewhere I wanted to be. Someone buys a book and I love car parks with no shade in Jebel Ali. We pulled off a double whammy, a lovely nuclear family walked away with two kids clutching exploding loo stories and two parents clutching exploding people stories. We were doing high fives and little We Sold Some Books dances when they come back to ask something or another. We tried to pretend it doesn't really matter when people buy our books because it happens all the time although it's always nice to think you've giving someone pleasure.

I started to wonder if that wee Spinneys sells the heavy turkey grade foil so I could make myself a heat exposure bag. A Lebanese chap stopped, seemingly mesmerised by the cover of 'Beirut.' What's it about? He asked. I said, 'It's about what happens when the future President of Lebanon acquires two Soviet nuclear warheads and European intelligence has to find out what he means to do with them.'

He put the book down and smiled a bitter smile. 'Trust me man, he does nothing with them. Nothing.' And walked off. I must confess it was the most brilliant reaction of the day and I was only stopped from running after him and giving him a book by having to wrestle with a warthog behind the yellow banner.

And that was it, really. I went home to immerse my head in aloe vera and Hamilton no doubt made it back to her tottering castle atop the dark hill to count out the gold into the vast coffer she keeps at the bottom of her four-poster bed with the skulls grinning down from their perches on each pillar.

There's probably a crow in there somewhere, too...

Gerbil Arlee

Dramatic Gerbil (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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

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

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

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

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

A Day In The Life

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

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

6.30pm
What happened?

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

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

From 'Beirut - A Deadly Thriller'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9am

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

Book Post: McNabb's Law Of Clicks

(Photo credit: MarkyBon)

McNabb's Law of Clicks applies principally to book promotion, but I find it extends equally well to other areas of Internet based activity that require an action.

When I say an action, I mean a real world interaction or transaction of some shape and form. For instance, paying someone some money to buy a thing or perhaps giving someone some money for a cause. It doesn't have to be monetary but it must be a transaction involving some degree of real world effort that goes beyond a 'like' or a 'share'. You know, getting people to actually DO something. Get up and move around. Change a physical thing. Anything beyond an RT and 'Yay for this'.

So here it is. McNabb's Law of Clicks:

100,000 impressions 
= 1,000 clicks 
= 100 opens 
= 10 views 
= 1 sale

I have been testing it these past three years with book promotions of various shapes, forms and sizes, also by tracking reviews (online or in traditional media) and clicks through the blog, Twitter, Facebook and the book websites for Olives - A Violent Romance, Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy. 

I now feel I can go public with the research. It's not peer-reviewed but hell, I'll live.

The very inexactitude of the science proves its applicability to our real and so very fractal world. Or in other words, sure, you go ahead and disprove it. Fill yer boots...

Book Post: Cheap Book Promo Bonanza!

Olives AND Beirut BOTH on promo? Yes!

Seriously, guv, I'm slashin' me own froat 'ere.

My first two serious novels, Olives - A Violent Romance and Beirut - An Explosive Thriller have both gone on promo and will both remain at the seriously tempting price of $0.99 (or £0.77 if you prefer) for the next three days.

 Links to buy Olives - A Violent Romance are here. 

 Links to buy Beirut - An Explosive Thriller are here. 

Both sets of links will lead you to the usual places - Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk for the Kindle, iBooks for iPad junkies, Barnes and Noble, Kobo et al. If, for any reason, some of the 'extended distribution' partners' websites (ie: anyone except Amazon) aren't updated, you can go straight to Smashwords.

It's all on account of Ebook Bargains UK, a mailer for readers who are interested in trying out new books at heavily discounted prices - even free! (You can sign up for a daily dose of discounts here)

Both books are on promo with Ebook Bargains until Monday. DO please feel free to tell everyone you know they have a chance to lift these two excellent tomes for mere pennies. In fact, feel free to tell them to tell everyone THEY know.

The more, as they say, the merrier.

Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy remains at its temptingly high cover price. I'll gouge yer in the end...

Book Post: The Displaced Nation

It's quite a neat title for an expat blog, isn't it? The Displaced Nation is a blog that ties together people from all over the world who have decided to live, well, all over the world. It shares the experiences and tales of people who have decided to leave the comfort of hearth and home and live somewhere alien, foreign and different.

I can imagine nothing more fun than alien, foreign and different.

Anyway, DN has been a great supporter of my book publishing endeavours over the years (They're +Displaced Nation or @displacednation) and I love 'em for it - which is why now that we have three books in the Levant Cycle, officially a 'trilogy' since I gave in to popular opinion, it falls to the Displaced Nation team to reveal details of the fantastic, limited time offer that's about to take place globally and in glorious Technicolour.

I'm going to put Olives - A Violent Romance, Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy up for sale at $0.99 each for a couple of days before Christmas. This is clearly an ebook only kind of deal, so if you're wedded to print there's no bonanza - but if you've got a Kindle, Sony, Kobo, Nook or iPad and want to get three decent thrillers based in the mystical and majestic Middle East for under $3, this is your perfect opportunity.

For accountants and others inclined to autism, that's about $0.00001 a word.

The kicker is you have to subscribe to the Displaced Despatch to find out when the promotion is taking place. It's linked here for your listening pleasure. The Despatch is a weekly summary of book reviews, recipes and posts from the DN blog and actually a decent enough sprinkling of international fun and games in its own right.

As you're in the mood to go signing up to newsletters, you can also sign up to mine (link on the right hand side there - it's a bit more random than weekly. Let's call it 'occasional'...) which gets you a copy of Olives - A Violent Romance for FREE! So then you could get your jammy paws on a whole trilogy for just $1.98!

Oh, the BARGAINS to be had around here! It's enough to make your head spin!

Book Post - A Week Of UBER-AWESOME Freebies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's all folks! Enjoy!