Libro Non Grata

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As I shared over on the Olives blog last night my debut novel, Olives - A Violent Romance, is not to be available on sale in Jordanian bookshops after distributors have declined to stock it.

The reason for their reticence appears to be my choice of name for the female character in the book, Aisha Dajani. The name is a common one all over the Levant, and the name of a large family originally from Jerusalem. The name was appropriate to the character for that precise reason, given the book itself is set in Jordan and deals with a Palestinian family and their history.

I've been shut down before, in a former life as a publisher of magazines (for a negative review of a computer in a PC magazine. The computer company CEO turned out to have 'wasta'). I've spent countless hours in various Ministries of Information (before they were all given more 'user friendly' names). I've been passed by numerous censors in one form or another but I have never actually been censored, in print or blog. I learned early on how to do that for myself. This would appear to be one instance where I've got it wrong.

As Kamal BinMugahid points out in his thought-provoking post today, honour is paramount in the Arab World. A family's good name is taken very seriously indeed, sometimes to the point where the mania spills out into murder, the so-called honour killings which tarnish the whole Arab World's good name to save the 'good name' of single families.

I have seen my work rejected by many people over the years, for a variety of reasons. But never before has someone knocked me back because of fear. Fear of the reaction of people with the same family name to a character in a work of fiction.

Olives is, indeed, libro non grata in Jordan...

A Worrying Journalistic Twend

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From decrying Twitter as lacking the context and analysis they, exclusively, provide, journalists have increasingly embraced the medium in their reporting. Part of the reason for this is that many journalists have taken to Twitter like wee ducks to water, finding it a valuable tool in a number of ways. For many of the UK-based journalists I follow on Twitter, it would appear to provide an ideal platform to bitch about each other. Elsewhere, journalists find it a useful tool for crowdsourcing as well as keeping up with local events. Tweet about a terrible car crash or massive factory fire and chances are you'll soon pick up a news journalist asking for more information.

Eye witness reports have long been a mainstay of local news reporting and Twitter merely makes those eyewitnesses easier and faster to access. What I find mildly worrying is the increasing number of stories being filed out there that are 'stood up' on Tweets. It would seem that all a journalist has to do is find a few outraged Tweets and before you can spell veracity backwards we've got headlines like 'public rage' and 'Internet outburst'. The great thing about this is there's no seeming need to actually quantify 'public rage', and making the assertion can now be backed with a couple of tweets from Furious of Guildford and Angry of Barsha. Even worse, the tweets from those with an opposing or more moderate viewpoint get left out because they don't help the angle the journalist has taken - we none of us are interested in that. As I have long said, we slow down to look at the terrible accident, but we never slow down to look at the happy family having a picnic. What sells newspapers (or clicks, which in many ways are worse for preserving news values than the pressure to sell papers) is drama, outrage and the like.

And when you can tap negative public reaction, all too easily expressed on Twitter but almost always only half the story as online opinions are almost invariably balanced by others weighing in, you've got a nice easy story that really doesn't require much work at all to put together. As long as you don't muck it up by presenting the whole picture and actually bothering to produce a professional tone analysis rather than a few selected tweets...

Amazon Book Pricing Fun

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I discovered today that Olives - A Violent Romance is now on sale in the UK through The Book Depository. One of the things I did when setting up the international edition was plump for Amazon's Expanded Distribution Channel, which costs a few dollars but which opens you up to distribution through bookshops, libraries and the like. Amazon doesn't actually do a very good job of describing quite what this means, hence my surprise to see The Book Depository selling the book for £7.61 on amazon.co.uk, which is considerably less than its $15.99 US price tag (The book should cost £10.16 at today's exchange rate). I went and did a little digging to find out who The Book Depository are and why they were able to sell my book for less than the US list price.

The Book Depository is actually an Amazon subsidiary based in the UK. They'll sell you a paperback copy of Olives, with free delivery worldwide (including anywhere in the Middle East) for £9.98, despatched within 72 hours. You can order it here.

This means buyers of Olives in the UK and elsewhere get a better deal than those in the US, which is no bad thing. It also means you can walk into any UK bookshop and order a copy of Olives, as well as buying it from Amazon or have it delivered to your doorstep anywhere in the world for under a tenner!

But how can they sell a book for less than I'm charging for it on Amazon.com? Because the Expanded Distribution Channel pays a different royalty, in fact 60% of the cover price of the book goes to Amazon, so it gives them a lot of 'wiggle room' to sell books profitably at lower prices, in fact about $13.50 of wiggle room.

In other words, Amazon is actually undercutting me!

In related good news, they've stuck a promotional discount on the Olives Kindle Edition and you can now buy it for £3.99. Look, I'll even include the link for you right here! :)

Olives - The Blog

The inevitability of it all! A blog of the book, a place for looking at some of the characters, locations and issues contained in that little 262 page slice of word-arrangement that is Olives - A Violent Romance.

It's linked here for your clicking pleasure.

How To Upset Your Customers

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I'm not sure I am aware of any organisation that is quite so skilled at ineptitude of the highest order as my bank, HSBC Middle East. As I have had reason to remark before, I cannot think of one aspect of personal banking that has not at some stage caused me problems, been mishandled or generally failed to deliver as promised. This is not generally considered to be a good thing.

You can search the blog for 'bank' if you want to steep yourself in the most recent five years of blthering idiocy, but it's been something like 18 years in total now since I first walked into the British Bank of the Middle East and admired the two gun-wielding bedouin guards at the door.

These days, I try and avoid going to the branch at all costs. It makes me physically angry even to walk in. (So please do take my remarks with a pinch of salt, I am not my usual calm and Zen-like self when it comes to issues related to banking.)

It's one reason why telephone and Internet banking has been such a Godsend. The vast majority of transactions can take place in a nice, automated phone call or browsing session. I actually only use phone banking because I can't remember all the passwords, PINs, forgettable questions etc. And even then, HSBC asks that you remember (and key in) your 10 digit personal banking number or your 12 digit bank account number, your date of birth, your six digit personal identity number and the average velocity of an African swallow.*

Now they've found a new way to get to me. They have started playing an advertisement for some financial service or another to their customers when they call up to use phone banking. The advert not only drones on in English, but is then repeated in Arabic. While.we.wait.

You can only imagine what kind of drooling nincompoop would have thought that interrupting customers using a service that's part of a service package they are paying for (and we pay plenty) and rendering them helpless to do anything other than wait out the interruption would be a good idea. It's frustrating, irritating and annoying. It clearly demonstrates the bank has nothing but disrespect for its customers, their time and their convenience. And it's clearly symptomatic of a failure to understand the nature and role of corporate communications at the most fundamental level.

Irritating and inconveniencing your customers is not smart marketing. It just shows your contempt for them.
 * Okay, so I made the last one up.

Amazon Remittance - I Am A Wealthy Man

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I'm dumbstruck. I don't know whether to do little jigs, run through the streets crying 'Eureka!' or just make myself a Vesper. Actually, let's face it, it's a no-brainer. Vesper it is.

You remember me mentioning that some of the 'big' moments in this self publishing thing have been the ones you'd least expect? No? Well, they have been. Getting the book from the printers wasn't a 'big' moment for me, sighting my first copy in a shop wasn't, either. But seeing the cover was and seeing Olives - a violent romance on the Kindle for the first time was. And this one is, too. A real wowzer moment.

I've just got my first remittance advice from Amazon. It's not much money, about twenty quid, but that's not the point. I just made money from my books for the first time. People actually went out and paid good money to own the book that over 100 agents turned their noses up at. What's more, people have been reading and enjoying the book. Some have let me know, personally or through reviews on Amazon and GoodReads. Nobody's asked for a refund either.

And now I'm looking at an email that says I made money from my writing.

I am inestimably happy and thought I'd share the joy. I'm off to make the down payment on a 50 metre luxury yacht now...

The Shipping News

Last year, you may recall two ships landed on the beach outside our front door after their crews had lost control in bad weather. The two grounded around a week apart and became something of a tourist attraction.

A couple of recent spats of windy weather has once again wreaked havoc in shipping circles, with not two but three ships falling foul of the inclement conditions. An Iranian tug has landed on Ajman beach, while the 'Lady Moon', a small tanker, sank just off the breakwater at Sharjah's Hamriyah port last week. Now Hamriyah has a second sinking, the supply vessel Hatem II, according to Gulf News.today.

The Lady Moon was lucky - the 30-metre ship had offloaded its cargo of diesel, which could have resulted in a nasty little spill. Its crew were taken into custody, while the captain of the Hatem II has apparently hightailed it and is nowhere to be found. Presumably he tripped and fell into a lifeboat.

Five Smarter Tweeting Tips

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Just in case they're of any use, here are five smarter Tweeting tips triggered by things I've been noticing cropping up on Twitter recently.

1) Want retweets? Write for retweets!
Just in case you're asking, 117 characters is a 'retweetable' tweet - you can retweet without having to edit my tweet. In fact, much of my Twitter editing time goes into editing other people's tweets so I can share them. That's partly my fault, I have a long twitter handle (this has long been a subject of debate, but it's my name and I'm sticking to it) - but it's also people not thinking about where their tweet is headed. This is not a good thing, as generally you're sharing a tweet because you want to share information widely (otherwise, surely, you'd just be keeping it to yourself!) and retweets are grist to the sharing mill. With this in mind, it's generally a good idea to keep Tweets to around the 120 character mark. And, of course, a link will further reduce your character count! This means some judicious editing, but doesn't mean you have to sacrifice 'proper' language.

2) Edit like you mean it
I've come across a few posts out there about 'why writers should tweet' and the like and, while I generally agree that Twitter is a great way for content producers (that's what we call writers these days. It's so much more practical than 'novelist', isn't it?) to connect with audiences, I think it has a much more powerful role to play. You see, Twitter is a fantastic editing tool. The discipline required to get your message across in 140 characters (or, in my case, in 117 characters) is considerable. But it can usually be done - and without resorting to eight year-old text speak - with a little consideration and some editing.

The skills used in twediting are the same skills we use when editing writing - boiling sentences down so they say what you mean without unecessary verbiage and redundancies, rephrasing sentences to make them crisper and clearer. In fact, rare is the tweet that couldn't use a quick edit.

I thought I'd just pick a tweet at random to show what I mean:

The weather is so poetic this morning;the inspiration is just itching 2 get out doesn't it?We hope that ur inspiration is fully active 2day

This tweet left one character .What can we do to improve it? Well, we can get rid of 'this morning' as we know it's the morning. We could also get rid of 'doesn't it?', although you could argue this is an invitation to engagement, which would be a good thing. So we'll just change it to 'isn't it?'. And we can now ditch the 'text speak' and be left with a properly punctuated tweet of 120 characters that hasn't lost a thing:

The weather's so poetic; the inspiration is itching to get out, isn't it? We hope your inspiration's fully active today!

3) Delete Redundancies 
One word you can almost always ditch, in twitter and MSs alike, is 'that' - a word responsible for almost as many wasted bytes as Tim Berners-Lee's //. It's almost always redundant. Phrases like 'somewhere else' can become 'elsewhere' and save five characters. And an odd thing I frequently see is hashtagged tweets that repeat the whole hashtagged phrase unnecessarily, as in:

Please read my book Olives! http://bit.ly/ttJ0Uq  #Olives


Obviously, the hashtagged Olives can go, the tab being appended to the remaining Olives. And you can stop saying 'dah' in that tone of voice, I see people doing this all the time.

4) Consider the structure of your tweet
People often seem to forget that starting a tweet with the @ character means that only people who follow you AND the person you're @ing will see that tweet. If you want to address the widest possible audience, restructure your tweet to place the @ handle within the tweet itself, for instance:

Hey, @alexandermcnabb, I just bought your book! #Olives

Another thing about twitter handles is they're not invalidated by punctuation, so if you tweet Hey, @alexandermcnabb! I'll still get that tweet - there's no need to add a space either side.

5) Bear context in mind
When you tweet 'You're absolutely right!' to someone three hours after they have shared the tweet you agree with, you're likely forcing them to backtrack the conversation to find out what on earth you're talking about. Similarly, a Tweet like 'I think you'd probably agree with @randomperson on this one!' is hardly helpful.

Tweeting a link to your content more than once is a temptation, but I always think it's politer to append 'in case you missed this' or another phrase that makes it clear you're repeat tweeting.

Happy tweeting!

Olives and The Book Club

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The Expat Women's Book Club meets regularly at Paul Café in Jumeirah's Mercato shopping mall and had decided to 'do' Olives - A Violent Romance as their book choice having scanned through a list of the books that are to be at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. We made contact on GoodReads.com and before I knew it, the day had come when I was to 'Come at 8.45 so we can meet at 8.00 and have some time to dissect your book before you arrive.'

That sounded ominous...

I duly rocked up to find a group of about 12 ladies in a secluded corner of Paul (I didn't actually count, I thought it might have looked rude, you know?) with copies of Olives strewn around the table. I pulled up a chair and got ready to hear The Verdict.

'Right,' said Mary-Anne, who had organised the meeting. 'First I should tell you we really enjoyed it, so you can relax on that score...'

The rest of the meeting was bliss - an hour talking to people who had read my book, enjoyed it and wanted to ask questions about it. What more can life offer someone who's written something? Why did this character do this? Why did that happen? Why does Aisha wear red underwear? Who are the baddies? Why doesn't Paul flee the country? What's the publishing process been like? What will I get up to next?

The time flew and I found myself having to think about my own book in a way I hadn't before, seeing it through other people's perceptions of the characters and the plot. It was a strange and very rewarding experience, I can tell you. On one occasion I got caught out not knowing an event had happened in the book one eagle-eyed reader had asked me about. Oh, blushes!

Here, as a result, are five things you likely didn't know about Olives:

1) Paul is mildly OCD
Paul's got a touch of obsessive compulsive disorder in his makeup. He's always counting steps to see if they'll be an even number, because if they are this or that thing will be alright. There's a slight echo of that in Aisha, the girl who thinks of olive trees as serried ranks of courtiers as she walks through them. One reader suggested I might have been better calling the book, 'The Olive Princess' which I actually fervently agree with - it was a decision I nearly took at the very end of the process (the book's working title has always been Olives) and didn't.

2) Paul becomes a smoker in the book
As the book progresses, Paul takes up smoking. The Jordanian member of the club was hugely amused by this, knowing how prevalent smoking still is in Jordan. It's also symbolic of Paul's increasing 'Jordanisation' in the book.

3) Anne is Merrie Englande
Paul's girlfriend Anne is a metaphor for England and its pull on Paul as he adjusts to a new life in a strange country. One club member looked at Anne's part of the story from Anne's perspective which, I confess, I hadn't been conscious of doing myself before. Lucky, then, it all worked for her! Anne's role towards the end of the book really represents Paul's determination to follow his course and finally take sides once and for all.

4) Paul's dilemma is TE Lawrence's dilemma
To love what you betray and betray the thing you love - Lawrence tried to balance loyalty to his country with loyalty to the Arab cause, whilst the conflicting purposes of each ensured he betrayed both. It's one reason why the book references Seven Pillars of Wisdom and, specifically, the dedication. I actually contacted Lawrence's estate and got their blessing for the quotes, by the way. They're out of copyright. Similarly, the Mahmoud Darwish quote is fair do's, qualifying as 'fair use'.

5)No, I don't identify with Paul

I think as 'the Brit' in the book, there's a tendency for people to ask if there's any of me in him and my answer is invariably 'I hope not'. There's been quite a lot of 'I don't like Paul' feedback, but I think that might be missing the point a little as you're not actually supposed to like him - I know this was me making life difficult for myself. Paul, as blogger Sara pointed out with a precise nail/head occlusion, Paul is the side of all of us that we know is there, but would prefer to think isn't - that we'd be braver, wiser and more true to ourselves than we actually are. He's young and callow and emotionally a little inept. There's actually a lot more of me in 'bad guy' Gerald Lynch. My reader for Beirut (my next book, which is a much 'harder' thriller and whose main character is our Gerry) complained, calling Lynch 'A violent, unpredictable drunk'. My response was 'yes... and?'.

Mary Anne was evidently somewhat perplexed by the juxtaposition of the evil Lynch with the witty, urbane and charming* young man sat beside her. What can I say?

I'm not going to make such a big fuss about every book club meeting, don't worry (oh, long-suffering reader), but this was my first. And I owe everyone there a huge vote of grateful thanks.

* Would you be sick quietly, please? Thank you.

Remember when Ratings Were About Films?

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So a company in America called Standard and Poor's has pronounced on the performance of Europe's economies and governments and downgraded them. This has been taken seriously rather than laughed out of court. I'm sure I'm not alone in being totally bewildered as to how this is the case.

I first came across a rating agency, and the concept of 'ratings' in 2001, when I was working on launching a mobile network. My client's competitor had been rated (It was being primped for a sale) by one of the 'big three' rating agencies with many As and pluses. I was interested to see how the competitor could rate so highly in someone's eyes and obtained a copy of the rating report. The report cited a total lack of competition and an excellent infrastructure. At the time, (if memory serves me correctly) we had just noisily launched a competitive network with the backing of a major international telco brand. The competitor's infrastructure was also, as was obvious to anyone who had spent any time on the ground, woeful. Even their masts looked like rickety water pumps on a hick Ohio farm.

The chap from the rating agency told me they didn't just rate companies - they rated municipalities in the States, too - cities. I remember being awed at the idea that some company would actually have the power to rate a city and effectively change its ability to raise money.

It's an experience that's been very much in my mind over recent weeks as we hear this or that agency threatening to downgrade this or that government. Firstly that these three companies hold that power (and don't tell me for one second these decisions aren't politically or commercially influenced over cosy little lunches in Washington) and secondly that my one experience of them showed that the rating was based on what was presumably some pretty sloppy research and didn't reflect the actual market conditions prevailing.

I wonder why everyone's putting up with it?