A Mountain Of Book Reviewers

English: Open book icon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Honestly, you've no idea how many book blogs there are out there. After trawling through them for a few hours, they start to morph together into a plastic gloop of Blogger and Wordpress templates, a putty of garish backgrounds and glittering widgets that eventually goes the way of school plasticine and turns into a dull, brownish purple.

Yes, we're in promo mode...

I missed a trick with Olives - A Violent Romance, in that I didn't focus early enough on the global online community. That's partly because I had a printed edition of the book which was targeted at the UAE. Later on, I shifted focus from 'traditional' and Middle-East focused online media to book bloggers and reviewers and had compiled a sizeable database of sites after a while. For Beirut - An Explosive Thriller, which will launch as an online-only book (both ebook and print), that online community is even more important. In fact, it's crucial.

That means trawling through, literally, hundreds of book review blogs to find appropriate reviewers. What makes a book blog appropriate? Here's Alexander's handy ten point book blog selection filter:

1) Is the site well formatted and readable?
Purple 6 point text on a cyan background with ebulliently serifed fonts, illustrations that 'crash' on the page and thousands of buttons, awards and widgets? If you find it hard to read, so will visitors. It just takes a quick check for 7) before we move on.

2) Is it updated?
If the last post was in July, we move on.

3) Is it well written?
I'm not talking about the odd literal, but you're putting your work into someone's hands and accepting their review of it. If they clearly aren't able to express themselves, it's not going to be as smart an investment in time as finding someone who - even if they don't like your work - can effectively reason a conclusion regarding that work. The vast majority of book blogs don't fall into this bucket, avid readers tending to be literate, but there are some that do and I choose to avoid them.

4) Does the site review in your genre?
If the last ten reviews have young men with eight-packs on the covers and titles like Love in Wyoming, I can't quite see Beirut floating the reviewer's boat. Olives was easier in this respect as it did wander into romance crossover territory, but Beirut is a pretty hardcore international spy thriller. A nip into the 'Review guidelines' to check the reviewer's preferences and we can both save ourselves some time.

5) Is the reviewer accepting reviews?
Closed to submissions means just that. Quite a few blogs have put this up as the reviewer drowns in the weight of eager, breathless little books scratching away at their skin. Ignoring it just wastes everyone's time. You can always put these in a separate list to check back in a couple of months. Often you'll find 5) and 2) signal that the blogger has decided to go back to reading for enjoyment rather than being hassled 9-5 by authors shrieking 'review my book!'

6) Does the reviewer accept ebooks?
I can't stress enough how much time and hassle is avoided by reading the review guidelines - and conforming to them. And when a reviewer says no ebooks, they mean it.

7) If not, does the site have significant reach?
For about $8, I can put a review copy in anyone's hands, anywhere in the US and Canada. For about £9.99 I can cover much of the rest of the world via the Book Depository. Now the question becomes how many of these outlays do you want to/can you make? And then, when you have a budget defined, where is it wisest to spend it?

How do you tell whether a blog has reach? That's  whole piece in itself, but comments and followers are a start. Bear in mind these days that Twitter and Facebook form a part of any site's 'reach', but as a rule of thumb few followers, lacking likes and a quiet blog are probably not where you want to spend your bucks.

8) Does the site have reach?
Does it matter? Unless you're eking out your print promo budget because of 7) above, you're looking at the cost of an email or two and a Kindle/epub file. If the blog gets 50 visits a day, that's 50 more people that knew about your book than yesterday. A hundred emails will take you a couple of days to send out, but net you 5,000 eyeballs. Anything above that is bunce. Many book bloggers also post to Goodreads and Amazon, so there are also signficant multipliers there. And, of course, you can share the review with your own followers. So reach be damned!

9) Is there a clear review policy?
Most book blogs have clear review policies that are straightforward and common sense and generally my submission package would conform to these. Where this isn't the case, it's important to reflect the policy and make changes. A personal touch is always appreciated, of course. In a few cases where I've come up against stringent and onerous review policies (such as extensive online forms) I've passed.


10) What's the TBR like?
Most book bloggers have a very long To Be Read list and it's not unusual to see reviews three or even six months out. So the sooner you get out to them, the better.


And what about paid reviews, listings and other services? I avoid 'em like the plague and will continue to do so unless I get some very clear recommendations from writer friends that a given service has worked. And so far I haven't.

If you've got a blog and you'd like a review copy of Beirut, BTW, do just leave a comment or ping me @alexandermcnabb.

Reading

I'm doing a reading tomorrow - and for a change, it's not from Olives!!!  Dubai based editor Meghna Pant is launching her first novel in the UAE. The book's already been a success in India, where it was published by Westland Books. It traces the story of Amara, an Indian girl struggling with modernity and tradition through a move to America and the collapse of her marriage to millionaire stock market man Prashant and her return to India to struggle with the conflict between modern independent-minded thinking and the duties of tradition.

Do pop along to the launch and join us -  it's tomorrow at Jashanmal in Mall of the Emirates at 6.30pm.

Rule 118

Mini-ature Parking Space (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Rule one: Do not act incautiously when confronting little bald wrinkly smiling men!
Lu Tze

The traffic laws of Sharjah are legion and best among them is Rule 118, which states that it is illegal to part with your car reversed into the parking space. All parked cars must be placed backsides out to the road. Headlights must not be presented to passing traffic. You go in frontwards, in other words.

Today's papers carry the news, without even cracking a smile, that such seditious behaviour will result in a Dhs200 fine and three black points slapped on the offender's license. That's out of a total of 24, rather than the UK's stricter 12, so you can park backwards a few times before you lose your license.

Khaleej Times quotes Col. Ahmed bin Darwish, Director of Traffic and Patrols at the Sharjah Police, saying, “Drivers have to park their vehicles in the same way they are told to do while in driving schools. Street parking is not designed for reverse parking and those doing it cause inconvenience to other road users and the traffic in general as the driver has to first drive and then come backward while other cars on the road wait all the time.”

The move is part of a campaign to curb 'parking space abuse', we are told...

TRA Calls for Innocence of Muslims Block

The TRA (Telecommunications Regulatory Authority) has directed the UAE's telcos, Etisalat and Du, to block access to the film trailer for 'Innocence of Muslims'. The trailer has been the cause of widespread and often violent protests around the world which have led to over seventeen deaths.

I checked just before mid-day but YouTube access to the film trailer wasn't blocked. Google has resisted suggestions it take down the content, although has supported legally backed blocking requests in Malaysia, Indonesia, Egypt, Libya and India.

It's an unpleasant little film and, in my humble opinion, is quite clearly in contravention of Google's guidelines, which allow it to block content if it constitutes 'hate speech'. The film and its intentions are clearly hateful in the extreme. I for one would hate to be the person who decided this wasn't hate speech, because they have seventeen deaths - and rising - on their hands.

But the film, judging by the trailer, is also clearly the result of a deranged mind. It is laughably acted, woefully directed and amateurish in the extreme. It's quite, quite potty. However, it purports to depict the Prophet Mohammad, which is at the core of the anger the film has caused.

You can clearly hear dialogue spliced in, supporting the actors' claims that the anti-Muslim content was jacked in at post production. The result is a school project gone wrong - but crucially, a film that has met the desires of its maker. Because, of course, we have that reinforcement of Islam as a violent, antipathetic religion - certainly at odds with my twenty six years' experience of travelling, working and for the past twenty years living in the Arab World. And the many, more reasoned, online objections expressed by Muslims all over the world to the trailer have, of course, not made the headlines.

Is blocking it the answer? I suspect not. Supporting its takedown is one thing, but stopping people accessing content that is having such a profound effect on our world means stopping people being able to make up their own minds and make informed judgement while others around the world continue to enjoy that privilege. Even if that content is hateful to us.

Absence (Editing Revisited)

If the adage 'absence makes the heart grow fonder' pans out, you should all be pretty fond of me. Sorry, I've had my head buried in a book.

It's funny, when you write one of the damn things, you think you've pretty much got it down pat. When you're 'in the zone' and the prose is flying off your fingertips like flying things, you just know that your elegantly turned phrase is just right, the description of the location breathtaking and your characterisation is so on the money, you could almost cash it.

You finish it and stick it in a drawer for a while, a pause for you to bring your head back down to earth and perhaps even spend some quality time synthesising vitamin D. And then you drag your weary carcase back to the huge pile of words (about 100,000 in the case of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller) and start to sift through them.

This is when you discover your prose is lumpen, your dialogue wooden, your MS is littered with unforgiveable continuity errors and - worst of all - its packed with grammatical errors, repetitive phrases and hordes of adverbs running amok all over the place.

The adverbs have to go. Most of them, at least. Sometimes they look up at you with big brown pleading eyes, like baby seals. But go they must. If it helps, close your eyes as you swing the club.

Editing is never a single pass process, you have to go over it all several times - as much to make sure the story works and every scene is necessary as to spot grammatical errors and typos, what we used to call in publishing, 'literals'. Now you can pack it off to your editor.

If you're self publishing, you MUST hire a professional editor. Budget $1,000-$1,500 for one. And get ready to suck it up because editor's aren't kind. You're not paying them to be. You're paying them to be brutal, callous and hard hearted. Those last few adverbs are likely to find a remorseless enemy in your editor - as are those scenes that do nothing for the story but you couldn't let go because you loved them so much. Your editor will clean the MS up - point out your stylistic weaknesses, tell you to cut dialogue or characters and generally behave like a crack-pumped Attilla in the china shop of your lovingly created prose.

They're worth their weight in gold. Mine is Southern Gentleman Robb Grindstaff and I do heartily recommend him.

So there we have it. The book is edited. Now it is time to focus on the other things we must do in order to make a book happen. So I might be gone a while longer. And then, yes my loves, you can prepare for the inevitable promotional blitzkrieg.

Jordan Rubberstamps Web Curbs

"Censored" rubber stamp (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gulf News and The National both make much of the Indian cartoonist arrested for criticising the government, but both fail to note that Jordan's lower house yesterday passed the amendments to the press and publications law which were behind the recent online 'blackout' protest in the country. The amendments bring websites under the regulatory framework established for newspapers and their passing saw protests outside parliament, with journalists and the Jordanian Press Association opposing the move.

The law brings website blocking powers to the government's Department of Press and Publications (so much nicer sounding than 'Ministry of Information' but functionally the same). Websites must now register and apply for a license - those that don't are liable to be blocked. Those that do will be governed by the press law.

Jordan has always had a free Internet, with no website blocking, commonplace elsewhere in the region ostensibly for religious and cultural reasons, but often extending to political and commercial blocks. It has been notable that the fabric of Jordanian society has not collapsed as a result. However the country has almost a thousand news websites as well as hosting websites such as the highly popular Kharabeesh.com, which often carry topical, critical and pointed satirical content. And there is much to satirise, as any Jordanian will happily point out at length.


The vote was carried by 69 attending parliamentarians in the 120 seat assembly, with a significant number walking out in protest. One of its more endearing articles makes websites liable for comments, effectively forcing every website, blog and even potentially Facbook pages, to moderate comments. That liability extends, and yes I am being serious, to prohibiting 'off topic' comments.

One ironic side-effect of the new law is that is has possibly rendered next year's edition of the Rough Guide to Jordan out of date. Svelte and dashing young journalist and travel writer Matthew Teller tweeted yesterday, "In the new edition of Rough Guide to Jordan, I wrote "The internet is not censored". The book isn't out till January. Don't prove me wrong."

Looks like he's going to have to pull the plates on that section...

Let The Chaos Begin!

Hornjoserbsce: A sim card (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gulf News today carries a Great Pronouncement Of Doom from UAE telecom provider Etisalat. If you don't register your SIM card on time, you're going to have your line cancelled, they tell us. It's all part of the UAE's Telecom Regulatory Authority slightly obtuse campaign,  'My number, my identity'.

As I predicted earlier, this one has all the usual Ealing Comedy attributes. We are all to trot off to a telephone company office with a passport copy (and original it seems) or a national ID card (copy and original we assume) and re-register our mobile lines by filling a form. The 'campaign' started on the 17th June - now Etisalat has given 1.5 million of its 8.6mn subscribers just three months to register their lines, failing which they will suspend the line. Three months after that, it's cancellation. They've sent out texts to the lucky 1.5 million hapless victims telling them to register or lose all within 90 days.

As I pointed out before, it took five years to issue everyone National ID Cards here - and that's still not a 'done deal'. The constant slew of frequently clashing announcements, pronouncements, threats and exhortations have provided endless amusement. Now we're going there all over again.

Does Etisalat really think they can get 1.5 million lines re-registered in 90 days? Even allowing for a constant and equal throughput across all their 104 offices, that means 160 applicants re-registered per office per day, or (with an eight hour day) 20 per hour. Or a constant rate of one registration every three minutes in each and every office.

Don't make me laugh. Etisalat doesn't process bill payments that fast, let alone re-registering lines (including, presumably, verifying and inputting the registration information as well as scanning documents etc). Can you imagine the long, hopeless, shuffling queues? I can and I'm in no hurry to play, thank you.

In fact, Etisalat's spokesperson told GN "It won't take more than ten minutes to fill the form... everyday we have an average of 10,000 subscribers who approach Etisalat offices to update their personal information.". At that, frankly unbelievable, number, we're still talking only 900,000 registrations in 90 days.

And then they're proposing to text another 1.5 million customers, just to add to the chaos from the preceding 90 days.

Words fail me.

Break Out The Freebies!

Once again, ladies and gentlemen, you have the chance to acquire a lovely fresh copy of my first, funny, novel for free. That's right, not one penny will it cost you from around 12 noon Gulf Standard Time right through to the same time tomorrow - 24 hours of untrammeled freebiness with a dollop of free ebook on the side.

All you have to have is a Kindle or the Kindle reader for PC, iPad or any other device.

You just click on this here easy to use YES! I WANT A FREE COPY OF SPACE link to Amazon.co.uk. Or if you're in the US or India you can CLICK HERE for amazon.com!

And that's all there is to it!

Why should you want a free copy of Space? Well, for a start it's free. Secondly it's funny (if at times a little risqué, not a read for the faint hearted or easily shocked, you have been warned) and comes with a laughter guaranteed or your money back promise. As I have explained before:

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

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

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

 The offer comes to you courtesy of Amazon's Kindle Select programme,  which means I can only sell Space over Amazon for three months, but can give it away for five days within that period. This is the second giveaway day of my five. It's a bit like having three wishes, except there are five of them and they're not wishes. And if you're a Kindle Prime subscriber in the US, Space is permafree!

Do share the news far and wide. The more people who download Space free, the happier I'll be! If anyone fancies leaving a review on Amazon, that'd be just lovely but there is no obligation so to do whatsoever.

Content warning - Space is published in the US and UK only and does have a number of rude bits in it. So if you're easily offended, please don't read it!

From Dubai to Moscow

 (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Could this be the story of the making of the worst film of the year? Those long in the tooth may remember I posted in 2007 and again in 2009 about a film script called 'Dubai', written by 'tyro' writer Adam Cozad and duly sold to Paramount.

A copy of the script was posted online but has now, tragically, been taken down. As I pointed out back in 2009, when it became clear that the GFC meant 'Dubai' was DOA, it was a slab of utter crap layered with some more crap and sprinkled with crappy hundreds and thousands. Written by a man who had not only never been to Dubai but wouldn't know Dubai from a pickled wombat if it hit him in the back of the neck, it trotted out every tired, vapid cliche in the book and complemented these with some woeful silliness, racism and a nice dose of unbelievable stupidity.

You might think I'm going overboard here. Trust me, I'm being kind. As I said back in 2009:

We are introduced to our hero in a shot where he is playing his regular game of tennis with his gorgeous wife. The camera pulls back to reveal that the game is taking place on the helipad of the Burj Al Arab. The whole thing goes downhill from that low point with such pace that it's like being on a theme park 'drop' ride.

 It now appears that 'Dubai' spent a couple of years in a cupboard somewhere at Paramount before someone realised they'd wasted real money buying the unlovely turd-like thing and decided to use it as the script to relaunch the Jack Ryan franchise. And so 'Dubai' became 'Moscow', with a number of writers, including ('briefly' according to Slash Film) Cozad hired to rework the script into, presumably, something at least viewable by mentally retarded macaques - a major task if the script that was 'Dubai' was to be polished to gleam like true Hollywood gold.

It remains to be seen if the film will open on the helipad of the Burj Al Arab or perhaps a game of tennis in Red Square. Will there be a snowy dacha and a sexy vodka love scene on a bearskin rug in front of a open fire? A skating scene with perhaps someone dying under the ice? There's bound to be at least one sauna/steam bath scene. And, of course, lots of gangsters and oligarchs. Will the idiotically helpful Sikh crane driver make it through?

It almost makes the whole thing worth watching. Not.

(Thanks to an eagle-eyed pal Talal who spotted the 'Moscow' news and my old post and put two and two together)

Fake Book Reviews. A Confession.

books (Photo credit: brody4)

I have to confess to being unsurprised at the 'established authors create fake reviews' furore. Authors are not gentlemen.

The latest head to fall, apparently, is crime writer RJ Ellory. The whole thing was started by novelist Stephen Leather, talking on a panel at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival. He crowed, idiotically, about the way he creates 'sock puppets' - alternative Internet personae - to big up his books, including creating false reviews and *gasp* tweeting false praise as well as dissing 'rivals'.

What annoys me is the line sniffily taken by mainstream media commentators such as The Independent's Terence Blacker, "You'd expect this from self published writers, but surely not established authors".

Would you now?

As traditional publishing has struggled, and largely failed, to come to terms with the challenges of the Internet Age, publishers have wasted no time in pushing their authors to blog and tweet in promotion of their work. That many authors aren't very astute users of the Internet should come as no surprise - the poor darlings mostly like to sit in sheds and write fantasies, not leap about Twitter dressed in a silver lame thong and squealing 'My book, read my book!'.

I have myself spent much of the preceding decade dealing with the infuriatingly analogue types known as literary agents (only latterly would they accept submissions online and there are still die-hards who won't look at email). A chummy, clubby and massivly analogue industry mired in a business model predicated on massive inefficiency, publishing has struggled to redefine itself, and largely failed. As more focus is drawn to the industry, we start to see more of the underhand, self-serving behaviours of 'big publishing', including authors writing blurbs for unknowns to please powerful editors and agents. A practise little better than sock puppetry, IMHO.

As it happens, not one of my reviews for Olives - A Violent Romance, is me in disguise or any friend or family member I have pressed to write positively. Many reviewers have encountered me online or at a conference of some sort, part of the reason people buy books. Many have been sent my book for review, the clear deal here is you get an independent review of your work. I am very proud of the very many positive reviews Olives has garnered and can see no reason why I should jeopardise that by cheating.

Besides, I'm not even totally sure about the value of reviews. I can trace no discernable impact on e-book sales resulting from any one review of Olives, although I do think there is huge value in a collection of positive - thoughtful - reviews of a book being available to readers. The trouble is now, they can't be entirely sure whether those reviews are the 'real deal'. This is where reputation - as so often it does online - comes in as an important factor. And that reputation has to be earned - it can't be faked for long.