Dying

Samar Maree is ten years old. She describes herself as 'clever' and 'smiley'. She comes from Ramallah. And she's dying.

Many will remember the story of little Ola Abu Jarmous, whose life was saved last year because of the fast response of the Middle East online community and the GeekFest crowd. Ola had a month to live and money was needed fast to save her life. The cash was raised in record time after Ola's story first appeared on Sara Refai's Ussa Nabulsiyeh blog.

The video above is Steve Sosebee of the Palestine Children Relief Fund telling Ola's story at TEDx Ramallah this year. Ola is doing very nicely, thank you very much.

It's groundhog day, people. There's another little girl with a brain tumour that will kill her unless something like $20,000 is raised to get her out of Ramallah and to Florence, where the specialist surgeons and equipment she needs are to be found. 

Please share links to this and Sarah's posts, post your own pieces on blogs, Twitter, Facebook - wherever and go here to the PCRF appeal page linked here where you can make donations. It doesn't have to be a lot, just a lot of you.

In the spirit of Christmas (or whatever spirit you fancy) - you can help save another life and we could get to see another little girl onstage at TED saying 'thank you' in Italian.

The Worst Radio Ads In The World

Image by bunky's pickle via Flickr

I'm not sure what made the marketing team over at the UAE's National Bonds corporation think people wanted to hear the sound of women committing suicide, couples arguing bitterly or men drowning but that's certainly what their new radio ads present to listeners. I may well be totally alone in this, but I find it unbelievably unpleasant and invariably turn the radio off when these ads come on. There are a number of other ads which trigger the same reaction in me. This is becoming increasingly a problem for my radio listening life, as I often forget to turn it back on again - and I generally enjoy listening to Brandy and Malcolm talk business and bicker on the radio during my drive to work.

I have railed against the awfulness of Dubai's radio advertising before. (for instance, take this example of egregious sexism from LG) I'm sure I will again. I am assured that it isn't an issue unique to Dubai, that radio ads all around the world are also completely pants, but I can't help but feel we're in a league of our own. Of course, in my own weekly forays to the studio, I can't switch the damn things off and have to sit, tied down to the squeaky high chair, and listen to them. One day I'm sure the mic will go live as I'm in the middle of one of my not infrequent 'I hate all radio advertising' rants at hapless co-host Desley.

So are we really being subjected to the worst radio advertising in the world today? Mark Makhoul over at Kuwaiti blog 2:48AM thinks he's got the world's worst eample, linked here. It's certainly special.

This one from a company called 'SuperScreen' in the UK is pretty dire, too. The last, triumphant call of 'free parking!' rounds it off nicely. Here's another contender, a radio ad that can only have been produced by a group of people incarcerated in a highly secure institution for the long term mentally challenged. This one (the one at the top of the search) is introduced by advertising commentator Dan O'Day, and features a burger and a sausage being burned to death. What's remarkable (and the reason I included a whole search for Kingsford Charcoal's advertising) is that it is by no means a standout moment of fail for the company's advertising - it's all utterly woeful. Take a look at the third one down and then the seventh if you really want to wallow in other people's total failure to communicate at any meaningful level beyond deep irritation.

This ad from the UK's Flintshire Motors takes it to a new level though. This is nothing less than the product of an incestuously conceived drooling nincompoop with a mental age of six who has been given a massive dose of LSD. I couldn't even finish listening to it. It's contagious - your draw drops and you start to shake your head and wail as the insanity infects you. It is undoubtedly the worst radio spot I could find on the Internet.

What worries me is it wouldn't stand out if you played it on radio here. None of the ads linked above would. They'd just sink slowly into the puddle of odiferous mediocrity with a viscid 'plop' and never be seen again.

Let It Snow!

Google the words let it snow and you shall be sore amazed, as Google has found a new way to turn us all into drooling morons following on from its amazing productivity-draining musical Google Doodle. Yes, your screen will frost up and you can clear it by holding down the mouse button and wiping the frost away or, if you're in a hurry or scared you might run into something, you can hit 'defrost' and it'll all clear away instantly.

I tried using my national ID card to wipe it away, but it didn't work. Given the current state of affairs, I'll get my chance to try out the card's ice-clearing action next week in the UK.

In the meantime, enjoy playing around with your screen as Google makes another $28 billion out of us all!

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.