@WeAreUAE

The Flag of the UAE (shown as artistically waving) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I've sort of been too busy with book posts over the long weekend to tell you, but the lovely people behind the co-curated '@WeAreUAE' Twitter account had a massive brain fit and lapse in judgement and handed the account over to me on late Wednesday night, lock stock and barrel. They even bust out with an Instagram account! It's mine, all mine precioussss, until next Wednesday!

What is @WeAreUAE? The idea is that someone new tweets from the account each week, opening up a kaleidoscope of different viewpoints, experiences and voices from the people who inhabit a given country. One of the world's more famous co-curated national Twitter accounts was @Sweden, which popped into instant notoriety when curator Sonja Abrahamsson used the account to ask a number of questions about what a Jew was. The questions were, as the New Yorker pointed out in its piece on her tenure, not so much anti-Semitic as childlike and born out of genuine curiosity. Nevertheless, she caused a storm that saw @Sweden draw followers like a follower drawing thing. Rather wonderfully, the Swedish Institute, one of the bodies behind the account, pointed out that Sonja was merely exercising the right to free speech that characterised Sweden - and apparently many of the people who arrived, drawn to the controversy, found Sonja actually quite charming and endearingly kooky.

I'm already having great fun with it all - and just in case you're waiting for me to do a Sonja, I'm actually taking the opportunity to celebrate the many things I enjoy and treasure about the country I have called home for the past  19 years.

See you at @WeAreUAE!

Book Post - What Price Reviews?

So I've started Beirut - An Explosive Thriller's review programme. It's reasonably wearying, tracking down active book blogs and websites, flicking through them to see if they're interested in broadly the type of book I'm getting up to, finding out what their review submission guidelines are, then emailing them with pitches, vouchers or attached book files. But, as I've said before, if every review is 10 readers, 100 emails is a thousand pairs of eyes.

Of course, getting heavier hitting media is great, but the competition for those platforms is both fierce and, all too often, restricted for self-published authors.

Which is why the review of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller in the Huffington Post had me doing Little Dances Of Happiness when it dropped late last night.

Alexander McNabb outdid himself in his second novel, Beirut, An Explosive Thriller, another adventure-filled story loaded with intrigue, espionage, love, murder, international hoods and plenty of violence.

Okay, that's a good start. This next bit, for me, was the jaw-dropper. The writer is an important Lebanese media figure, former AFP and UPI staffer and was one of the Monday Morning team, so knows what she's on about:

The author has an uncanny understanding of the country's dynamics and power plays between the belligerent factions, post-civil war of 1975-1990.
McNabb seems to have amazing insight into Lebanon's convoluted, sectarian political system.
He masterfully merges people from the Maronite Christian community to confuse readers, with snippets of character descriptions that would fit any or all of the current leaders and former/remaining warlords.
His very expressive narrative has an eerie resemblance to the current status quo with all of Lebanon's dysfunctional problems.

Oh wow. I think she just gave me too much credit but I am most certainly not going to complain. The review goes for a showy finish, a little like a great chef putting a touch of 'English' on the plate as he presents it to the pass:

Beirut is a gripping, fast-paced exciting book that may well jar Lebanese and others familiar with the city and its heavy legacy. But it's a must read.

You can read the full review by Lebanese journalist Magda Abu-Fadil here.

I'm still grinning today. Now, let's face realities. Not all reviews will be like this. Some people out there will hate Beirut, or just go 'meh' (the worst reaction, actually. I'd rather vilification than indifference. At least the former cares about you!). But, as Oscar Wilde tells us, there's only one thing worse than being talked about - not being talked about.

My experience with Olives - A Violent Romance taught me some stuff about how people approach buying books, and it's been something of a surprise. Reviews are important, as is word of mouth recommendation. But it actually takes quite a lot to make someone buy a book. It's not a case of reading a good review and rushing to Amazon to click that all important click. People seem to need quite a few triggers pushed at once. I'd personally rather book buying were a more, well, male process. But it ain't.

So it's going to take more than a few reviews out there. It's going to take a lot and that means a certain degree of relentlessness in the whole business of promotion. Being creative and not just repetitive will help to ease the pain, but to all of you I'd like to say sorry in advance. I'll try not to be a PITA, but you know the best thing you can do to shut me up.

Yup. Buy the book. :)

Book Post - Beirut Launch Talent Unveiled!

How about if you took your book and gave extracts of it to four very different types of performer to interpret and deliver as readings - as they see fit? How about you were lucky enough to have friends and friends of friends who knew people who were acknowledged talents in their very diverse fields of performance, but all of whom used language, cadence and rhythm in what they do?

An actress, a rapper, an orator and a poet will deliver readings from Beirut - An Explosive Thriller at the launch event on the 1st December 2012. Dana Dajani, apart from having 'that name', is a recognised acting talent - I defy you to view that linked clip without a tingle making its way up your spine. Rapper Jibberish is another talent fast going places, while Kevin Simpson, educationalist and orator is a man who certainly lives up to his billing. Frank Dullaghan provided Lynch's Irish accent at last year's TwingeDXB when he kindly helped me launch Olives - A Violent Romance - here he is, unfeasibly, reading from his work at the White House.

Four very different voices, four very different styles and a set of performances of readings that combine a neat mixture of sex and violence. What more could you want? Come on down!

The UAE Cyber-Crime Law

English: Logo Information Technology (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The story dropped on national newswire WAM late Tuesday - past 6pm, when the papers would normally have pretty much been 'put to bed'. The UAE President His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan had issued Federal Legal Decree No. 5 for 2012 on "combating cyber crimes".

WAM story part one, part two and part three.

The new decree includes amendments to Federal Legal Decree No. 2 for 2006 on cyber crimes and is, as far as I am aware, the most comprehensive such law in the Middle East. The National team hit the phones like a wild thing and filed the story with comment. GN ran with WAM.

It's a pretty wide-ranging piece of legislation and includes many specific categories of online criminality, including human trafficking, trading in antiques, defamation, blasphemy, extortion and pornography. It repeatedly uses the phrase "using electronic sites or any information technology means to..."

The law includes some important clauses for those in the habit of posting comment and opinion online. Quoting the WAM file (extracting paras from the whole), the decree:

It also criminalizes acts by any one to insult others or to accuse others of acts which would lead to punishment or contempt by a third party, online or through any other information technology means.

It also stipulates punishments for any person creating or running an electronic site to publish, online or through any information technology means, any programmes or ideas which would promote disorder, hate, racism or sectarianism and damage national unity or social peace or damage public order and pubic decency.

It also stipulates punishments for any person for creating or running an electronic site to raise, online or through any information technology means, that may call for the raising of donations without authorization from the competent authorities.

It also stipulates penalties of imprisonment on any person who may create or run an electronic site or any information technology means, to deride or to damage the reputation or the stature of the state or any of its institutions, its President, the Vice President, any of the Rulers of the emirates, their Crown Princes, the Deputy Rulers, the national flag, the national anthem, the emblem of the state or any of its symbols.

It also stipulates penalties of imprisonment on any person publishing any information, news, caricatures or any other kind of pictures that would pose threats to the security of the state and to its highest interests or violate its public order.

It also stipulates penalties of imprisonment on any person creating or running an electronic site or any information technology means to engage in, or to call for, the overthrow of the system of government of the state or to seize it, or to seek to disrupt or obstruct the Constitution or the effective laws of the state, or to oppose the basic principles which constitute the foundations of the system of government of the state. The same punishment is imposed by the decree on anyone who calls for, promotes or provokes the aforementioned acts or abets or helps others to engage in them.

It also stipulates penalties of imprisonment on any person using electronic sites or any information technology means to call for disobeying the laws and regulations of the state that may be in effect.

It also stipulates penalties of imprisonment on any person using electronic sites or any information technology means to call for demonstrations, marches and similar activities without a license being obtained in advance from the competent authorities.

The new decree also imposes penalties of imprisonment to any person providing any organisations, bodies, institutions or entities, online or through any information technology means with misleading, inaccurate or incorrect information which would damage the interests of the state or damage its reputation and stature.

The new decree also imposes penalties of imprisonment and fines, or either of these, on any owner or administrator of an electronic website or any information technology means or devices for storing or intentionally providing illegal content ,despite his or her knowledge of the illegal nature of the content, or for not removing, or failing to prevent access to this illegal content within the period stated in a written warning sent to him by the competent authorities declaring the illegal status of the content available online or the electronic site.

There are no surprises in there - although you may take some comfort from the last para's explicit inclusion of a takedown order, which at least would avoid automatic recourse to the full might of the law. In the main, the clauses above merely reinforce the 'online' aspect of actions that were previously considered an offence 'offline'.

That last para would, however, be something of a worry to Google, for instance, which would now presumably face a takedown order with the threat of imprisonment for its local representative or a fine for the corporation for hosting 'illegal content' in the definition of the law, which does include content which is found to "display contempt for any holy symbols, characters, figures and rituals of Islam including the Divinity (Allah, God) and the Prophets; for any other faiths or religions or any of their symbols, characters, figures and rituals; or to display contempt for or to insult any of the Divine Religions and to call for the engagement in or the promotion of sins."

What's interesting is how this law will be interpreted and enforced by the courts. UAE law doesn't work on precedent, so a great deal of the interpretation and application of the law in any given case depends on the judiciary. Here, as pretty most elsewhere in the world, that judiciary is going to require a great deal of specialised training and assistance if it is to grasp the ever-changing and fast moving online environment and the technologies it both depends on and spawns.

Genetics, Biodiversity And The UAE

English: Cobs of corn (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was mildly alarmed to note a story filed by national news agency WAM recently that referred to a new law being studied by the UAE's Federal National Council. that had been referred to the FNC's Committee for Foreign Affairs. That bill was the 'bill on plant genetic resources for food and agriculture' and the second I saw that, I thought 'Uh-oh, here comes Monsanto'.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

The debate over Geneticall Modified Organisms, GMOs to you, has raged fiercely since companies started to commercialise products built around the new and exciting science of genetics. Experimenting with, discovering more about genetics, is important research - it's only recently we have mapped the human genome, and our understanding of genomes in general is scant. Every step we take forwards opens vast new tracts of understanding and potential cures for humanity's ailments. Yet we understand so little about these incredibly complex building blocks - and the tiniest changes to them can have massive, far-reaching consequences. So glibly splicing, twisting and shaping genes for wide-scale commercial deployment has always given me the shudders.

Something like 85% of US corn is genetically modified. A good example of this is Monsanto's 'Roundup ready' (TM) corn, which is modified to make it resistant to Monsanto's Roundup (TM) pesticide. This allows farmers to use larger doses of stronger pesticide, increasing crop yields and helping them to pay for Monstanto's seeds - which they have to buy annually. It also, incidentally, ensures that traces of that pesticide are in the food you're eating. And you haven't been genetically modified to make you resistant to it. The market leading corn in the US is (and have a think about this name as you're eating one of those little polystyrene cups of hot corn with butter sauce down at the mall) Monsanto's triple-stack corn, combining  Roundup Ready 2 (TM) weed control technology with YieldGard (TM) Corn Borer (Bt) (TM) and YieldGard (TM) Rootworm insect control. Yummy!

It's not just corn, either. 91% of the US soybean crop (those yummy Planters peanuts are roasted in it) is GM and 88% of the cottonseed crop. Over 90% of the US (and 90% of the Canadian) Canola crops are GM - Canola is a brand name for a hybrid variety of rape that contains less acid (natural rapeseed produces a bitter oil not suited for food use - and Canola sounds so much nicer than rape, doesn't it?), originally developed in Canada and now grown all over the world. Canola is a hybrid, not inherently GM, but most of the current North American crop is GM.

About 90% of American papaya and sugar beet crops are GM. Other GM foods are also making their way into the American soil now, including courgette (zucchini to them). The bad news is that the EU has approved the sugar beet 'product' - and also that GM products can be imported into the EU if they are to be used as animal feeds. Ever smart to an opportunity, Monsanto has produced a genetically modified ('roundup ready') alfalfa - an animal feed crop.

All of this tinkering with our food has had one interesting side effect. Companies have raced to 'own' foods - Monsanto, for instance, makes its money on selling seeds (and pesticides) to farmers. And it wants to protect its intellectual property, so it has patents on its corn and other products - and duly licenses these to other companies. So food becomes Just Another Technology. Something to be abused at will by any dominant player.

Which is where the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture comes in. A number of the world's smaller countries spotted companies trying to patent various useful plants and objected to this 'genetic imperialism'. The treaty establishes a framework whereby food cannot, effectively, be patented in a way that prejudices the rights of farmers and communities and limits the ways in which companies can dictate the use of a food crop or product. For instance, Monsanto doesn't like farmers using 'farm collected seed' because then it couldn't sell 'em another bunch of seed every year. Farmers sign a contract with Monsanto which contains a number of provisions and restrictions and grants Monsanto a number of rights - including the right to monitor the farm to ensure the farmer doesn't save seed. That contract applies even if a farmer doesn't sign it but opens a Monsanto seed bag. This treaty acts against that sort of behaviour in a most timely fashion.

Although the treaty in no way limits the use of GM crops, it does limit the ways in which companies can use market dominance and the toolbox of other corporate egregiousness to dictate commercial terms to the world's less well off. And at its core is a commitment to biodiversity and the preservation of food producing communities.

That the UAE is a signatory to it is a little piece of rightness.

Half Thought...

Serial on BBC iPlayer, see The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As a wayward youth (and you can be assured I was suitably wayward), I once found myself walking back from London with a pal in the dead of night. We'd been 'celebrating' and were hitching because we'd missed the last train. We got picked up by an old guy in an Aston Martin who was smoking a spliff. In all other respects he was unremarkable - friendly enough, took us up the road and dropped us near enough to our respective homes, which was kind of him.

But it did rather leave me wondering how unfair was a world where you had to be that age to own a car like that, when clearly it was a car more suited to someone my age.

I was reminded of this the other night purely because a load of programmes Sarah had downloaded from the BBC's iPlayer timed out before either of us had time to view them. And yet The Niece From Hell is jacked into iPlayer 24x7. She's got all the time in the world to consume content and wastes none of it getting about the business of being perma-connected.

It's not fair. Why don't I have all the time in the world to consume content and she does? Come to think of it, how come I don't have an Aston Martin, either...

Self Publishing Workshop Canned Alert

Empty seats (Photo credit: ΒЯІΑN®)

With sadness, I've cancelled my self publishing workshop at the Sharjah International Book Fair, scheduled to take place on Monday 12th November at 7pm.

The scheme came to be just a tad too late in the day and without confirmation of any registration arrangement, room, LCD projector or other facility I felt it would be a waste of time to go ahead. The Book Fair team ain't to blame, they have their hands full with a 500,000 person event and consequently have bigger fish to fry.

At some stage later this year I hope to do a similar event with the Dubai Literary Group. In the meantime, if you have questions about self publishing in the UAE, drop a comment here or hit me up on Twitter - @alexandermcnabb and I'll do the best I can to help out.

TTFN!

Book Post: Launching Beirut - An Explosive Thriller

The Middle East print edition of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller will be launched on December 1st 2012 at Jashanmal's book store, Mall of the Emirates at 7pm.

I'll be joined by friends - and friends of friends - and it should be a load of fun. I've been toying with the idea of readings as performances. Book readings are often dry things, all polite listening and stumbling renditions of pieces of text. I wanted to see what would happen if I gave up my book into the hands of performers. So the event will feature performances from a rapper, a poet, an actress and a well-known, larger than life figure. Each one will interpret what they're reading as they see fit, perform it as they see fit. It should be compelling stuff...

The cover is pictured above. If the spine seems a little wide, that's because the Beirut - An Explosive thriller Middle East edition is in standard 'thriller' format - 11x17.5 cm and is a whopping 456 pages long. Olives followed the larger 5x8 format dictated by POD machines. The Middle East Beirut has been reformatted - I might add lovingly - to a more attractive size.

I'll share more details next week as my ducks line up. In the meantime, I'm doing a workshop for UAE educationalists in RAK later this month on narrative in Arab culture and guesting on blogs like a blogpost guesting fiend.

A Tale Of Two Revolutions

Photo credit: Wikipedia

They are the best of times, they are the worst of times.

The Industrial Revolution changed the world and brought us to the world we have today. The compelling combination of innovation and communications transformed society, at first in the United Kingdom, where it had its roots, but then spreading to America, Europe and the rest of the world. The confluence of mechanisation, improvements in transport and communications and entrepeneurialism transformed agrarian societies and created industrial powerhouses that brought wealth and opportunity - and created poverty and appalling illnesses, too. It tore society apart and remade it. Constantly.

In the latter C18th and into the C19th, that revolution built cities as it emptied rural communities. The old ways had changed and people, from legislators down to the common man, had to find ways of adapting to the furious pace of change our world was suddenly pitched into. Life would never be the same again, from our views on community, family and morality through to the expectations we had of our rights and place in society.

Sound familiar?

Imagine, then, a country that took one look at the industrial revolution and threw up its hands in horror at the very prospect of change. Oh no, not for us these naughty steam engines, looms and ironclads! We'd rather stay tilling the land! These countries would arguably be the ones that would subsequently fall to the inevitable rush for empire - because an entrepeneurial revolution sustained by free market economics will inevitably cause expansion into new markets. And the sheer force of the explosion will open those markets by hook or by crook. As it did in the C18th, as Europe's powers jostled to dominate smaller, less able countries who were still in 'the dark ages' compared to these new, brash economies.

An alternative model might be to try and cherry pick from the revolution. We want the steam engine and the mill, but we'd rather not have looms if that's all the same to you. And we'll take canals, but pass on the roads. The trouble with this is that innovation revolutions are integrated - any part of the set of available innovations that is not embraced and made competitive will create a market opportunity for the expanding revolutionaries.

And so it is with the Internet Protocol in the UAE. And although the Internet is the core technology of our new revolution, it is merely a road network. The producers of raw materials, the refiners and manufacturers need hauliers to find their markets, but once the canals and roads are built, that's about it. You can build roads and charge tolls, but you can't own the traffic or the goods that pass over the roads.

Critically, you can't dictate to road users what they must pay to use your road if you are competing with other transport networks - the market then defines price. So when you have a Microsoft retiring Messenger and replacing it with Skype, the global VoIP provider whose website is blocked in the UAE, you face a very clear choice - one you have failed to face,  but known about, for years now. Do you reject the revolution (an attitude that has long been your inclination) or do you accept that you have no choice but to compete in the newly transformed environment or inevitably fail?

Both of the UAE's telcos now work on wholly IP based infrastructure. And yet we pay Dhs1.50 for a text message. That's the most expensive 160 bytes of data imaginable. Extrapolate that to a 1Gbyte month and you'd be shelling out about nine million dirhams ($2.5 million) for a normal data package. You can see how WhatsApp starts to look attractive, can't you?

Telcos have no choice but to adapt to the IP (and by that I mean VoIP) era. Their revenue models will have to change, they'll have to lean up and cut staff. I watched thousands of jobs go in the years I worked with Jordan Telecom going through just such a transformation. It's not pretty, but that's revolutions for you. They'll have to find new ways of creating products and services relevant in an IP world. I'd say the solution lies in transactional commerce over IP networks, but hell I'm just a PR guy what would I know?

Right now, we're busy sitting on a chair squawking 'go back' at the waves. But they're waves of innovation and they're inexorable...

Self Publishing Workshop Alert

English: Open book icon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Rather to my surprise, the workshop on publishing and promoting your book I gave at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature earlier this year was a sell-out. Given that tickets cost Dhs200 (about $55) a pop, I was impressed at the level of interest - it points to a larger coterie of would-be novelists out there than I thought existed.

I'm doing another one at the Sharjah International Book Fair. on Monday 12th November at 7pm. This one's free.

So if you want to know how self publishing works, if it makes sense compared to beating your head against the bastions of 'traditional' publishing, how to format a book for publication, which platforms to choose for ebook and print book editions and why, how to design a cover and how to negotiate the red tape of creating a book in the United Arab Emirates, come on down. It'll be about an hour of frenetic brain-dump that should answer all your questions and even some you hadn't thought about yet.

If you're Dubai based, don't worry. The traffic's not as bad as you think (but, yes, you will spend 30 minutes in the queues unless you decide to pitch up at about 4 or 5-ish and have a mooch around the exhibition halls before the workshop, in which case the traffic's fine), dragons and spiny tailed bandersnatches don't actually wander the streets of Sharjah eating unsuspecting maidens despite what you've been told and no, you won't catch diphtheria by contact because Sharjah's unclean. Incidentally, the exhibition halls are packed with publishers and books, with a strong turnout from international titles and there is literally something there for everyone.