Fake Plastic Souks Is Ten

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Oh golly, oh gosh! I nearly missed it. Happy Birthday, Fake Plastic Souks! Ten years ago this month, I was sufficiently intrigued by the idea of expressing my opinion without using a pseudonym (at the time the standard approach for bloggers in Dubai) and was also missing writing magazine articles (I used to do a lot of that) enough to contemplate starting a blog. It's hard to imagine today, but back then it was all, well, terribly experimental. Now, of course, it's quaintly retro.

It all followed on from another experiment in online scribbling, a Wiki called 'Orientations' I had started to put together, which played with the idea of creating a hyperlinked series of articles that led you on an adventure, a little like playing Colossal Caves, around what was something of a stream of consciousness. PB Works, the nice people wot hosts the Wiki, have been threatening to take back that workspace for years and yet the crumbling ruins of that largely incomplete experiment still exist. The first word of the first post on Fake Plastic Souks linked, through the fiendishly clever use of houmus, back to the Wiki in a sort of nod to the past.

Here's the first Fake Plastic Souks post, linked for your clicking pleasure!

That first post was inspired by the sententious rumblings from the Arab Media Forum and amused me greatly. Like many things that amuse me greatly (my first novel, for instance), I find I am in an audience of one. Luckily, that has never detracted from my amusement. The ability to amuse oneself avoids a great deal of unpleasantness in life, I find.

An awful lot of water has flowed under the bridge since those early days, quite a lot of the events which took place around me documented as I jotted things down. It's not quite Samuel Pepys, but I occasionally enjoy stumbling across something old and dusty. In all this time, a tad over 1.2 million pages have been read. Which is nice. I would hate to think how many words I've thrown into this little cloudy corner. I've probably written about 700,000 words in my various novels (not including the two books I made from FPS posts for publishing workshop purposes) and likely more in the blog.

Oh yes, the books. There were two of them, made when I needed a text to create a sample book for a 'hands on' publishing session I did for the LitFest chaps. The first one documented 2007-2009: Fake Plastic Souks - The Glory Years. I joked that I'd do another one if that book sold more than ten copies and to my mild amazement, it did. So I made the second, Fake Plastic Souks - The Fear Returns, which covered 2009-2011. The links take you to the Kindle editions, but there are also paperbacks. I never did get around to a third one. Just as well, probably.

It all seems a little irrelevant these days. Mind you, an early and perhaps over-passionate proponent of 'social media', I now find myself yearning to sit under a tree and play with wooden toys rather than post, share, tweet and snap for the benefit of small and frequently mildly bemused audiences.

I think my favourite things from over the years are were when I 'outed' Harper Collins' Authonomy and the 'Shiny' posts, which did rather tickle me. Documenting the egregious contents of Tim Horton's French Vanilla Coffee not only provided me with amusement, it has informed something like 10,000 people. The 'stuff they put in our food' posts have always caused the most 'Yews'. My abiding interest in food, of course, led to the co-creation of Dubai's first 'food blog' with partner in crime Simon McCrum, The Fat Expat. That was finally shuttered due to lack of time and photographic talent back in 2013. TFE was never really Instagram gold, but I still use it to find recipes even today.

These days, as people may have noticed, I post rather more infrequently and have stopped looking at Sitemeter or analytics. In the early days, the blog would attract a sort of 'background radiation' of readers, about 30 or so per post. That grew to hundreds and even thousands, with anything up to 40,000 page views each month. I was just starting to think that was getting rather reasonable when I met Russian writer Boris Akunin, whose blog gets about 1,000 comments a day. When he invited readers to join him in a walk around Moscow to protest Putin, 10,000 people turned up.

I was duly humbled.

Anyway, there's no real point to this post. I just thought I'd mark the occasion...

Books - A Journey

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is all totally irrelevant to anyone, anywhere, ever, but I thought I'd take the chance to document some stuff now I've finished another book and have a little time before I can face editing it.

My first completed novel was a rather silly affair called Space, which I reckon I started back in 2001, but probably only really started in the spring of 2002. The oldest archive files I can find for the book only date back to 2003.

The oldest book files I have are actually a backup of an unfinished novel called Booze - those date back to September 2001, so I must have started Booze then put it to one side to work on the the less controversial Space.

When I'd finished Space and shopped it to agents, being rewarded with a remarkable tally of rejections (by the time I gave up, I had over a hundred), I started back on Booze, a rather scurrilous tale about a Kuwaiti buying a monastery that holds the recipe to an aqua vitae that tastes like angels' tears and is as addictive as crack cocaine. I began to get messages back from agents that said things like 'Humour doesn't sell dear boy' and so the work in progress that was Booze got shelved and, indeed, lies gathering dust even now.

I'll finish it one of these days, it was great fun. Let us remember that I still think Space is funny - it made me laugh enough, re-reading it after all these years, to put it up on Amazon for sale at a princely £0.99. Its first review on Amazon pointed out that "...it just isn't very funny."

It's linked here for your cheap Kindle read buying pleasure!

So I wandered off and decided to write a serious book. The result, Olives - A Violent Romance, was originally written in September 2004, pre-dating - I always thought rather presciently - the 2005 Amman bombing by a year. However, the bombing in the original manuscript was a dream sequence.

The original MS starts...

The first day of my new life started out in the dark, dreary sodium wetness of Heathrow Airport and ended in a cell. Let’s just say things didn’t go according to plan. Now, months later and looking back to the start of my time in Jordan, I wonder that I stayed there at all. Part of me bitterly regrets not leaving the second I was released. But there’s a tiny glimmer of hope in me that won’t go away, although now I’ve run out of choices and the consequences of my actions are written in the wreckage around me. 

And was considerably improved by the large amounts of editing and rewriting that went on between then and 2011 when it was finally published. Most of these took place post-2007, when I discovered Harper Collins' Authonomy and met other writers who taught me how to write better books, principally Australian Italian novelist Phillippa Fioretti. Other than that, the whole Authonomy experience was, as I have documented extensively in earlier blog posts, pretty pants.

Beirut - An Explosive Thriller was started in Autumn 2009 after the 'reader' for an agent called Eve White, who had requested a 'full read' of Olives had finally responded that it was all 'A bit too low key' for them. I was in a fury. The book's crammed with spies and bombs and shit and it's too low key?

That was it. The final straw. I was going to write a mad book and it was going to be based in Beirut. The first versions of Olives had Paul moving to Beirut, looked after by Gerald Lynch (who at that time was called Nigel Soames, a character who nagged at me because he wasn't 'working'), who felt guilty at the way things had panned out for the feckless young journalist. Beirut just made all sorts of sense as a location. I chucked Prague, Hamburg, Spain, Malta and the Greek Islands into the soup mixture just to be sure.

Work on Beirut - An Explosive Thriller actually started with 'The Muezzin Cried', a short story I posted here on the blog, derived, as usual, from a dream memory.

By December 2009 I had realised I was actually going to have to go back to Beirut if I was going to pull this one off. I had been travelling there since the '90s, but hadn't been back in a few years. I needed to refresh my memories and impressions of that sexiest of Eastern Mediterranean cities.

At the time, I had been involved in running a social un-event for online people in Dubai called GeekFest. I called a friend in Lebanon, Alex Tohme, and asked her if she'd be up for running GeekFest Beirut? Of course, she was totally up for it. And so I had my ticket to Beirut sorted!

On the 6th February 2009 GeekFest Beirut took place and I spent a few halcyon days striding around the city often in the company of old friend and partner in crime Eman Hussein. Thanks to GeekFest, I had 'my' city in the 'can'. I went back again for ArabNet with colleague and friend Maha Mahdy, discovering Barometre in the process thanks to geek and blogger Roba Al Assi. And again for GeekFest 3.0. And again, and again. The gorgeous Paul Mouawad Museum, the model for Michel Freij's own private museum, I discovered for myself.

It was with Maha that I went in search of Shemlan, the village nestled high in the Chouf that was home to the 'British Spy School' MECAS - The Middle East Centre for Arab Studies. I was to go back time and again, with the lovely Micheline Hazou and then also with friends Eman and Sara Refai. This village and an inspirational gentleman called Barry were to combine in the person of one Jason Hartmoor, the anti-hero of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy.

Work on Shemlan actually started back in 2011 but was postponed because I decided to self-publish Olives and that took 110% of my time, back in November 2011. Beirut followed in September 2012.

By early 2013 - having visited Estonia, the location of the book's finale - I restarted work on Shemlan and it went like a rocket. I raced to the mad, climactic and rather unusual end of the book, propelled by death metal and much musical mayhem. I sent it off to my agent and when he responded, weeks later, that he wasn't even going to try shopping it to publishers, I terminated our relationship.

Boy, did that feel good.

Shemlan was published on 1 November 2013. I didn't publish a book in 2014, I spent the year wrestling with A Simple Irish Farmer and quite a lot of existential self publishing angst. Olives and Beirut have sold quite well, but Shemlan - easily the best of the three books - was plagued by the fact I didn't do a UAE print run and was too exhausted by the whole farrago of promotion to actually get out there and market the thing. Shemlan has been terribly - and unfairly - neglected as a consequence.

Seriously. I can't even look at a book blog now. If I see the words, 'I love books and...' one more time, I'll burn the puppy. Big brown eyes or no big brown eyes...

I've written a screenplay for Olives since. I just don't know what to do with that, so it's in a desk drawer. It was fun to do!

So here I am, fifteen years into my journey as a writer of books. I have one more book now finished, being steadily rejected by a number of agents. That's taken, as I have documented earlier, a year to write. And I have another new book to edit now, which took about a month to write. If traditional publishing turns both books down, as I confidently predict they will, I shall self publish them in September this year (A Simple Irish Farmer) and March next year (the newnew book) to coincide with the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature.

And after that, I reckon, I'll be hanging up my literary shoes...

Bee Bones

Back in 2007, a post on uber-blog Boing Boing alerted me to a new website from Harper Collins Publishers called 'Authonomy'. The site allowed you to upload the first 10,000 words of your book and then have other writers critique your work or vote it to the top of a pile to be read by a Harper editor.

I posted about it a lot at the time, pimping my first, silly, book Space - which I uploaded to the site. I also posted about my disaffection for a process and website I came to see as debased, not because my book didn't win a gold star (because it did) but because the gold star was actually duller under its micron of plating than the average Shiny.

Authonomy did something marvellous for me, though. It allowed me to meet other writers - to learn from them, to share the ups and downs with them. It transformed my approach to writing and led to me writing more books and, I like to think, better books.

I've kept in touch on a regular and almost formal basis with a group of ex-authonomites, the feared and shadowy Grey Havens Gang. And I've kept in looser contact with a number of the people I met during my month-long odyssey propelling Space to the top of the greasy pole. You know how Twitter, Facebook and all can keep people sort of popping up every now and then.

One such is Richard Pierce. Like everyone else I knew on authonomy, he never got picked up by Harper as a result of winning the monthly plugfest, but he did get taken up by British publisher Duckworth, who published his novel, Dead Men. Which I thought was a tad funny as that wasn't the book Richard was shopping on authonomy - that was a book called Bee Bones. It's a long time ago now, but I remember Bee Bones being pretty popular on the site - a stark and yet very human book that explored a young man rooting about in his dead mother's life.

Having had his taste of the conventionally published life, Richard has taken to self publishing - and so Bee Bones is coming out as a self published novel, some seven years after I first came across it on authonomy. Which is a while, I know, but then it took Olives - A Violent Romance about the same length of time to become a book rather than a manuscript.

I'll be buying it - I enjoyed it on authonomy as I enjoyed so many books from a selection which I thought at the time consistently threw up better and more diverse reads than I could find in my local bookshop. A number of the writer friends I made have been published - a few conventionally (a couple becoming best selling novelists) but many more taking the self-published route (a couple becoming best selling novelists).

So if you need a book recommendation, take this one. Richard's Facebook page is linked right here and when he presses the button and lets Bee Bones out into the wild, you can be among the first to know.

I hope he doesn't mind me nicking his cover...

Book Post: Meeting The Great Unwashed

Olives for Sale! Who IS this Andy McNab,
anyway? (Photo credit: Bibi)

I'll start off with a huge thanks to the expatwoman.com team, who were kind enough to suggest I came to their 'Big Day Out' event at the Arabian Ranches Polo Club and flog my books. I confess at some considerable trepidation about the whole stunt and last night was - something I don't often experience - genuinely nervous.

I've never before sat behind a table full of my books and attempted to sell them. It was a very odd feeling indeed to begin with. I mean, what do you do with yourself? Do you stand to attention and appear keen and approachable? Do you take a seat and finish rereading John Le Carré's excellent and vastly underrated 'The Night Manager'? Do you ignore people and let them select what they want or leap on them and punch them until they buy the damn books?

It felt like a reality show challenge. What a great idea. Take a bunch of people who've written books and then hone their authorial talents until one of them wins through. Like Authonomy with a real prize at the end sort of thing. One of the challenges would surely be to man a stall selling your books for a day.

I got mistaken for Andy McNab twice. The first one was the funniest. He was clearly someone's dad out for a winter break.

"You were on the radio the other day, weren't you?"
"Yes, I was."
"Funny that, you not being able to read until you were twenty."
"What radio station were you listening to?"
"LBC."
"No, I'm on Dubai Eye. You're thinking of Andy McNab, aren't you? The SAS bloke?"
"Yes."
"That's not me."
"Who are you then?"
"Move on before I punch you."

I watched people passing all day, the way they scanned the books. Brits in particular are scared to catch your attention, eye contact makes them nervous and defensive until they've decided they might be interested. Once I'd finished my Le Carré and actually started talking to people I was feeling better about the whole thing and making sales, but every single sale of the day's 25-odd was a 'sale' rather than a 'this looks interesting, I think I'd like to buy it' approach. I worked hard for every man Jack of 'em. Imagine in a bookshop where I'm NOT there to bug them!!!

I'd do my POS differently next time and have a big sign saying I AM THE AUTHOR OF THESE BOOKS AND WILL SIGN THEM IF YOU BUY THEM. I might even have to wear it instead of my 'Doesn't Mary have a lovely bottom' Father Ted T-shirt which did, however, attract great attention. It's amazing how people don't make such small cognitive leaps.

People scan across the covers of books as they walk by, a clear 'I'm not in the market for a book today' decision going on. The vast majority of people simply walked by without a glance or darted a cursory gaze of absolute disinterest. Maybe if I'd coated the bloody things in chocolate.

I had a single copy of Shemlan, which the vice-consul from the British embassy in Abu Dhabi bought early on. They were, incidentally, doing a great job of outreach - the idea being to inform expats of the legal 'issues' here before they fall foul of the law. "Excuse me, are you a Brit? Do you have a liquor license?" We chatted a bit about dips and the scandalous Tom Fletcher, Our Man In Beirut. (whose mission I have so mischaracterised in my books!)

Most of those who stopped ended up buying and most of those bought both Olives and Beirut. A few preferred Kindle, but most were paperback addicts. All of the Lebanese required some sort of assurance that I lived in Lebanon or knew it. Magda Abu-Fadil's Huffpo review to hand, I was able to quell their unease quickly enough.

"The author has an uncanny understanding of the country's dynamics and power plays between the belligerent factions, post-civil war of 1975-1990.... Beirut is a gripping, fast-paced exciting book that may well jar Lebanese and others familiar with the city and its heavy legacy. But it's a must read.

Magda Abu-Fadil writing in The Huffington Post 

See what I mean? It's a neat answer to 'but how can you write about Beirut if you're not Lebanese or haven't lived there?' Glad I had that printed out along with some other choice reviews.

Nobody haggled. It was a binary decision. I want to buy a book or I don't. Everyone wanted them signed. Everyone was kind, interested and genuinely surprised to meet an author together with his books.

Beirut attracted the most attention, the body language the same every time there was a double take and a move towards the book - everyone picks and flips, the blurb is SO important once your cover image and title have done their job. But that high impact cover image, the lipstick bullet, together with the strong all-caps title. You could see it was clearly hitting people in a way Olives doesn't.

As they flip, so I start talking. They're on the hook and need to be landed. I was amazed at the flip - something I have catered for in my covers and blurbs (since Olives, which was self indulgent of me but I still love the art of it, while recognising it's not a 'commercial' cover - I'm actually on the hunt for a new cover image that'll fall in line with the 'look and feel' of Beirut and Shemlan), practised and evangelised in workshops but never actually observed in large crowds.

Recounting a summay of the story of Olives gave people more pause for thought than Beirut - Beirut was an easier book to characterise and 'get across' to people. But a few were more than taken with the idea of a 'violent romance' which was nice.

I would suggest this to every and any author - traditionally published or self published alike. Do this. Spend a day in a market selling your books. Initially daunting, it's an amazing way to meet people and see how they react to books and the idea of books, how they approach buying books and what makes them tick in that process. And what it is about YOUR books they like!

Weary, sunburned and clutching a Martini (natch), looking back on the day, the wealth wasn't in the little wad of money in my wallet. It was learning about those annoying carbon based lifeforms we depend upon to buy our books - the Great Unwashed. And bless 'em, one and all!

Marketing And Promoting Books

Writing a book is just the start of the journey to publication, whether you’re self published or taken on by a publisher. More and more people, including agented and published authors, are taking to self publishing as Internet-enabled tools to create and distribute books lessen the value of a mainstream publisher's contribution to the process. We’ve seen this process before, it’s called ‘disintermediation’, when an intermediary is removed from a process by the Internet. And Amazon is a great disintermediator.

This means I can find my readers anywhere in the world and get a book to them without having to physically create and distribute tens of thousands of books. It also means anyone who has written a book can now get on the Web and promote it. Including the lunatic on the bus who has an atom bomb in a corned beef tin, the author of a dreary memoir of life in Tuscany and the deluded nincompoop who’s penned a trilogy about a dystopia where dolphins are smarter than people. Oh hang on a second...

That clutter means authors – all authors – have an awful lot of noise to cut through. And we face readers increasingly barraged by needy wails of ‘buy my book’. And yet you need to get your book out there.

As they say here in Dubai: What to do?

There are a lot of people out there ready to help you in this endeavour, for a few dollars. I tried a couple but I never really believed in them and I was right. The recommendation of someone who sells recommendation is worthless. Honest reviews are gold dust, but only part of the formula. Social interaction is good, but you really have to balance promotion with content – some would argue I got that balance wrong with Olives – A Violent Romance, but I’m happy with myself overall.

The one critical lesson I’ve learned about book marketing is the lesson I learned when I first took a sales job in the early 1980s. AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. People don’t just buy books. They have to have their interest piqued in some way – something has to catch their eye. And that something has to evoke enough curiosity for them to want to look under, literally, the covers. What they find has to make them want the book, because only then (and I have been amazed at how much pushing it takes to take the horse to water) will they actually click on that link to Amazon.

It’s worth looking at each of these four cardinal rules of sales:

ATTENTION

Your cover is critical. I love the cover of Olives, it’s a point of considerable pride that I could pick my own cover artist and that the talented Naeema Zarif brought her unique style to the book’s cover. But compare Olives to Beirut and you’ll find I was being self-indulgent. Appropriate to the book? Yes. Artistically valid? Yes. But that’s not what it takes. It takes immediate, in your face whambam.

As I pointed out in my workshop at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature on book promotion and marketing, you need a ‘book hook’, something that makes the book stand out and attract attention. In Olives it was water rights and the drought gripping the Levant. Lead with this, build your content around it – and get that content out there.

Traditional media is key. Radio, TV, newspapers, magazines. Features about you and your book hook, reviews. Do signings, book clubs, conferences, book fairs, workshops, readings. Take every chance you can to get out there. Recruit supporters whenever you can. This can be exhausting, but it’s necessary. Build a media database and send out review requests to as wide an audience of reviewers as you can. The more you’re in front of people, the more attention you’re getting.

If you can’t bear the thought of all that attention, I’d consider whether you want to do this book thing. I fear in today’s world all authors are being forced blinking into the spotlights to face the audience and ‘engage the community’. And yes, that includes the conventionally published.

Talking of communities - I cannot over-emphasise the importance of communities in promoting books. If you're an active and contributing member of an online community, their help can get you off the ground in no time.(Anyone out there remember the deep joy of Klazart gaming Authonomy?)

A website for a book is critical – it’s somewhere you can point people (Twitter is great for attention, but you need to trigger a click somewhere – and that somewhere has to build interest) and tell them more about the book. The Olives website is probably too busy and contains too much information. The site’s not there to celebrate or justify your work – it’s there to trigger a link to ‘buy the book’. You also need to bear SEO in mind – the site is a discoverable asset: when I search your name, your book or even the topics your book is based around, I should find YOU staring at me.

The Olives website is hardly the Huffington Post – in the year it’s been around, it’s pulled 4,200 page views - some 340 visitors clicked on the ‘Buy Olives’ link. The majority of visits have been from the UAE and USA. However, it’s also been somewhere I could post some of the many positive reviews of the book, giving me credibility – particularly with book bloggers who can be resistant to self published writers. And good reviews are critical in building attention and desire.

The Olives blog has been a much bigger traffic draw with over 10,500 page views (about 500 of these were for the Olives is blocked in Jordan post – a wee whiff of controversy I refused to capitalise on and fan into flames. Looking back, I rather wish I had now).

The blog was intended to create a stream of content that was, again, discoverable and also to engage potential readers with the book, taking excerpts from the book that touched on some of the issues it’s built around – the water conflict in the region, nationality and identity and the Palestinian story. It also discussed issues brought up by book clubs and reviewers – including the book’s treatment of alcohol and sexuality in the Middle East. It also gave a steady source of content that went beyond ‘buy my book’.

The Beirut- An Explosive Thriller website is, by the way, much cleaner and faster to get to the point.

INTEREST

So you won the click. Now you can sit back and enjoy yourself. Not a bit of it. Now you have to build interest. I’m interested enough to give you my consideration, how do you hold me? In today’s world, when every movement of our online eyeballs brings a new skateboarding dog or man with five nipples, that’s a big ask.

The big tool here is your ‘blurb’, the summary of your book’s content that graces the back cover. Writing blurbs is a skill in itself – what do you leave in, what do you take out? How do you describe your story enticingly and draw the reader in? I’m not about to write a piece on how to write blurbs, it’d turn this already long post into a book in itself. But précis, précis, précis is the key. And, as in your writing, try and make one word do the work of ten. A quick example from the blurb for Beirut – An Explosive Thriller:

Michel Freij is about to become the next president of Lebanon.

One of the feared Grey Havens Gang suggested:

Michel Freij is poised to become the next president of Lebanon.

See? That one word is so much more dramatic. It’s detail like that has to go into your blurb. And you should learn it off by heart, because when people ask you ‘What’s your book about?’ you have their attention, your answer will dictate whether you have their interest.

The content you create, including the content of your book site, should build on interest, deepening people’s engagement with your work. This is desire at work.

DESIRE

I was attracted by the cover, liked the sound of the book and enjoyed what the author said about it/what I read on the book’s website. I think I’d like to read some more of it. The extract made available by Amazon (you MUST enable sampling on Amazon, Smashwords et al – and have a sample, say an opening chapter, on your website) was well-written. Hell, I’m going to do this thing.

This is desire.

For most of us, desire is tempered by price. I’ll give you an excellent and personal example. I am re-reading the paperback of Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Scoop’. I’ve had that book for years, this was the first time I notice Penguin hadn’t bothered re-setting the book – the margins are massive and if that had been my book, people would have complained to me. Whatever, I simply can’t settle down with paper these days so I tootled off to Amazon to get me a Kindle copy. £7.99. I couldn’t believe it. The Kindle version of a 1938 book is £1 MORE than the paperback.

I really want to read Scoop on my Kindle, but I’m not paying a greedy, stupid publisher (listening, Penguin?) £7.99 for it. It’s simply not happening.

Book pricing can make you or break you. And that’s another post right there.

ACTION

It all leads to this. The click on your 'buy my book' link, the click through to Amazon or iBooks or wherever else your book is available from. It goes without saying that each site needs to be well populated with good, well-edited content, properly tagged and your author pages etc available and updated. Don't shrug this advice off - Olives was filed under 'theatre' in iBooks for almost a year because I tagged it in Smashwords as 'Fiction - Drama'. I only found out after my Mum bought me an iPad for my birthday!

It doesn’t end with action. That click to buy your book is a chance to engage your readers as components of your marketing campaign. Encourage reviews, seek feedback, enrol evangelists. Now, if readers are telling you your book sucks, there’s valuable input for you. It might hurt, but thicken up your skin and suck it up – if you need to improve your game, there’s no better way to do it than listen to your customers. If multiple readers have a problem with a character or point out a flaw in your dialogue, you’d be mad not to re-evaluate that work.

There’s no more powerful marketing tool than third party endorsement - if readers like your work, get them to tell others. Encourage reviews on Amazon, Goodreads or Shelfari. Repost these to Twitter (not in a constant stream, mind) and host them on your book blog. Post ‘em to Facebook. Get the good news out there. Because you won a click on ‘Buy with Whispernet’ and now the eternal, Sisyphean cycle starts again. A happy reader buys you attention. A happy reader makes you interesting. A happy reader builds desire. A happy reader can provoke action.

I love happy readers.

(You can become one too, by clicking on this link to the website for Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and then wandering over to the 'Buy Beirut' section!)

If you want to talk books and have a drink or three, the celebration of the launch of Beirut takes place tonight at Billy Blues in Satwa, Dubai. The invite's here.

Space - A Literary Lacuna

I sat down to write a book sometime in 2002. I'd given up smoking and it was annoying me. I reckoned I'd just dash down the first thing that came into my mind and London's literary scene would fall at my feet. Shockingly, they not only failed to fall as predicted, they rejected me. A lot. In fact, Space went on to pick up well over a hundred little photocopied slips that said something along the lines of 'Not for us, thanks'.

Space spoofs a genre that I have come to call the ‘airport novel’; that comfortingly large slab of silliness that you invariably turn to when you have to survive a seven-hour flight. Just like the Avian Obsession and the Maltese Balcony and those other man-in-race-against-time-against-unfeasible-odds-to-save-the-world-against-shadowy-cabal-led-by-megalomaniac books, Space is a fast moving page-turner filled with baddies and secret agent babes. Unlike the majority of them, Space is also intentionally and successfully funny.

Main character Dr. Ben Jonson is transformed from being a happy middle-class GP into a wilful killer, chased across Europe by police and various intelligence agencies. His odysseyette (it is so a word. I looked it up on the Internet) brings him together with a psychopathic CIA agent in a catsuit, a sex worker from Weybridge and a devastatingly effective computer virus that causes widespread societal breakdown. It all ends up with American bombers, the police and army, the Russian Mafia and a number of highly eccentric octogenarians coming together under a stone circle somewhere in Southern England.

 In Space, the baddy spends most of his time with his hand up his pneumatic secretary’s skirt, the good guys are kooks and MI5 safe houses are staffed by pink-haired camp people. The book darkens a little when the action starts moving, but it never stops being irredeemably daft. By the time we’re ready to resolve things at the end, there’s lots of slightly strange sex going on. I always find that strange sex is so much more interesting than ordinary ‘boy meets girl and gets it on’ which, lets face it, has been done before.

It was a popular book on Harper Collins' Authonomy peer-review website, but never even garnered a 'full read' from an agent. Having taken a look at the original MS and edited some of the worst flaws out, I found myself rather enjoying reading it. I'll tell you one thing, it's damn funny.

So I've eventually (and with mild reservations) decided to publish it as a Kindle only book for $0.99 (or 79p to you). You can go here to buy it from amazon.com or here to get it from amazon.co.uk. If you've got Amazon Prime you can borrow it instead. If you haven't got a Kindle or Kindle software for your tablet, you're going to miss out, sorry. I'll plug it a couple of times here and there, but I'm not going crazy promoting it. If you enjoy it, you can do that for me. If you hate it, please feel free to leave a review on Amazon or a comment on this post! I won't mind, honestly!

I'd get it while it's cheap. If I sell more than a few copies or start getting good reviews, the price is going up faster than you can say 'nmkl pjkl ftmch'...

Warning - Space has got a number of rude bits in it. So if you're easily offended, please don't read it.

First Fictions

Richard Pierce-Saunderson's first published novel, Dead Men, which charts the last days of 'Scott of the Antarctic' is being published by Duckworth. As I'm doing a panel session at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature focusing on how authors found their route to publication, I thought it would be interesting to explore Richard's story and look at how he took 'Dead Men' all the way to the hallowed shelves of your local bookshop.

So, you’re off on a blog tour of the world. Why stop over in the Middle East?
 You’ve got a different circle of readers to me. I want to extend my reach, so to speak. And then you sent me an article about the UK Ambassador to Lebanon hosting a dinner to commemorate the centenary of Scott getting to the South Pole, which contained a reference to Maxime Chaya from Lebanon, who’s retraced Scott’s footsteps to the Pole, or some of them anyway. And given Dead Men is about Scott’s last days, I found the connection too much to pass by!

What do you mean some of them?
No-one’s ever completed that journey from Scott’s base at Cape Evans to the South Pole and back on foot. That’s about 1,800 miles.

Oh.
Quite


So. First fictions. Let's start where we met, on the Authonomy writers’ web site back in late 2007. Tell me why you ended up there in the first place.
My wife found it for me, actually. The Guardian reported in September that it had come out of beta, and that it was open to the public. It was pitched as a chance to get your work in front of Harper Collins editors, and a place where writers might expect to improve their skills. So I joined, with a book I’d written some years before, called Bee Bones. I didn’t really expect much, to be honest. And for someone who’d been banging on the locked doors of the publishing industry for years it seemed like a last throw of the dice, before chucking in the writing lark and focusing on day job and family for the last years of my life.

Did it teach you anything?
It did, actually, and not just about writing.

Explain.
You know, writers are odd people. They’re desperate to share their words, to get them printed on someone else’s paper at someone else’s expense (and for their gain), but when it comes to marketing themselves, they’re actually clueless. What I learned then, in 2008, is that if we want something, we have to go for it.

What we called shameless plugging, back on Authonomy...
Exactly that. The community there was fairly light-hearted, as I recall it, and you and Simon Forward and I used to play these silly games where we’d try to plug our books in a subversive sort of way, rather than spamming people to come and read them. It meant we devised all sorts of subtle (and mostly humourous) strategies which might drive readers to our books. The thinking needed for those stratagems has stood me in good stead, I think. And it stopped me from packing in writing, stopped me from giving up, because it made me feel like I did have somethinig to say. I don’t know if you feel the same way.

Well, Olives has been published.
There you are then. Part of not giving up was also to grow a thick skin, and to be able to deal with criticism.

Just ignore it, you mean?
No, no, the opposite, in fact. It’s when we’ve not yet developed thick skins as writers that we tend to ignore any criticism of our writing, and skim over advice that could actually make us better writers. Personally, I tend to find that it’s the writers who deflect criticism or call it invalid who are those who are producing sub-standard work. Developing a thick skin means taking all criticism seriously, but learning not to take it personally, and to understand that writing is very subjective.

You’d not learned that before then?
No, I hadn't! Anyway, within the first couple of weeks of being on there, I’d asked for, and got, a long review from an American guy, which basically recommended that I scrap Bee Bones because the plot was faulty, and because it was totally unbelievable.

That must have been a bit of a blow.
In one way, yes. In another, no. He made some valid points about how the book might have been differently structured, which I think I used when I rewrote it. But after about half a day’s grieving, I decided that his core criticism was just his opinion, that the book could stand, and so I left it up there. I’ve still got a copy of that review somewhere.

Do you think it informed your subsequent writing? Because Bee Bones hasn’t been published, has it?
It did inform what I’ve done since. And no, Bee Bones hasn’t been published – yet. There are two versions of it now. But, and this is perhaps the most important point, that book was actually the key to Dead Men getting published.

How so?
I sent Bee Bones to Peter Buckman, the guy who agented Slumdog Millionaire, after Harper Collins had reviewed the book on Authonomy and turned it down (it got to Number one at the end of October 2008, as you know).

I know, I was in the Top Five with you the same month.
I thought I’d let you get that one in. But not with Olives.

No, it was a funny book called Space. Still unpublished, too. Anyway, we digress.
Right, Peter read the first three chapters of Bee Bones and an extended synopsis, but didn’t take it on. He said it was a good book, but too midlist (ie no chance of selling really, really well). I asked him if I could send him my next book when I finished it and he said yes. I had, in the meantime, started Dead Men after coming back from the Antarctic, and after getting lots of encouragement to write another book from my friends on Authonomy. So, when I’d finished the book after 6 months (and some helpful comments from people), I sent it to Peter. Two 3-hour phone calls, five weeks, and a massive edit (from 113k words down to 85k) later, he asked me if I’d sign for him.

It’s taken four years to get it published?
That’s the thing, though. Everyone thinks you’ve made it as soon as you get an agent, because that part is ball-breakingly difficult, but I had to wake up and smell the coffee, because getting an agent’s only the start. Peter made a massive effort to sell the book to mainstream publishers, but nearly all of them, without exception, quoted the market place as being too difficult to try to sell a new author into with such a complex book. Some of the feedback we had included “A few years ago I may well have offered, but it’s so inhospitable out there in the markeplace”, and “It’s an impressive and really quite brave novel; an ambitious and complex novel.” But still nothing, until the lovely independent Duckworth came along and took it on at the end of summer last year. To an extent that extended selling process was more depressing and discouraging than being constantly knocked back by agents, and one that led me, on more than one occasion, talking to Peter about self-publishing.

But you didn’t go that route?
Peter persuaded me to be patient. Also, I have self-published poetry, and in all honesty I’m just too lazy to do all the marketing gruntwork self-publishing involves.

So Duckworth are doing all the hard work for you?
They have arranged some events for me, and I’ve arranged others. But my mind-set’s different now. I just hate doing admin stuff, and to have someone who points me in the right direction is really helpful, because I’m one of the most disorganised blokes in the world. Now that we’ve got events set up, I’m desperate to do more, and not too lazy to catch trains from one end of the country to another. In fact, if any airline wants to sponsor me to tour the US and Australia and New Zealand, I’d gladly do that, too.

You’re obviously bonkers, and still on that shameless plugging trip.
Now that a third party’s put time and money into editing, typesetting and printing my book (and converting it into Kindle and Kobo format), I suppose I am.

So, what next?
The Kindle version of Dead Men is already available, although I am trying to encourage people to use their local bookshops instead. The physical book comes out on 15th March, although there’s a rumour that the Natural History Museum in London might be putting it on their shelves in the week starting 5th March. I just hope it sells lots of copies.

So, many congratulations are in order. Have you bought your celebratory copy of Olives yet?
Erm...

Here's a link to 'First Fictions' at the LitFest, which you can still buy tickets for at the amazing, knock-down price of Dhs65 and which even includes a seat!

And this here is your very own link to Richard's debut novel, Dead Men, which you can pre-order from Amazon or snap up on Kindle.

And here, last but by no means least, is a link for Richard to buy Olives ... >;0)

The Newest Profession

The blog is littered with writer types this week, sorry. Today comes a guest post from deepest Cornwall as mustardy-shirted author Simon Forward takes the helm and tries to crash into the nearest landmark. I leave you in extremely unsafe hands indeed...

The Newest Profession? Independent authors, of course! They’re everywhere these days. Loitering on every virtual corner, peddling their innermost thighs – I mean thoughts, for a few pennies and bringing the internet into disrepute. As rampant and desperate as a sexbot, their responses are almost as automatic and you could be forgiven for not realising there’s a real live person on the other end of that Tweet.

They weren’t getting anywhere through the traditional route, so zealously guarded by agents and publishers (the two faces of an industry Janus, albeit both are wearing blinkers and looking backwards). So they removed the gatekeepers from the equation and struck out alone.

Unfortunately, even with the gatekeepers out of the way there’s this massive fence to climb. And it’s getting higher. Readers are building up the walls against the rabble. And who can blame them, with an mob of whores scrambling to find some way into their personal library? Pick me! Pick me! It’s like the X Factor audition stages out there. Tens of thousands of hungry souls – Zombies Got Talent. There’s a reason ITV show an edited version of the competition – who wants to sit through that lot of hapless wannabes? I pity the readers, I really do.

As a reader, I’m hugely selective. A book’s something you invite into your life, after all, and spend a fair chunk of quality, intimate time with. I’m very fond of my Kindle (if you turn that around you get kind of my Fondle, but I digress), so I’m very fussy about what I put on it. (In fact, I’ve ended up with a collection of reads queued up from people I know, so there’s a strange kind of non-industry nepotism going on there. Luckily, most have been good, but I’ll admit it’s possibly not the best filter for buying books.)

Currently, I buy hardly any traditionally published books except for firm, established favourites. I don’t buy into the notion that the backing of a traditional publisher is an integral stamp of quality. I’ve seen too many bloody good manuscripts passed over and too many not-so-good ones passed through the system and excreted onto the bookstore shelves. Too often it’s a stamp of mediocrity. It’s safe. It’s the soft option. It’s selling wool to sheep, which is what large parts of the industry are good at. Trouble is, any readers who are looking for something new may well be inclined to turn to the independents. But a brief scan of the internet will turn up a baffling array of authors bleating for attention, with way too many press-ganging a small army of friends and relatives into posting 5-star reviews on their Amazon listings. Trying pretty much any trick, in fact, just to turn a trick.

Readers, be afraid. Be very afraid.

But, on the other hand, as an author, what’s a whore to do? I’m reasonably sure batting my eyelashes and hitching up my skirts is not going to do me – or anyone else – any favours. There’s a great scene in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross where Alec Baldwin is lecturing a bunch of losers on what it takes to succeed in sales. He reaches into his suitcase and produces a pair of brass balls. I’m not sure how far those would get you on the streets of Babylon, but it seems to me you need them for this business.

As a Doctor Who author, once upon a time, you could sit back and let the brand sell your books for you. And I remember attending two different conventions, one in the UK, one in the US. In London, the writers were like B-list (I’m being charitable) celebs, we had some fun on a discussion panel in a relatively small room tucked over on one side of the hotel. In Los Angeles, we were A-listers, welcomed and celebrated as near as damnit on a par with the stars of the show. I’d sit on the signing panel with fellow authors and fans would come coyly over to me and ask if I’d sign their copies of my book. One even brought a bag full of all the Doctor Who output – books, audio dramas, a novella – I’d written at that point. Sigh. I’ve come over all nostalgic for those days now.

Part of the reason I’m getting misty-eyed is because I wasn’t there to sell books. I was there to enjoy myself. Which has a lot in common with why I write. But yes, I’d also like people to read my books because, you know, I get exponentially more enjoyment out of other people’s enjoyment of the things I enjoyed writing. Still, for all my desire to share, I’m preternaturally shy. I pour my heart and passions into my stories – why the hell would I want to pour myself and my opinions out all over the internet? Yuck. I hate myself a little bit more every time I do it. Those virtual street corners are far from my natural environment – well outside my comfort zone. I have this conviction, you see, that anything interesting I might have to say is limited to my works of fiction.

Today I would rather be back in my shell, writing my latest sci-fi adventure. That will be of interest to readers. But the poor thing’s being (temporarily) neglected again in favour of promoting my latest release.

If a book is released on the internet and no-one’s around to see it, does it make a sound? Simple answer: no. Authors have to advertise on Facebook and Twitter and all the rest, and beg for a simple RT or a wall post to pass the message on, spread the word. And like wealth, the bulk of Retweets and FFs generally flows upwards to those who least need them. So authors have to work harder to make themselves heard, which in turn drives more folks away because, let’s face it, do we really want our Twitter streams flooded under a deluge of #PleaseReadMyBook?

So it would seem that while publishers, agents and self-whoring authors are all keeping good books safely out of the reach of readers, we authors are also keeping ourselves away from (writing) good books. Where, I’d venture to suggest, our time is best spent.

Back in 2008 when I first signed up on the Harper Collins’ authonomy site, there was so much wild abandoned pluggery it’s a wonder God didn’t step in to strike the whole thing down. The funny part is, there were two key figures most known for their shameless plugging. One Alexander McNabb and, er, me. Him in his field of sunflowers, me on my Cornish cliff top in my (then-infamous) mustard shirt. When it comes to whoring, he taught me everything I know.

But that’s the thing: it was funny. To start with, I was there to enjoy myself, to have a laugh – and laughs we had aplenty. And why not? It was a game. Until I suppose we all discovered there wasn’t a prize. But it was also, as I wrote in a post for the authonomy blog, something of a microcosm of the indie publishing universe. The experimental authonomy world was flat and when we all travelled to the edge we fell off into a bigger version of the same old circus.

Readers, authors, publishers. We’re all losers in this game, the way it’s currently being played.

Maybe what’s needed is some kind of convention. An organised virtual event or one-stop shop, a meeting point for readers and authors and publishers. Somebody is at least talking about something of the sort:
Is it the answer? I’m not sure what shape this new model should take. I have no idea - because that, like the whole whoring business, it’s outside my remit. It’s not my cup of tea. All I know is, something needs to be done by somebody.

“Change, my dear, and not a moment too soon,” says the Doctor at the end of the Doctor Who story, The Caves Of Androzani, and at the beginning of another regeneration. Of course, what was needed to trigger it was Peter Davison’s Doctor keeling over and dying.

I’m not sure what we should learn from that.

Meantime, if anyone needs a whore I’ll be the shy, reluctant one still trying to wear his author hat while accessorising with something sluttier.

Publish vs Self-Publish - A Voice of Reason?

I posted on Patty Jansen's blog last week and she's posting on mine this week. I do hope she doesn't make as much mess in my place as I made over at hers. I met science fiction author Patty on Harper Collins' peer-review website for aspiring authors, authonomy. Here's her take on the whole business of getting published and where the self-publishing 'revolution' is taking us. We don't necessarily see eye to eye on this, but in diversity lies life...

On Friday, Alexander wrote a guest post for my blog entitled Rejection – An Author’s Guide detailing how his books had gained him 250 rejections, and how, despite being given hope, he had ultimately failed to find a publisher.

My first reaction was: Wow, 250 rejections. My second reaction was: Is that all? I loved Olives, and recommend it to anyone, but for the sake of argument, let’s take a different perspective.

After Alexander’s post, I went and tallied up my own rejections. I don’t tend to keep close tabs on these, because, frankly, it gets depressing. I counted more than 300. Many more publishers, especially for book-length manuscripts, never bothered to respond at all.

Within that massive pile of rejection, there are some acceptances. Some small stories to small magazines, soe to delightful but fairly unknown local anthologies, all of them fun and stroking my ego as writer, but none significant. There are also a handful of special acceptances I would like to talk about.

In 2010, I won the Writers of the Future contest. Apart from publication (at 10c per word), and $1,000 prize money, this involved a one-week workshop with some of the greatest writers of Science Fiction and fantasy alive. The workshop, the use of resources, travel to LA, accommodation at the famous Roosevelt Hotel was all paid for. This is especially significant, since I live in Australia.

It didn’t fully dawn on me how big this thing was until as part of the program, we visited the printing plant where the book was being printed. The print run is 40,000.

Later that week, there was an acceptance ceremony broadcast on the internet, which was watched live by many people, and has been watched by many more since.

Also, I have recently sold a story to the largest Science Fiction short fiction magazine, Analog Science Fiction and Fact - a print run of 25,000 dedicated readers and many online sales.

My point of mentioning these is that there is just no way a nobody writer is going to attract those kinds of numbers with a only self-published material. Yes, you can do give-aways, and sometimes these attract a few thousand freebie downloads, but how many people are actually going to read freebie downloads?

The second point is that many people want to be familiar with a writer before buying books. Do they like the style? Can they be fairly sure the book is going to meet certain standards? Personal opinion aside, when a writer has published traditionally, this writer takes both skill and audience to a self-publishing venture.

Therefore I think it’s plain dumb to write off publishers completely. How I hate the term legacy publishing, and see it bandied about with vitriol, as if large companies are stupid. These are business people, who owe the writer nothing except what’s in the contract. They owe it to their company to make a profit, and will make decisions accordingly. That’s not evil. That’s how many of us make a living. They do not owe unpublished writers anything.

On the other side of the spectrum, with the option of self-publishing, writers no longer owe publishers anything either. Fed up with shitty or downright rude business practices, writers choose to vote with their mouses, and good on them. I am one of them, and started my venture into self-publishing when a contract on a novel fell through and I couldn’t bear to take the damn thing to market again.

But.

That is not to say that there is nothing beneficial to be gained from interaction with large or slightly less large publishers.

Large publishers have one major thing in their favour: numbers. Even if your book tanks, it will have been read by many more people than you are likely to reach with self-publishing only. These people have already invested in your work and, unless they absolutely hated it, are more likely to buy your next self-published book over the self-published book of an author they don’t know.

To be honest, I find the mutual disdain between self-publishers and publishing houses and those published by them quite silly. There are books that won’t appeal to large publishers on first sight (mind you, they will appeal if they sell well self-published). Writers used to go to small press with these titles. These days, they might as well do it themselves. As aside, I think small press will suffer more from the self-publishing boom than large press and will probably have to re-invent themselves as editing and formatting services. There will always be a market for mass-published books.

From a writer’s perspective, self-publishing and traditional publishing enhance each other. You draw people to your work by publishing traditionally, and sell your other work to them for 70% royalties at Amazon. Sneaky, huh?

A bit more about Patty
Patty Jansen lives in Sydney, Australia, where she spends most of her time writing Science Fiction and Fantasy. She publishes in both traditional and indie venues. Her story This Peaceful State of War placed first in the second quarter of the Writers of the Future contest. Her futuristic space travel story Survival in Shades of Orange will appear in Analog Science Fiction and Fact.

Her novels (available at ebook venues, such as the Kindle store) include Watcher's Web (soft SF), The Far Horizon (SF for younger readers), Charlotte's Army (military SF) and books 1 and 2 of the Icefire Trilogy Fire & Ice and Dust & Rain (post-apocalyptic steampunk fantasy).

You'll find Patty on Twitter (@pattyjansen), Facebook, LinkedIn, Goodreads, LibraryThing, google+ and her Must Use Bigger Elephants blog is at: http://pattyjansen.com/

Must Use Bigger Elephants

I'm over in Australia today rabbiting away about my remarkable tally of rejections from the British publishing industry on Ozzie Sci-Fi writer Patty Jansen's brilliantly titled blog, Must Use Bigger Elephants.

It's all part of Patty's 'Blog Tour', a brilliant scheme writers have evolved to share space on each others' blogs and therefore give each other access to their readers for a day. I've guest posted on a number of other writers' blogs (and gladly hosted them on this one), mostly because of the international community of writers I've stayed in touch with since we all met on Harper Collins' Authonomy website.  Few us still visit Authonomy, but a great number of us still stay in touch.

It's interesting, Authonomy could well turn out to have had a demonstrably important and wide-ranging effect on writing and fiction that was completely unintended by its founders. And one not entirely in their interests, as many of us have thrown up our hands at the publishing industry and gone it alone. Tools like blog tours give writers access to global audiences as well as giving readers access to new writers. And of course self-publishing means you can reach global audiences far more easily than all the printing, shipping, distributing and stocking involve in 'traditional' publishing.

So do please be my guest and pop over to MUBE and have a root around and perhaps, if you're into science fiction, take a look at Patty's work. Don't forget to behave well while you're there and wipe your feet before going in...

How To Write A Book

This, believe it or not, was my Christmas gift from 
The Niece From Hell - a 'starter pack' of book napkins!.

You have to bear in mind the advice below comes from a self-published author who's just started out and will likely never sell more than a couple of hundred books, not Jeffrey Deaver, okay? You are, of course, more than welcome to buy my book and decide for yourself whether to listen to me.

Pal Abdulla Al Suwaidi (@Aabo0 to you) asked me on Twitter to share the resources I used developing my book, Olives - A Violent Romance. To that end, the below.

In terms of actual literature on writing books, there are hundreds of books on how to write a book. It's notable that few of them are written by successful authors of anything other than books on how to write books and many carry mendacious subtitles such as 'How To Get Published'. I think you've more chance of being published by wearing a duck on your head and standing naked outside Blackstone's than you have by reading these books. Books on writing will only take you so far - the rest of the process is as arcane and mystifying as the famous Nebulising Nonentity of Nether Thragulon Nine.

I own two books about writing, foisted upon me by an insistent and exasperated Phillipa Fioretti as we worked together on an early edit of Olives. Self Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Brown and Dave King and The First Five Pages by Noah Lukeman. Both are books I am very glad I bought. Other than those, I suppose I've read a load of articles and stuff online but most of my learning has come from working with writer friends on my manuscript or theirs - there are writer's websites such as Harper Collins' Authonomy or Litopia which let you post up your manuscript and allow others to 'crit' it. The upside of this is you get lots of advice and input, the downside is there can be a lot of backbiting, competitive 'backing' where, for instance authonomy, the site is based on competing and it can be hard to know if the advice comes from a seasoned pro or a complete dufus.

Should you join a writers' group? I have found (as I acknowledge in Olives) the company of writer friends utterly invaluable, but I stress they are friends - people whose company I sought and enjoy. I have never belonged to a writers' group as such and look on them with mild horror. But don't 'go it alone' for pity's sake. I did that for over five years and now fervently wish I hadn't wasted so much time.

I follow a number of blogs, but these are more focused on publishing rather than writing. However, I'd recommend:

The Passive Voice - mostly posts from other people's blogs, but his selections are usually thought-provoking and his observations often add value, too. And, of course, he's finding other writers worth following for you.

The Shatzkin Files - Consultant Mike Shatzkin was one of the early voices that 'got' digital and he remains a must-read commentator on publishing.

The Bookseller - The trade journal of publishing. I find this great for following the industry and occasionally  useful for 'reality checking' some of the more strident neologist voices.

Pub Rants - A useful agent's blog. Kristin is one of the very few agents who I follow.

Writer Beware - A good early warning system for scams and scammers. As self publishing grows, so will the marketing scams that promise to market your book etc.

Mad Genius Club - A bunch of writers writing about writing, always worth a visit.

The Independent Publishing Magazine - Does what it says on the cover.

Obviously, if anyone else has any smart ideas on writer/author/publishing blogs to follow, feel free to chuck 'em in the comments.

As for the rest of it, here are some of my learnings so you don't have to smack your head against the same brick walls I did.

How to write a book

So, you've set up all these blogs in your reader and popped off to Amazon to buy those books. You've got a nice, sharp pencil and a piece of paper ready. Now you can start writing your book. Step back from that keyboard, I was serious about the pencil and paper.

1) A Novel Form
What kind of book are you intending to write? Be clear with yourself, categorise it from day one. Chic-lit for the over 30s European housewife? A thriller for early 20-something professionals? Tighten it as much as possible and try to imagine your audience. Is it a large audience? What kind of books is it buying? Where is it buying them? Is your genre of choice one you read a lot in? Which authors do you admire/enjoy the most? Are they selling well? How will you be different to them, yet occupy the same space on the shelf? (One writer solved this problem by using a pseudonym that placed him next to his 'target author' on bookshelves!)

These questions all seem far removed from the beautiful process of creating literature and they indeed are. But if you want your beautiful literature to get published, you'd better start thinking commercially from the get-go. Publishers don't buy beauty any more, they buy books they think they can sell in the mainstream. If you're in it for the beauty and to hell with the consequences, then you're self-publishing and you're as well to understand that before you press a single key.

Now to use that piece of paper (some people use whiteboards or big charts, I happen to use paper). Presumably you've got an idea of the basic plot of the book. Now you can Google 'narrative curve' and came back to this after you've spent a couple of days reading all the advice out there. I start out by putting the events in my book in little clumps of text and linking them with arrows, so each clump is a little like a scene. Each scene, then, takes your character forwards on the journey of your book (the journey can, of course, take place on an armchair), by moving the character or by moving other characters and situations that influence or impact your character. The arrows let you move to the next scene and connect scenes. Force yourself to do this through the whole book to the end (the temptation is to do about half and then decide to resolve the rest when you get to it). It doesn't have to be totally granular - it can be a very 'broad brush' approach, but you want to have an idea of what you're setting out to do. Ideally, the whole thing can also be colour-coded to belong to the beginning, middle and end, which takes you back to the narrative curve stuff.

2) Start writing
Now you can start putting your scenes on paper, knowing where they belong in the full picture. In fact, books are ideally structured in scenes, each scene having an objective to it that moves the story forward. Each scene belongs in a place, so be careful to let your reader know where he or she is. Each scene has a single point of view, that is the events are witnessed through one character. If you start using two or more POVs, you'll confuse the reader. This is where you Google "point of view" and come back to this article in a couple of weeks when you've exhausted yourself with the endless debate writers love to have about POV.

How much should you write? I'd aim for 1,000 words a day, but if you're doing 500 that's fine. The keyboard has arguably done us some dis-favours here as it makes it all to easy to dash ahead like a charging rhino, which is hardly the stuff of considered prose. Writers who worked long-hand did a great deal less editing, I suspect, than we do today.

3) Consider these things.
What person will you write your book in? There are arguments for first person and arguments for third person. Come back when you've done Googlin' - I wrote Olives in the first person, but my other books are all written in the third person. The first person demands that you really get behind one character and I created something of a rod for my back by choosing to narrate my story through a character who isn't intended to be necessarily likeable or admirable, in fact other characters elicit your sympathies and admiration. I personally think it's worked, but I'm biased. And it was a hell of a lot of work to do. Third person would have been simpler and easier all round. Having said that, there is some really smashing literature out there written in the first person and a cherry-pick of the very finest I'd suggest would include Camus' The Stranger, Fowles' The Magus and Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. If you're going to write in the first person, I'd recommend some movement of green paper over to Jeff Bezos' account.

Who is your main character? No, I mean really who? One of the things that makes JRR Tolkein's work so fabulous is that he created his world before he populated it, even down to defining its history, folk-lore, culture and languages. What are your character's personality and quirks, background and situation? How will your character be changed by the story you're telling? How will other characters interact with your main characer - and who are they? All of this is "characterisation" and, yes, you should Google it right now and come back to this article in a few days when you've defined your characters and fleshed out their lives so you feel you know them. They can develop as you're writing, of course - but you're best having thought them through first so you can have them react to situations realistically and in a way we believe and can empathise with.

4) As you write...
Think about where you are in each scene and how it is best experienced through your character's POV. What are the sights and sounds? The smells? The feelings? Close your eyes and  breathe it in, live it. And now put it down on paper. Use one word where ten will do, but pick the word that really nails it. Don't kill yourself being a 'rivet man' and detailing the scene to the point where we all start haemorrhaging , just set it up in a few well chosen words and then make it come alive for us by referencing it through your characters' senses. Don't forget touch - a cold key in the pocket, a warm baby. You might like to Google "writing style" here and come back in a couple of months or so.

Language is the only tool you've got, in the same way as voice is the only tool you have during a phone call. That means you have to use it to create pictures, draw the reader in and build a sense of reality. Strangely, less is more - a few well chosen words is all you need because we will fill in the gaps for you. But do avoid cliché and don't use two verbs where one will do. In fact, one writer friend is a passionate killer of adverbs and she's right almost all of the time. Consider your choice of words. If Simon gets up and walks from the room leaving Helen behind is Simon being as interesting or engaging as if he pushes back the chair irritably and strides out of the room, brushing past Helen? Be careful not to let yourself get too 'purple' here, it's a balancing act.

Focus on your characters' emotional responses, but do try and avoid telling us what those responses, those feelings and reactions are. We're better off you showing us what they are in the way the characters react. Here's another Google moment, the idea of "showing not telling". See you in a few days.

5) Hammer away
 Keep hammering away at it, building your scenes and helping your characters live the lives you've given them in your mind. Keep to the straight and narrow, don't forget we're going to have to read this, so your amusing, if self-indulgent invention of Granny Smith who is a totally great character but actually matters not one jot is something you might like to reconsider spending time on given you're almost certainly going to dump her when you get around to the edit. Do bear in mind many books suffer from a 'soggy middle', something you should avoid if you've planned well but can also avoid by bearing this particular bear trap in mind. One day, probably in about 80-100 days depending on your genre and story, you're going to sit back and experience a remarkable moment of satisfaction.

Now the doubt can creep in from the dark corners and gnaw at you. Is it any good? Did it all work? Will anyone read it? Is it just a pile of self-indulgent tripe?

Welcome to my world. And good luck to you.

Rejection. An Author's Guide

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The very nice piece about me in The National last Sunday did  contain one or two teensy-weensy mistakettes, one of which was that Olives - A Violent Romance had been passed up by 250 agents and 12 publishers. That's not actually the case, that's my total rejection count, not just those notched up by Olives.

It's mostly my fault - for the first few years I pursued my writing goal in secret and flung myself repeatedly against the same wall, the Dunning Kruger Syndrome coursing through my veins. I'd send off batches of manuscripts, four or five at a time, convincing myself that all sorts of things were possible. That it was a numbers game. That agents further up the alphabet would be easier. That this edit was the one that'd make it through.

My first rejection was from an agent at big agency Peters, Fraser and Dunlop (PFD to you), who had made a big noise online about how he loved to help new authors. I remember cursing and shaking my fist at him (from 4,000 miles away) as his form rejection showed me how little he, in fact, cared for us unsung geniuses.

I've already said several times that I now consider my first book, Space, was badly written. It was funny, but really lacked the technique to cut the mustard. I realised that in 2007 when I finally 'came out' and made contact with other writers. I was still 'shopping' Space then, hopeful that whatever quality had got it to the 'Editor's Desk' on Harper Collins' peer-review site Authonomy would be seen by someone who would take it on and get it a nice editor. It was not to be. I had finished Olives and started submitting it to agents before then, but Olives too had been notching up rejections from agents, some of whom had said odd things like 'The British public isn't interested in the Middle East' and 'We see enough bombs in the world without wanting to read about them.' I took these statements seriously at the time, but have since learned not to - literary agents and editors alike will cast around for the nearest glib phrase to decorate a rejection, these aren't thought-through guidance, but a brush-off. They do an awful lot of rejecting, they reserve their time and effort for the stuff that gets through.

So Olives must have racked up another 100-odd rejections (in batches, in between major editing runs and re-writes) before one request for a 'full read' came back with 'it isn't dramatic enough'. I stomped off with gritted teeth and the determination to give them dramatic if they wanted dramatic. Beirut, an insane, pumped up international spy thriller on crack, the result of that particular temper tantrum, was certainly dramatic.And it was also rejected time and again before a cheeky correspondence with the very kind agent Andrew Lownie resulted in my getting a professional reader to look at the manuscript - his advice taken, I resubmitted to Robin Wade and it was Robin who signed me up and took Beirut to 12 of London's Finest.

Who all rejected it.

It's certainly a remarkable tale - 250 rejections is quite a tally. Many of these are completely my own fault - for going it alone, for thinking this was a numbers game, for sticking with it and for beating my head repeatedly at the same wall. But a good number of them are the fault of an industry in its death throes. Agents are gatekeepers for publishers, filtering out anything they don't believe is a dead cert winner. Agents get paid 15% of authors' revenues and like nothing more than a nice, fat advance. If you can land a £100,000 advance once a month alongside some strong residuals, you're in the moolah, no? So there's a strong trend to support the well-trodden path, to be mainstream and not take risks. Added to that, the sheer number of hopefuls submitting to agents means manuscripts will be rejected for the most arbitrary reasons - bad formatting, an unconventional beginning, a difficult topic. And then there is the faddishness of safe publishing - if African Memoirs are this year's Big New Thing, then they're not going to be too open to a Sweeping Russian Drama. Sorry, Leo.

In the UK today, books are going straight to paperback and straight to discount - 3 for 2s and half price deals stacked up in supermarket bins as publishers try to find new ways to hit the popular pocket for money as they struggle with a public becoming ever more indifferent to full length linear narrative. People today are consuming so many streams of content and entertainment in such easily digestible media - and of course, e-readers are now part of that world, which rather confuses those used to thinking of the dynamics of publishing in terms of percentages of the hugely inefficient wodge of dead tree that is a booky book. E-book sales are going through the roof as the prices asked for by authors are going through the floor - publishing is finding it ever harder to map out its relevance in this scenario. And so only the very safest, most obvious decisions get made.

I'm sure someone in publishing will drop by and say, no, that's not the case - we just back quality. But I don't think the protest will carry much conviction these days.

So how can an author today handle rejection? First, remember it's not personal. Second, take any feedback as a hugely positive thing (remember, they're focusing on the stuff that gets through, so if they spare you a comment or two, they've done you a big favour). Third, don't let 'em pile up to 250. If you notch up just ten of those nasty little photocopied slips, assume the next ten won't be any different and get your ass off to www.kdp.com and sign up to Kindle Direct Publishing.

Because that, my dears, is where the party is.