The Scatter Here Is Too Great: In Conversation With Bilal Tanweer

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Last night marked the final day of the Sharjah International Book Fair 2013 and the pre-launch of Bilal Tanweer's debut novel, The Scatter Here Is Too Great. The fair was silly enough to foist me on Bilal as his host and we decided on a Q&A about the book and a reading or two as a suitable way to pass an hour on a Saturday evening.

The actual launch will take place in Goa, with Random House presumably splashing out for luxury yachts, dancing girls, champagne and cake. And then there are launches in London, Paris and New York. Let's face it, start in Sharjah and you can hardly go wrong in your upwards trajectory of launch events.

Bilal managed to dig up an ARC (Advance Review Copy, silly) for me earlier in the week, which rather put the pressure on given my already extensive TBR (To Be Read list. DO try and keep up with the jargon, would you?) and beta reading commitments. The book was a pleasure to read (I was its first 'general public' reader as it's still in production) - I accused Bilal of doing the same to the good people of Karachi as James Joyce had done to Dubliners with Ulysses and he couldn't muster any disagreement ("When a dog fouls the carpet, you rub its nose in it. Ulysses was my attempt to do the same for the Irish people") - The Scatter Here is Too Great is a book with a varied cast of characters muddling through in a mixture of joy, horror, sickness, health, youth and old age. It's rarely a book that spares the reader strong and pungent description of a city that Bilal admits he loves and loathes.

From the little boy who is teased for his teeth and called parrot, parrot through to the repo man in his immersion in an increasingly violent cycle as he struggles through life, the book is packed with horror and violence, yet there's also life, laughter and love in there. It's a heady mixture of influences, characters and cameos. The violence is rarely explicit, yet implied throughout the book.

And so we talked about it, about these people and the city that spawned them, the bomb that forms the hole in the windscreen that all these cracked lives revolve around as they dance their dance of life and death. Tempus duly fugitted and we found ourselves standing blinking at the end of Q&A with the audience.

An odd but rewarding week, then, in which I have been introduced to two charming Pakistani writers whose work I have enjoyed and whose company it has been a pleasure to find myself in.

In the meantime, Jashanmal sold out of their SIBF stock of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and that made me glad...

Guest Book Post: Bubblecow On Show - Don't Tell

There’s a critical problem dooming your book and you may not even realize!

At BubbleCow, we’ve edited more than 800 books. That’s a lot of books! One thing that this unique level of editing allows is for us to see beyond the problems with any single book and look at the wider picture.

That’s how we know that many writers face a problem that they don’t even understand exists.

The problem is… Emotion!

To be more precise, the problem is making your readers feel REAL emotion.

We are not talking about readers feeling emotion for a character, along the lines of ‘Oh, how sad that they died’, but your words and story triggering a true emotion in a reader.

I know this all sounds wishy washy, but stick with me.

I am sure you’ve read a book that made you cry! Think about it. I am betting that if a book has made you cry that you can still remember that book to this day. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if you can still recall the exact moment you were reading that book, as tears rolled down your cheeks.

That’s the writer triggering true emotion. That’s the writer delving into your heart and ripping out feelings that leave you emotionally altered…. Now that’s writing!

If you are writing from a third person perspective (that is when the narrator is separate from the story and not one of the characters in your book, that’s first person), then you probably face a problem that you’ve never considered.

Writers become so consumed by TELLING the story, that they forget that the reader is actually part of the process. The reader is part of the story. They are not a passive observer; they are an active component in the process. The moment your reader becomes passive, they turn off, get bored and, eventually, stop reading.

If you TELL a reader that a character is sad, all you do is add a twist to the plot. What you don’t do is make the reader feel the sadness of your character.

This is important. There’s a world of difference between a reader knowing the character is sad and FEELING the character’s sadness.

What you must do, if you are to trigger emotion in a reader, is SHOW them how the character is reacting and then let the reader fill in the gaps.

If… you write with emotional honesty and with a universal truth, the character’s actions will trigger an emotion in the reader. On feeling this emotion, the reader is immediately engaged with your work on a new level.

In other words, by SHOWING not TELLING you are creating a narrative space between the reader and the characters. Because you are not telling the reader how to think and feel this leaves a narrative gap. The reader then leans into this gap and fills it with their own emotion.
Ok… These are big words, but let me show you an example.

Let’s imagine a scene where a young boy has just opened a birthday present to find a book he has been asking for all year.

Here’s the scene written with TELL:


John lifted the present from the table. His heart was filled with joy. He was happy to see the brightly colored wrapping paper. He pushed his finger into the paper and ripped a tiny hole. He was excited. He peeked inside, his heart racing with anticipation. Unable to control himself he ripped open the paper to find the book he had been dreaming of reading.


OK, not Shakespeare but you get my drift.

Now let’s look a little closer at what I’ve written. In the second sentence, we TELL the reader that John’s heart was ‘filled with joy’. In the next sentence, we TELL the reader he was ‘happy’. In the fifth sentence, we TELL the reader he was ‘excited’ and in the next, that his ‘heart was racing’.
This is a lot of TELL and leaves no space between John and the reader. In this section we are being told by the writer how John is feeling. We are not allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions.

Now… here’s the same scene with all the TELL removed and replaced by SHOW:

John lifted the present from the table. It was a small package wrapped in red and blue wrapping paper, the colors creating a smooth swirl under his fingers. A smile crept onto his lips as he brushed the paper. He glanced from the present to his mother, his grin spreading to a smile. He held the present at arms length for a moment, his hand shaking. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, small breaths pushing from his lips.

The boy returned his gaze to the present. He removed his left hand and extended his middle finger into a poke. His head moved forward, his expression now one of concentration. His finger pushed at the paper, ripping a tiny hole. He leaned in even further, peering into the darkness.

A slight squeal slipped from his lips, an explosion of a smile on his face. Holding the present with his right hand, he ripped at the paper with his left. Long strips came away and were discarded to the floor. A small brown book sat in his right hand. John brushed the cover with the tips of the fingers on his left hand. He stood motionless for a moment, his eyes glistening with moisture. He looked at his mother and mouthed the words ‘thank you’.


The first thing to notice is that the scene is longer. The reason is that the moment we can no longer short cut by simply TELLING the reader what is happening, we are forced to add in description. This is what I call ‘crafting’. I have tried to conjure an image in your mind. If I am not going to write ‘John opened the present’, then I need to accept that I need more words.

The second thing of note is that I’ve tried to write with an emotional truth. I’ve tried to remember what it felt like to receive a present as a child. I’ve also plumbed my own memories of my own children receiving presents. The result, I hope, is a scene that has a universal truth. If I have managed to access this truth, this scene should trigger an emotion in the reader.

Finally, I’ve created a space between John and the reader. I’ve not TOLD you how John is feeling, I’ve just described his actions. It is left to the reader to interpret these actions. This is where I hope to trigger the emotion in the reader. As the reader fills the gap they are forced to tap into their own feelings of the joy of receiving a present. If I’ve managed it, then this suddenly turns into a powerful scene.

And that’s Show, Don’t Tell in action.

I feel strongly that this single technique can turn the most pedestrian of books into an engaging work that readers will remember. No, let’s scrub that. I know that this is true. I’ve seen it happen time and again. In fact, I’ve based our whole business on it! At BubbleCow, Show, Don’t Tell, is the backbone of the editorial approach we take to books written in third person. In fact, we feel it is so important, that we have created a free book to help teach writers how to use this technique in their own writing.

Let’s finish with a little writing trick that can work wonders. It’s called the ‘camera technique’. When writing a scene, imagine you are observing the scene through a camera. Now, just write what the cameraman can see. No thoughts, no short cuts, just the action. The result will be a scene packed full of SHOW and devoid of TELL.


Gary Smailes is the owner of BubbleCow, a company that helps self-publishing writers to produce publishable books. They provide book editing and proofreading.

In Conversation With Mohsin Hamid

Cover of The Reluctant Fundamentalist

I'll have to be honest here: I was dreading meeting Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid. I had read his second novel, the Booker-nominated The Reluctant Fundamentalist, with enormous enjoyment.

Given the man behind the book was a Princeton-educated management consultant (a species for which I have an instant aversion), I couldn't quite imagine what I was walking into when I agreed to host his appearance at the Sharjah International Book Fair, but it was probably something around a bi-cultural jerk in a suit with an affected proto-American drawl and a superiority complex.

Quite why I ever thought that was the case is beyond me, but then I was the bloke prepared to batter the world's most pleasant literary agent on stage with a tyre lever, so I've got form in the 'getting these things horribly wrong' stakes.

Mohsin Hamid turned out, of course, to be charming, affable, witty and passionate - a sparkling intelligence with an abiding curiosity. The accent was more British than anything else, a product of Pakistan's school system. We quickly agreed on how we would structure our chat and took to the two chairs on stage. We ran through Mohsin's motivations in writing, his first book, Moth Smoke, which he had taken seven years to complete and which gained him near-instant prominence before The Reluctant Fundamentalist cemented his reputation as a startlingly original writer who creates strong voices that subtly direct us to ask ourselves difficult questions we might otherwise conveniently avoid.

We talked about using 'voices' in writing and how Mohsin had consistently made life difficult for himself by choosing unusual voices and structures in his writing - about the influence of living in London, the US and Lahore and always writing about the place you weren't in, secularism and Lahore's underground scene and about how you watch your book being turned into a Hollywood movie. The time flew.

Mohsin read from the opening of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and I got something of a shock. I'd seen that voice as a sing-song Pakistani accent but Mohsin cleared that up as completely as he'd confounded my mean-minded expectation of him: from reduced circumstances, our man has a slightly old-school colonial Englishness to him. He's not jabbering, his voice is measured and reflects the reassurance he constantly offers his clearly nervous dinner guest. Given the entire book is a monologue, that voice cleverly modulated between the present day conversation and the reminiscence of a tragic love affair, the revelation was not inconsiderable. As Mohsin pointed out, everyone puts something of themselves into reading a well-written book and thereby changes it and as a consequence takes away something different, too.

We also talked about Mohsin's new book, How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia and how he struggled with the book's format before he came about the idea of writing it in the second person in the style of a self-help book. We timed out - the room was needed for the next gig and we had to cut questions from the audience short all too quickly. I blame the sloppy moderator myself.

If you missed it, you missed a highly entertaining hour listening to a charming, interesting and self-deprecating man whose work is as remarkable as it is readable. So sucks to you.

I would argue SIBF hasn't done enough to promote the author events taking place there - but if you missed Mohsin, you can still catch up with another Pakistani writer from the 'Lahore scene' on Saturday as I try and mess up the launch of Bilal Tanweer's The Scatter Here is Too Great. We'll be doing a fireside chat (minus the fireside, clearly), a reading and generally celebrating the release of this new novel by Random House.

That's November 16th, 7:15-8:15pm, the Book Forum at Sharjah Exhibition Centre in Al Nahda. There's no excuse not to come from Dubai, the traffic's fine on a Saturday evening.

Neologist Nomenclature

(Photo credit: Frank Kehren)

If you searched 'Neologist nomenclature' and you're for real, I apologise. I just wasted your time.

Hot on the heels of the news Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority is to commence a mega-project to name some 22,000 of the city's streets comes Abu Dhabi's pledge to do the very same thing. The two cities have long had a street numbering system in place, but now we're going to get real road names.

As eny fule no, navigation in the Gulf has traditionally been a matter of using landmarks. I recall with delight the early days of my life tramping around the region and discovering I was to spend my day looking for 'the red office building to the right of French Corner, just down Talateen Street from the big Pepsi hoarding' and similar locations. I spent many a joyous hour in Riyadh's insane traffic (back then, they'd shove you from behind into a roundabout if you hesitated in joining the choking stream), perplexed and deeply lost. This is also, incidentally, frequently how I pass my time in Abu Dhabi, the words 'don't worry, it's really easy to find' instantly plunging icy shards of horror into my soul.

Those popular landmarks were to lend their names to roundabouts and roads, areas even. So Dubai, for instance, gained 'Bank Street', 'Budgie Roundabout', 'Chicago Beach', 'Fish Roundabout' and the like. Sharjah got 'Mothercat', 'Flying Saucer' and - of course - 'National Paints'.

Now they're all going to be renamed. Sharjah already renamed all its roundabouts as squares years ago, to the perplexity of many. And it already has street names, each more impenetrable than the last. This has also been the case in Riyadh, where long-standing roads such as 'Pepsi Cola' and 'Airport' have been renamed with dignitaries' full names. The joy of finding out you actually wanted Abdulaziz bin Sultan bin Abdulrahman Al Saud street when you finally made your way to Abdulaziz bin Abdulrahman bin Sultan Al Saud street was always a marvel to behold.

And so, I fear, it will be in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The usual pandering will take place and we'll start with Prominent People With Long Names. Then great historical figures - the usual astrologers, mathematicians, travellers (hands up who wants to live in Ibn Battuta Street, then?) and transmuters of lead to gold. Then they'll get desperate and start using desert animals and the like. If I know Dubai, there'll be an auction to let companies sponsor a street name.

I can't keep up. I'm already having issues remembering what I'm supposed to call the Emirates Road these days, let alone Diyafah street and, of course, remembering it's now the Al Fahidi Cultural Neighbourhood. Like many others, I suspect, I'll likely keep directing people using the Emarat before Satwa Bus Station rather than whatever new name gets slapped on the street our office building is on.

Why they don't use the 'popular' names, I'll never know. Although I always thought 'Budgie Roundabout' disrespectful - especially with the descriptor popularly appended...

Abu Dhabi Bans Silly String

(Photo credit: mikecogh)

One of my favourite jokes of all time is that people in Dubai don't understand the Flintstones, while Abu Dhabi do.

Sorry, silly string brought that to mind. And you won't be finding much of it around on December 2nd in Abu Dhabi, because it's been banned - along with 'unofficial' car parades, car painting and a range of other popular national day activities.

The warnings come nice and early, but then reports are already tumbling in about car decoration workshops doing Dhs20,000 makeovers in preparation for the UAE's 42nd National Day which takes place on the aforementioned 2nd December. If Dubai gets Expo 2020, the result due in on November 27th, they're going to completely lose the head all across that weekend.

I've said before that the UAE is the only place in the Middle East where the people take to the streets to celebrate their country, and that they most certainly do. It's a happy time and a time to go wombat crazy and generally make like it's mardi gras, but police around the Emirates have had enough and over the past couple of years have moved to regulate a celebration that at times looks as if it could border on hysteria.

So no changing the colour of your car, obscuring your number plate, having your windscreen tinted with pictures of the UAE's leaders or the flag, no tinting the driver side windows, no hanging out of cars or over-stuffing cars and no, and I'd like to make this quite clear, no silly string.

If you breaks the rules, it's a Dhs1,000 fine and 12 black points. And Abu Dhabi police have set aside a special area for impounded cars on the day. Presumably other emirates' police forces will enforce similar rules, although I haven't seen any announcements.

Sharjah Corniche will doubtless once again be packed and there, I am sure, you will find silly string.

Rent Hike Pain. We Are SO Back, Baby

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Today's The National reports on a 50% increase in Dubai landlord/tenant cases going to law on the back of rental increases that have topped as much as 40% year on year.

Sure enough, the news that we're back in the property-flipping, mega-development real estate boomtastic jetstream has filtered down to landlords, who have had to deal with a good five lean years as Dubai's over-heated 2008 rental prices dropped like a stone circling a black hole, resulting in a market awash with a glut of unwanted housing.

Nowadays, we're looking at undersupply of rental property - I've come across several people who've actually found it hard to find a flat, particularly at reasonable prices. And the news that we're back has prompted landlords to take the fast boat to rent increase paradise and just evict their current tenants at the end of their one-year contract.

Except you can't do that anymore - there's a pesky property law in place now and what's more it's actually being enforced. Dubai's got a sparkly new property tribunal which means wronged tenants (and, yes, wronged landlords) can take their case to law quickly and get a settlement - and in the meantime property regulator RERA hears cases.

That law has two fascinating clauses. The first relates to the RERA rental calculator, a basket of average prices which is used to calculate permissible increases in rent for landlords, the 'average similar rent'.

Decree No. 2 of 2011 on rentals in Dubai states that increases in rent are allowed as follows:

Up to 25% below the average similar rent = no increase. 26-35% = 5% maximum increase. 36-45% = 10% increase. 46-54% = 15% increase and 55% less than the average similar rent = 20% maximum increase.

In other words, even if your property rental price is less than half the RERA calculated market average (which is itself often less than market 'asking prices'), your landlord can only increase the rental by 20%

Ah, but he can just chuck you out at the end of your rental in any case. Well, actually, no he can't.

Dubai's property law states a landlord must give a tenant 12 months' notice to vacate a property AND have good reason to do so. The usual canard is that he's moving himself or his family back in. Fine, but the law actually states he has to prove he has no suitable other property for this purpose AND if he does re-let the property, the original tenant is due compensation.

So there's actually pretty comprehensive protection in place for tenants - and it seems more and more are actually taking to seeking recourse. You'd have thought landlords would be aware of the law and take care to work within this very clear framework, but the lure of those rental increases appears to be a strong one and they're trying it on.

They're much less likely to do so when people are clearly aware of the law and their rights within it, of course.

BOOK POST: Shemlan and the Big C

Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy is about a man with terminal cancer whose journey into his past  to find the lost love of his life stirs up a hornet's nest that threatens to kill him before the disease does.

I so far have not had, but am fully expecting, the reaction 'But I don't want to read a book about someone dying of cancer.'

I genuinely hadn't given it a moment's thought until I hit the 'go' button on the various publishing platforms I've used. But then I've never really set out to make life easy for myself with this whole book thing.

I can even sympathise with that reaction. I suffered it myself to a certain degree when the book was being conceived.

Jason Hartmoor was born when Barry Cook came to stay with us back in 2008. I posted about his visit on the blog a while afterwards and I do heartily recommend you take a read. Barry had been fighting off cancer for ten years and was desperately ill. I had dreaded the visit - we knew we were going to be playing host to a terminally ill cancer patient and had both steeled ourselves for a pretty hellish three days. We were to be totally blindsided by what happened next.

"I didn't stop laughing, or smiling, for the next 72 hours. Not only were our visitors delightful company, Barry was nothing short of inspirational. Although he'd get the odd twinge of pain in his back and needed to take enzymes to aid his digestion, he was more on top of a disease so chronic that an x-ray of his skeleton showed the cancer was so widespread it was like 'someone had thrown a handful of sticky rice grains at it' than I could ever have imagined. He'd been fighting it for ten years and was still beating it back."

And so was born the Roxanol and enzyme popping Jason Hartmoor. The resemblance ends there, Barry was a charismatic, laughing man with enough charm and twinkle for ten. But I had been building a 'challenged' character and Barry's condition - with its inevitable end - wriggled its way into that character. I think Barry himself crept into Hartmoor every now and then - Jason's lighter, more human moments are probably Barry breaking through.

I've often talked about how authors 'steal' people. This is the ultimate example, stealing a dying man. But blag away I did. My only defence is that it wasn't intentional.

I didn't want to make Hartmoor's condition harrowing or graphic in itself, at least in part because Barry had shown me having cancer doesn't necessarily mean every day is spent recalling your last chemo session or the day you first found out. After ten years, it had settled into a sort of 'business as usual' for him. Hartmoor gets tired: he fatigues easily and has to depend on The Hated Stick more than he would like to - increasingly so as the book progresses. He's frail, his routines are those of a man who depends absolutely on his medication - particularly the painkillers. But his disease has become a fact of life for him, a constant companion he has reached a sort of understanding with.

The constancy of Roxanol, by the way, was the reason I was so taken by the cover image, by Australian artist Gerrard King. But more of that another time...

So I wouldn't let the fact there's a man with cancer at the heart of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy stop you reading it. In fact, I'd rather like to think it was yet another reason TO read it.

The link's to the right of this post. Do it now before you forget...

Book Post - So Wearily To Market

When I finished writing Space in 2002 or thereabouts, the idea of writing a synopsis after having dashed down 100,000 words of prose was really rather horrifying. I staggered duly to my feet and got on with it in the end, but I wasn't happy. Finishing a book should really just be about that. Finishing.

Now, of course, when you finish writing a book it's just the start rather than the finish. Probably as much effort again has to go into finding readers. And they are becoming increasingly adept at not being found, I can tell you.

So rather than putting my feet up and eating my way through the Hotel Chocolat website, I'm sending Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy out to reviewers - a list of a tad over a hundred book blogs being my secret weapon. Several of the blogs that were extant at the start of this year as I sent out review copies of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller are now dead blogs, the bloggers having presumably succumbed under the dead weight of thousands of needy authors sending in their hopes and dreams in the form of ePub and Kindle files. It's worse now, the publishing houses have joined in and now court book bloggers like love-lorn lorikeets.

I'll be dreaming up other schemes, too, of course, including readings and shouting abusive gibberish at any audience that'll have me - I am, once again, popping up at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature as well as booked to appear on radio show Talking Of Books.

As I've said before - it's lucky I'm not shy. I have author pals who are altogether less outgoing and they find this stuff painful to point where it provokes much existential angst. I enjoy it very much. So if you're in a book club, do feel free to hit me up!

Posting People's Pictures Online Could Carry A Fine Or Even Jail Time

United Arab Emirates (Photo credit: saraab™)

The National newspaper today confirms what has long been an odd quirk here in the UAE has indeed been taken to its (inevitable) online conclusion - publishing (posting) pictures of people without their consent is against the law here - and, as a criminal case, could result in a hefty fine or prison time.

It's always been the case that you actually needed written consent before publishing somebody's photo in the UAE. That we often shortcut this requirement - as so many legal requirements are shortcut in a society which rubs along very nicely with a mainly 'laissez faire' attitude - does not mean it does not exist. As with so many aspects of life here, when things go wrong, the law comes into play and suddenly what seemed a forgotten piece of legislation becomes very real indeed.

Now it's been confirmed in words of one syllable that the online equivalent of the offline phrase 'publish' which is, of course, 'post' also carries the same weight. In short, you post an image on Facebook, Twitter or the like and you are open to criminal prosecution. Not a civil case, you understand, a criminal one.

Lt Col Salah Al Ghoul, Head of the bureau for law respect at the Ministry told The National: "Article 24 of the cybercrimes law stipulates that anyone who uses an information network to infringe upon someone else’s privacy shall be punished by a minimum prison sentence of six months and/or a fine of between Dh150,000 and Dh500,000."

You can consider an image to include video and, presumably, audio. So if you see a gentleman beating a hapless-looking chap around the head with his agal, you have 500,000 great reasons to pass by rather than film the incident and post it on YouTube.

That has always been the case here - as some of the more liberally grey-haired on Twitter pointed out when that particular video was put up. You can, literally, defame someone with the truth in the UAE.

Protecting decent folks' privacy or obviating social justice? You tell me...

Book Post - Populating Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy

Image via CrunchBase

So we pushed the button yesterday, but even in the 'Internet age' these things can take time. We're looking at three editions of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy: Smashwords, Kindle and CreateSpace. Here's what happens when you press 'go' on a book.

Smashwords
Smashwords populates pretty much instantaneously, provided your documents are formatted in the required fashion. Smashwords' own guide to formatting is a free download and reading it will save you time and hassle. I choose not to publish to Kindle using Smashwords but use Amazon's own Kindle Direct Publishing. Once 'Meatgrinder', Smashwords' multi-publishing engine, has done its work, the book is available on the Smashwords site as an ebook compatible with Sony, Kobo, Barnes and Noble's Nook and Apple's iBooks. So you can go to Smashwords here and buy Shemlan.

Smashwords also populates the relative stores - B&N, Kobo and iBooks. But that takes a good deal longer - it's part of the 'Premium Catalog' and requires quality checking by Smashwords before that goes ahead. So for now, it's just Smashwords, not the retail sites. That can take a week or so.

Kindle Direct Publishing
Kindle takes a while longer, promising 12-24 hours but usually beating that quite comfortably. In fact, the Kindle book of Shemlan was up a few hours after Smashwords. So you can go here to buy Shemlan from Amazon in the UK or here to buy it from Amazon.com. There are now Amazons around Europe and even further afield, including Japan, but posting all those links is just too exhausting. I have never sold a book in Japan.

CreateSpace
This is the print edition of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy and takes longest. Createspace is currently still reviewing the book files. Once they've passed the files (an automated check is performed when you press 'go' but they still do a manual check following that), they'll populate the Createspace store, Amazon and then expanded distribution outlets such as The Book Depository. This can take a couple of weeks.

While that's happening, it's down to compiling the list of reviewers/book blogs. And yes, you're all in for a rough old ride because I'm in promo mode now and that means bugging everyone and their uncles to run around screaming 'buy Alexander McNabb's novel Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy now now now!'

It's not about you buying it, see - it's about you getting everyone you know to tell everyone they know to buy it!!!