The ExpatWoman Festive Family Fair And Selling Books. Live As It Happens.

It's become sort of traditional to live blog the ExpatWoman Festive Family Fair, which I usually share with madcap children's author Rachel 'Poo Pants' Hamilton and winsome author of 'domestic noir', Annabel Kantaria. Annabel can't make it this year so it's just me and the lunatic. And I'm ill. This could get twisted.


08.30
This is not starting well. I've been sick as a dog for the last two weeks and its showing no signs of abating. Up all night in a terrible state, shivers, sweats, yarking up boluses of phlegm and generally gibbering. My stomach's not good, I've got a head like Oliver Plunkett. Thank God I loaded the car yesterday. Coffee is making things better but I guess I don't really need a day standing in the sun right now. I hope to God Hamilton hasn't remembered the bloody gold dinosaur.

10.30
I have set up next to Hamilton's mad empire of tottering popups and branding, a huge display of THIS IS RACHEL HAMILTON GIVE HER YOUR CHILDREN'S MONEY. I'm not well. There's a lady shouting at us over the tannoy which makes talking to people quite difficult. Hamilton is running around banking money and screaming CHING CHING.

11.30
It's warm enough but we're nicely shaded. Books have been moving which is nice and there's been a lively run on Birdkill. Chatting to Hamilton about Jamalon's POD operations, she suddenly breaks off and dances around the table. There's a small child looking at her books, face illuminated in awe. Two seconds later, small child has been relieved of money. It's terrible...

12.30
People are funny, they really are. I just sold a copy of Beirut to a Lebanese lady who doesn't read in English. She's off to try the experience and has promised to let me know how it goes for her. It's hot. I'm still alive, the waves of nausea and misery have receded, probably burned off by the sun like morning mist. Hamilton is on a massive run of book sales. Depressing, really...

1.00pm
Rachel's daughter Jodie has been sent on a leafleting mission with 100 flyers promoting Poo Pants and me. This is a cunning scheme indeed!

Five minutes later she's back, all dispirited. They're all really rude,' she complains. She's been given 50 shades of 'No, thank you, we don't want your leaflet little girl now go away' from the general public. Cunning plan thwarted, then. That's a new one for the marketing things wot I learn at ExpatWoman Festive Fairs list. I'm melting. Someone's cooking sharwamas and I hate them. The person, not the shawarmas. The shawarmas, I want.

There's something of a lull on. Hamilton goes for a wander around, but a small child approaches her table. Quick as a flash she does a double take from way over on the other side of the courtyard and there's a Matrix-like blur and stop-motion emergence from hyperspace aaaand she's back. One small child relieved of funds later, she takes off for her wander. Honestly, it's beyond belief.

2.00pm
I've just put something strange and wrong in my mouth. It's supposed to be a hot dog, but it reminds me of something out of Terry Pratchett. I remember Elton John once describing a gustatory experience with, 'I've had stranger things in my mouth.' Well, while Elton (or Reg, as he should really be known) and I have different tastes, I can honestly say I can't recall anything quite so odd passing my lips. It was very kind of Hamilton to take a few seconds out of vacuuming money from small children to get them, but they are very, very strange.

A lady has just told me she loved Olives so much she lent it to all her friends. I managed to keep smiling, I'm not sure how, with my heart so black and murderous. Oh, I loved your book so much I photocopied it and put it up on a torrent site. Yvette and Flora from the LitFest have swung by to laugh at Hamilton and I being slowly reduced to sweaty, crumpled heaps. It's just struck me how much I've earned today compared to my hourly fee in my day job. I am now in a deep depression. But it's all about the readers, honestly. Truly, really, honestly. I mean it. Most sincerely. My lovely, lovely readers. I burp an aftershock of turgid pink proto-meat sausage, HFCS laden tomato gloop and scabby mustard and think of all those super, wonderful readers.

2.30
I'm on the downward spiral here, I'm running out of energy and things have slowed up a bit. Reckon I'll hightail it in a while. Even the madcap Hamilton has become less assiduous in her thieving of innocents. The Christmas music in the heat and hacienda style architecture of the Ranches Polo Club is endearingly odd, perhaps even slightly surreal. This is starting to trigger visions and this is probably not a good thing.

3.30
That's it. I'm out. Totally done. Sold some books, met some people, chatted with some nice strangers, watched Hamilton's mad pop-up empire come tottering down around her ears like a great metaphorical thing, caught in the breeze and dominoing disastrously. I manage to laugh long and loud enough so she notices.

It's funny how people are with books: how much convincing they take to pick up something new, how people will come back for more if they like what you've done before. As usual, the seminal importance of covers and blurbs reinforced but, oddly enough, how many people will just walk past books with absolutely no curiosity at all - anecdotally from today, at least, I'd say the majority of people don't actually, you know, care about books. And that's hard for me to say.

Sick, exhausted, sweaty and shivering, I retire with a few thousand Dirhams in my pocket and only one box of books left to carry to the car. Which is just as well, because I don't have the energy for anything else.

Until next year, then... Yay.

A Decent Festive Family Fair

Yo ho ho! It's that time of year again. Deranged writer of childrens' books Rachel Hamilton and I shared a table at last year's Family Fair and we had a lot of fun and sold some books. Well, I sold some books, Rachel pushed hers like narcotics at eager-eyed children who, bless them, knew no better. Honestly, it's awful to watch the way she dances and coos around them as she steals up to whip the money out of those damp little hands.

This year, we're being joined by sensible author Annabel Kantaria, who will hopefully curb the worst excesses of Hamilton's unstable and mercurial personality. Annabel is the author of psychological thriller Coming Home, dubbed by Judy Finnegan as 'An utterly compelling story of loss and betrayal.'

So we've got Rachel and her books for kids, Annabel and her book for mum and me with my big boy's toys. A proper little family offering we make. All down at the Arabian Ranches Polo Club...

I've got copies of A Decent Bomber, natch. And I have Olives with its new cover as well as Beirut. I forgot to order copies of the new, unexpurgated Shemlan on time, but hopefully they'll make it before the weekend. All, of course, the ideal Christmas present for that loved one or, depending on your view of my books, your worst enemy.

See you there!

Book Marketing - The UAE, Stunts And Social Glue...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have, as you may have noticed, a blog. I also have a number of followers on Twitter, Google+ and a few people occasionally keep in touch on Facebook and Instagram. I have an 'author website', which I happen to think is quite natty. And I have a mailing list of quite a few people who have given me permission to share stuff about books with them. You can join them, if you like, by using the simple, easy to use form to the right of this post.

There are a few people out there who review books who have enjoyed my previous work and so have been keen to review the latest. That is a small and steadily growing resource of people who are treasured because they represent a network effect. A review tends to reach a wide audience and have the benefit of providing recommendation.

This, then, is my 'author platform' - my very own marketing machine. All of these people have, for one reason or another, given me permission to talk to them. Not all of them want to talk to me about books, a lot have been attracted by my ranting and other unstable behaviours. And so when I do talk about books, I see a drop in blog traffic and, with an increasing frequency of promotional tweets and posts, provoke a mixture of reactions from disinterest through to mild amusement, bemusement and, when an unseen line has been crossed, even mild irritation.

The balance here is clearly to try and provide interesting, thought provoking or amusing content on these platforms to increase engagement and stretch the elasticity of the Line of Follower Irritation. When it comes to book marketing, I am clearly without morals. And while I'm not quite reduced to screaming 'Buy my book!' in the faces of strangers, there have been times when I've thought about it. The trouble is, of course, people don't automatically go away and buy books just because they're asked to or told to. Oh, how much simpler my universe would be if that were the case! No, there's something else that makes us click on that 'Deliver to my Kindle' button. And I wish to God I knew what it was. I don't even recognise it in myself as a stable or discernible pattern of behaviour.

It's interesting to see how little strength there is to 'social glue', as well. People will 'like' at the drop of a hat and generally make nice, supportive noises. But getting them to take an action, beyond a click, based on social media interactions is not easy - or even a known, defined science. We basically do a number of things we think might result in that (engagement and all that stuff) and hope it's worked. Clicks are not a measure of action - as I've explained before.

Without a doubt, word of mouth has a huge role to play. Reviews, as I have mentioned above, take the form of recommendations* and so have the power of word of mouth - but I haven't seen them create notable spikes in sales. This is hard to track in terms of physical book sales because physical book distribution is such a slow and placid process. On Amazon I get day by day data and analysis and so can see spikes when they occur. They're usually of a binary nature, by the way. I'm not quite in the hundreds of books a day game!

But my experience has been that people, even when they have thoroughly enjoyed, even 'loved' a book, don't necessarily go around berating their friends about it. And a single recommendation isn't enough to send people jetting off to the nearest bookshop, either. Scale has a huge amount to do with it. If you see a positive review, have a friend or even two recommend it and then see it on display in the bookshop, then you may well act. But any of those in isolation will likely not do the job. My personal theory is the average punter will act on a book purchase after five 'touches' - and then only if the last touch is while they're actually in proximity to a BBO - a Book Buying Opportunity.

It's that scale that is the issue, of course, in the UAE - where, incidentally, much of my 'author platform' is located. The market here is relatively small (Olives - A Violent Romance sold out its run of 2,000 copies and is considered consequently to have done really very well here) and also underserved by all the major platforms - Amazon won't play here, Google and Apple have limited offerings and B&N and Kobo are non-existent. And people here will buy my books from me at signings and other events, but they'll tend not to buy a paperback from Amazon to have delivered here.

Which is why at last year's LitFest, I sat next to Orion's Kate Mills and explained that, as a self-publisher, I was weary and recognised that I actually could really do with the scale that an operation such as hers offered to reach into a market like the UK where I cannot, for all my 'platform', reach. It's there where the scale lies that brings quantum effects into play and starts to launch books towards the exosphere. Of course, in order to make that stellar journey, the book has to have 'that' quality, the something that has people interested enough to pick it up, flip it around, scan the blurb and go, 'Hmm. Sounds interesting. I'll give this little puppy a spin.' Or whatever it is they say at that sublime and subtle moment when a complete stranger decides to exchange value for your book...

Meanwhile, I'ma gonna keep plugging away on the A Decent Bomber pre-order campaign. Once November 5 is past, it'll be all about reviews and events. Up until then, I'm quietly nagging people to email their friends to ask them to email their friends with a link to the book. Because in the world of 1,000,000 clicks to get one sale, network effects are king, baby.

See? I got through a whole post without linking to the pre-order A Decent Bomber link on Amazon.com! Oh...

* Unless they're stinkers, of course! I have so far in the main avoided these, although I do say this with the feeling of mild dread that accompanies pronouncements such as 'I've never had a car accident in my life...'

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...

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.

Amazon, Createspace And When Customer Service Goes Heroic

So my third serious novel, Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy is only available online, there's no Middle East edition. Don't you just loathe people who start sentences with 'so'? Me too.

You can buy Shemlan as a paperback from Amazon.com (and the various Amazon dots), Barnes and Noble, The Book Depository or order it from any independent bookshop in the world by citing the ISBN number 978-1493621934.

It's a rather smashing book. I strongly suggest you do one of the above. The kitten might just make it through, see? This here handy link to the buy links for the book shows you where to get it as a paperback, Kindle ebook, Nook, on your iPad or, in fact, as any other ebook reader format ebook. But the paperback can be yours wherever you live, from Alaska to Kamtchatka. The Book Depository even ships it FREE OF CHARGE!

Do it now, you'll feel better. It's okay, I can wait. Here: I'll even do a reminder link.

Right? Great, thanks. Anyway, the reason you can buy Shemlan as a paperback anywhere in the world is because of a clever little Amazon owned operation called Createspace. Createspace allows authors to mount their book online and then prints out books to order using POD technology - Print (or Publish) On Demand. So they put an ISBN number in one end and a printed paperback with a nice glossy cover filled with wonderful words comes out, gets put in a shipping box, addressed to you and arrives a day or so later.

So when you hit that 'buy' link on Amazon or any other serioo book website, Createspace prints your book to order and despatches it to you.

A POD book is barely different enough from a booky book printed on novel paper for most readers to notice a difference. The quality is just fine.

It's all pretty marvellous, really.

However, there's trouble in paradise. People in the UAE hate buying books online - and Amazon hates selling ebooks to the Middle East. So most people don't bother buying the thing, they wait for me to have stock and buy 'em direct from me or just don't bother at all. For this reason - including a couple of upcoming events I'm doing - I bought 20 from Createspace earlier this year. They're more expensive to print than booky books, no surprises there, really, and so cost about Dhs30 a copy landed. That's too expensive to make traditional book distribution make any sense, 'cos disties take 50% and so with a cover price of Dhs60 dufus here doesn't make any money. Not, incidentally, that I have to. But I sell 'em direct and at signings and so on.

My books never turned up. I kept popping up at Sharjah Post Office so full of hope and optimism it was starting to remind me of back in the day when I used to go there to pick up the inevitable wodge of rejection slips. Months passed. Nada.

So I eventually told Createspace about it this week. And within the hour they'd mailed me back, said terribly sorry and promised to ship me a replacement batch out priority. I have to admit, I was impressed.

But that was nothing to how I felt today when DHL rocked up at the office with a box of 20 books. They DHLed them to me! How beyond the call of duty is that? I got my 20 books FOUR days later!

I emailed them to say thank you. They mailed back:

It is because of comments like yours that we strive to be the very best. Thank you for your very kind feedback! Without members like you, we could not continue to provide the service you have come to expect from us.

Your comments are greatly appreciated, and I sincerely thank you for choosing us for your self-publishing needs.  

Best regards,

Abu-Bakr
CreateSpace Member Services

Now you might call me easily impressed, but I'm blown away. Totally. I'm grinning like a Cheshire Cat who's just done a major hit of Amyl and found out in that very instant he's won the Lotto and Kate Bush is coming to tea naked.

If you want to buy a book, BTW, be my guest! Just hit me up at the usual @alexandermcnabb. I'm off to see if I can eat dinner with this grin in place.