Thanks, George Winston!

American pianist and composer George Winston's Four Seasons are some of my favourite musical things, perhaps surprising given I'm also quite fond of listening to System of a Down, but there you go.

There's an iPod in the bedroom at McNabb mansions and we go to sleep listening to music - nothing to shouty, you understand. George Winston's work is perfect. And so it is that one night I went to sleep listening to this music - February Sea from the first season, Winter into Spring. It made me think of a girl dancing in the rain and that's what was in my mind as my eyes for what someone cleverer than me once called 'the little death of sleep'.

I woke up in the morning with a book in my head, clear as day - clear as blacktop through the desert, the story stretched out in front of me. I bashed it out in four weeks, then spent seven years editing, changing and re-writing it.

Oddly the sequence of the girl dancing in the rain (I always knew she was downhill from the Blue Fig in Abdoun) has not only remained in the book but ended up pretty smack bang in the middle of it and marks the pivotal turning point in the story.

You can find the whole album on YouTube, but it's available on Dancing Cat Records and you can buy it here at Amazon.com which is the same place you can also buy this rather wonderful book.

Thanks, George!

Wadi Wurayah

Image by Peachland Joe via Flickr

It's been a while since Wadi Wurayah has been in the news. In fact, as far back as this totally pointless piece in the now (you can see why, too) defunct EmBiz24x7.

But now it's a 7Days front page splash! OUTRAGE AS VANDALS SPOIL BEAUTY SPOT trumpets the terrific tabloid. Actually, I hate to tell you this guys, but Wurayah has looked like it escaped from LA Ink since the early 1990s, when a road was built that turned the former 19km offroad drive required to get to Wurayah into a two minute saunter in the old Tiiida.

Wurayah is the only year-round waterfall in the UAE and a site of very real natural beauty. If you nip up to the top of the waterfall there's a little bowl you can sit in and let the cool water run over you as you lie back and reflect that yes, it is indeed Tough In The Gulf. You used to get to it by turning off the Khor Fakkan road by a wrecked aeroplane (well, until they removed the wreckage, which caused a lot of readers of Motivate's Offroad in the Emirates more than the odd problem. Mind you, we found more lost travellers in Hatta after the track cited in the book was washed away. Motivate continued, of course, to sell the book!) and trundling up wadi beds in your 4x4 to get to the waterfall.

We went up just after the new road was built and the wadi was already strewn with graffiti and the pools at the base of the waterfall contained rubbish - tin cans and broken glass. We found a man there, camping. He had a light bulb on a pole in front of his tent and a generator to light it, which was causing a terrible racket and stank. That was back in 1994 or so.

Today's outrage is a tad overdue...

Olives - UAE Group Buying WIN

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Group buying site LivingSocial has a great deal on for the next four days in the UAE - A Dhs100 Jashanmal books and stationery voucher for just Dhs 50.

It's linked here!

What makes this deal so very splendid is that it means you can now buy Olives - A Violent Romance for just Dhs10! The book's RRP is Dhs60, the voucher costs Dhs50 AND you get another Dhs40 in voucher value left over for other, less desirable books. Or rulers and rubber bands, whatever floats your boat.

So if you've been reading this blog over the past couple of weeks and been wishing I'd just shut up about the damn book, now you can play your part in actually silencing me! All I need to do is sell out the print run and I promise I'll never blog about it again! Well, not on here, at least. Well, not as often. Well, not as overtly...

Anyway, if you want to pay full price, Olives is available at Spinneys and Virgin and other discerning UAE bibliophile hangouts...If you're not UAE based, you can always buy the print edition from amazon.com or ebooks from just about everyone, including iBooks - links on the panel to the right! :)

I Am Glad

Olives - A Violent Romance has launched and I am glad. It launched, in that any self-published book 'launches', with a talk/reading/Q&A session at last night's TwingeDXB event, 'Praise for Prose', which took place at the Wild Peeta Open Space down at Dubai World Trade Centre. It was fun.

I had a couple of conversations at the event about my decision to self publish and what that meant to me after so many years chasing a 'conventional' publishing contract. Those conversations were perhaps a little more poignant in the light of the internal memo from publishers Hachette, leaked to 'Digital Book World'. The memo outlines Hachette's 'messaging' for why it remains relevant in a world increasingly dominated by e-books and populated by a new wave of self published authors.

I had seen mention of the memo a couple of days back, but read it in full this morning after a link was sent to me by writer pal (and self published author of the most excellent Diary of a Small Fish, which I recommend as an interesting, fun and enjoyable read, BTW) Peter Morin.

The DBW story is linked here. It's worth a read - as is the memo DBW gleefully reproduces in full. There's an interesting rebuttal of the memo by self publishing poster child Joe Konrath, if you have the patience to read it all. If not, I can sum it all up with this sound.

How does this link to the chats I was having? Well, I was explaining to people how at the end of the day I was actually very glad indeed I took the decision to self publish. I can't say I could have taken the decision sooner, because there was a road I had to travel to get here - and if I hadn't taken that road, I wouldn't be as well equipped as I am now.

But I am glad for a wide variety of reasons. First and foremost, I have the cover I want for my book, created by the designer I passionately wanted to represent my work. A publisher wouldn't have let me within a mile of the cover design. I got to control the 'look and feel' of the book, from the paper (I know, I know, I've become a Paper Bore) to the typography. I also own all the rights to my work and can assign them as I see fit - a publisher would have insisted on me assigning my rights en bloc to them. And I have been able to promote and represent my work as I see fit - not have the way my 'content' is 'packaged' dictated by a marketing department somewhere in London. Those include the rights to translated editions, especially Arabic, by the way.

I have had to invest thousands of hours into promotion, writing, planning and executing my own marketing campaign - which has barely started. I'll have to invest thousands more before I'm through. I've enjoyed every single one of them. I would have had to invest just as much as if I had signed with a publisher but suspect I'd have enjoyed myself a great deal less.

The Hachette memo leaves the most important part of nurturing a publishabl project to last:

We offer marketing and publicity expertise, presenting a book to the marketplace in exactly the right way, and ensuring that intelligence, creativity, and business acumen inform our strategy.

 In today's crowded publishing world, where literally tens of thousands of voices are clamouring for attention out there, publishers are finding their efforts at 'traditional' marketing are ever less effective - more onus is being put on the authors themselves to get blogging and Tweeting as well as meetin' an' greeting. It's a world where social networks, word of mouth and content are driving traffic and conversation that defines the success or failure of a project - big budget advertising campaigns aren't cutting it. Not that publishers ever launched those unless it was to support a book already proven to be so wildly successful you could argue the campaign was in any case a redundant move.

Looking over the Hachette memo, I can see they offer me nothing at all I can't get for myself - and that with the confidence I gain from making my own decisions and knowing I am working with the best people out there in every case where I need partnerships.

And I am glad.

(The picture above is another odd milestone - seeing a 'real' price sticker on my book!)

Meeting The Sales Team

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Yesterday morning saw me loitering around Mall of the Emirates at the ungodly hour of 8.30am - I had an appointment to present Olives - A Violent Romance to the sales team at Jashanmal's - the company responsible for taking my book and putting it on sale - not only in their own outlets, but in stores like Spinneys and Virgin Megastores. This isn't by any means an automatic process, and actually requires effort and sales skills. Bookshops don't stock all books publishers push at them by default, but only those they believe they can sell. And getting onto those booksellers' shelves can be hard - even in the Middle East. In the UK or US, it's so hard as to seem almost Sisyphean.

Author friends have frequently commented on how important this process is to a book's chances of getting anywhere. You can advertise and promote a book to death, but it needs to be there in front of people's eyeballs. Sure, your book's great, your blurb is catchy and your cover looks wonderful. But if it's not in the bookstores, nobody will ever see it. The sales team can define whether a book lives or dies and, all too often, new authors and those consigned to the 'mid list' (ie: they do quite well, but never quite as well as JK Rowling) are introduced later on in the sales team's pitch and are neglected. Which means they don't get on display, or are put in that dusty corner at the back, while some glitzy piece of schlock by a witless semi-celebrity gets front of store billing. It's no wonder authors get bitter.

So the chance to actually present to a sales team - to share what the book's about, what made you do it, why you think it will sell and who it'll appeal to - is a rare and wonderful privilege and opportunity. I took it gratefully, gave my chat and answered questions, shook hands and exchanged smiles. Now it's up to them.

Saturday will see the 'official launch' of the book on the first night of TwingeDXB - the first Dubai Urban Arts Festival. I'll be talking a bit about what makes Olives 'tick' and doing a reading from the book. I'll be helped in this by Irish poet and Man of Mystery Frank Dullaghan, who'll be reading Gerald Lynch for me. Lynch, the somewhat brutally inclined spy in Olives, is from Northern Ireland and while I can usually mug up a reasonable 'Norn Oirish' accent for a phrase or two, I just don't have the consistency to keep it up through dialogue. Frank does the twisted vowels brilliantly.

You can find out more about TwingeDXB, including the link for live streaming if you live outside the UAE here on the official TwingeDXB website. Other highlights of the 'Praise for Prose' evening on Saturday include Frank reading from his own work, the second birthday bash for the Twitter Book Club, a talk from Emirati author Sultan Darmaki and a display by free book initiative blog, The Book Shelter.

Copies of Olives will be on sale (Jashanmals is sponsoring the evening) and I'll happily sign them, although I do warn you that the rarity value of an unsigned copy is currently considerable.


TwingeDXB goes on all week, by the way, it's not just one night. There are events spanning poetry, music, comedy and more - the website's well worth checking out.

Territorial Book Rights - An Unnecessary Evil

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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

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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

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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.