Territorial Book Rights - An Unnecessary Evil

Image via Wikipedia

I have had a number of potential readers of Olives - A Violent Romance point out to me that they are unable to download the Kindle ebook, getting a message from Amazon that the book is not available to readers in the Middle East.

This answers one particular burning question for me. In the past, when I have asked why Amazon won't serve content to the Middle East, People Of Knowledge have sagely rubbed their chins and told me it's a question of rights. As the rights holder to Olives, I specifically checked the option on my Kindle Direct Publishing dashboard that opened up distribution to the entire world. There is no rights related reason why my book should be blocked from Middle East based readers. We can infer, therefore, that the reason Amazon is blocking other content from the Middle East - particularly self-published content - is also not necessarily related to rights.


Amazon, Apple and Google are effectively retarding the development of a vibrant and innovative content market in the Middle East. None of these three organisations support the distribution of paid content to the region. They are culturally bombing us back to the dark ages. While the US, UK, Europe and Asia are migrating to e-readers and reader-based content of increasing richness, the Middle East is unable to buy books, content or apps from any of the 'marketplaces' these companies operate.

However, while it's not about rights in my case, it certainly is with traditional publishers - they're holding on to the old territorial models with a tenacity that would almost be admirable if it weren't so fundamentally idiotic.

The idea of territorial rights in publishing comes from the 'old' model of print and distribution, with a little language slung into the mix and some price-fixing to boot. The world can be carved up into a number of relatively neat territories, for instance the US and Canada, UK and Commonwealth or Middle East. Each of these has a common language, can be served by a single print run and distribution/marketing push and network and each can be allocated a price tag that suits the market. (The print run stuff is subject to some cost dynamics - depending on the size of the run and shipping costs, it would likely make more sense to split the run, but it's not something set in stone. The broad target is a 'landed cost' of around 10% of cover price.)


So when, say, a US publisher buys the rights to a book, they take on the cost of print, distribution and marketing. Other markets will also take on translation costs, which are significant. This outlay on a book means that territorial rights are defended vigorously in the traditional publishing world. But it also means that rights have a value - and publishers will pay significant amounts of money to secure the rights to a successful book or a book they believe will be successful.

The Internet has, of course, blown that model wide apart. I can now write a book in Dubai and sell it in Boston, Beirut and Bogota. Interestingly, Amazon gives me the option to set different prices for my book in different markets - and, fascinatingly (well, to me at least) will change the displayed price I see where there are disparities in my pricing. For instance, Olives costs marginally less in the US than it does in the UK (blame the UK government's insane insistence on charging VAT on ebooks) but when I, as a UK customer, visit Amazon.com, the site displays a dollar equivalent of the UK price rather than the dollar price I set for the book in the US market.

Amazon's getting quite good at supporting this type of price fixing - you just need to look at how the Kindle costs $79 in the US and $133 in the UK. They say Amazon is subsidising the cost of Kindles in the US, but to me it looks more like the rest of the world is subsidising them.

So when a 'traditional' publisher creates an ebook and puts it up for sale on Amazon.com, two things happen. The first is the author only gets 20-25% of the price, even though Amazon pays a 70% royalty on Kindle books and there is virtually no cost of print and distribution (about 60% of the cost of a booky book goes on these two). The second is the traditional publisher applies the traditional idea of rights and won't put the book up for sale globally.

Which is insane. The very thing that makes the Internet tick as a platform for e-books is its scale. I can reach readers all over the world with a few clicks, I can sell my book to audiences based on their interests, not their location. The whole idea of the long tail, the concept that makes Amazon possible, is based on scale. Why would a publisher restrict sales of an e-book to a limited home market when it could reach all of humanity for not one penny more?*

The answer is rights - and the publisher's hope that one day it could sell rights to other world markets. And in order to keep that potential asset, the publisher will restrict the market an author can address whilst basing its decisions on arbitrary assessments of what a market will or won't buy based on little more than 'experience' and 'knowledge' rather than trusting us all as consumers and just letting us decide whether or not we want to buy a book about rubber planters in Malaya, geishas in Japan or bullfighters in Spain.

* I'm not factoring in translation, I know. But the opportunity is the same - an Italian book, say, can now be available to everyone in the world who speaks Italian.

Olives - A Book in Print

I keep passing milestones I hadn't expected to be milestones. I had barely finished reading my first (and thoughtful, thanks 'Big Dave'!) review of Olives on Amazon.co.uk when I found myself down in Dubai's Al Quoz industrial area picking up two boxes packed with fifty books. In the moment when Tony from Raidy Emirates handed over those boxes, Olives - A Violent Romance was 'published' in the true sense.

If you remember, I had been holding out for 'proper' booky book paper and getting nowhere. I have had so many arguments with people about Kindles and the 'feel of curling up on the sofa with a good book' that I decided there was to be no compromise. Books are printed on a special grade of paper called novel paper - it's a lightweight, high bulk paper. If you pick up a paperback by the spine, it doesn't flop. Most 'books' printed in the UAE are printed on standard grade 'wood free' art paper, which is way heavier. If you pick up one of those by the spine, the weight of the paper makes it flop over. It just doesn't feel right. Olives had to printed on novel paper. The decision has cost me, literally, weeks of delay as my journey to find anyone who stocked the paper (or, indeed, even understood what I was on about) led me into blind alley after blind alley.

Every printer in the Emirates was quick to assure me that yes, they did have the paper I was talking about, each one greeting me at journey's end with the inevitable idiotic, drooling grin and a swatch of copier paper. The thinking seemed to be that I'd settle for whatever they had once I'd driven across town to them. One fool actually quoted me for news print. I finally decided my only option was to print in Lebanon, Egypt or Jordan where you can actually find novelists and, therefore, printers who can print real books. I asked heart-rendingly talented Lebanese cartoonist Jumana Medlej for a recommendation and she came back, quick as a flash with 'Raidy, silly. I knew you'd finally realise Lebanon's the only place to print.'

The whole idea rendered my weeks-long quest for 'permission to print in the UAE' worthless. I was going to print overseas after all. I reconciled myself to the fact and got in touch with Raidy, who returned my query. Yes, they could print on novel paper but I might like to give the job to their Dubai based subsidiary, which also stocks the paper. Hallelujah!

Another milestone this morning - signing my first copy of Olives. How do you sign a book? Surely not with your 'real' signature! You can imagine the Nigerians having a field day with that one, queuing up with 'Could you dedicate it to "Please transfer the amount of" if you don't mind?'...

And to top off the start to the week, the SEO is beginning to kick in and 'Olives' now appears on the first page of results if you search books on Amazon.co.uk (although the results on amazon.com are still pretty poor). You wait, one day I'll knock those smug bastards at Crespo off the top spot...

Olives - A Violent Romance launches at TwingeDXB - the first Dubai Urban Festival on the 10th December where I'll be doing a chat and reading thingy, along with poet Frank Dullaghan and Emirati writer Sultan Darmaki. The book will be available in Jashanmals stores and other major UAE outlets from then onwards.

If you can't wait, or if you're based outside the Middle East, you can get a print copy of Olives at amazon.com, linked for your clicking pleasure right here. And if you have a Kindle, you can buy it here in the UK or here in the USA. If you have another e-book reader (from iPad through to Kobo), you can buy ebooks here at Smashwords.

40

Image via Wikipedia

Happy birthday, United Arab Emirates!

We've had our ups and downs together, the UAE and me, but I've got no complaints about the past 18 years since Sarah and I sat looking at each other over a green and beige covered table in the President Hotel and asked each other what the hell we thought we were doing. It's been 25 years since I first came to this country to visit and yes, the journey has been phenomenal.

We're staying in tonight. There's little point in trying to get anywhere through the slow-moving motorcade that every road in Sharjah has become. All you can hear outside is hooting and excited jabbering. The local 'cold store' has packed its counter-tops with silly string and flags. It's going to be a late night for everyone - let's just hope it's a safe one, too.

Fakhr El-Din Restaurant Amman - The Update

It's a fascinating exercise in SEO wot I posted about earlier today. Amman's classiest and tastiest (IMHO) Arabic restaurant, Fakhreddine, has long caused major search-derived traffic hereabouts because, in fact, the restaurant is properly called 'Fakhr El-Din'. and its 'proper' website is http://fakhreldin.com/. The restaurant, part of the ATICO group, has had to face standardising the English version of an Arabic name - so you could call it Fakhr El Din or Fakhr Eddine or Fakhr El-Din or Fakhreddine (the popular spelling at the time I first blogged about the restaurant) or any other combination of names.

The conundrum is which spelling you plump for - and which misspellings you include in your SEO efforts. The most popular (as I say, at the time, 'Fakhreddine' was the 'defacto' name of the restaurant in English) ones can be easily hijacked or cause frustration, so the trick is working out what they are and re-routing them to your 'real' spelling.

Arabic is wicked like that. Are you Ali Alhashemi, Ali Al-Hashemi or Ali Al Hashemi? Perhaps Ali Hashemi? All four are essential SEO targets. What's more, it gets even more complex as you 'drill down' into search.

But for now, let us consider Fakhr El Din to be the name to click on. It's a GREAT restaurant. The Fat Expat review says it all, really: It's linked here!

Fakhreddine

Image via Wikipedia

I flew to Jordan this week to speak and also gave a workshop on digital communications at the MediaME Digital Summit. In my humble opinion, MediaME - together with ArabNet and Click - is one of the region's critical digital events and this year's conference featured some great speakers (present company etc etc) and much thought-provoking opinion and debate.

It was slightly odd to be back in Jordan after having hit the 'go' button on the Middle East print edition of Olives (A Violent Romance) - somehow the book has become solid, concrete now. The King's Highway (the road from the airport to Amman, but also the Kingdom's core arterial route from Amman to Aqaba) is being rebuilt and is apparently to become a privatised toll route. The new airport will be ready by summer next year. And Amman nightclub Nai has been refurbished and rebranded. Just as well, after the incidents recounted in Olives! Did I mention you can now buy Olives as a printed book at amazon.com, BTW? I did? Ah, okay then...

During the workshop at MediaME, I used this silly wee blog as an example of SEO, pointing out how mad it was that I 'owned' Amman's delightful Fakhreddine restaurant on Google. If you Google 'Fakhreddine Amman' you don't get the restaurant itself (as you rightly should - it's a must visit if you're staying in Amman and want to eat some of the best Arab food the Levant can dish up), but you do get me.

This is not a good thing. It's a compelling reason for the restaurant to invest some money in SEO and grabbing back its ownership of its brand.

I got a comment from the audience - "Actually, we're their agency and if you Google just 'Fakhreddine' you get our client!

No you don't. You get Fakhr Al Din, various Fakhreddines, the restaurant in Broumana (Lebanon) and me. You don't get Amman's famous Lebanese/Arabic/Levantine (delete as your preference dictates) restaurant Fakhreddine. If you Google 'Fakhreddine restaurant' you get Fakhreddine Broumana, London and me in that order. You don't get Fakhreddine Amman. And that's mad, because the place is famous and generally celebrated for its excellence.

I wish I'd stopped the workshop to look it up then and there. If Amman's Fakhreddine had a website (if it does, I can't find it), I'd do a post specifically to right the wrong and redirect hungry Googlers to the right place, because I really do appreciate and support this most excellent of restaurants and wish it nothing but the very best.

But it does, like so many Middle Eastern businesses, need to get smarter about its online presence and search parameters.

Olives - The Book Goes To Print

It's an odd feeling, there's a strange finality sending my novel Olives to the printers. I've sent dozens of magazines, yearbooks and other projects to print over the years, but nothing quite equals sending something so personal off to print. And a book's somehow different to a magazine - a 'literal' in a magazine is an annoyance, but usually something that you live with because it's transitory. I once printed a yearbook with the immortal words 'Midddle East Buyer's Guide' across two pages in 24 point print and it was two years before anyone noticed. I put this down at the time to the SEP field (first proposed by Douglas Adams, the SEP field renders objects invisible by the sheer scale of the incongruity they represent, therefore making them 'Somebody Else's Problem. In Adams' case, a spaceship that looked like an Italian bistro).

But it's different with a book. A book is graven, as it were, in stone. This particular book, Olives, has been edited to death. It's had structural edits, line edits, readers' edits, a professional edit and then I finally got my author's proof from Amazon's Createspace and, to my horror, managed to dot said proof with little red line corrections. Quite a lot of them. Sloppy writing, slapdash phrases, clunky bits. And a few honest to goodness literals in there, too. How did they get through?

But that's it, now. If you buy a copy and find a literal, I don't want to know. I'm done changing it. This is the finished product. This is my statement.

The Middle East edition of Olives launches at TwingeDXB - the first Dubai Urban Festival on the 10th December. It'll be in UAE bookshops from then onwards and I'm working to get it into Lebanese and Jordanian bookshops as soon as I possibly can after that.

If you can't wait, or if you're based outside the Middle East, you can get a print copy of Olives at amazon.com, linked for your clicking pleasure right here.

Olives Book Pricing Thinks

Image by epSos.de via Flickr

How do you put a price on a book these days? Many authors are selling Kindle books for $0.99, many others $2.99 but mainstream publishers are putting prices at $5.99 and more - all of Iain Banks' books will cost you $8.02, for instance, while Jeffery Deaver's Carte Blanche will set you back a cool $16.05 - his backlist is set at $8.02.


Amazon pays publishers/authors either a 35% or a 70% share on sales. The 70% share only applies to books priced between $0.99 and $9.99. So the mad thing is that while you pay double for Deaver's Carte Blanche compared to his back list, the publisher only gets the same as selling it for $8.02. Go figure.


So how do I price Olives the novel wot I have writ? I decided on $5.99 for the e-book, equivalent to £3.99, which is the UK price (and €3.99 for Europe). I actually make less from a US sale than a UK or European one because of the withholding tax. How did I decide on that price? Purely on an average price of novels I scanned that were from published authors. I can't really say that I'm in this for the money, although it'll be nice to break even. But I'm not selling my work for less than the cost of a couple of pints or a t-shirt. It's worth more than that. And this is really where my pricing strategy is at.


Other writers have proper strategies. Poster child for Kindle success Amanda Hocking, for instance, sells each book in her trilogies for different prices with a low entry level, typically $0.99 rising to $2.99. Interestingly, now she's signed to a publisher, her new books seem to be priced at $8.99 - I've seen no sign of any great outcry about that yet, but would expect one to come!



Finding out book prices in the Yankee Dollar isn't as easy as it first appears, BTW. Amazon works out you're an Amazon UK customer and 'games' the dollar prices to make them equivalent to the Sterling prices - super sneaky, huh? This must at least in part be due to the appalling disparity in Kindle prices - the entry level Kindle in the USA costs $79, while in the UK it's an unjustifiable £89 ($133!!!).


The same is true of the international print edition of Olives- the amazon.com price for the printed book is $15.99, which is about equivalent to average book prices for this type of work as far as I can tell. With the Amazon edition of Olives the booky book, I make varying amounts of money from each copy sold depending on the platform its sold across. And again, I lose 30% to Uncle Sam. This is painful to me as a resident of the gloriously Tax Free UAE even though, as I say (and will keep saying until everyone believes me), it's not about the wonga.


The Middle East Olives book price is based on the Amazon price and again is based on an average price on the back of books, with slight reductions for Jordan and Lebanon based on anecdotal evidence of street prices for books there (I asked pals on Twitter, in other words).


And that's it. The whole brilliant Olives the book pricing strategy laid bare.

Permission To Print

Image via Wikipedia

It always reminds me of the Black Adder sketch in which George is requesting 'Permission to speak' with increasing desperation, said permission denied by the wily Blackadder.

Permission to print is something I bet few writers have to seek on their road to publication. Here in the UAE, it's a must-have - no printing press here will touch a book that doesn't have a Permission, much as no garage will touch a crash repair without a police report.

The permission is granted by the National Media Council, which has to read the work. I was extraordinarily lucky in that the gentleman who manages the English language section of the Media Control Department was very struck with Olives - A Violent Romance and actually went off leave to go into the office and sign off the MS and grant me that all-important go-ahead. It's taken until now for the news to trickle up the Abu Dhabi highway to the NMC offices in Dubai so today I went off to pick up my Permission.

There's a fee of Dhs25 to pay, which I slid onto the desk of the Relevant Person. 'Ah, no, you have to have e-dirham.'

You're kidding me. For Dhs25? Oh yes, she said, handing me a gnarly-looking form with all sorts of requirements, labour cards, passport copies, authorisations, countersignatures by authorised persons. Worse, you have to go all the way to the Ministry of Finance in Bur Dubai to apply in person. For a Dhs25 fee? Yes, this is mandatory.

I left the NMC after vain protests, my head in a spin. I looked at the e-dirham website and found there was an easier way - you can pick up a pre-paid e-dirham card at any branch of a number of banks! Yippee!

A number of banks later, I realise this is total bunkum - the banks at the immigration department have these cards, one chap told me. Sure enough, they did. I dashed back to the NMC all eager and happy. They were having a reception for their colleagues from Abu Dhabi and the place was filled with plates of food and oudh was being burned - so much it set the fire alarms off.

Despite the carnival atmosphere, my own little firework display was to suffer the fate of micturation. She wouldn't take the e-dirham card. 'Only this card from Ministry of Finance I can take.' But it's the same card, look, e-dirham, it's precisely the same card, it just has a different picture and doesn't have my photo. 'No.'

That's when I lost it. I'd printed out two 280-page manuscripts and given them to her, I'd printed a third and sent it to Abu Dhabi, I'd been back and forth to the NMC and the Ministry of Youth and Culture. And now, at the end of it all, I was being made to jump through even more hoops for Dhs25!!! I asked for the mudhir. But he, of course, was closeted in a meeting room with the guests from Abu Dhabi. My gatekeeper managed to mask a look of triumph, but I knew it was there anyway. I left in a high old temper and dragged my way down to the Ministry of Finance.

Who were wonderful. Friendly, smiling and bright, young Buthaina had me sorted out in a few minutes, even transferring the balance from the pre-paid card I'd bought to my new photo ID card. It all certainly lightened the old mood as I set off once again to the NMC, my new e-dirham card sparkling in my pocket.

The long and the short of it all is that I have my Permission to Print in my sticky little fingers. So now I'm going to do just that: print Olives!

Rejection. An Author's Guide

Image via Wikipedia

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.

So You've Written A Book. What's It About?

Image via Wikipedia

The first question anyone asks you when they find out you've written a book is 'What's it about?'. This is a natural byproduct of human curiosity, but comes with a built-in conundrum. You have about fifteen seconds before their eyes glaze over and they suddenly remember they had to be somewhere else like really fast.

How do you sum up your 80,000 words of lovingly crafted prose in a few seconds? You can't just read them the blurb (you could maybe have it printed onto index cards to give to people. Hmmm, that might be an idea), but you need to find a way of getting the scheme across to them because if writing books does nothing else, it transforms us from thieves into salesmen.

Thieves? Yes, everyone wot writes books steals moments, traits, expressions and gestures from the people around them. The biggest act of thievery in Olives, for instance, is Northern Irish spy Gerald Lynch. He's got a hangup about being called 'Gerry', it's always Gerald. He's spent twenty years escaping from being Gerry Lynch. That, for instance, was stolen. Someone said it to me in a meeting and I couldn't wait to get away and make that phrase into a new character. Believe it or not, the spy in Olives used to be a fiftyish, gingery fellow called Nigel Soames. Gerald Lynch, born of a theft, replaced him that very evening and has gone on to be the central character in my two subsequent books.

Salesman because all I want to do is sell you my book now. When you ask me what it's about, I'm going to take the chance to tell you enough to make you want to pick it up when you see it in the bookshop, beguiled by Naeema Zarif's stunning cover art, and take it to the cash counter. I want you to click on the book cover on the right, go to the the Kindle store and send the data flying over Whispernet to populate your reader.And I want you to be curious enough to click the 'Olives - A Violent Romance' link on my blog and find out more about it so you can be ready to buy it when it comes out in December. At least you know what's deep in my black little heart now, the next time we meet. And don't think it stops there, by the way. I want to talk you into reviewing it on Amazon and GoodReads too. I've become quite shameless.

And, as you ask, Olives is about a young British journalist called Paul Stokes who goes to Jordan to live and work who becomes attracted to a Jordanian girl. He's blackmailed into spying on her family by British intelligence, who claim the family's involved in funding terrorism and he has to try to work out quite who the good guys and bad guys are as a series of massive bombings go off around him that seem somehow tied to his movements. With each decision he makes, things just get worse until he finds he has to betray everyone around him to survive.