Writing And Publishing Workshop Thingies

Sharjah-stamp1 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's been a while, I know. Holidays, work, more holidays. Stuff. Life's been busy.

I've been blogging for Sharjah. About time someone did.

I've been getting ready for  the Emirates Literature Foundation workshops starting tomorrow on how to write, edit, find a publisher or publish your own books. This has meant updating the PPTs I already have from doing these sessions before, adding new learnings and putting together a series of 'hands on' sessions as well. The sessions have sold out, which is always nice...

I'm quite busy with the ELF this last quarter of the year. On top of these workshops, I'll be doing a mentoring thing along with Mad Rachel Hamilton for NaNoWriMo and it looks like there'll be a standalone 'How to Self Publish' session in December as well. It's the UAE's Year of Reading and October is the 'Month of Reading', so there's loads going on.

I've also been quietly playing with some locally based POD solutions, which is still very much a WIP but looking mildly exciting.

The one thing I haven't been doing - to the relief of those dreading the marketing onslaught - is writing another book. There's no plan and I'm in no hurry. That's the nice thing about not having publishers and contracts breathing down your neck. Beirut and Olives are both popular free downloads over at Amazon and the other books have been trundling along nicely on the back of the freebies. You still have to put out a lot of freebies to sell a handful of books, mind.

So there. Consider yourself updated...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Decline. Pfft.

Smash It Up

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For the first time in my book writing career, I have been censored. And it's not by who you'd think it would be.

Birdkill is now available on all platforms, both ebook and paperback. That's Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iBooks and all major ebook retailers. From 1 March 2016 the paperback will be in stock at WH Smith in the United Arab Emirates and available on order from any bookshop in the world by quoting ISBN 978-1523986736.

I use a 'multi-publishing platform' called Smashwords to manage the distribution of the ePub book, which avoids having to deal directly with B&N, Apple, Kobo and all the others. Smashwords has always been core to my distribution, offering as it does an alternative to Amazon which, although I am broadly in favour, does tend towards the Evil Empire a tad too much to make one want to wholeheartedly endorse it as a sole platform.

Imagine, then, my horror when Smashwords came back and informed me last night Birdkill had failed its review process. What was the book's cardinal sin? That it makes mention of the Kindle and other publishing platforms. This makes Smashwords' partners 'uncomfortable', apparently. So in order to pass Smashwords' review process, I had to remove the text at the end that tells readers where they can buy my books.

The wicked words in question:

Please do not link or refer to any other digital download source other than Smashwords. Our retail partners don't want to see links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or mention of the Kindle or Nook.

But hang on a second. That's the content of my book. It's my right to publish what the hell I want, isn't it? Surely that's what all this free speech gobbledegook is about? Who cares what their partners are comfortable with or do or don't 'want to see' or 'mention'? It's a fact the book's available on Kindle and Nook. So you're masking the truth here. It's commercial censorship.

You're insisting I don't mention your rivals in my content. What if I want to have one of my characters enjoying reading a novel on their Kindle? Or having fun shopping on Amazon.com?

Amazon, for all its Dark Empire status, has never for any reason whatsoever asked me to amend the content of one of my books.

The UAE's National Media Council (An 'Islamic' Middle Eastern Arab government 'censoring' my books before they can be printed here in the UAE) has never - despite the books containing plenty of content you'd think they'd find uncomfortable to say the least - asked me to amend the content of one of my books. They have never removed or requested I remove one F, C, drugs or prostitution reference. And the books are liberally laced with those.

It took US 'home of free speech' publishing platform Smashwords - ironically the platform I use to assert my freedom of choice - to insist I amend the content of one of my books. To censor me.

It's an apparently small thing and yet at the same time it's a HUGE thing. And - I would submit - it's not a good thing at all.

Footnote: Just for clarity, we're not talking links here. The offending text in the book was:

Available from Amazon on Kindle and in paperback from Amazon, Book Depository or from your local bookstore on order quoting the book’s ISBN.

Also available as an ebook from iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and other fine online retailers.

And if you can find the line in Smashwords' TOS that says you can't say Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kindle or Nook in your book's end matter, please do put me right. Because I can't...

An Embarrassment Of Books

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It's not my fault I've ended up with two books. The Irish Farmer took a year to write, the newnew book has taken a tad over a month, having possessed me in the spirit of something Steven King would think up. I've been haunted by a book and it used me as an unwilling channel to create itself.

So now I'm in the odd position of having one book still being rejected by literary agents as I start to shop the second one around. Even beta readers haven't finished sending me their comments and feedback on the Irish Farmer. Some of the poor darlings have ended up with TWO of my books in their inboxes because they weren't fleet enough to get rid of the Irish one. I'm keenly aware my beta readers, kind enough to agree to being part of my book development process, are being soundly abused right now.

So now I have two unpublished manuscripts clamouring to become real books with titles and covers and Amazon pages and everything.

The question is what to do next. Assuming the result of sharing the newnew book with agents will be the usual round of smug, platitudinous form letters...

Sorry, but we're going to pass on this one. It's a tough market right now and we didn't feel enthusiastic enough about this to take it forward. However, this is a subjective business and others may feel differently, so don't be dispirited.

...I will then face self publishing two books, both set in the UK and so with limited appeal for a Middle Eastern audience. Do I print them as I did Olives and Beirut? Certainly, not printing a UAE edition of Shemlan had a major (negative) impact on the book's sales - but then I really don't have the time to go around chasing up bookshops and trying to chivvy up a charming but ultimately flaccid distribution chain. Doing that for the first two was exhausting.

And Shemlan didn't leave me out of pocket to the tune of a Dhs 15,000 print bill. Every copy of the book I've sold has been profit and while it all hardly amounts to a hill of beans, it seems to make more sense to be in the black than in the red. Call me old fashioned.

Fair enough, having sold out both books' print runs means I'm not technically out of pocket, but I'm hardly laughing all the way to the bank - and back at square zero anyway, because I'm certainly not about to order a reprint and start all over again. So if you want to buy Olives or Beirut today, you'll have to go online same as you do for Shemlan.

I tried to resist, honestly I did, but it's no use.

You can buy Olives - A Violent Romance here.

You can buy Beirut - An Explosive Thriller here.

You can buy Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy here.

I can order smaller runs from Createspace, getting them delivered here to the UAE for a little over Dhs30 per book. This means I can sell them to people at events and so on, but makes traditional distribution unworkable (the disty takes 50%). People here generally seem happy to buy a book that's in front of them but very averse to buying print books online. In fact the online habit, including ebooks, is pretty nascent around here.

But, for a self-published author, online makes so much sense it's not true. So the decision's pretty much a no-brainer: no big print runs, we'll be going with Amazon, iBooks, Createspace et al.

The next big question is timing. Giving agents another month to finish rejecting the Irish book takes us into July and Ramadan and Summer. And editing takes 4-6 weeks. So we're looking at October publication. Should I hold back on the newnew book and publish it to coincide with the LitFest in March next year? That would seem to make sense, but I can't for the life of me see how I can sit on a book for six months without bursting. Especially the newnew one, because I am very, very excited about it.

So I'm going to have to mull that one over. There are no easy answers. Any smart ideas gratefully received...

I've Finally Sold Out To... Well, You!

Olives - A Violent Romance and Beirut - An Explosive Thriller have sold out of their print editions.

I'm still not sure how to react to that. So I'll just post about it.

I found out from WH Smith, who are providing the books for this year's LitFest (where I am severally appearing), that they couldn't buy my books from Jashanmals.

I naturally asked (gently and politely as always) the Jashanmal gang what gives and the response was that they don't have enough left to fulfil the order. There are about 5 'clean' copies of Beirut and a few more of Olives, mostly on the shelves in their stores. They're clean out at warehouse except for about 60 shop-soiled copies that are 'unsaleable'.

I've got a few copies at home. But that, basically, is that. Experiment over. We've sold out, people.

Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy never did have a UAE edition and was always an online-only book, orderable as ebook or print.

Now, you can clearly still buy all three books as ebooks for Kindle, iPad, Android et al - and if you love print more than anyone loves print, you can also buy all three books in print from Amazon, Book Depository or, on order, from any bookshop in the world by quoting their ISBN number.

But the UAE edition wot I printed myself in the thousands, the booky books you could nip off to Kino's and carry away in a placcy bag, they're no longer available. That's it. Gone. Finished. Pining for the fjords.

I really couldn't do this without posting the 'buy' links for any lazy sods that haven't yet done the decent thing yet....

Buy Olives - A Violent Romance here.

Buy Beirut - An Explosive Thriller here. 

Buy Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy here.

:)

Book Review: Zero History

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It's terrible not to have the time for stuff and I'm increasingly struggling to cram everything in. I suppose the pressure of writing is foremost: when you're 'in the zone' everything becomes subordinate to your own work and the world you're building. When things jam up a little you end up on Twitter and infesting other places where the jobless and marginalised smoke up and drink cups of odiously strong tea. Reading has been relegated to a few minutes in the evening or snatched moments wandering around in a towel. There's no time for that curling up on the sofa stuff.

So it might be my fault entirely that William Gibson's Zero History was a labour of love to get through - I might have been introducing more interstices than any author deserves of a reader. It's the third in the 'Blue Ant' series, preceded by Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. All three books are built around a sort of now, perhaps a few months into our future at the time of writing but now, of course, a couple of years into the past. The drones featured in Zero History would have been very cutting edge and funky in 2010, when it was first published. Now they're more 'meh'...

Funny that Gibson's Neuromancer remains so startlingly futuristic and Zero History feels a little dated.

Ex rock star Hollis Henry and ex drug addict Milgrim are sent on missions to discover fashion coolness by multi squillionaire agency head and cool addict Hubertus Bigend. Bigend is interested in how military clothing achieves coolness in a circular relationship that injects street coolness back into military wear. Or something like that. He's saved Milgrim from his existentially threatening addiction only to make the man his tool - an echo, in fact, of the plot of Neuromancer and I did feel several times that Zero History was a cookie-cut of the Neuromancer arc.

Zero History lacks some of the flashes of descriptive brilliance that mark Gibson's earlier work. It doesn't come across as fresh and impelled, it doesn't compel the reader as much and meanders a lot. There are lots of blind alleys, scenes that don't actually seem to take us somewhere. The coolness becomes wearing, pressing down on you. Oh this is so cool, that's such a concept, this hotel/club is funky beyond even sehr funklich. Hollis' boyfriend, a cool military type, BASE jumps off the Burj Khalifa and I have to resist the urge to purge the whole damn book from my Kindle. The cause, the mission impelling the characters to their climax, seems rather, well, marginal. At the same time, there's a lot to love. The drug-autistic Milgrim, always somehow feeling a little two-dimensional, falls in love with Bigend's despatch rider and you find yourself rooting for him to get to root her. Bigend's a twat, but then when you've worked with Bigend types you'll maybe have less sympathy for that overwhelming control freak millionaire mentality.

An interesting read and a book that had me standing on occasion towel-wrapped and dripping onto the tiles as I tried to hold out to the end of the scene. And a book that lay on the bedside table for days, unloved as I read other stuff more immediately interesting (given the novel I'm working on, I'm spending a lot of time on the history of the IRA and the Irish Troubles). Not the book I'd recommend as a first Gibson novel. That remains, through all the years, Neuromancer.

Book Post - Promotion And All That

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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 - Shemlan Chalks Up LitFest First!

Gerrard King's amazing pill skull image, 

wot graces the cover of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy.

I didn't realise until the dirty deed was done, but my third Middle East spy thriller, Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy, today became the first book ever to be published at the Emirates Airline Festival Of Literature's spiritual and temporal home, the Dar Al Adab.

Today's workshop, part of the LitFest's 'Open Door' series of workshops and writerly things, was for the Hunna ladies writer's group and explored how to publish a book - both getting an agent and publisher and doing it yourself.

As part of the latter bit, I showed how to format, upload and manage a printed edition using CreateSpace, a Kindle book using MobiPocket Creator and Kindle Direct Publishing and also an Epub standard ebook (for Kobo, B&N and Apple among others) using Mark Coker's brilliant Smashwords.

What better example than the book I have just finished editing and proofing?

All three took well under half an hour, underlining how essentially easy and accessible self-publishing platforms are these days.

So Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy is now published - available here right now for your Kobo, Sony or iPad and here for your Kindle.


It's a funny old feeling, actually. Shemlan became something of a project on hold after I decided to self-publish Olives - A Violent Romance and then Beirut - An Explosive Thriller. Shemlan completes the Levant Cycle (three books set roughly contiguously but NOT a trilogy) and comes at the end of a lot of enjoyable but hard work.

I'm wondering what people will make of it, actually. I love it to death (obviously!) and think it sits somewhere between Olives and Beirut. I've already had people express strong preferences for both of those books at the expense of the other, Gerald Lynch appears to be the Middle East espionage thriller equivalent of Marmite and the strength of feeling he provokes from readers can take a chap aback occasionally. It's fair to say his behaviour in Shemlan will do little to dampen down the love/hate debate.

Needless to say, one will be having a quietly celebrative quaff this evening...

Book Post: Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy - The Cover

The cover of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy.

Australian artist Gerrard King created the cover image for Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy. I stumbled across it during a session of frustrated Googling, having found various images that just wouldn't really do the job. I was looking for a combination of pills and death, two themes that run through the book, and you'd hardly find a better themic concatenation than Gerrard's decorated skull - one of a series he created as part of a perhaps worryingly extensive exploration of the artistic potentialities of skulls.

I had tested a tentative image or two with my pals over on the mailing list only to find them definitely 'meh' about the ideas. But this one really does the job - it's got impact, vavavoom and lipstick bullet following kabamm - in my humble opinion.

The image file (1600x2500 resolution both for Kindle and Smashwords, people) is ready to upload, as is the full Createspace cover. I have yet to finalise the .prc format text file for Kindle, the .docx file for Smashwords (all Meatginder-ready) and the Createspace text file. That's today's job.

And then tomorrow I'll be pushing various buttons at the 'How to self-publish a book' workshop at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature's spiritual and temporal home, the lovely and tranquil barjeel-laden Dar Al Adab tomorrow. The Hunna ladies group of writers will be gathered to watch in puzzlement as I wrestle with the various feersum endjinns involved in actually making a book happen in this brave new eworld of ours.

And then, gradually, pixels will pixellate. It's all quite exciting, really...

Book Post - Shemlan On Target

As they climbed up into the hills above Beirut, Hartmoor gazed out of the car window at the buildings around them. No scent of spring for this trip, he reflected, the February rain greying out the scenery. Misty tendrils snaked around the treetops. He remembered his first journey on this road, past the sprawling village of Bchamoun at the foothills then the road winding through the villages clinging to the plunging gorges of the Chouf Mountains. Now, as then, the houses in the villages seemed stacked up on top of each other, densely packed on the steep hillsides.
To the side of the road ran a concrete storm drain that crossed the tarmac as the camber and direction changed, the grating covering it clanging under the taxi’s wheels. The taxi hit a pothole hard, the engine note jumping and a dark cloud left behind as the driver changed down a gear. The rosary hanging on his rear mirror jangled.
They passed the village of Ainab, Hartmoor marvelling at the number of new stone-clad villas, gated developments and building sites overlooking Beirut spread out far below. A blue sign proclaimed ‘Shimlan.’ He leaned forward and asked the driver to slow down, ‘Shway, Shway.’
From Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy

The mornings and evenings this week have been a tad hectic, with proofreader Katie Stine chucking up no less than 230 line errors (where the hell did THEY come from?) in her edit of the MS of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy and my last editing round, performed using a Kindle, now almost over.

Its amazing that after so many edits, beta reads, a professional edit and a professional proof read (Katie's VERY good) that I'm still chucking stuff up but that's the way it goes with books. You can do a lot with 85,000 words, including word repetitions, lazy adjectives, little touches to clarify points, better word choices, filters (he saw the shiny spoon = the spoon shone) and more.

I'm giving a follow up workshop for the Hunna Ladies Writer's Group on Saturday at the Emirates LitFest's home, the Dar Al Adab - on how to self-publish a book. Last time we looked at how to write and edit, so now we're going to complete the exercise and look at how you can use POD and ebooks to make your work available to a truly global audience. What better example to use in the live demos than Shemlan itself? So I'll be publishing the e-book on Saturday.

That doesn't mean you'll be able to get your hands on it Saturday. Amazon Kindle takes 12-24 hours to populate, Createspace for the paperback can take longer (including the Book Depository which can actually take a couple of weeks to bring up a title) and Smashwords' Premium Catalogue (iBooks and the like) can similarly take a while. I reckon by my 'official' target publishing date of November 5th you'll be good to go and the links can go up.

Book Post: Writing Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy

I found a sub-folder in my laptop's big mess of writing folders that contained a tiny snippet of text - an idea I'd jotted down at some stage. It was dated early 2004 and the Word doc in contained no more than:

Today I have been alive a little over an hour. The sea is very blue outside the window of my bedroom, which makes up most of one side of the room. The bed sheets are white and crisp, and they feel good.

It was an odd thing to find in 2013 - particularly as Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy starts:

Jason Hartmoor has been alive a little over an hour. He has recovered from his recurring nightmare and turned the damp side of his pillow to face the mattress. He lies, luxuriating in the bright light streaming through the window overlooking the sea. It takes up most of the length of the room. The bed sheets are white and crisp. Every opening of the eyes is a bonus, a thrill of pleasure. Sometimes he tries to stave off sleep, lying and fighting exhaustion until the early hours. It is becoming increasingly hard to push back the darkness. These days he’s lucky to hold out beyond midnight.

The idea seems to have stuck around, no?

The concept of MECAS - the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies - has long fascinated me. Somewhere up there in the Chouf mountains above Beirut was a building that had for thirty years housed the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Arabic language school - known to the Lebanese as the British Spy School. Founded by Bertram Thomas, disgraced by George Blake, (taken from Shemlan and arrested as a Soviet double agent) and closed by the Lebanese Civil War, MECAS is an enigma and a minor marvel to me.

The idea of setting a spy thriller around someone who had studied at the school - around the school itself - had long nagged at me. I bought books about the school and sought out memoirs written by people who had studied there, life-long diplomats like Ivor Lucas, whose self-published memoir of his career was to inform Jason Hartmoor's mostly unremarkable diplomatic existence. Eventually, on a misty, rainy spring morning, I travelled up into the mountains with pal Maha and we tottered around the dripping village of Shemlan looking for the school. Or rather Maha tottered, wearing her usual mad heels and complaining that I was responsible for ruining her McQueens as we squelched around.

She found my comment about how she should have worn trainers unhelpful for some reason.

The locals didn't think much of being asked about the spy school by some Egyptian chick with a camera-toting Brit old enough to be her dad in tow. But we eventually tracked it down. I've been back to Shemlan a few times now - the village is lovely and the Cliff House restaurant an absolute delight that is alone worth the journey up from Beirut. It's odd how all roads lead to Shemlan - pal Dania 'Summer Blast' Al Kadi hails from the next village, as did a lady present at the recent How To Write A Book workshop I did for the Hunna writer's club (the How To Publish A Book one is at Dubai's Dar Al Adab on the 2nd November). Choueifat is just down the road, the home of the school that brought Sarah out to the UAE first in 1988. And Shemlan was home to Philip Hitti, the author of 'History of the Arabs' - a book I have long revered.

I had actually started writing Shemlan just before I published Olives - A Violent Romance. The book was shelved, paused about halfway through, while I got publishing Olives and Beirut out of my system. Originally called Hartmoor, the title was quickly changed when I discovered Sarah Ferguson's 'planned' historical novel of the same name was scheduled to publish in 2015. Having sent Beirut bobbing into the wide open sea last year, I took up the reins on Shemlan again earlier this year and finished the novel in a mad burst of frenetic activity, pumped on death metal and alternately smacked down by Arvo Pärt like a twisted druggie shredded by a mouthful of French Blues chased down with slugs of chilled vodka and warm dark rum.

And just in case you're interested, yes - I do know precisely what that feels like...

The story of Shemlan was, from an early stage, fated to travel to Estonia. We went to Tallinn for a magical week a couple of years back and I dragged Sarah across town to the British Embassy so I could photograph it for use in the book later - as it turns out, Lynch never does go to the Embassy to fall out with the ambassador in the final version of the book and so I didn't need the Embassy at all, but you can never be too careful.

Sadly, the other major location for Shemlan was Aleppo and the marvellous C14th Ottoman souk has been destroyed. In the overall devastation the last two years have brought, the loss is a small one, I know.

An odd footnote of interest to absolutely nobody but me is that the Urfalees church of St George's in Aleppo was somewhere you could still hear very early plainchant - the root of all European music lived on in the preserved practice of the Urfalees community. I use the past tense only because I don't know if it - and they - are still there. The little green orthodox church (Estonia is the most secular country in Europe - you don't get a lot of working churches there!) down by the port in Tallinn is also somewhere you can hear Estonian Orthodox singing, a rare and beautiful sound that is not only similar to the haunting echoes of Aleppo, but also the inspiration for Pärt's sparse, spine-tingling music. And it was to the aching soundscape of his 'Fur Alina' I finished writing Shemlan.

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!

Beirut - An Explosive Thriller Reviewed

"Those looking for nonstop action, political intrigue, smatterings of sex and violence and explosions aplenty need look no further."

India Stoughton reviews Beirut - An Explosive Thriller in Lebanon's Daily Star newspaper today. The review is linked here. She doesn't let me away with much, although the review is pretty positive on the whole. Clearly in the 'liked Olives more' camp, Stoughton points out that Beirut is altogether flashier and dashier, which is a fair point.

Anyway, if the review piques your curiosity and makes you want to read a madcap international spy thriller based around a "violent, womanising alcoholic", you'll need this link here.

And if you've read Beirut - An Explosve Thriller but not left your own review on Amazon, you can always go here and air your own views on the book!

Fake Plastic Souks - The Glory Years

Yes! It's the book of the blog! As I mentioned in one of last week's traffic-destroying booky posts, I was giving a workshop at The Archive's 'Day of Books' (nice to see HH Sheikh Mohammed dropping by and commending Safa Park's finest book haven and café) on how to use self-publishing platforms.

Trouble was, I didn't have a book to use as a sample. And then it hit me - pull the blog into a book format. It took a tad longer than I had anticipated, but resulted in the best bits of my first two years of bloggery being poured into a nice booky book shaped mould. So now you can buy Fake Plastic Souks - The Glory Years as both a print book or ebook.

I found the whole process fascinating. For a start, going back over stuff you dashed down five years ago means quite a few surprises - I enjoyed myself reading over posts from that time when Dubai was overheating like a lunar capsule re-entering earth's atmosphere and then noting the transition to abandoned cars and vicious, clueless articles in the UK's media about the Downfall of Dubai. I think that period of turbulence is quite neatly documented (but then I would, wouldn't I?).

For the workshop, we uploaded the book to Createspace - which means you can buy a printed paper booky book of the Blog from Amazon for £8.99 with next day free shipping. It then went up onto Kindle Direct Publishing, which means a Kindle book can be yours for £0.77 (Amazon's minimum price). And then we uploaded the files to Smashwords, which supports the important ePub format (Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Sony and iBooks), again pricing the ebook at $0.99. All in about 90 minutes.

One interesting learning for me was that the Kindle Direct Publishing people came back to me as a result of their validation process because they had found the content in my book was already available on the Web. They wanted to know why - and that I owned the rights to the content - before they would proceed with publishing the book to the Kindle store. They were the only one of the three platforms to do this.

I might play around with the booky book price a little, but you can quickly see how the production cost of a paper book forces the price into the stratosphere compared to ebooks. It's one reason why I now refuse to pay publishers the same price for a Kindle book they charge for a paperback. They're just being greedy and lazy. As most will know, Amazon pays a 70% royalty if you charge between $2.99 and $9.99 for your ebook, but otherwise (from $0.99 to $2.98 and $10 to $200) it pays only 35%.

It all goes to show something frequently overlooked, but actually, IMHO, quite important. You can create an ebook out of almost anything - content can make its way into peoples' hands in seconds flat and archive material, as long as it's of interest to someone, anyone, out there can be turned into a globally distributable and available asset for an investment of pretty much nada up front.

Anyway, you can now buy a bit of this blog to put on your mantelpiece or wherever else you display precious things. If I sell more than ten, I'll do a sequel!

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Smashwords

Book Post - Beirut - An Explosive Thriller Formats

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Someone just found out they could get Beirut - An Explosive Thriller on Kindle. Whaaat? How could anyone in the world not have known that? I really have been under-doing the promotion, haven't I?

Here for your reading pleasure are the formats Beirut is available in - and, for attendees at last nights fab (if somewhat café-noisy) Umbrella Series workshop at The Archive, my reasoning for making these formats available.

Paperback

First and foremost, Beirut - An Explosive Thriller (as well as Olives - A Violent Romance) is available in paperback from all good UAE bookshops, including Kino's, Magrudy's, Jashanmal and book counters at supermarkets, including Carrefour, Abela and Spinneys. Virgin prefers not to stock my books.

Internationally, you can buy Beirut in paperback from Amazon.com for $15.99 or if you want you can buy a copy for just over $30. This is a side-effect of bookseller algorithms going mad.

You can buy Beirut in paperback from Amazon.co.uk for £8.99 with FREE shipping anywhere in the UK. You can also buy it from Amazon across Europe. Alternatively, if you're based somewhere windswept and interesting, The Book Depository will sell you a copy of Beirut in paperback for just £10.34 with free delivery worldwide. Not, ironically, including Lebanon...

If you prefer to support local bookshops, you can order Beirut - An Explosive Thriller from any UK or US bookshop by quoting ISBN: 978-1477586594.

Ebook

Beirut - An Explosive Thriller is available as a Kindle ebook from Amazon.co.uk and amazon.com. You can also get it from other Amazon stores for your Kindle.

If you own a Nook e-reader, you can get Beirut from Barnes & Noble here. Alternatively, if you prefer Kobo, that's linked here. If you want a copy of the book for your iPad or any Android tablet, you can buy the ePub format ebook from Smashwords at this here link. Alternatively, a quick search of Apple's iBooks will yield a gloriously buyable copy of Beirut for your iPad.

Formats

With the above formats, there's no way you can avoid Beirut - An Explosive Thriller - a paperback delivered anywhere in the world, an ebook delivered to any reader anywhere in the world. All with the flick of a few switches. You can now happily let friends and family know where they can get this most thrillsome of books delivered to them within a few days for paperback or a few seconds in any e-reader format. Or even better, you can go crazy and buy them as gifts! :)

If you'd like to browse more formats and 'where to buy' links or generally find out more about Beirut - An Explosive Thriller, the book's website is linked here. There's background info and stuff. And don't forget, you can sign up to my email list using the box above and get free books, updates, info and other wonderfulness.

Free Space

Ben Jonson is a doctor in Richmond, London. Life is peachy, perhaps the only cloud on his horizon being the problem of communicating with his incomprehensible housemaid. And then a roast chicken appears out of nowhere.

Ben Jonson never wanted to save the world. But with no warning, no final demand and certainly no invitations issued, Ben finds himself racing against time, the Russian Mafia and spooks aplenty. Driven to near-insanity by auto-manifesting incongruities, Ben is launched into a journey across Europe in search of the source of his problems by the charismatic Lysander Cullinane, the head of a shadowy government agency that specialises in telling awful lies.

Enter a catsuited blonde bombshell with a death fetish, a life insurance salesman on the run and some wickedly nasty Russians with very big guns. Add the world’s most effective computer virus, an imperious old lady with a gimlet eye, England’s most evil-tempered policeman and a dead man with a number of highly developed personality disorders. And then pop in a splash of sex worker with legs all the way up to the bottom of her basque.

The body count rises hourly and Ben’s on the run. But you can’t escape space… 

My first attempt at writing a book resulted in a silly spoof caper called Space. It was quite badly done, but enormous fun - and has since had a bit of a spruce up to make it at least semi-presentable: possibly even readable. It's FREE on amazon through to Friday this week, so do feel highly pressured to not only download it to your own Kindle or Kindle for Android or iPad but also to tell friends, family, passers-by, whoever. Share the link, tweet it - stick it on yer facebook. This is, after all is said and done, a total freebie! And we all likes a bit of it free, doesn't we?

GET YOUR COPY OF 'SPACE' HERE

It still makes me laugh, but its first amazon review says it's totally unfunny. The second one says it IS funny! You be the judge - and do feel free to leave your own amazon review too!

Self Publishing Workshop Alert

English: Open book icon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Rather to my surprise, the workshop on publishing and promoting your book I gave at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature earlier this year was a sell-out. Given that tickets cost Dhs200 (about $55) a pop, I was impressed at the level of interest - it points to a larger coterie of would-be novelists out there than I thought existed.

I'm doing another one at the Sharjah International Book Fair. on Monday 12th November at 7pm. This one's free.

So if you want to know how self publishing works, if it makes sense compared to beating your head against the bastions of 'traditional' publishing, how to format a book for publication, which platforms to choose for ebook and print book editions and why, how to design a cover and how to negotiate the red tape of creating a book in the United Arab Emirates, come on down. It'll be about an hour of frenetic brain-dump that should answer all your questions and even some you hadn't thought about yet.

If you're Dubai based, don't worry. The traffic's not as bad as you think (but, yes, you will spend 30 minutes in the queues unless you decide to pitch up at about 4 or 5-ish and have a mooch around the exhibition halls before the workshop, in which case the traffic's fine), dragons and spiny tailed bandersnatches don't actually wander the streets of Sharjah eating unsuspecting maidens despite what you've been told and no, you won't catch diphtheria by contact because Sharjah's unclean. Incidentally, the exhibition halls are packed with publishers and books, with a strong turnout from international titles and there is literally something there for everyone.

Book Post - Beirut In Print

Beirut - An Explosive Thriller will be in UAE bookshops by December. With a little luck (and the permission of censors) it will go on sale in Lebanon some time in January. If there's a Lebanon left for it to go on sale in.


It's odd, watching history threaten to take away the setting of your book. I suppose few writers have that problem, but writing books framed by the backdrop of the Middle East makes it something of an occupational hazard. The odd thing is I have long feared Israeli action against Iran's nuclear programme would sideline the plot of Beirut, I hadn't reckoned on Syria collapsing and drawing Lebanon into its conflict.

I remain an optimist, though. Lebanon has been through a number of aftershocks since the 15-year earthquake that flattened Beirut and claimed 150,000 lives. It can muddle through this one, too. With many friends there, with a longstanding fondness for the city, I have to believe that.

Meanwhile, I've got my UAE permission to print, I just have to get my ISBN and finish formatting the manuscript for the book's prnted size- this one will be in a standard format for thrillers, smaller than Olives - A Violent Romance and chunkier, too.

I'd much rather have stayed with an online only edition, but there are too many hurdles for the majority of people in the UAE to jump - it's clear that, as with Olives, people want to buy from a local bookshop rather than go online and the majority still don't have e-readers or use their tablets as reading devices. Amazon, and Apple et al, still do not serve content to this region. And I have the strong feeling that the print edition of Olives generated much of the word of mouth that fuelled online sales (as of now, sales have been split pretty evenly between the Middle East and International editions).

I'm planning on a launch sometime in the first week of December - as things get finalised you will be the first to know. In the meantime, start saving up (cover price will be Dhs59) or if you can't wait, you can go here to buy Beirut in print, delivered to your doorstep FREE or as an ebook which is just as free for delivery and considerably faster.

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.

Beirut - An Explosive Thriller

Michel Freij is poised to become the next president of Lebanon. The billionaire businessman’s calls for a new, strong regional role for the country take on a sinister note when European intelligence reveals Freij has bought two ageing Soviet nuclear warheads from a German arms dealer.   

Maverick British intelligence officer Gerald Lynch has to find the warheads, believed to be on board super-yacht the Arabian Princess, before they can reach Lebanon. Joined by Nathalie Durand, the leader of a French online intelligence team, Lynch is pitched into a deadly clash with Freij and his violent militia as he pursues the Arabian Princess across the Mediterranean.  

Beirut – An Explosive Thriller sweeps through Lebanon, Hamburg, Prague, Malta, Albania and the Greek Islands on its journey to a devastating climax...

Well, you can now go here to the Beirut - An Explosive Thriller website and buy the book.

Buy Beirut here!

You can get either a printed book from amazon or an ebook to fit any reader device. Many people have expressed a desire to buy several copies and this is something I would heartily encourage.

Beirut is the book that landed me (finally) my very own literary agent. Friends and family had to put up with at least a week of me answering any given question with 'speak to my agent'. I admit, I'm hard to live with. Tragically, the book was subsequently rejected by editors at fourteen major publishing houses. That was the point where I decided to self publish my books - having previously resisted the idea robustly.

I am very glad indeed I took that decision, the past year has included many milestones, but the reception my first book, Olives - A Violent Romance, got from readers and reviewers alike was a wonder to me. I can't pretend I'm not worried about how Beirut's going to go down - I'm munching keratin. But that's all part of the fun.

In the meantime, I'm off down to favourite haunt Billy Blues this Wednesday to celebrate. You're more than welcome to join me - there won't be any readings or even any books. Just some pals having a few drinks and perhaps indulging in the guilty delight that is the Blues Platter. The Twitter invite thingy is linked here for your RSVPing convenience.