The Trouble With Stuff

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

During the recent hurricane Irma, a number of Tesla owners stuck in the traffic fleeing the path of the storm were delivered a software update by Tesla which upgraded their cars and extended the battery life and therefore range of their cars. Once the storm had blown over, another update removed the additional capacity and reduced their cars back down to the performance level they had paid for.

In fact, their cars were always capable of the extended range but they had chosen not to buy the full 75kw battery option. Few could have been aware that in fact their cars had the full battery installed, but that it had been effectively downgraded in software. Their cars were always capable of the extended range.

It all caused quite a bit of controversy, as you might imagine. But it's just an extension of a whole range of issues which are linked to the concept that you buy hardware but license software and that when you buy into any ecosystem, your rights are effectively limited. You might own that iPhone, bub, but you don't own the software or any of the content it stores and gives you access to. This is also true of your Kindle and your Apple TV or other box with your Netflix subscription.

We don't buy CD racks anymore and many of us don't have upgrade plans for those bookshelves. Content is digital, always-on and an Alexa command away. The ownership of content has changed forever. Of course, you never owned that book or music, you merely owned a physical medium containing the text or recording. The rights to the content subsisted with the author and publisher. But you could leave a book to your kid - you can't leave your Amazon account.

Worse, your iPhone, Kindle, Echo or Tesla is enabled by software which you only enjoy a grant of limited right to access. Amazon et al can simply turn your super-duper gizmo into a brick of e-waste at the blink of an eye.

Tesla extending that model to cars is sort of interesting. Next step is your house. An integrated home automation suite provided by the developer sounds really cool until you find out that if you break the terms of your licence (install the wrong type of shrub in your garden, say, if you've bought a Shiny) your kitchen will stop working.

Volvo has started down that road in a sort of legacy manufacturer trying to be hip with the kids kind of way with the announcement of a sort of extended leasing package called Care by Volvo.  You can bet other manufacturers are going to start exploring the delights of software/hardware industry models for disempowering consumers and disintermediating insurance companies and others who currently profit from the lack of a car 'ecosystem'. In this, Tesla is Apple.

Forget the threat of AIs and the like to our technological futures - here comes the spectre of the elife (and I don't mean Etisalat's crappy FTTH package) - your existence will be dominated by your parents' choice of life ecosystem for you and your world will be under license to The Man.

You mark my words...

The Passing of Paper

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I follow quite a few legacy publishers on Twitter and suffer from the not infrequent urge to block them as I stare, open-jawed, at their attempts at what they clearly think is 'marketing'. Where most self-published authors have worked out, often by trial and error, that 'buy my book' doesn't work, publishers are frequently to be found out there using Twitter as a broadcast medium.

My least favourite of an ugly bunch are the guys who have clearly logged into Twitter for their daily session ("Dave does Twitter from 4-5pm, then goes through the slush pile") who then retweet anything nice said about them or one of their authors. To the luckless recipient of this gold, a timeline suddenly packed with retweets of breathless praise for Dave's publishing house, event or client's book until Dave runs out of RT cruft. At this point, if you're really unlucky, you'll get Dave asking you what's your favourite colour or what book changed your life as he practices his 'engagement' skills.

The example that flashed across my disbelieving eyes last night, however, took the proverbial biscuit:

It ticks every 'shit use of Twitter by a publisher' box I can think of. What, you mean if I pre-order this book and send you proof that I have, indeed, placed a pre-order, you'll actually send ME a real whole honest-to-goodness PDF file containing chapter one of the book I can't read yet? I am SO grateful! I can't begin to thank you! Really! A whole chapter one of a book I just paid for but can't read as a crappy, bitty PDF (like the ones torrent sites serve) just for little me? Squee!

These are just a few examples of how legacy publishers are struggling to get their heads around marketing, promotion and distribution in a post-paper world. We're not quite there yet, of course - there's still a lot of papery stuff around. But anyone not habitually wedded to a paper-based business model can see that the consumption of ideas, information and narrative on mushed-up dead trees and bleached old knickers (paper) is moving to a diverse and often inter-connected ecosystem of devices with blinding speed. 

When we are using those devices, we are not pleased to be 'disrupted' and, in a device-centric world, the publishers' ability to use their market power - sales teams stocking retailers - is minimal. They're no better off than the rest of us. The Internet, as we have been seeing since 1995, is a great leveller.

The idea that there is value in selling information encoded in a 'book' or indeed any other conventionally printed product now belongs in a Cadbury's Smash advert. When was the last time you looked at a paper map? 

I fondly recall driving across Scotland in 1988, following a printout from Autoroute 1.0 and picking up some hitch hikers who, when they found out I was following a computer programme around Scotland, became very nervous indeed and wanted let out early. They clearly thought I was a madman. It's taken a while, sure enough, but the paper map today is (along with the dedicated GPS device, incidentally) a thing of the past. 

The ability to contextualise information based on a layer over the 'real' world is incredibly powerful. It's why Google has invested so much in building that layer with Earth, Streetview and the like. Apple is rumoured to be making a huge play in 'Augmented Reality'. 

Not only are we consuming information about where we're going totally differently, we can clearly see around the corner a world where we won't care where we're going. We'll just tell the car to go there and it'll tell us how long it intends to take and then provide us some entertainment of our choice as we travel. It'll probably be plotting to kill us, but that's another kettle of fish.

Newspapers are clearly in the throes of another aspect of the movement of information online. In their case they're having to struggle with the reduction of value in two ways - the loss of revenue from people buying papers and that of advertisers willing to pay to reach those readers. The problem becomes one of scale - the news gathering resource and reach of a quality newspaper is expensive - and when you devalue the good through information ubiquity, you lose the ability to pay for large teams of journalists. 

Who will custodiet custodes, then? Smaller teams working more efficiently - but also a slew of copycats, content farms and repurposers. Quality content has to fight harder to cut through the rubbish. It's messy out there, but there's one thing that's certain - nobody's interested in print anymore - and the revenue models for print don't translate online, the scale doesn't work at cents per click. Not only do you not have the resources for big newsrooms, presses and distribution networks, you arguably don't need them.

Print books are a good whose price is set entirely on its own inefficiency. The cover price of a book consists entirely of percentages based on the cost of print - including the author's royalty and distribution. A tiny proportion goes to editorial costs. Oh, and profit. Let's not forget profit. An author is remunerated on a percentage of the revenue generated by the book as, indeed, is a distributor - the latter gets a whopping 50% of cover price. 

You could perhaps see how publishers would be wedded to this model - it has been thus for the past century or so. That's the way we do it around here, see?

When you go online, you not only rip out the costs of print and distribution and sales returns/stock loss but you also tear down the sales network publishers have depended on for so long. Bookshops are dead, sales are taking place on platforms the publishers don't own, control or influence. And so that most passive of sales environments (the long shelves packed with attentive soldiers of stiff-spined papery joy, the tick of the clock, Mildred sitting behind the till, reading and leaving you to have a nice, long browse) has been transformed into an online nightmare of conflicting shrill demands for people's time and attention.

In this brave new world, publishers no longer offer the significant scale they used to. Even the media they retain privileged access to are less powerful. Physical book retail is on a massive decline, despite constant announcements by 'the industry' that ebook sales are under pressure. These are mendacious and statistically skewed to an amazing degree - and they're quite poignant, in their way. 'It's going to be okay, chaps, you'll see' - that brave last sentence nobody quite believes, but they're all grateful for as they all walk into the hail of enemy gunfire.

The one thing publishers had to offer authors was scale. Scale of marketing, distribution, recognition. That's a product of marketing. Rip out the sales channel and go online and you've got some serious problems on your hands unless you can get your head around building serious online scale. Legacy big-hitters like JK Rowling or Neil Gaiman have made the leap and brought their audiences online with them and have massive reach on platforms like Twitter.

Publishers haven't. And they really don't know how to do it. They can't believe they need to do it. And they won't resource to do it properly because they're still clinging on to that last log in the sea.

Or, as an old pal once said to me (of literary agents, but never mind, it fits today's legacy publishers too), "They're like eunuchs in the Ottoman court. They see it happening all around them; they know what it is that's happening. But they're totally incapable of doing it for themselves!"

The Unbearable Lightness Of Not Writing

English: Erik Pevernagie, painting. Representing the opposition with lightness of being (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I'm not writing.

I'm not editing or marketing, either. I'm not planning, plotting or playing with a new MS. I started a new book but it's come to a sort of 'meh' point and I've put it aside while I do other things. I've scribbled a few short stories and other things, but nothing really significant.

It's mildly embarrassing when you meet people who know you only as a booky person, because they invariably (and perfectly politely) ask what you're working on at the moment and 'I'm not really, I've just sort of got nothing right now that's floating my boat' sounds wrong.

But it's God's honest, guv. I see no reason to force things and the new project is nowhere near qualifying for that excellent advice that saw me race to get A Decent Bomber done, 'Finish!'

I'm glad I'm not under contract. The agent/publisher would be nagging, reminding me an MS is due in next month and I'd be going spare about it, wracking my brains to force words onto the screen as I write in the certain knowledge that it's not really what I want to do or, indeed, what I want to write. And, by extension, that it's not really quite good enough to put my name on it and be proud of what I've done. I'd hate that.

It's not like it matters, of course. As we speak I languish in complete obscurity as a writer, so my lack of a new project is hardly going to have the NYT worrying about the future of literature.

In fact, it's something of a bonus. There's a certain sense of relief at not having characters bumbling around in my head all the time, not worrying about getting that next scene down or being niggled by a piece of dialogue. I've been doing more cooking, ambling about on the Internet and going out at weekends to rediscover bits of the Emirates. It's amazing how you get blasé about living somewhere as downright wonderful and exotic as Lalaland.

And no, I've not been posting here very much. I realised the other day that this silly little blog of mine will turn ten years old next month. That's pretty venerable. I suppose I shall have to celebrate in some way.

In the meantime, I'm enjoying the, well, lightness of not writing...

How To Self Publish Your Book In Dubai. Or Anywhere Else, For That Matter...

I just thought this was more fun than the EAFOL logo, to be honest...

The Emirates Airline Festival of Literature is once again upon us. Yup, that was a year right there.

I'm doing  workshop on how to self publish in the UAE, although you'd be able to use the info to self publish in Copenhagen, Watford or even, to remain topical to our peregrinations last weekend, Kathmandu.

I'm also doing a Q&A panel session on publishing, apparently which seems to have become an annual event confirming me as the UAE's poster child for self publishing. Which is all very nice, but I'd honestly rather be talking about censorship, selling books, telling stories, spies in the Middle East or the region's troubled relationship with narrative fiction, building a sense of place in novels, terrorism in fiction or a number of other aspects of my booky life. Hey ho.

The How to Self Publish EAFOL Workshop is linked here for your ticket-buying pleasure: that's Dhs 250 to you, mate.

What do you get for your Dhs 250? Well, you get to be shouted at by me for two hours. You'll also learn about editing, cover design, page layout, formatting your core manuscript, file management, rights, ISBNs and copyright, dealing with the National Media Council and booksellers in the UAE, printing books and mounting to sites like Amazon - as well as ebooks and Kindle, Apple, B&N and other online outlets. Then we'll also explore book marketing and promotion, online marketing, using dashboards and other booky sales stuff.

In short, a grounding of all you need to know to publish your own book effectively, to the highest possible quality and directed at the widest possible audience. Not bad, eh?

Sign up right here! Right now! 

I've Been Busy...

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I've written a children's book.

I could tell you that it was because we were riffing around with my wee niece Ellen in the summer and teasing Nanny Webster about her obsession with cheese, and so I eventually decided to write the book in time to make it one of Ells' Christmas pressies but you wouldn't believe me.

You'd probably think I did it in an explosion of jealousy at 'I only have to write 10,000 words' lunatic and childrens' writer Rachel 'Poo Pants' Hamilton. That I got sick of watching her relieving small children of their money at a rate of thousands of Dirhams an hour and decided to get myself some of that 'scoop the wee brats out of their pocket money' dosh action. And you'd be basing your assumptions on some pretty decent science - Rachel literally hoovers the stuff from kids when we do markets and stuff together. Hoovers it, I tell you.

But the truth is - honestly guvnor no word of a lie, trust me on this one - it's a present for Ellen. A book as a Christmas present is, if I say so myself, rather inspired. If you are in the fortunate position of being able to write, edit and produce books, they make a rather fun personalised gift!

And the idea for Nanny's Magical Cheese Box did, in fact, come during our stay at the wonderful Inchiquin House in the County Clare. Ellen's Dad (the book's cover designer, as it happens) had the idea and then I made up some daft story for Ellen about how Nanny saved the world using nothing more than various types of cheese and she was entranced.

I remember being like that when my Dad used to tell me stories about Charlie the Chipmunk every night when he put me to bed. Charlie was a major highlight of the day. He used to get up to all sorts of high jinks. Wonderful stuff. When I was about eleven I asked him, 'Whatever happened to Charlie the Chipmunk, Dad?' He promptly responded, 'Oh him? He's dead.'

There went innocence.

So this is going to be an interesting addition to the old Amazon profile: Middle Eastern thrillers, nukes, whores and deaths by torture alongside decent bombers and psychological thrillers about girls going bats and then we have Nanny's Magical Cheese Box.

There's precedent. Aldous Huxley, James Joyce and even Mr Macho Hemingway himself have all written children's books. Few people realise Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was written by Bond author Ian Fleming, for instance - although the original Fleming novel (published posthumously, Fleming died of a heart attack before the book went into distribution) has little to do with the story told in the popular film. Actually, something of a worry, one scathing review of Fleming's book said, "We have the adult writer at play rather than the children's writer at work."

Fleming, by the way, was an unmitigated shit as a human being. The only Bond book in which the female lead is not referred to as a 'stupid bitch' is The Spy Who Loved Me, which is (uniquely) written in the first person - that of the female protagonist, who doesn't let the side down by herself announcing, 'I know I'm a stupid bitch, but...'

All that apart, the world of children's fiction can likely rest easy. Nanny's Magical Cheese Box is going up on Createspace for the hell of it and I'll print a short run of Christmas presents with Jamalon's POD operation. I'll probably 'properly' publish it to Kindle for the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature 2017, where I'm doing a 'how to publish books' workshop thingy. Having said that (and sales of NMCB are truly the last thing on my mind), kids' books don't sell well on Kindle. It's A Great Truth that kids like paper best.

It was a whole lot of fun to do, by the way. But I think Rachel's safe. It's not really 'me' as far as the old writing career goes. Now that Nanny's Magical Cheese Box is done, I'm back to working on next novel project, The Dead Sea Hotel.

Of Books And Festive Family Fairs

Next Saturday, the 12th November, is the ExpatWoman Festive Family Fair. This hotly anticipated annual occasion takes place at Dubai Polo and Equestrian Club (opposite Arabian Ranches just behind Studio City) and is a family day out packed with crafter's stalls, food, diverse and lavish entertainments and dazzling exhibitions of polo, the sport of kings - as eny fule no.

Here's a handy 'all you need to know' link!

It's well worth the trip out, not least of which because you'll be able to come and meet Old Poo Pants (Beloved Children's Author Rachel Hamilton in other words) and myself and buy our books. You can buy mine for adult Christmas presents and Rachel's for small people's Christmas presents. This way we don't compete and it cuts down on the fighting and squabbling. Unless she brings a bloody gold dinosaur along again, in which case there'll likely be fisticuffs.

Rachel and I often collude at this event, usually joined by Domestic Noir author Annabel Kantaria who can't make it this year. Rachel leaches money from young children like a mixture between a Dyson Money Hoover and the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and I spend the day reeling at how she'll literally take the sweets from a baby's mouth.

Rachel trying to look foxy in a bucket. 

Seconds after this image was taken, she fell out of it.

I, on the other hand, being altogether more noble of soul, only sell to those of an age to take responsibility for their actions. This is why I sell less copies than Rachel, not because my books aren't as popular as hers or anything like that. Oh no.

So here's a chance to pick up that paperback copy of the Lovingly Restored Author's Cut of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy, or update yourself and pick up a sneaky A Decent Bomber or Birdkill. Or even buy a friend that lovely new revised edition of Olives - A Violent Romance with its spangly cover.

These books, by the way are very different in one critical respect. They're printed in Jebel Ali, not America. So a) I don't get hit with ruinous shipping charges and b) you'll soon be able to buy my books shipped anywhere in the world for FREE and anywhere in the UAE same day from bookselling megawebsite Jamalon.com. Which is all a rather cool development for UAE and regional book publishing, I can tell you.

Do feel free to come along and pick up a book or five and even have a chat about how YOU can now sell books with virtually zero inventory in the UAE!

Saturday 12th November, 2016 

10.00am - 5.00pm 

Dubai Polo & Equestrian Club 

Maps, FAQs and Stuff Here!

Birdkill On Air. Will It Fly?

Every Saturday, the Emirates Airline LitFest crew take over the Dubai Eye Radio studio for three hours. They do unthinkable things behind the scenes and bring cookies and coffee into the hallowed halls of studioland, then settle down for three hours 'Talking of Books', a generally unhurried and relaxed conversation about books which usually combines a Book of the Week, a kids' book slot, a 'book champion' slot where a book geek is brought in to rave about their given favourite right now and much general book talkery.

The Book of the Week is read by the team prior to the show and then discussed on air as they share their views and generally dissect the whole thing, effectively a book review by several reviewers at once. Occasionally, they drag the author on air, too, for a light grilling.

You can see where this is leading, right? Right.

This Saturday, they're reviewing my fifth serious novel, Birdkill. It's subtly promoted to the right of this here post and gently highlighted over at my website. As many of you will know, I don't like to make a fuss of these things.

This should be interesting. Birdkill is pretty different, IMHO, to my other books. It's the first time I wrote a book entirely for myself, without a thought for agents and publishers. Its genesis is the first story I ever tried to tell and its inspirations lie in dreams: particularly scenes at the beginning, middle and end of the book. I think it could be harrowing reading for some - it certainly packs a few punches and twists a few earlobes. It's based around a premise which seems a bit mad but which is actually frighteningly real. And it's either about a woman battling a psychic child or a woman going mad. Or both.

My favourite review for Birdkill on Amazon so far came, sadly, with two stars attached. These were more than made up for by the text of the review, which still delights me every time I read it: "This is a cynical negative, depressing book. Everyone decent died. I'm sorry I read it."

Let's see what happens on Saturday, then...

Talking of Books airs on Dubai Eye 103.8FM from 10am - 1pm GST (from 7am UK time) and streams here on this handy wee link. I'm sorry about the advertising, it's not my fault. But do drop in for a listen anyway!

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...

How To Write, Edit And Publish Your Novel

I've done a number of workshops over the past few years which set out to help accelerate people's booky journeys by sharing with them some of the more useful things I have found out in my own sixteen years of writing, publishing and selling books. Mostly I have discovered things the hard way and the idea is just because I did, doesn't mean you have to.

Now I'm doing a new and expanded series together with the Emirates Literature Foundation, set to take place in their august and hallowed halls: four workshops which combine presentation-led talks with hands-on practical sessions where attendees can put some of the stuff we talk about into practice.

You can go straight here and sign up right away 'cos places are really limited!

Starting Saturday 17th September, each five hour workshop breaks into two hours talk, an hour's lunchtime chatting and a two-hour practical session. They run through until 8th October.

In session one, we'll be looking at how to write a book, a big picture overview of why you'd even want to, what to expect, how to structure your story and some guidelines for writing. The second session will look at editing techniques as well as some practical guidance on things like characterisation, dialogue, scene-setting and all that good stuff. 

We'll give session three over to understanding publishing - what the industry looks like right now, what that means to you and how you go about pitching your book to agents, as well as understanding more about what traditional publishing means to you as an author. 

And then, last but by no means least, we'll be looking in session four at how self publishing works and how you can do it for yourself, including what platforms to use, formatting books and covers, uploading them and a look at promotion and marketing.

All in all these sessions are intended to give you everything you need to get started on making that book you always thought you had in you happen, working within a sensible and supportive environment together with a bunch of people going through exactly what you're going through. As I said, I've done a number of these workshops in the past and people have generally enjoyed them, there have been a minimum number of breakdowns or violent assaults and no requests for refunds, so people generally seem to enjoy them and find them useful. Or maybe they're just too embarrassed to complain...

Here's that sign-up link again over at the ELF website - see you there!

If you have any questions, please do hit me up over at Twitter - @alexandermcnabb and if you haven't come across me or my books before (where HAVE you been hiding?) you can find out more over 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?

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

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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.

Friday State Of Mind

"A Decent Bomber was an excellent story."

"I read and reviewed prior novels by Alexander McNabb (Shemlan, Olives, and Beirut). I enjoyed all of them, and recommend them to anyone who enjoys a good thriller. In my opinion, A Decent Bomber is the best yet."

"McNabb moves from the familiar ground of the Middle East to Ireland, and remnants of the Provisional IRA. Thoroughly enjoyed this book. A really pacey thriller with brilliant characters."

"Crime, political, conspiracy, action thriller, call it what you need to, this one is a page turner you do not want to miss."

"Thoroughly enjoyable."

"Enjoyably nasty canter through a familiar Troubles-based background."

Straight five stars on Amazon. Rave reviews. It's sold less than 200 copies.

Sometimes I think I'm missing something massive, shake my head and just move on...

'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...

Birdkill And Making War Cool

If you needed proof I am truly ancient, I know what these computers are.

One of the things I love best about the Internet is how it started. The DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Project Agency, part of the US Department of Defence) network was designed to survive a nuclear holocaust and still retain the capability to hit back at the Russians - all part  of a neat piece of thinking which, handily, answers to the acronym of MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction. The idea, which was really quite nice and simple, was to let the Soviets know that if they hit first and succeeded, Uncle Sam would retain the ability to hit back and get 'em even if they scored a nuclear bullseye. To do that, you needed a network that could, literally, withstand a series of nuclear strikes. And so we have the Internet.

These days there are some shrill denials of this fact and attempts to rewrite history a little ("No way, guy. We always intended the Internet to benefit all of humanity. We didn't do that bad stuff. That's so not us."), but there is crucial surviving testimony that very much backs up the MAD aim of the ARPANET.

The Americans may have invented the toilet seat, but it took a Brit to put a hole in it. Tim Berners-Lee was the man who invented the 'Web', the Hypter Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that makes the Internet more useful than just some connections between computers. Funnily enough, he's quite contrite about the //, which was merely a programming convention at the time and represents two bytes of wasted communication in every browser call.

And so we take this essentially evilly-intended technology and we turn it into a vehicle for watching dogs ride robot vacuum cleaners and making videos of kids unpacking toys. It's the ultimate sticking of a flower into the army's gun barrels. It's cool when we can turn bad tech into fun tech.

DARPA may like to dress up what it does as fluffier than inventing new ways to murder people, but war is war. Throughout, it has consistently flirted with human augmentation and eugenics programs, including a number of strands that explore the use of genetics in such efforts. The Hamilton Institute in Birdkill is, sadly (as I have said before) not really far fetched at all: there are programs in place today that make the bonkers place in the book appear so sensible, it's virtually staid.

DARPA is spending multiple billions of dollars annually in these research programs, some of which are very worrying indeed. Truth being stranger than fiction, the stuff these guys are investing in actually makes Birdkill's mad scientist Lawrence Hamilton seem perfectly sane and normal.

So there we have it. The people who created the Internet are now working on super-humans. I only hope we'll find as creative a way of exploiting their inventions...

Birdkill, by the way, went 'live' on Amazon today. So do feel free to nip off and buy your copy. You can also find it on Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Kobo and all other fine online ebook retailers as well as in paperback.

Beyond IQ: Birdkill And The 150 Problem

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My newest novel, Birdkill is set in the wooded grounds of The Hamilton Institute, an enterprise dedicated to the fostering of the talents of exceptionally gifted children.

It is here that damaged teacher Robyn Shaw is hoping to recuperate, an incident in her recent past triggering amnesia that cloaks the events and replaces them with the Void. She finds herself involved in a number of odd happenings seemingly triggered by one of the children, an unusually difficult and truculent child called Martin. She finds herself fighting against a child for her sanity as her friend Mariam rushes to find out what terrible event in Robyn's past could possibly trigger the unravelling of her mind.

The children in Birdkill are marginalised, Robyn is told. They haven't been able to find their place in society and are often difficult and wayward. They struggle with being an old head in a young body, intellectually capable of resolving complex problems but lacking the life experience to fundamentally understand the advanced ideas they can so brilliantly study conceptually.

The truth is we often struggle to manage exceptionally gifted children, for a number of relatively good reasons at that. Firstly we have the issue of benchmarking quite what a gifted child is. Every pushy mum thinks their little darling is gifted and I have seen (through having lived a lifetime with teachers as my parents and partner) numerous examples of children being 'hot-housed' by mums who are convinced their child has that extra something, quite often living vicariously through their child.

The great benchmark is the IQ test but I have always been convinced these tests merely measure one's ability to do IQ tests, not any exceptional giftedness or intellectual capacity. Whatever benchmark one applies, the next problem is that there is little resource dedicated to facilities for such children. A relatively small percentage of the whole, meeting their needs is frequently limited - where they're lucky - to being differentiated within their age group rather than being taken out of 'standard' education and offered programming suitable to their capability. Home schooling has been the recourse for many parents of such children.

It has been a fascinating area to research, I have to say. And there are a lot of kids out there who are being pretty badly let down. Sir Ken Robinson has wisdom on this, with his ideas about schools quashing creativity. Because a mathematical mind doesn't necessarily mean a gifted mind. And structured learning isn't necessarily the greatest gift we can give to such a mind.

So an institution dedicated to not only helping these children but extending their capabilities seems like perfect sense to Robyn, who is mildly irritated to find when she arrives at her new job that the Institute is not just a boarding school, but also a research institution. What does it research? Nobody will tell her. Fraternisation between the research staff and the faculty is not allowed. And then she watches one of the children seemingly calling sparrows to him out of the air and carelessly breaking their necks. Caught in his gaze, she knows she will be next.

Robyn starts to wonder quite what she's got herself into...

Birdkill is available from Amazon and will be on sale in print at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in Dubai from March 1st 2016.

And Now the Hard Part: Getting Your Book Into Print And Onto Shelves

That's the title of the publishing type panel session I'm sitting on at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature 2016. The other gig I'm doing is also about acts of murder: I'm talking crime fiction with fellow criminal minds Christ Carter and Sebastian Fitzek.

I swear they just put me on these panels to cause trouble, but it keeps going wrong. I got put on one a few years ago with Luigi Bonomi only to find my plan of whacking him over the back of a head with a tyre lever washing up against the uncomfortable fact that he's one of the most pleasant, smiley people in publishing.

Similarly, last year I shared a stage with Orion supremo Kate Mills who turned out to be rather a love and not the mean old harridan I had psyched myself up to confront. We got on rather well, as it turns out, and agreed about a great deal more than we disagreed about.

When I started this here publishing journey, I was full of wide-eyed surety. I have posted before about the Dunning-Kruger effect and my long, slow realisation that publishing didn't want me. It used to make me angry, certainly self-publishing Olives - A Violent Romance was an act of fury triggered when my own agent couldn't be bothered to look at - let alone shop - the book.

But I've had so much fun since then, I don't really have that anger any more. Mainstream publishing doesn't want me and that's just fine: we can co-exist, ploughing our respective furrows in the rich soil that is the reading public. I'm a tad weary of promotion these days and really could use some help with marketing and getting 'reach' into markets outside the UAE, but I didn't even wait for my small test sample of agents to reject Birdkill before deciding to self-publish the book. I'm sort of done with the old cycle of submission and rejection. I have a life to lead.

For myself, I now believe that publishing doesn't want me because I don't sit comfortably topically. It's not about the quality of writing, characterisation and other technical stuff. It's because the things that interest me don't immediately scream 'mainstream appeal' - the Middle East, the grey areas of morality, bad guys you empathise with, good guys who are weak-minded, men dying of cancer and betrayal and retired IRA bombers don't top agents' lists of books just made to sell themselves. And yet I clearly have a readership - the sellout local book sales, rave reviews, feedback from book clubs and all the other good stuff that's been happening tell me that.

I think the million dollar question facing this panel is not really so much 'how do you get an agent and publisher', there have arguably been too many words thrown into the wind about those two topics for any of us to have anything more useful to say on the topic.

For me the question is more, 'What's the secret sauce? What makes book A a soaraway bestseller and book B a guaranteed dud?' Century and Arrow publisher Selina Walker, who gave us 50 Shades of Grey, and Jonathan Lloyd, who heads major agency Curtis Brown, should certainly have some answers. And our fellow panellist Sean Fay Wolf, whose Minecraft themed fan fiction got him picked up by Harper, has undoubtedly tasted of that elusive sauce.

The question is finding it and amplifying it. And that's where I think this panel will be so interesting. The publishers on the panel will either have cracked it or be foundering, as clueless as I as to how you do this thing in the atomised world of the Web and its Medusine long tails. Finding out which of the two states they inhabit are itself be a thing of great fascination.

I'm not setting out to misbehave this year. But I can promise you this panel will be nothing less than mesmerising and insightful. This based on the other panellists, clearly...

The panel is linked here if you want to buy tickets at Dhs70 each. If not...

Birdkill, Books And The Demon Drink

I suppose there is, one way and another, quite a bit of drinking in my books. Space, my silly first effort at writing, was originally packed with smoking scenes precisely because it was written in the throes of me chucking up my Olympian 60 a day smoking habit. I can't say the same for the other books. And while Space does feature the occasional drinkie, my personal favourite is the scene where daft sex-worker and Jessica Rabbit lookalike Kylie discovers the non-alcoholic French drink 'Montalow'...

Of course, thanks to hard-drinking anti-spy Gerald Lynch, there's a good deal of Scotch put away in Olives, Beirut and Shemlan. But it was Paul Stokes in Olives - A Violent Romance who started it:

I dutifully pretended it was, indeed, news to me and thanked him, hung up and poured more whisky into my glass, walking through the house into the garden, where I stood looking over the lights of the city. I went back and poured more until eventually, quite drunk, I held the heavy-based tumbler between my two fingers above the flagstone floor in the kitchen and let it fall, bright and scintillating in the halogen spots as it twisted through the air, shattering on the stone. A thousand reflective shards skittered across the floor. I went, unsteady on my feet, to bed where I lay in the darkness, trying to stop the room from spinning.

There was a hint of sulphur around the Jordanian family in Olives drinking, which provoked no small amount of sniffiness at the time. How could I possibly portray members of a Muslim family drinking alcohol? That never happens in Abdoun. Perish the thought.

I set myself the unenviable task of killing someone using a bottle of champagne in Beirut - An Explosive Thriller. Not battering them to death with it, but using the liquid. It's actually quite hard finding an untraceable poison that dissolves in liquid and I'm not quite sure why my Google life at the time didn't have the cops around with copies of the local pharmacy's poison book in hand. I eventually settled on a nice dose of potentiated chlorzoxazone...

Meier nodded graciously. He sipped his champagne, noticing how fine the flute was, holding the dry, complicated drink in his mouth and revelling in the fact that a lifetime’s work had culminated in this – a new identity, a new life of reward and luxury. The stress of the past few weeks was making itself felt now as he relaxed, a feeling of lassitude creeping over him. He placed the glass down on the coffee table, and Freij reached over to top it up.

‘It is a particularly fine champagne, no, Herr Meier?’

Meier nodded. ‘I have always preferred Sekt, of course, being German. But I have to confess, when the French get it right ...’

Freij sat back in his chair. ‘Lamiable is a small house, a grand cru, of course, from near Tours. Sixty percent Pinot Noir, forty percent Chardonnay. We can enjoy champagne because of the Levant, you know this, Herr Meier? The Chardonnay grape was taken back to France by the Crusaders. My ancestors.’

The champagne I chose to use to kill a man in Beirut was a relatively esoteric single-grower extra brut called Lamiable, which is solely imported into the UK by the excellent Charles Meyrick of Balthazar Wines. Otherwise dependable as they come, Charles turned fink and shared the book with the family who make the wine. They were reportedly somewhat bemused to find their very fine beverage applied in such a casually murderous manner. Sometimes this writing lark is SO worth it all. I'm still laughing, to tell the truth...

Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy had the occasional glass in it, too; Lamiable returned for a cameo role, but old Lynch was on the demon drink with a vengeance again... One of my favourite characters in the book was the tubercular old General in Aleppo, dying his death in a souq that, tragically, events have managed to ensure, at deaths door though he was, he probably outlasted.

The General sat in the middle of the room next to a pot-bellied stove, a dull metal table to his side carrying a bottle of whisky and an overflowing ashtray. There were two glasses, one half-empty. The table was scattered in coins as was, Lynch noticed, the windowsill. The General sat in a wheelchair, his twisted legs covered in a beige woolly blanket. He had withered, his great frame shrunken inside clothes that were too big for him.

The Sandhurst English voice was still strong. ‘Come in, damn you, you Irish bastard. There’s a chair over there.’

Lynch lifted the bottle out of the bag and onto the table. He pulled up the battered wooden schoolroom chair, its scrape echoing in the empty room. The General nodded appreciatively at the Green Label. He unpeeled the foil, pulled out the cork and poured Lynch a stiff drink. He fumbled for the pack of cigarettes and lit one, puffing smoke from grey-blue lips under his great yellowing white moustache. There was an unhealthy sheen on his forehead and he started to cough, a rumbling noise that ended in a great walrus bark.

A Decent Bomber, set in Ireland as it is, has the odd Guinness in it. Pat O'Carolan isn't much of a drinker, perhaps the occasional hot whiskey on a cold night up on the Cummermore Bog is pretty much the only glass he takes. The two Irish politicians, Driscoll and MacNamara, are quite fond of a pint, though...

He glanced at the door of the pub as it admitted sunshine and the clamour of the street. Brian MacNamara’s big frame blocked out the sunlight momentarily. The pub was empty save for the two of them and the young barman, who poured MacNamara’s pint unbidden.

‘Well, now Sean. How’s the man?’

‘I’m good, Brian. Looking forward to the win, you know yourself.’

MacNamara eyed the three-quarters full glass resting on the bar, the creamy froth billowing. The barman slid it back under the tap to finish it off. He laid the pint down with a diffident nod and took himself away to the other end of the bar.

‘Slàinte.’ Driscoll raised his glass and drank. ‘So what’s this great mystery that brings you galloping from campaign headquarters on a Sunday morning right before the election?’

MacNamara brooded over his pint, his keen eye on Driscoll. ‘Quinlan is dead.’

Birdkill has quite a few very intentional mentions of Ksara, that most excellent of wines from a monastically established Château just outside the town of Zahlé. This town, the capital of the Beqaa, nestles red-roofed and splendiferous in the foothills of Mount Sannine. It sits atop the Berdawni River, the banks of the torrent lined with restaurants and shisha joints. In the evening, it becomes magical in the way only the Middle East becomes magical at night. It is to Zahlé Robyn Shaw travelled to work as a teacher, and it was here something terrible happened to her and it was here, in her obliterated past, Robyn's appalling secret lies. And it is in the glasses of Ksara the dark, blood-red spirit of her past is echoed.

Warren delved into the drawer and pulled out a corkscrew. He stripped the lead from a bottle of red wine and pulled the cork. He twisted the label to face her. Ksara. Mariam stared at the cream label with its pencil drawing of the Château nestled in its vineyards, the letters picked out in gold. Her gaze flew to meet his brown eyes. He was smiling. ‘I make it my business to know stuff. It’s how you stay alive when you deal with bad people.’

Anyway, here's a glass to books... Slàinte!

How To Start Writing A Book

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I've posted in times past on how to write a book. I've posted about how to edit a book - and most certainly how to publish a book, as well as my own booky journey. And I've posted a lot about book marketing. I've probably posted about how to murder a publisher, too.

But I've never talked about how you actually start a book. You know, how you sort of decide you want to do it then knuckle down and actually get on with it. That moment when you realise, 'Here I am. I'm actually doing this. I'm writing a book!' is something else. But how do you, you know, get there?

And so @dollz87 on Twitter made a good point today. It's all very well talking about this here Emirates Airline Festival of Literature 2016 'How to get your book published' session wot I'm taking part in, but how DO you stop talking about writing a book and actually start writing a book?

For myself, I had a couple of false starts. I most certainly had not the faintest idea of what writing a book entails. It's probably lucky I didn't, because I'd probably have found something more destructive and less intelligent to do instead. My first book 'Space' started with me writing a scene set outside the Pompidou Centre in Paris. I had a character, René the Horse, in mind. I wrote about 1,500 words and then the file sat on my Toshiba T1600 (showing my age, but it was one flash puppy of a PC to own back in those days) for years as it rotted in my brother in law's attic. It's still there, for all I know...

When I eventually decided to write a book, I sort of had René in mind, but I had to get from the start of a book over to him in Paris. I dreamed up the idea of an auto-manifesting chicken and started writing...

The chicken appeared on the kitchen worktop with a percussive ‘pop’, interrupting Ben Jonson’s rummage in the fridge for something to eat before afternoon surgery. There was little on offer: stale bread, no butter and a pot of slightly mouldy jam. Scanning the kitchen for the source of the noise, Ben found himself looking at a particularly magnificent roasted chicken on a ceramic dish. It was occupying a space that had previously contained neither chicken nor dish.

A soft hissing sound fizzled into silence. The chicken was plump, still warm and its rich, savoury fragrance filled the air. Ben’s mouth pricked with saliva. He’d eaten nothing since yesterday lunchtime and now he was looking at a glistening, freshly roasted chicken. 

Licking his lips, partly from animal lust and partly from apprehension, Ben scanned the room. Just a kitchen. He looked up. Just a kitchen ceiling. 

The disconnect overwhelmed Ben’s response to sudden bounty. He felt like a laboratory mouse: If you press this button, food appears. His mind raced, grasping for explanations like a lunatic reaching for butterflies. This was wrong. The chicken had failed to follow due process. Chickens are born in hatcheries, raised in farms. De-beaked, plucked, dipped, shocked, slashed, racked, packed and stacked, bagged, bought, stored, stuffed, cooked and scoffed. They know their place, do chickens: they’re food. Except he hadn’t bought this chicken, and he hadn’t cooked this chicken. This was new chicken. Inexplicable chicken. Chicken á la quiz. He reached across to the oven and opened the door. It was cold.

You can buy 'Space' here for 99p. It still makes me laugh, I must confess.

And so I was away. 100,000 words later, I leaned back with a sigh of satisfaction and decided I deserved a Martini. Space was written and I could now unleash my genius on literary London. The rest, as they say, was pants.

But how do you START? I've got news for you. It's really easy. Here's my $1mn super secret writer's tip: just start. Get it down on paper, at least the first few pages. Start writing. Now begin to think about what it is you're building here. Ideally, sketch out the big idea and then break it down into chapters, building your big idea in an outline. Don't stop writing while you're doing this, keep the momentum going. Don't put off writing to do planning, but write as you plan. The further ahead you plan, the better, but don't stop writing, whatever you do.

Start by writing down your opening scene. Don't sweat this too much, it'll likely never make it to the final cut, but make a start. Finish whatever you write in that first session and have a think about where you want to take it next. Start again with the next session and read over what you wrote before, then take up the quill again and write more. Repeat.

Scope out a 'writing time' for yourself. For me, it's first thing in the morning before the office wakens (I spend half an hour thinking in the car and then an hour writing. I'll write in the evenings as well when I can. Morning me leaves notes for evening me. I write on Fridays, too. I'm married to a teacher, so she spends Fridays planning. We're happy enough, both beavering away in our study.). You're looking at giving yourself a daily 1,000 words to write. You don't have to DO this, but have it as a target. 400 well written and considered words that resolve a problem are better than 1,000 sketchy ones that leave you with a problem later on, believe me. But if you end the week 7,000 words to the wise, give yourself a massive pat on the back.

Don't tweet, don't let yourself get distracted. Switch the Internet off. Just concentrate on that story, the big picture one, the scenes you're building and the story you want to tell. Think about things when you're not writing, dream up characters and their backgrounds, their stories and their lives. Steal quirks from people. Keep writing. Every day. Even a few words. Keep writing. Keep writing.

And you'll do it. Trust me, you'll do it. Don't bother with NaNoWriMo type deadlines, that's a sure-fire route to a rubbish book and a huge editing job (an editor friend dreads the end of NaNoWriMo because he knows what sort of MSs are going to start dropping on him). Stick to your 1,000 words a day as best you can and just plug away at it.

Believe me. The second you've started, you're on the way to finishing. By the fourth or fifth second you're committed. A couple of minutes in, you're carving your way to success. A few days in and you're a writer, writing. Don't worry too much about all that show don't tell sort of stuff (maybe have a read of this here handy post), or even worrying about POV and other writing techniques for now (there's time for that later), but focus on telling your story.

Once you've given those first few days to it, you're on the way to redemption. It's just like giving up smoking, but in reverse. And that's how I did it: I gave up smoking and my novel became my new obsession.

Just remember the golden rule: start now. Seriously. Right now. Close this window and open Word, take a deep breath and just write something. There. You've started. You can worry about the rest later. If you need a shoulder to cry on, it's @alexandermcnabb. But NOT in your writing time, hear me?

Good luck!

Smash It Up

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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...