A New Book Is Born

So the order's gone in to Createspace for WH Smith's stock of Birdkill (as well as my other books) to sell at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature 2016, where said book will debut/launch. It's up on Amazon for pre-order and I'm formatting the Kindle ebook today so the file will be ready to go 'live' then. Smashwords, too, with the ePub (which will populate iBooks, Kobo et al).

Five books. Wow.

I'll be doing pretty minimal book promotion, less even than A Decent Bomber got, which resulted in its enormous complement of one review on Amazon. I don't really care greatly, to be honest. I'll have to buck up my ideas by the time we get to the LitFest, won't I?

In the meantime, here's some stuff about the new book scraped from my lovely website.

Robyn closed her eyes and steadied herself as the spinning sensation faded. The rain pattered on the window and she tried to cast her mind back to the yawning lacuna in her past, as she did every night when she found herself with nothing to distract her. Peel away the onion skins, reach into the blackness. As always, it skittered away, elusive just beyond her grasp. Frustrating, shapeless things evaded her; try as she might, they wouldn’t come back. 

What's Birdkill about? 
It's about a woman called Robyn Shaw who takes a job teaching at a school for especially gifted children after she's been through a trauma in Lebanon. She's not sure what happened to her, because her mind's shut the incident down and nobody's very keen to tell her very much about it. Shipped back to London, Robyn goes through counselling, where she meets Mariam Shadid, who becomes her best friend. Mariam's originally Lebanese herself, a journalist based in London.

Robyn's very fragile and her world starts to unravel when she meets a group of children playing in the woods by the school buildings. One of them is calling birds from the air and twisting their necks. He sees her and calls her to him, she knows to the same fate. Her battle for sanity against the boy, who is a student at the school, is also a battle against her past and its suppressed memories. Mariam goes in search of answers before Robyn is pitched over the edge into madness.

It sounds more 'psychological' than the guns and bombs of Beirut or, say, A Decent Bomber... 
It is, very much so. Quite a lot of the writing I get up to is inspired by dreams and Birdkill was the result of a particularly vivid dream which I noted down in the form of a short story, written sometime in the last 1980s. It sat in a file since then, a few sheets of stapled-together paper I'd sent to Sarah back when she lived in Sharjah and I lived in Northampton and we used to write to each other.

I found it again when I'd finished A Decent Bomber and suddenly the book was there, wriggling in my hands like a live thing. I wrote Birdkill in six weeks. A Decent Bomber had taken me two years and Birdkill was a sort of massive sigh of relief.

Sister Mary craned forward to pinpoint the whump of rotors. The helicopter dropped from the mountains to skim the city rooftops like a fat, mottled fly. It rocked to a landing on the roof of the far wing of the hospital. Men ran doubled up under the still-whirring blades to wrench open doors. 

There's that link back to Lebanon again. I thought you'd been told to get out of the Middle East? 
Yes, but then I've given up trying to please those people. Lebanon, Zahlé in particular, just sort of shouldered its way into the book and I let it. Of the many wonders you'll find in Zahlé, the Chateau Ksara is probably the most international. It's Robyn's memories of Zahlé and her time in a school there that are repressed, so you could argue that it's all a metaphorical reference to that 'get out of the Middle East' thing. The Middle East isn't letting me go without a struggle. The book's actually set somewhere in England, although it's never quite specified where the school, the Hamilton Institute, is based.

The Audi TT held tight to the tarmac and Robyn revelled in the car’s electric surge around the corner as she pressed it. The road was wet, russet clouds of leaves thrown up by her passing. She flew to her new beginning, her mind having shut out much of her recent past. 

There's quite a lot of Ksara in there. And a lot of Audi TT, too. 
Yes, proof reader Katie Stine gave me a hard time over that, but I let the book have its rope and it wanted Robyn to be car-mad and love her Audi TT. And so it was. The first scene in the book to pop into my head beyond the kids in the woods and sparrows was an Audi TT driving through the dark to a new beginning. And so we have it. Have you tasted Ksara? It needs no excuses for being in the book. Wonderful stuff. I'm particularly fond of the rosé.

There's a theme of suppression and repression in the book...
Robyn's memories and the incident that led to her amnesia being hushed up are sort of key to it all. And Robyn's safe as long as her amnesia continues, while Mariam's efforts to find out what happened to her friend are well-intended but ultimately threaten Robyn's destruction. There's a lovely line in an early Wire song, Marooned: "An unwilling sailor adrift from Arctic waters, as the water gets warmer, my iceberg gets smaller."

The dream was still rotten in Robyn’s head when she surfaced to the wan light and the peeping of her cheap little Ikea alarm clock. She hadn’t pulled the curtain and was rewarded with a view of relentless cloud. She was warm, but her hand struck out from under the duvet and found cool air. She’d have to suss out how the heating worked. Her grasping fingers touched plastic and she batted at the thing. The clock skittered across the bedside table and crashed to the floor still chirping. 

Robyn's dreams leave her waking up with them 'still rotten in her head'. Is that your dream experience? 
No, just as much as Paul Stokes in Olives isn't me, either. I enjoy my dreams in the main - they lead to scenes, ideas and whole books. Robyn's dreams of the Void drain her. The threat of Martin's abilities, however real they are, is that they could unlock the Void and Robyn comes to fear that more than anything else. There are hints of schizophrenia in there, aspects of troubled sexuality breaking through. You'd probably have DM Thomas' The White Hotel to thank for that.

So what's next? 
I have not, in a perfectly cheery way, got the faintest clue. I'm in no hurry. I'm sure I'll dream something up...

HERE'S THE 'MONEY SHOT' - THE LINK TO PRE-ORDER BIRDKILL.

Not Posting

Wow. I'm mad busy with the day job like you wouldn't believe and yet I've got a Birdkill to edit in time to get copies over here for the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature on 1 March which might seem like a lifetime away but is, in fact, just over a month. When you're printing books with Createspace and shipping 'em, a month isn't very long. When you have to finish proofreading the book then format it for print, upload it - review and approve the page layout and then order a run of copies, a month is nothing.

And even this post is coming at the expense of editing time.

WH Smith has yet to place their order, which is the only thing stopping me from going mental right now. I'm trying to get the thing ready by the time they do. I'm doing school visits and the like, but right now I've got a work deadline that's massiver than massive Mick McMassive.

I can tell you that Birdkill's a huge departure in some ways, a logical development in others. I can tell you it's got me grinning from ear to ear. I can tell you at least one reader from the LitFest found the book left her feeling violated, which is pretty high praise, as it happens.

Editing it, with this pressure on, is probably the hardest thing I've ever undertaken in my great booky journey. Birdkill was written in six weeks in a huge pressure relief surge after the two years it took to squeeze out A Decent Bomber, and yet it's right. This edit's just a nit-picking exercise, yet I have to do it well which means giving it time, effort and focus.

Tempus bloody fugit, I can tell you...

You can pre-order Birdkill here, by the way.

The Expat Woman Festive Fair Live Blog

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Selling books at the ExpatWoman Festive Family Fair along with winsome authorettes Rachel Hamilton and Annabel Kantaria today. Signing them, too, because people like their books signed. I've never been able to work out why, but always perfectly happy to comply!!!

I'm live blogging the day. Well, why not?

08.30
Coffee. Decided to sell my small stock of shop soiled Olives first editions, so have knocked up a quick sign to that effect. Running late now. Microsoft hates me. Light clothes, expecting a hot day. Shouldn't really be posting this, tempus fugits. Books are heavy.

10.00
We're set up. Things are looking good. Hot, but good. Classical music, polo club. It's all rather a posh way to sell books. Hamilton is already causing trouble and having fights with Annabel. We've got two tables to fill with books and the girls are embarking on spirited land grabs on each others' space. Hamilton has brought a cuddly Santa in a cynical bid to capitalise on Yuletide good feeling. People have started circulating. We're off!

2.03
It's busy here! We've been happily flogging books. Gotta go, someone's looking at me covers!

2.45
Hamilton is, as usual, shifting great tottering piles of books in the direction of small children with glazed over eyes who push money at her in their thousands. Grinning, cackling and bouncing around like a madly animated marionette, she's pushing money into her Tardis-like cash tin faster than the mint can mint it. It's awful to watch. I hate her.

3.05
It's calmed down generally. Beirut's been selling well, A Decent Bomber has flown, which is nice. Annabel and Hamilton are cramming chips into their faces. Annabel has been steadily selling, wondering why she's here flogging books  and not her publisher. People ask funny questions. A small boy wanted to know how many words are in my books. He was wonderfully wide-eyed at the answers. The crowd tends to ebb and flow and quiet periods suddenly become quite manic. I love the sound of books being sold. I wish I had a 'kerching' sound on my wee cash box.

4.00
Consensus. The people are no longer buying. Time to pack up and slink off. Hamilton has a skateboard on a rope to use as a trolley. The day ends with her walking her books off to the car.

Annabel and I have agreed the psychological effect of small children stopping, going all glazed-looking and then being drawn inexorably to colourful books about poo and brains will now be called 'The Hamilton Effect'.

At one point Hamilton wandered off to have a look around the other stalls and a small child popped up and started looking at her books. I swear to God, she came from nowhere, just appeared and embraced the child, leaching it of its money. She reminded us of the child snatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

The live blog thing didn't really work. Every time I whipped out the laptop, someone pitched up and started looking at my books and I had to cut and go sell a book.

A nice day, in all. It amazes me how hard you have to work to sell a book sometimes. And how much selling work the blurb on the back does...

A Decent Festive Family Fair

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

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

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

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

See you there!

It's Like Beirut Around Here...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

O’Brien cut in. ‘Tom? Tom? You okay?’
Dunphy’s voice on the radio was tight. ‘We’re coming in. All units block access roads.’
Blue lights flashing, Dunphy’s car jerked forwards and right, sliding into the yard.
‘Dead. They’re all dead.’ O’Donnell sounded shaky. ‘It’s like Beirut in here.’

I have posted before about Lebanese blogger Jad Aoun's delightful campaign to post 'Looks Like Beirut' certificates to people who use this laziest of comparisons, although it looks like he's no longer running the campaign, which means I won't get my certificate.

Basically, he would send a certificate and some photos of modern Beirut to people who used 'looks like Beirut' to describe various degrees of carnage. Beirut, twenty years after the end of the civil war, doesn't look like that any more. It might stink, but it's not a war zone. It is, as I have pointed out many a time, a sexy, vibrant, gorgeous city with very up ups and, yes, very down downs. But it's not a war zone or the setting for something silly and lazy like 'Homeland'. To quote me:

"Beirut today is a complex city, sexy and shabby, filled with promise and hopeless, vibrant and drab, it rarely fails to entertain and challenge. Plagued by power cuts, creaking infrastructure and endemic corruption, Beirut is full of life, creativity and celebration – even if that celebration sometimes takes on a brittle, desperate air."

I couldn't resist it in my first non-Middle Eastern book and so here, in A Decent Bomber, we have what may be the first ironic use of the 'looks like Beirut' simile in print. You're welcome, Jad. That's what friends are for...

My fourth serious novel, A Decent Bomber is available on pre-order from Amazon.com. Do feel free to go ahead and place your pre-order now. It publishes November 5 when all your lovely pre-orders kick in at once to create a 'blip' on the Amazon charts and perhaps even take the book to a wider audience...

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

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sectarianism And Decent Bombers

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It was late in the afternoon as Gerald Lynch hopped along the uneven paving that lined Gouraud Street, the heart of Beirut’s bustling Gemayze area. He wore jeans and a leather jacket against the chill spring air, his hands in his pockets as he squeezed between the parked cars.

Gouraud’s bars, as ever, welcomed those who wanted to party and forget the woes of a world where violence and conflict were a distant memory but a constant worry. Orphaned by Belfast’s troubles, Lynch appreciated Beirut’s fragile peace and sectarian divides, the hot embers under the white ash on the surface of a fire that looked, to the casual observer, as if it had gone out. Lynch scowled as he passed a poster carrying Michel Freij’s smiling face, encircled in strong black script: ‘One Leader. One Lebanon.’

From 'Beirut - An Explosive Thriller'

Gerald Lynch features in my first three books, a violent and drunken Northern Irish spy. Well, a well-mannered and teetotal one would be a bit less fun. His appreciation of Lebanon's sectarianism is visceral because it mirrors his own experiences growing up during 'the troubles' in Northern Ireland.

It's not until you drive through a wee township bedecked in fluttering Union Jack pennants, bunting and flags, with kerb stones painted red white and blue and murals on the walls that you begin to appreciate the strength and depth of feeling still in the North. Even the nomenclature is loaded: Northern Ireland or the North - or N. Ireland? I say Derry, you say Londonderry. And the next township down the road will be themed green white and gold, although you won't typically find as much bunting and never painted kerb stones in the Catholic areas. They're just more, well, Irish.

I recall my amazement standing by the 'peace wall' in Belfast (pictured above). Dividing Protestant and Catholic neighbourhoods, these walls or 'lines' are found in several places in the north and are mostly higher than the Israeli separation wall. That's pretty mad, no? They're being torn down, but in the meantime have become something of a tourist attraction. Which is at the same time sort of nice and a tad perverse.

The conflation of politics and religion is absolute. Republican Nationalist Catholic, Unionist Loyalist Protestant. The conflict between these two communities goes back centuries, old wounds have never quite healed and unfairnesses never quite been forgiven, let alone forgotten. But in the past twenty years, as in Lebanon, the peace has held. The marching season is an annual incitement, a national holding of breath as everyone in their right minds hopes that it'll pass without incident or a descent into chaos. But with a little give and take, perseverance and a shared will to avoid falling back into the violence and repression, the communities of Northern Ireland have managed to preserve their mutual accommodation. It hasn't all been plain sailing, by any means.

A great deal of the credit for even getting us here belongs to a dead woman. Mo Mowlam was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in 1998 and was instrumental in pulling together the Good Friday Peace Agreement of that year. Remarkably, she achieved her feats of diplomacy knowing she had brain cancer, a fact she kept secret until forced to respond to the charming British red top newspapers, who were hurling jibes about her dumpy appearance. Her memoir, Momentum, is an exhilarating read, packed with the personality of a straight-talking, no-nonsense woman of remarkable character. Sadly, insanely, the book is out of print. Reading it was one of my more enjoyable research tasks working on A Decent Bomber.

All of this, inevitably, forms the backdrop to the book. Pat used to make bombs for the IRA and doesn't want to do it again. His old mate Brian MacNamara is in politics these days and doesn't need bombs going off, particularly as MacNamara's boss, Sean Driscoll, is standing for election. Former 'freedom fighters', they'd rather not get involved in Pat's upset apple cart and the looting of arms caches* they'd pretended weren't there any more. And then there's Boyle, the boy who watched his da shot by the IRA, who turns into an angry copper...

MacNamara pressed his hands together between his legs. ‘There were plenty big daft lads. On both sides. We depended on them.’

‘Well this one shot my Da. Dropped him there in the garden. Bang. Not even bang bang. Just bang.’

‘I’m sorry.’ MacNamara struggled to still his twisting hands, to lay them on his knees. He caught Boyle’s sideways glower.

Boyle focused back on the road. ‘Sure you are.’

Pat's loss from 'the troubles' still hurts him today. So does Boyle's. They find themselves pitched together, working to face a new threat from outside that, ultimately, unites them. I had never intended the book to be a moral tale about reconciliation, but it's in there somewhere. Inevitably, someone, somewhere will take exception to something I've written in the book, because passions still ignite and feelings still run deep. Twenty years, as anyone in Lebanon will tell you, can pass in the seeming blink of an eye.

But the vast majority of people in both communities never wants to go back. That alone is reason for enormous optimism. And if you do find something you don't like in the book, get in touch. I'll be happy to talk about it. Because, let's face it, when we stop talking is when we're in trouble...

* Demonstrating, once again, that truth is stranger than fiction, two separate arms cache finds were made in Ireland and England earlier this year. Given I'd worried about the unlikely nature of this aspect of my fiction, I was oddly a little relieved when they turned up!

Emirates Airline Festival Of Literature 2016

I not only have this book, but have cooked from it. I hope you're duly impressed...

The LitFest unveiled its 2016 line-up of authors yesterday in a cosy and yet, well, lavish event at the Intercontinental Festival City - the 'home' of the Festival.

There were pass-around canapés. A lot of them. Little deep-fried balls of seafood, cones of houmous and muhammara (an odd nod to the influence of Thomas Keller and his French Laundry), wee bowls of noodles and stacks of tapenade. Pairs of sushi on diddy plates with tiny plastic pipettes of soy sauce. It was all a long way from the usual starving in a remote garret scratching away with a quill and the last of one's home-made ink, I can tell you.

There were mocktails with names like The Grape of Wrath, White Tang and The Wonderful Blizzard of Oz. They weren't half bad, either. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble here and it showed.

The speeches were mercifully short. The unveiling was nicely done, a musical piece by students from Dubai College performed as a sand artist artisted sandily. The list was duly unveiled. It's a pretty stellar lot. Anthony Beevor, James Waterson, Justin Marozzi and John Julius Norwich alone will make any history buff explode in glee. Dom Joly is coming, which is nice as long as he's not going to spend all his time here cooking up an AA Gill. So's the chap behind Bob the Builder (What do you call Bob the Builder when he retires? Bob) and Korky Paul, who as eny fule no is the chap behind Winnie the Witch.

Ian Rankin's on, too. I interviewed him the other day on Dubai Eye Radio. Scottish fellow. As Festival Director Isobel took to the stage, I remembered how during one ad break on that occasion I had been screaming 'Luddites!' at her and my fellow guests/hosts in a spirited exchange about the merits of books vs Kindles. She was remarkably gracious about it, all things considered. Victoria Hislop's coming. I only know of her because my sister in law is a devotee and will be dead jealous. There are a lot more Arab authors this year - and more Emiratis, including Noura Khoori, Sultan Faisal Al Rumaithi, Shaima Al Marzooqi, Sultan Al Ameemi, Lulwah Al Mansouri and, of course, Maytha Al Khayat and Noura Noman. And that's a very good thing indeed. I have made no secret of the fact I think the festival has been a major catalyst for the burgeoning literary scene here in the UAE.

You know where all this is leading, of course. I'm there as well.

I wasn't going to go this year. I was feeling too weary. But Rachel Hamilton and Annabel Kantaria (both of whom are on the list, natch) made me do an about turn and clamber back on the bus. So I'm doing a couple of sessions and will, in fact, launch Birdkill at the Festival. I've wanted to publish a book at the festival for years now (2016 will be its eighth year, can you believe it? I'm feeling very old) but have never managed it. Birdkill, coming as it did out of the blue, means I've got a 'spring book' in hand.

So there we have it. In the meantime, if you're wondering about where to pre-order your copy of A Decent Bomber, the link's here.

:)

A Decent Paperback

A big box of books arrived yesterday. In fact, three boxes of books did. Amazon deliverith early and so advance copies of A Decent Bomber as well as copies of the new format Olives and Beirut dropped all together onto my desk while I wasn't looking.

And I am glad.

For all the arguments I have about Kindles, there's something reassuring about a physical book. It's so very, well, booky. And I'm finding quite a few readers remain deeply - indeed emotionally - attached to these papery wodges.

I've talked before about the economics of book production. Both Olives - A Violent Romance and Beirut - An Explosive Thriller were conventionally printed and put on sale in bookstores in the UAE, Bahrain, Lebanon and, oddly, Mumbai. Both sold out their print runs a year or so back, but I have yet to see a final reconciliation from the distributor. Conventional book distribution is like a Massey Ferguson to Amazon's Concorde.

It's amazing how slow, conventional and passive the book industry is. In both cases, I shelled out a load of money up front, watched bookshops and the disty taking 50% of the cover price and wasted a great deal of time trying to gee up sloppy and lazy sales channels. It was time-consuming and, to be honest, ultimately wearying. And it gained very little except possibly making my books marginally more accessible to a relatively small audience.

The alternative is POD - print on demand. Amazon's Createspace is the platform I use for all my books. Basically, when you buy one of my books from Amazon, they print it out especially for you. There are an increasing number of 'inventory free' book print and production solutions out there now, which make enormous sense in our 'long tail' world. The cost per copy is sky-high compared to conventional print, but it's a highly efficient way to produce books for a global audience - and means a much wider choice can be effectively offered to the reader.

The quality of a POD book is, incidentally, just fab. In fact I've found readers consistently preferred the POD book when I've asked them which Olives they prefer. POD also means I can update books, for instance I found a couple of nagging errors in the MS of Beirut and they're gone now. And, of course, my restoration of Shemlan will, when I finish it, automatically turn into an updated book. Which is all rather nice.

As I've said before, if you are a writer of books and would like a kick-ass Createspace template for a 5"x8" novel format, hit me up right here.

For now, though, it's a quick bask in the glow of all my lovely new books. I'll be shelling out copies to reviewers - Talking of Books is getting a load tomorrow at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature launch event at the Intercon in Festival City. The rest I am saving for a very special date indeed...

A Booky Spring Cleaning

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

With the publication of A Decent Bomber came the opportunity to do a quick clean of the Augean stables that is my 'back list' - the books already out there in the cruel world.

For a start there was a new cover for Olives - A Violent Romance which brings it into line with the style of the others. And it's easier to ditch the black spines because the printing's not always accurate enough to avoid the odd wee strip escaping onto the front cover.

Then an overhaul of the books' interior templates - a move to Palatino, a slightly 'roomier' font than Garamond - but keeping Perpetua as my title font. The result is a bit spacier and more accessible all round. By the way, if you're in the market for a kick-ass Createspace template for 5x8" format novels, hit me up and I'll happily share.

And then on to Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy. The book's editor, Bubblecow's Gary Smailes, ditched the 'backstory' chapters in the book to create a more accessible narrative that flowed more easily. That change, impacting some 30,000 words in all, was reflected in the original Shemlan when it published and it had the desired effect.

But it's been a while now and I've had time to think it over. In creating a more straightforward read, I was missing some of the spirit I had originally intended for the book, the contrast between Jason Hartmoor the young man full of hope and spirit and Hartmoor the lifetime diplomat whose failed marriage and lacklustre career had hardened him into unyielding and crusty later life. The story of Jason and Mai was rather sacrificed to the cuts, as well. And that was a story I wanted to tell. And, finally, the evocation of Beirut in the late 1970s and the British 'spy school' up in the Chouf was lost - and that was sort of core to my original scheme for the book.

And so I have been restoring the book, on the grounds that I only have myself to please. Well, I have you lot to please, too - but I generally find you're happy enough with what I get up to. It's the agents and publishers who seem to think whatever it is I decide to do is simply not commercial enough to bother them. And they are clearly never going to revise their somewhat dim view of what it is I do.

I'll let you know when the restored version goes up, but you can always sign up (just over on the right there) to my mailer to get the news first or to get your hands on the restored edition as a free ebook. Meanwhile I'm still trying to think up new daft schemes to get people to pre-order A Decent Bomber so it makes a wee blip on the charts come the 5th November. Any suggestions would be more than welcome, I can tell you!

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

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Quinlan passed out; a merciful release.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Research Madness

It's funny, but it's not until you set out to write a book you realise how little stuff you know. I've said it before but can't help repeating it - I don't know how writers did this before Google. Really.

Yet again, how researching A Decent Bomber didn't get me nicked, I don't know. Surely someone, somewhere is looking out for people from the Middle East displaying an interest in supplies of ammonium nitrate and detonators? Maybe they are, and a whole team of over-excited NSA types has just been stood down. 'Calm down, lads, it's just another bloody author'...

I now know how you make a one ton bomb. It's a bit like being able to touch your nose with your tongue. There's not much call for the skill...

Meeting former IRA man Brendan Curran was a big deal for me, not least because it made me realise the book I had written didn't achieve the aim I set out for it. I'll confess I was nervous about the meeting, which started with me spotting a 50mm brass shell on the sideboard and him asking me the immortal question, 'So. What are you about, then?'

Ulp.

My serious and dedicated research in Belfast consisted mainly of getting hammered with the in-laws and staying in the lavish Merchant Hotel. If you're ever in Belfast, go for a few late night drinks at The Spaniard - the nearest thing to a Hamra bar I've ever encountered outside Hamra itself.

It's a bit like researching Shemlan by eating lazy afternoon mezze with friends - oh, this author's life! It was nice that an anti-internment march the next day plunged Belfast right back into 1990s timewarp, with armoured squad cars and water cannon on the street.

You have to find out all sorts of things. Cow diseases, train timetables, bullet impact velocities and the like. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to actually kill a cow if you're not using an RPG. The organisational chart of Tipperary police was one delightful evening's work. Ferry timetables, capacities and freight sailings get jumbled up with the colour of this police station wall or the reception layout of that hotel. Visiting locations (suspicious drive-by's of Banbridge nick) and checking facts, distances and even number plate series conventions all come into it.

And all because there's an Internet and somewhere in it is Nigel who knows the air speed of an African swallow. Unladen.

A Decent Bomber is available on pre-order from Amazon, iBooks and all good ebook outlets. It's also available in paperback from Amazon, Createspace or on order from your local bookstore.

Publishing A Decent Bomber

Perpetua (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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

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

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

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

Sorry. Sidetracked again.

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

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

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

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

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

Which is nice...

A Decent Bomber

Back in February, I glibly declared here on da blog, A Simple Irish Farmer was finished. This turns out to have been deeply premature as today, the 19th September, I actually finished it.

In the meantime I have wailed, gnashed and generally hooned around wearing sack cloth. I have written another book (a psychological thriller called Birdkill) and spent a lot of time not working on the book about an IRA bomber pulled out of retirement which I have come to title A Decent Bomber after someone in publishing who knows that she's talking about told me ASIF was the pantsest title she had ever heard for a book.

Beta reader feedback, together with the need to fix some things in the book that simply didn't work that well and which made it a weaker and less enjoyable read than it should be, meant I had quite a bit to do. In fact, this has generally been my experience with my books so far - Olives is a markedly different book to the one I finished back in 2004, while Beirut needed a total restructure following its reader's report and Shemlan lost 30,000 words to that slash-happy servant of evil, editor Gary Smailes.

So now A Decent Bomber has gone out to a bunch of agents in the US, mainly because the UK bunch have an aversion to Irish books. And, depending on what happens with them, it'll likely be publishing in December.

In the meantime, both A Decent Bomber and Birdkill's covers are gracing my lovely website as I phase out my various book websites and consolidate all there.

So now you know.

Olives - A Violent Cover

This is the new cover for Olives - A Violent Romance. You can go here to buy it, as well as my other books. No, no need to thank me. It's a pleasure.

Why on earth would I want to change the cover, five years after publishing the book in the first place?

It seems more like a million years than five, I must say. A great deal has changed since then for me, personally and professionally. If you'd asked me back then if I thought I'd end up writing six books, I'd have laughed at you, hollowly. 'Ha ha', or something like that. Maybe just 'Ha.'

I'd turned my back on the endless round of submissions and rejections that had characterised my life as a writer up until then, finally accepting if I was going to go anywhere with this writing thing moving forwards, it was going to have to be on my own two feet.

I started looking at publishing platforms, stumbled upon Smashwords, wrangled with Amazon's strange idea of HTML to get a Kindle edition up and running and downloaded Createspace templates and started playing with book formatting.

Before long, I realised I needed a cover and I lost no time turning to Lebanese designer and graphic artist Naeema Zarif, whose clever and compelling work I had long enjoyed and who had also provided the 'visual identity' for GeekFest (although it was brother in law @deholyterror who came up with the initial logo for GeekFest 1.0, just to give credit where it's due!). Sadly, her website appears to be no more.

Naeema created that blue and beige cover, a superimposition of the Mediterranean sea and sky, the soil the olives grow from, a peace treaty and the edges of leaves. It's how her art rolls, layers of imagery super-imposed to create a series of visual 'jokes'. There's a bit of Amman's Citadel in there, too. It was just the ticket and I was pleased and proud to have her art illustrate the cover.

But that was then, this is now. The old cover is much admired, but is very, well, Arabesque. And my other covers have taken a very different direction, tending towards that very stark white space with a single illustrative element; Beirut's lipstickbullet, Shemlan's pillskull and now the two new books look like they'll have iconic emblems on the covers.

You can see all my book covers arrayed together tastefully here.

Olives ended up just looking odd and out of place, so I decided a long while back to update it. That's the lovely thing about publishing online, you can do that sort of thing. The UAE print edition, clearly, was going to stick with the old cover!

I've cast around for an image for Olives, to no avail. It's a very bad title for a book (I've had it confirmed by a top professional that my book titles suck lemons. That's sort of okay, it's the way things have ended up and I probably wouldn't have it any other way) at the best of times and a cover image is hard to think up. What do you do? Some olives? A crushed olive? I found a nice image of some olives and a skull, but it wasn't quite right. I've asked artist/designer friends, but nobody seems to have been able to come up with an image that 'does the trick', so I've finally invested a few days in finding some things that might work. The result is certainly impactful.

Amazon et al have been updated. So if you bought the book with the old cover, you now hold a limited edition print in your hands, one of about 2,500. There'll never be another one. I rather think, and hope, that'll amuse Naeema.

The old cover. A limited edition of 2,500 prints with a free book.

So there we have it. A new website, new cover and two new books. Golly, it's all change around here these days, isn't it?

An Embarrassment Of Books

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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...

Book Post: Submissions. Oh joy.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A Simple Irish Farmer, which I am assured is the thriller working title from hell by people who know better than I, is going out for a round of submissions to UK literary agents. Here's a handy Q&A for anyone interested in the whole area of novels and the process of submission. And no, there's no BDSM stuff going on here beyond perhaps a slight queasy feeling of impotence and pain the whole process engenders.

Why are you submitting your novel to agents?
Most publishers worth talking to won't talk to an un-agented author. If you want to get your work in front of an editor, the person who decides to take a book on within a publishing company, you'll need an agent. Agents are also useful further down the line for things like contract negotiations and a number of other things that make them worth the 15% of your income they'll charge.

No, I mean why are YOU submitting your novel to agents?
Mr Self Publishing, you mean? I've always sent my novels to agents. About 100 rejected Space, about another 80 rejected Olives - A Violent Romance, another 80 or so rejected Beirut - An Explosive Thriller before one signed me up and then 14 publishers rejected that book. Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy was sent out to a small number of agents, 3 or 4, including my own. When HE rejected it, my own blasted agent, I terminated our agreement. And when the others did, I self published it. Believe me, I am very, very good indeed at rejection. I can, we can safely say, handle it.

Why only a few agents for Shemlan?
I was weary then, (and I'm even more weary now) and was pretty much going through the motions before self-publishing the book. Shemlan didn't even get the promotion it deserved because of that weariness, which is a shame because it's probably (IMHO) my best work so far. I reckon if you pick up 10-25 rejections, you're self publishing or sticking it in a desk drawer.

Submitting to three million agents won't change your chances. Don't ever waste your hopes and talents on a desk drawer. Self publish. Hell, what have you to lose? Amazon, Smashwords et al don't cost a penny and if you earn $10 from that book, it's a) $10 more than you had b) been enjoyed by several more people than it took to write.

So you want a publisher?
Yes. I need a UK publisher to get some scale and traction into that market and beyond. With Olives and Beirut selling out their print runs in the UAE, a very small market, and all three books getting positive reviews from media reviewers as well as Amazon and Goodreads I still haven't managed to drive any scale. I need help to do that.

What if they all reject you?
Self publish. I've said this all along at workshops and things: don't do what I did and collect 100 rejections. Submit to a number of agents who are open to submissions and willing to look at work in your genre. If they all pass on it, self-publish rather than get caught in iterative Sisyphean loops of polishing the work and resubmitting it. In my experience the issue isn't necessarily quality.

What is it, then?
Serendipity. Is your book the kind of thing they're looking for? Does it press the right buttons? Does it deal with issues they don't think the market will buy, either for reasons of squeamishness, sensibility or ignorance? Is it in a genre that's selling, with a clear standout 'hook' that makes it a powerful book to market? All these things are commercial decisions agents take.

Being able to write well doesn't mean your book will sell well and knowing what will and won't sell is where agents pretty much stake their livelihoods. 15% of the author's 10% cut of the cover price of a book that doesn't sell is hardly going to send young Clarence and Philomena to Repton, is it?

What do you send them?
A query letter that clearly states who you are and what your book's about, a synopsis of the book as a one page document, a bio of yourself and 10 or 50 pages of the manuscript, depending on their guidelines.

It's very, very important to visit each agency's website, make sure they're working in your genre and that you identify an agent who would be interested in you. Make your submission to that agent, ideally explaining why you think you might be interesting to them. And then you sit back and wait, for anything up to a couple of months.

Do they ever give you helpful feedback?
Almost never. Getting feedback from an agent is quite a deal. An average UK agent gets about 40 submissions a day, an American one anything up to 200. Nobody in their right minds is going to give 40 free writing a book sessions every day. And if they did, they wouldn't be in their right minds for long.

A high percentage of those submissions will be way off the mark, so the winnowing is quite harsh. Very few will have enough spark to merit a closer look and a read of that 50 pages. And very, very few will get through to the next stage, which is a request for a 'full read'.

I've heard that term before. What's a 'full' vs a 'partial'?
There are three stages, really. A query, which is a letter saying I've written a book in this genre, it's about this and that, do you want to take a look? If they say yes to that, they'll ask for a partial read. Many will take the partial as part of the original submission package and, if the book's in a genre and has a hook they can see is commercial, they'll dip into the writing sample you've sent.

A 'partial' as I noted above is a sample of 10 or perhaps 50 pages which demonstrates to the agent that a) you can string two words together b) your plot and characters are developing as per the synopsis. Now, if they think your book's in a commercially viable genre (and they don't already have full complement of writers already working in that genre/area) and stands out within that genre AND you can write and your book seems to be delivering the goods, they'll ask for a 'full read' - that's the whole manuscript.

At this stage you'd better really have finished the manuscript and not be winging it in case someone says yes to it. You send 'em the full MS and they will read or, typically, pay a reader to look at it. Very few get through to the 'full' stage precisely because at this stage an agent is putting a lot of time or a little bit of skin in the game.

So you're almost there!
Yes, you are. But not for sure. I've known full reads come to nothing (and yes, it sucks), so don't go getting all puppyish about it. If the agent thinks the whole thing smells of roses, they'll sign you and go on to represent your books to the publishers they deal with. In an ideal world, loads of publishers will fight to get their hands on your brilliance and the agent will conduct an auction, getting your book into the hands of the highest bidding publisher.

Sounds exciting!
It doesn't happen so much these days, although it does still happen. Large advances are not so much a part of the publishing landscape. Agents like advances, because they pay for Tuscan holidays in nice, satisfying single transactions. Authors have to earn back their advances, so it's a bit like having a mortgage.

Can you play one agent off against another?
No! If you get an offer of representation, take it. Don't go playing silly B's at this stage, just take it. If you have two offers, take the agent you think you can work with - who will do the best job for you and with whom you could bear working. Sign and then sit back and let them get on with selling your book.

If agents aren't buying the kinds of book you're writing, why not write what they do buy?
I'm not really very interested in writing to order. I write what I do because the situations, locations and characters interest me. As a life-long voracious reader, I like the idea of different, intelligent thrillers. And if nobody's buying Middle East thrillers, or editors don't like books about people with cancer or retired IRA bombers, that's my tough luck. That's what interests me - and in my experience so far - has interested readers. I can't write Scottish romances. Not only would it bore me to death, I'd probably be really bad at it.

So what happens next?
You sits back and you waits to hear from 'em. You NEVER ever call 'em up. Just leave it with them. Welcome to your first taste of the passivity of the book industry...

Authors Bleed For Art

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The BBC ran a neat piece yesterday, exploring the money British authors are making. Pal Taline shared it, which was kind of her. When I had finished wiping the tears from my eyes, I got past the headline and started to read the actual piece.

It's not pretty.

The top 5% of authors earned 42% of all the money authors earned. And they pulled, on average, £100,000 each. That's as good as it gets. The big time. Tickertapesville. Yay.

Now, I'm not saying we should be turning our pretty little noses up at £100k. Far from it, let the 100k's flow like the very rivers I say. But it rather reinforces the warning I give whenever I do book writing workshoppy things: chances are, overwhelmingly, this book writing thang isn't going to make you rich. If you think the road to Scrooge McDuckness is paved with words, you are about to get a gilt-edged wake up call.

I have quoted it so often, I've forgotten the source of the statistic: 98% of books in print sell less than 500 copies. And that - as the BBC points out in its piece - is getting even worse as a flood of thousands of writers washes around in the market. It's hard to build a stand-out position in this tide of relentless 'read my book' imprecation. Only a very few 'break out' - and while the average full-time writer earned £11,000 according to the Beeb, the vast majority self-published authors won't make one percent of that.

For myself, I don't care. I still prefer getting emails from Amazon with royalties to getting cut and past rejections.

But it's another reminder that you'd better be in this book thing for the love of it...

FREE BOOK BONANZA!!!

BOOKS? FREE?

YES! FREE BOOKS!

WHERE? RIGHT HERE! ISN'T IT AMAZING?

WOW! WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO?

The Dubai Radio ad scriptwriters would have a field day. Free books. What more could you want?

Here's a brilliant scheme which allows you to get Olives - A Violent Romance, Beirut - An Explosive Thriller AND Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy ALL FOR FREE.

It's thanks to Amazon's pretty cool 'Matchbook' promotion.

You just go to Amazon and buy one of these super books as a paperback gift for a deserving UK-based relative or friend. Go on, you know they could do with a wee surprise from you to show your appreciation/love/dedication. I've even included the links for your listening pleasure:

Buy Olives - A Violent Romance paperback here.

Buy Beirut - An Explosive Thriller paperback here.

Buy Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy paperback here.

You'll actually save £2.68 on the cover price of Shemlan 'cos Amazon has, as they do occasionally, decided to take a haircut and is offering a discount on the book!

All three could be delivered anywhere in the UK free of charge if you a) buy something else to take the total over £10 or b) agree to a free trial of Amazon's Prime service.

You can, of course, swap the .co.uk in the URL for .com to buy for anyone in the States, or .de for Germany or .fr for France etc etc.

Amazon will then offer you a Kindle version of the book for FREE. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Maafi.

And there we go - three free books!

Don't forget (altogether, now) no refunds!

So You've Finished Writing A Book...

This is one of those comfortable, traffic-destroying book posts. It comes to you mainly because I'm not writing any more. I posted a while back that I'd finished writing (which got pretty intense towards the end) and now I'm about done with the book. It's had a couple of editing runs, a few tweaks here and there and it's in the hands of a group of people whose opinions on such things I value - my 'beta readers'.

Once I get their feedback, it's time to shop it around. Once about ten agents have all rejected it, I'll self publish as usual.

I've written the synopsis. It's always hard to pick yourself up having finished a book and draft a synopsis, but it helps when you're editing to have a 'big picture' view of the book's contents, because you can map what's happening on the page to where we're supposed to be going in our little journey to save/destroy the world, depending on what mood we're in.

I've written a blurb, too, although I'm going to have to play around with that for a while, because I'm not entirely sure what I've done is the way to go. This has been my 'difficult' fifth book, but I want to position it right, not least because it has potential for controversy.

Other than that, it all feels a little strange. You've suddenly got time on your hands and Mr Head isn't up in the clouds thinking about situations and people who don't, well, exist - yet whom you have given reality. It's a bit like waking up in a strange bed - a moment of 'where the hell am I?'

I put a book project aside to write A Simple Irish Farmer (which a friend who's 'big' in publishing says is a crap title. She's kindly offered to come up with a better one, which is nice. I can't say I've been very good at titles, tell the truth. Olives has me competing with (and losing to) Crespo on Amazon, Beirut and Shemlan are hardly inspired, either, so now I'm going to take some time and advice on getting this one right) and now I'm going back to it. I'm  not going to rush, but take some time to enjoy the peace and quiet.

But I can't help myself. I'm away writing once again...