Marketing And Promoting Books

Writing a book is just the start of the journey to publication, whether you’re self published or taken on by a publisher. More and more people, including agented and published authors, are taking to self publishing as Internet-enabled tools to create and distribute books lessen the value of a mainstream publisher's contribution to the process. We’ve seen this process before, it’s called ‘disintermediation’, when an intermediary is removed from a process by the Internet. And Amazon is a great disintermediator.

This means I can find my readers anywhere in the world and get a book to them without having to physically create and distribute tens of thousands of books. It also means anyone who has written a book can now get on the Web and promote it. Including the lunatic on the bus who has an atom bomb in a corned beef tin, the author of a dreary memoir of life in Tuscany and the deluded nincompoop who’s penned a trilogy about a dystopia where dolphins are smarter than people. Oh hang on a second...

That clutter means authors – all authors – have an awful lot of noise to cut through. And we face readers increasingly barraged by needy wails of ‘buy my book’. And yet you need to get your book out there.

As they say here in Dubai: What to do?

There are a lot of people out there ready to help you in this endeavour, for a few dollars. I tried a couple but I never really believed in them and I was right. The recommendation of someone who sells recommendation is worthless. Honest reviews are gold dust, but only part of the formula. Social interaction is good, but you really have to balance promotion with content – some would argue I got that balance wrong with Olives – A Violent Romance, but I’m happy with myself overall.

The one critical lesson I’ve learned about book marketing is the lesson I learned when I first took a sales job in the early 1980s. AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. People don’t just buy books. They have to have their interest piqued in some way – something has to catch their eye. And that something has to evoke enough curiosity for them to want to look under, literally, the covers. What they find has to make them want the book, because only then (and I have been amazed at how much pushing it takes to take the horse to water) will they actually click on that link to Amazon.

It’s worth looking at each of these four cardinal rules of sales:

ATTENTION

Your cover is critical. I love the cover of Olives, it’s a point of considerable pride that I could pick my own cover artist and that the talented Naeema Zarif brought her unique style to the book’s cover. But compare Olives to Beirut and you’ll find I was being self-indulgent. Appropriate to the book? Yes. Artistically valid? Yes. But that’s not what it takes. It takes immediate, in your face whambam.

As I pointed out in my workshop at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature on book promotion and marketing, you need a ‘book hook’, something that makes the book stand out and attract attention. In Olives it was water rights and the drought gripping the Levant. Lead with this, build your content around it – and get that content out there.

Traditional media is key. Radio, TV, newspapers, magazines. Features about you and your book hook, reviews. Do signings, book clubs, conferences, book fairs, workshops, readings. Take every chance you can to get out there. Recruit supporters whenever you can. This can be exhausting, but it’s necessary. Build a media database and send out review requests to as wide an audience of reviewers as you can. The more you’re in front of people, the more attention you’re getting.

If you can’t bear the thought of all that attention, I’d consider whether you want to do this book thing. I fear in today’s world all authors are being forced blinking into the spotlights to face the audience and ‘engage the community’. And yes, that includes the conventionally published.

Talking of communities - I cannot over-emphasise the importance of communities in promoting books. If you're an active and contributing member of an online community, their help can get you off the ground in no time.(Anyone out there remember the deep joy of Klazart gaming Authonomy?)

A website for a book is critical – it’s somewhere you can point people (Twitter is great for attention, but you need to trigger a click somewhere – and that somewhere has to build interest) and tell them more about the book. The Olives website is probably too busy and contains too much information. The site’s not there to celebrate or justify your work – it’s there to trigger a link to ‘buy the book’. You also need to bear SEO in mind – the site is a discoverable asset: when I search your name, your book or even the topics your book is based around, I should find YOU staring at me.

The Olives website is hardly the Huffington Post – in the year it’s been around, it’s pulled 4,200 page views - some 340 visitors clicked on the ‘Buy Olives’ link. The majority of visits have been from the UAE and USA. However, it’s also been somewhere I could post some of the many positive reviews of the book, giving me credibility – particularly with book bloggers who can be resistant to self published writers. And good reviews are critical in building attention and desire.

The Olives blog has been a much bigger traffic draw with over 10,500 page views (about 500 of these were for the Olives is blocked in Jordan post – a wee whiff of controversy I refused to capitalise on and fan into flames. Looking back, I rather wish I had now).

The blog was intended to create a stream of content that was, again, discoverable and also to engage potential readers with the book, taking excerpts from the book that touched on some of the issues it’s built around – the water conflict in the region, nationality and identity and the Palestinian story. It also discussed issues brought up by book clubs and reviewers – including the book’s treatment of alcohol and sexuality in the Middle East. It also gave a steady source of content that went beyond ‘buy my book’.

The Beirut- An Explosive Thriller website is, by the way, much cleaner and faster to get to the point.

INTEREST

So you won the click. Now you can sit back and enjoy yourself. Not a bit of it. Now you have to build interest. I’m interested enough to give you my consideration, how do you hold me? In today’s world, when every movement of our online eyeballs brings a new skateboarding dog or man with five nipples, that’s a big ask.

The big tool here is your ‘blurb’, the summary of your book’s content that graces the back cover. Writing blurbs is a skill in itself – what do you leave in, what do you take out? How do you describe your story enticingly and draw the reader in? I’m not about to write a piece on how to write blurbs, it’d turn this already long post into a book in itself. But précis, précis, précis is the key. And, as in your writing, try and make one word do the work of ten. A quick example from the blurb for Beirut – An Explosive Thriller:

Michel Freij is about to become the next president of Lebanon.

One of the feared Grey Havens Gang suggested:

Michel Freij is poised to become the next president of Lebanon.

See? That one word is so much more dramatic. It’s detail like that has to go into your blurb. And you should learn it off by heart, because when people ask you ‘What’s your book about?’ you have their attention, your answer will dictate whether you have their interest.

The content you create, including the content of your book site, should build on interest, deepening people’s engagement with your work. This is desire at work.

DESIRE

I was attracted by the cover, liked the sound of the book and enjoyed what the author said about it/what I read on the book’s website. I think I’d like to read some more of it. The extract made available by Amazon (you MUST enable sampling on Amazon, Smashwords et al – and have a sample, say an opening chapter, on your website) was well-written. Hell, I’m going to do this thing.

This is desire.

For most of us, desire is tempered by price. I’ll give you an excellent and personal example. I am re-reading the paperback of Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Scoop’. I’ve had that book for years, this was the first time I notice Penguin hadn’t bothered re-setting the book – the margins are massive and if that had been my book, people would have complained to me. Whatever, I simply can’t settle down with paper these days so I tootled off to Amazon to get me a Kindle copy. £7.99. I couldn’t believe it. The Kindle version of a 1938 book is £1 MORE than the paperback.

I really want to read Scoop on my Kindle, but I’m not paying a greedy, stupid publisher (listening, Penguin?) £7.99 for it. It’s simply not happening.

Book pricing can make you or break you. And that’s another post right there.

ACTION

It all leads to this. The click on your 'buy my book' link, the click through to Amazon or iBooks or wherever else your book is available from. It goes without saying that each site needs to be well populated with good, well-edited content, properly tagged and your author pages etc available and updated. Don't shrug this advice off - Olives was filed under 'theatre' in iBooks for almost a year because I tagged it in Smashwords as 'Fiction - Drama'. I only found out after my Mum bought me an iPad for my birthday!

It doesn’t end with action. That click to buy your book is a chance to engage your readers as components of your marketing campaign. Encourage reviews, seek feedback, enrol evangelists. Now, if readers are telling you your book sucks, there’s valuable input for you. It might hurt, but thicken up your skin and suck it up – if you need to improve your game, there’s no better way to do it than listen to your customers. If multiple readers have a problem with a character or point out a flaw in your dialogue, you’d be mad not to re-evaluate that work.

There’s no more powerful marketing tool than third party endorsement - if readers like your work, get them to tell others. Encourage reviews on Amazon, Goodreads or Shelfari. Repost these to Twitter (not in a constant stream, mind) and host them on your book blog. Post ‘em to Facebook. Get the good news out there. Because you won a click on ‘Buy with Whispernet’ and now the eternal, Sisyphean cycle starts again. A happy reader buys you attention. A happy reader makes you interesting. A happy reader builds desire. A happy reader can provoke action.

I love happy readers.

(You can become one too, by clicking on this link to the website for Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and then wandering over to the 'Buy Beirut' section!)

If you want to talk books and have a drink or three, the celebration of the launch of Beirut takes place tonight at Billy Blues in Satwa, Dubai. The invite's here.

How To Find An Agent? How To Self Publish in the UAE?

 (Photo credit: jm3)

Or, in short, what to do? You're in the United Arab Emirates and you're thinking of writing a book. You may have started. You may have finished it. But now you want to know what to do next. You have two options - find a publisher (which pretty much means get an agent) or become a publisher.

I can help. For a start, I know exactly how NOT to find an agent, I got rejected over 250 times. Believe me, I can tell you how to withstand the knock-backs. I signed with Robin Wade of that finest of London's literary agencies Wade & Doherty. How did I do it? What was the secret to my success? More to the point, how can YOU do it for yourself?

This Wednesday night, from 6-8pm at Dubai's gloriously funky uber-hangout The Archive, I shall share.

Promise.

I'll also be taking workshop attendees through how they can 'go it alone' and self-publish. Once the stuff of vanity and now an increasingly important avenue for writers, self publishing can be a road to riches, a source of immense satisfaction or an eyeball full of broken glass. How you approach it will, in many ways, define which of these is your most likely outcome. From picking platforms through formatting your manuscript and getting word out there to printing a physical edition, I'll take attendees through the easiest possible ways to get their work in people's hands.

Places are really, really limited - the room was full last time and most people booked for all four of the sessions in the Umbrella Series of wordy workshops, so do call or email Sarah at The Archive and ensure there's a place for you - sarah@thearchive.ae or phone The Archive on 04 349 4033.

If you want to get your hands on the presentations, resources and other stuff from the workshops, sign up to the emailer list using the form to the top right of this 'ere blog and I'll be sharing links an' stuff.

Bee Bones

Back in 2007, a post on uber-blog Boing Boing alerted me to a new website from Harper Collins Publishers called 'Authonomy'. The site allowed you to upload the first 10,000 words of your book and then have other writers critique your work or vote it to the top of a pile to be read by a Harper editor.

I posted about it a lot at the time, pimping my first, silly, book Space - which I uploaded to the site. I also posted about my disaffection for a process and website I came to see as debased, not because my book didn't win a gold star (because it did) but because the gold star was actually duller under its micron of plating than the average Shiny.

Authonomy did something marvellous for me, though. It allowed me to meet other writers - to learn from them, to share the ups and downs with them. It transformed my approach to writing and led to me writing more books and, I like to think, better books.

I've kept in touch on a regular and almost formal basis with a group of ex-authonomites, the feared and shadowy Grey Havens Gang. And I've kept in looser contact with a number of the people I met during my month-long odyssey propelling Space to the top of the greasy pole. You know how Twitter, Facebook and all can keep people sort of popping up every now and then.

One such is Richard Pierce. Like everyone else I knew on authonomy, he never got picked up by Harper as a result of winning the monthly plugfest, but he did get taken up by British publisher Duckworth, who published his novel, Dead Men. Which I thought was a tad funny as that wasn't the book Richard was shopping on authonomy - that was a book called Bee Bones. It's a long time ago now, but I remember Bee Bones being pretty popular on the site - a stark and yet very human book that explored a young man rooting about in his dead mother's life.

Having had his taste of the conventionally published life, Richard has taken to self publishing - and so Bee Bones is coming out as a self published novel, some seven years after I first came across it on authonomy. Which is a while, I know, but then it took Olives - A Violent Romance about the same length of time to become a book rather than a manuscript.

I'll be buying it - I enjoyed it on authonomy as I enjoyed so many books from a selection which I thought at the time consistently threw up better and more diverse reads than I could find in my local bookshop. A number of the writer friends I made have been published - a few conventionally (a couple becoming best selling novelists) but many more taking the self-published route (a couple becoming best selling novelists).

So if you need a book recommendation, take this one. Richard's Facebook page is linked right here and when he presses the button and lets Bee Bones out into the wild, you can be among the first to know.

I hope he doesn't mind me nicking his cover...

Back to Skool - Let The LitFest Fun Commence

I love school visits. They're sort of part of being at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. You don't have to do them but there's a lot of effort put into integrating the Festival with local schools and authors are asked if they will drop by a school or two and give a talk to students.

I always jump at the chance. I get to behave like I'm a real author and everything. The faculty usually gets a bit twitchy, because I don't do 'PC' so well, but it normally comes right in the end. I try and use the opportunities as something of a sales pitch to get students thinking about writing their own stories. It's not just about thinking you've got a book in you: narrative is a powerful tool in communications and story-telling permeates pretty much everything we get up to in the nasty, commercial world we're bringing up our kids to inhabit.

Which is sort of funny, given our mums always told us that telling stories was a bad thing to do.

Tomorrow I'm off to Al Ain, where two groups of students from Brighton College are going to spend an hour or two with a strange, shouty man bawling incoherently at them. Next week it's English College and Pristine Private School. I'll be testing the surfaces for dust at that last one.

It's hard to believe, but we're only two sleeps from the LitFest - that fine bonanza of all things narrative, bookish and even literary. 140 writers from 25 countries are set to workshop, panel session, chat, sign books and generally delight something like 37,000 visitors. This year's Festival theme is 'time' and there's a huge programme planned which will take place across two weeks, both over at Shindaga and at the Intercon Festival City where the main programme takes place.

The Festival has grown like a mad thing over the few years it's been running. It's created new writers and seen people getting publishing contracts, start writing for themselves and expand into writing for others.

People have been self-publishing books, forming writers' groups, book clubs and generally enjoying books all the more. The Festival has, in short, triggered all sorts of growth in the literary scene in the UAE and even beyond in the wider Arab world.

The increasing focus on the Arabic programme has created a new opportunity to expand readership and contemporary literature in a language that has seen all too little focus on literature in recent years.

We've seen UAE-based writers clinching publishing contracts, new writers emerging and a vibrancy in the literary scene here which simply didn't exist before the Festival started taking place.

And all because a lady with a bookshop in Dubai woke up one day and thought 'Wouldn't it be lovely to have a literature festival?'

It's staggering, really...

Ebooks Outsell Booky Books. So What?

Image by englishpen via FlickrWith the news that ebooks have now outsold booky books, we can perhaps now recognise the tipping point has been reached.

One fascinating report I’ve seen of this year’s London Book Fair neatly paints a picture of an industry reeling as it comes to terms with the ferocity of the changes taking place around it. More and more writers are taking to putting their works up on the Kindle store and other self publishing platforms rather than go through the relentless round of submissions and rejections that getting published entails.

HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray, speaking at the LBF, called this time 'a watershed'. Murray was noting that sales of a number of HC's front list titles were running at over 50% on ebook formats - he also noted that the growth in e-readers (to 40 million) was having a disproportionate effect on the market because e-readers had reached 'core' readers, people who buy over twelve books a year.

There are reports of Amazon employing editors and seeking an editorial director. This is interesting precisely because if Amazon decided to have its own imprint, it could pick from the many new titles being uploaded to the Kindle e-book store and take the best of them and place them under its powerful marketing wing – with editors guaranteeing the quality of books under that imprint.

That would address one major complaint of the post-ebook era - the lack of qualitative guarantees where so many authors now have direct access to the market without the checks and balances of editors and the like.Yes, this gives a more egalitarian market with greater choice for readers (and less Katie Price schlock being pushed in our faces), but it also atomises the market (there is such a thing as overwhelming choice) and makes it potentially hard for readers to work out when a book is total rubbish. I have to confess, of my current crop of 34 Kindle books, one non-fiction title turned out to be a rip-off project.

But with editorial input, an imprint, Amazon could possibly create something a little like Authonomy done right. Everyone’s uploading their books, the best of those books are plucked out and given a sheen by Amazon, which could sell books under its imprint at a premium (because you know they’re good) and effectively become its own publishing house. Now a publishing house that owns the majority of the distribution medium becomes interesting. It would be like one publisher owning every high street bookstore (remember them?).

It’s also potentially massively anti-competitive, but that’s another kettle of frogs.

Book Post - Shemlan Chalks Up LitFest First!

Gerrard King's amazing pill skull image, 

wot graces the cover of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy.

I didn't realise until the dirty deed was done, but my third Middle East spy thriller, Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy, today became the first book ever to be published at the Emirates Airline Festival Of Literature's spiritual and temporal home, the Dar Al Adab.

Today's workshop, part of the LitFest's 'Open Door' series of workshops and writerly things, was for the Hunna ladies writer's group and explored how to publish a book - both getting an agent and publisher and doing it yourself.

As part of the latter bit, I showed how to format, upload and manage a printed edition using CreateSpace, a Kindle book using MobiPocket Creator and Kindle Direct Publishing and also an Epub standard ebook (for Kobo, B&N and Apple among others) using Mark Coker's brilliant Smashwords.

What better example than the book I have just finished editing and proofing?

All three took well under half an hour, underlining how essentially easy and accessible self-publishing platforms are these days.

So Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy is now published - available here right now for your Kobo, Sony or iPad and here for your Kindle.


It's a funny old feeling, actually. Shemlan became something of a project on hold after I decided to self-publish Olives - A Violent Romance and then Beirut - An Explosive Thriller. Shemlan completes the Levant Cycle (three books set roughly contiguously but NOT a trilogy) and comes at the end of a lot of enjoyable but hard work.

I'm wondering what people will make of it, actually. I love it to death (obviously!) and think it sits somewhere between Olives and Beirut. I've already had people express strong preferences for both of those books at the expense of the other, Gerald Lynch appears to be the Middle East espionage thriller equivalent of Marmite and the strength of feeling he provokes from readers can take a chap aback occasionally. It's fair to say his behaviour in Shemlan will do little to dampen down the love/hate debate.

Needless to say, one will be having a quietly celebrative quaff this evening...

Media Regulation and Freedom in the UAE

Sorry, this is a long post.

There was another scurry of activity in Dubai last night as media gathered for a meeting with HH General Sheikh Mohammad and Sheikh Abdulla Bin Zayed Al Nahan last night. The news of the gathering, which ran big in media here today (with, oddly, the exception of Emirates Today), revolved around further clarifications of the position regarding the rights and responsibilities of media in the UAE. That position was certainly made clearer on the news that the UAE Journalists' Association had put forward a voluntary code of conduct which has been adopted by the leading daily newspapers in the country. That code is given below in full.

Although by no means the entire story or solution, the code is presumably an attempt to move in the direction of a self-regulating media. That attempt comes prior to the publication of the much anticipated new media law, which may well render the code of conduct redundant on many points. In the meantime, there is at least a level of guidance now available for journalists and others working in the UAE media industry.

The below text is a cut and paste of that available at Gulf News' website. I do find it interesting that the focus is consistently not on the rights, roles and credibility of journalism, but on what journalists should not do and how they should not behave or act.

The desire to reconcile a belief in media freedom and a capable media together with attitudes and requirements of a conservative, albeit highly tolerant, society in a region where media freedom is at best patchy is not an easy thing to manage. It is a process I have seen developing for something like 20 years now and it's like watching Eensy Weensy Spider...


The Code of Ethics

The undersigned, board members of the Journalists Association and editors in chief of newspapers and publications, and out of belief in our responsibility towards the public and society, and the basis of journalism, on top of which is commitment to the truth and principles of freedom, justice, values, ethics and respect of law, approve the “Journalism Code of Ethics" and undertake to:

1. Respect the truth and the right of the public to have access to the true and accurate information.
2. While performing his duty, the journalist is demanded to commit himself at all times to the principles of freedom and integrity in gathering and publishing stories. He should also voice fair and neutral comments and criticism.
3. A journalist must only publish facts from sources known to him, and must not hide any basic and important information, forge facts of falsify documents.
4. He should use only legitimate means to obtain information, photos and documents from original sources.
5. Publishing news and information of pictures must be examined carefully for accuracy, and their true meaning must not be altered by editing, title or photo comment. All documents must be edited accurately, and any uncertified reports, rumours or speculations must be reported as such. If re-edited or reproduced material was used as a symbolic picture, it should be made clear through the comment that it is not a documentary picture.
6. Journalists undertake to rectify any published information that proved to be wrong and harmful to others.
7. There should be no compromise in credibility.
8. Respecting privacy is a main principle in the profession and journalists should respect the privacy of individuals and not expose it by publishing any thing without the consent of those individuals. If personal conduct over crosses with public interest, such conduct may be covered without violating the personal rights of uninvolved individuals.
9. In regards to the news source, the code and charter stress that Professionalism and confidentiality should be strictly observed if the source demands anonymity. The journalist has every right to present evidence or expose their source without the source’s consent.
10. Journalists should not seek to provoke or inflame public feelings by any means or use means of excitement and deception or dishonest reporting. They should not use media organs for purpose of libel or slandering.
11. The edited publications should not be influenced by personal interests or businesses with a third party. Publishers and editors-in-chief must turn down any such attempts, and draw a clear line between reported stories and commercial articles or publications.
12. Journalists should be very vigilant to traps of discrimination and avoid involving themselves by any means in any stories hinting to discrimination of race, sex, language, faith or national and social backgrounds.
13. They must be aware that a suspect is innocent until proven guilty, thus names and photos of suspects should not be published until a final verdict is issued.
14. In crimes and issues dealing with children, names and photos should not be published.
15. Journalists must be very careful in their personal relationships with news sources so as these bonds can not impact the Partiality.
16. The media should refrain from publishing photos of brutal violence and respect the feeling of the public especially children.
17. Journalists are urged to avoid using offending and obscene language in their reports.
18. Islam is a basic and important component of UAE culture, values and traditions, and the respect of divine religions and traditions and values of nations takes centre stage at the mandatory code of ethics of the media and should not be offended or desecrated by any forms.
19. Human rights should also be respected and valued and should not be abused by the media under any pretext.
20. Plagiarism, ill-intention interpretation, libel, slandering, censure, defamation, allegation and accepting bribery to publish or hide information are all dangerous professional violations.
21. When using facts published by competitors, journalists must give credit to the competitor.
22. Competing for news, pictures and information is a right, provided practicing such competition is honest and clear and does not hinder the work of colleagues in competing publications.
23. A journalist has to do his best not to become part of a story, and to cover news not make them. While gathering information, a journalist may not present himself as anything other than a journalist.
24. Coverage of medical cases must not be sensational, as this can lead to spreading fear or unrealistic hope among readers. Publishing the first stage of results of researches and medical achievements must not be portrayed as final and undisputed.
25. Journalists must not acquire information or pictures through harassment, temptation or violence.
26. Accepting valuable cash and kind gifts may cause a journalist to be biased in his coverage and is considered breach of the code. This does not apply to souvenir gifts given to the public.

Book Post - Promotion And All That

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I've just been working on slidesets for next week's series of workshops on how to write, edit and publish books. In the last of the three, I look at getting an agent and also self publishing. And that invariably leads to the knotty issue of book promotion.

It's something of a conundrum, this promotion thing. I threw myself into promoting Olives - A Violent Romance like a particularly relentless lunatic, taking every opportunity to make a fuss, create content, repurpose, share, link and generally hoon around. Given the day job, I had a relatively good go at using my platforms and reach to nag, annoy, bully and generally beseech anyone who had ever come within my relatively wide ambit.

I did interviews, LitFests and ran a very extensive online reviews and outreach campaign. I published the book in October and by the following June was so exhausted with the whole thing I never wanted to see another book blogger again. Ever. Even the words 'I love books' used to bring me out in a cold sweat.

Picking up the energy to promote Beirut - An Explosive Thriller was a big deal. I never really managed it that well, beyond a cool launch event and some interviews/workshops and other stuff. I simply didn't have the energy left. And one thing that was becoming clear was there was a law of diminishing returns at play here - social media wasn't having the same impact it used to.

Everyone talks about getting an 'author platform', but what happens when those outlets become jammed with authors abusing their platform to promote books? Or when that platform is no longer seen as crucial or important to the people using it? What if everyone's just, you know, moved on?

I really haven't promoted Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy that much. IMHO it is by far the best of the three books but hasn't even drawn ten Amazon reviews. Because I haven't printed an edition in the UAE as I did for the last two books, it's not being bought by its 'core audience' in the main because Amazon doesn't serve the UAE, the adoption of e-readers is generally miles behind in the Middle East and few people seem to be buying books online.

Book bloggers, who used to be relatively accessible, have TBR (to be read) lists stretching ahead months. A lot of book blogs have just ground to a halt, are no longer accepting self published books or simply aren't taking on more reviews. It's getting harder and harder to get your voice out there and have it heard.

And when you do, McNabb's law applies. You have to kiss an awful lot of frogs to get one buyer. And even then, they probably won't read the damn thing for months.

It's starting to get problematic. There HAS to be better way to get good books into people's hands (and no, it's not blasted GoodReads) than this trilling and primping on social media - because that's simply not working.

If you know the answer, clearly I am more than interested in your views. Because I, for one, don't...

An Embarrassment Of Books

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's not my fault I've ended up with two books. The Irish Farmer took a year to write, the newnew book has taken a tad over a month, having possessed me in the spirit of something Steven King would think up. I've been haunted by a book and it used me as an unwilling channel to create itself.

So now I'm in the odd position of having one book still being rejected by literary agents as I start to shop the second one around. Even beta readers haven't finished sending me their comments and feedback on the Irish Farmer. Some of the poor darlings have ended up with TWO of my books in their inboxes because they weren't fleet enough to get rid of the Irish one. I'm keenly aware my beta readers, kind enough to agree to being part of my book development process, are being soundly abused right now.

So now I have two unpublished manuscripts clamouring to become real books with titles and covers and Amazon pages and everything.

The question is what to do next. Assuming the result of sharing the newnew book with agents will be the usual round of smug, platitudinous form letters...

Sorry, but we're going to pass on this one. It's a tough market right now and we didn't feel enthusiastic enough about this to take it forward. However, this is a subjective business and others may feel differently, so don't be dispirited.

...I will then face self publishing two books, both set in the UK and so with limited appeal for a Middle Eastern audience. Do I print them as I did Olives and Beirut? Certainly, not printing a UAE edition of Shemlan had a major (negative) impact on the book's sales - but then I really don't have the time to go around chasing up bookshops and trying to chivvy up a charming but ultimately flaccid distribution chain. Doing that for the first two was exhausting.

And Shemlan didn't leave me out of pocket to the tune of a Dhs 15,000 print bill. Every copy of the book I've sold has been profit and while it all hardly amounts to a hill of beans, it seems to make more sense to be in the black than in the red. Call me old fashioned.

Fair enough, having sold out both books' print runs means I'm not technically out of pocket, but I'm hardly laughing all the way to the bank - and back at square zero anyway, because I'm certainly not about to order a reprint and start all over again. So if you want to buy Olives or Beirut today, you'll have to go online same as you do for Shemlan.

I tried to resist, honestly I did, but it's no use.

You can buy Olives - A Violent Romance here.

You can buy Beirut - An Explosive Thriller here.

You can buy Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy here.

I can order smaller runs from Createspace, getting them delivered here to the UAE for a little over Dhs30 per book. This means I can sell them to people at events and so on, but makes traditional distribution unworkable (the disty takes 50%). People here generally seem happy to buy a book that's in front of them but very averse to buying print books online. In fact the online habit, including ebooks, is pretty nascent around here.

But, for a self-published author, online makes so much sense it's not true. So the decision's pretty much a no-brainer: no big print runs, we'll be going with Amazon, iBooks, Createspace et al.

The next big question is timing. Giving agents another month to finish rejecting the Irish book takes us into July and Ramadan and Summer. And editing takes 4-6 weeks. So we're looking at October publication. Should I hold back on the newnew book and publish it to coincide with the LitFest in March next year? That would seem to make sense, but I can't for the life of me see how I can sit on a book for six months without bursting. Especially the newnew one, because I am very, very excited about it.

So I'm going to have to mull that one over. There are no easy answers. Any smart ideas gratefully received...

Books - A Journey

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is all totally irrelevant to anyone, anywhere, ever, but I thought I'd take the chance to document some stuff now I've finished another book and have a little time before I can face editing it.

My first completed novel was a rather silly affair called Space, which I reckon I started back in 2001, but probably only really started in the spring of 2002. The oldest archive files I can find for the book only date back to 2003.

The oldest book files I have are actually a backup of an unfinished novel called Booze - those date back to September 2001, so I must have started Booze then put it to one side to work on the the less controversial Space.

When I'd finished Space and shopped it to agents, being rewarded with a remarkable tally of rejections (by the time I gave up, I had over a hundred), I started back on Booze, a rather scurrilous tale about a Kuwaiti buying a monastery that holds the recipe to an aqua vitae that tastes like angels' tears and is as addictive as crack cocaine. I began to get messages back from agents that said things like 'Humour doesn't sell dear boy' and so the work in progress that was Booze got shelved and, indeed, lies gathering dust even now.

I'll finish it one of these days, it was great fun. Let us remember that I still think Space is funny - it made me laugh enough, re-reading it after all these years, to put it up on Amazon for sale at a princely £0.99. Its first review on Amazon pointed out that "...it just isn't very funny."

It's linked here for your cheap Kindle read buying pleasure!

So I wandered off and decided to write a serious book. The result, Olives - A Violent Romance, was originally written in September 2004, pre-dating - I always thought rather presciently - the 2005 Amman bombing by a year. However, the bombing in the original manuscript was a dream sequence.

The original MS starts...

The first day of my new life started out in the dark, dreary sodium wetness of Heathrow Airport and ended in a cell. Let’s just say things didn’t go according to plan. Now, months later and looking back to the start of my time in Jordan, I wonder that I stayed there at all. Part of me bitterly regrets not leaving the second I was released. But there’s a tiny glimmer of hope in me that won’t go away, although now I’ve run out of choices and the consequences of my actions are written in the wreckage around me. 

And was considerably improved by the large amounts of editing and rewriting that went on between then and 2011 when it was finally published. Most of these took place post-2007, when I discovered Harper Collins' Authonomy and met other writers who taught me how to write better books, principally Australian Italian novelist Phillippa Fioretti. Other than that, the whole Authonomy experience was, as I have documented extensively in earlier blog posts, pretty pants.

Beirut - An Explosive Thriller was started in Autumn 2009 after the 'reader' for an agent called Eve White, who had requested a 'full read' of Olives had finally responded that it was all 'A bit too low key' for them. I was in a fury. The book's crammed with spies and bombs and shit and it's too low key?

That was it. The final straw. I was going to write a mad book and it was going to be based in Beirut. The first versions of Olives had Paul moving to Beirut, looked after by Gerald Lynch (who at that time was called Nigel Soames, a character who nagged at me because he wasn't 'working'), who felt guilty at the way things had panned out for the feckless young journalist. Beirut just made all sorts of sense as a location. I chucked Prague, Hamburg, Spain, Malta and the Greek Islands into the soup mixture just to be sure.

Work on Beirut - An Explosive Thriller actually started with 'The Muezzin Cried', a short story I posted here on the blog, derived, as usual, from a dream memory.

By December 2009 I had realised I was actually going to have to go back to Beirut if I was going to pull this one off. I had been travelling there since the '90s, but hadn't been back in a few years. I needed to refresh my memories and impressions of that sexiest of Eastern Mediterranean cities.

At the time, I had been involved in running a social un-event for online people in Dubai called GeekFest. I called a friend in Lebanon, Alex Tohme, and asked her if she'd be up for running GeekFest Beirut? Of course, she was totally up for it. And so I had my ticket to Beirut sorted!

On the 6th February 2009 GeekFest Beirut took place and I spent a few halcyon days striding around the city often in the company of old friend and partner in crime Eman Hussein. Thanks to GeekFest, I had 'my' city in the 'can'. I went back again for ArabNet with colleague and friend Maha Mahdy, discovering Barometre in the process thanks to geek and blogger Roba Al Assi. And again for GeekFest 3.0. And again, and again. The gorgeous Paul Mouawad Museum, the model for Michel Freij's own private museum, I discovered for myself.

It was with Maha that I went in search of Shemlan, the village nestled high in the Chouf that was home to the 'British Spy School' MECAS - The Middle East Centre for Arab Studies. I was to go back time and again, with the lovely Micheline Hazou and then also with friends Eman and Sara Refai. This village and an inspirational gentleman called Barry were to combine in the person of one Jason Hartmoor, the anti-hero of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy.

Work on Shemlan actually started back in 2011 but was postponed because I decided to self-publish Olives and that took 110% of my time, back in November 2011. Beirut followed in September 2012.

By early 2013 - having visited Estonia, the location of the book's finale - I restarted work on Shemlan and it went like a rocket. I raced to the mad, climactic and rather unusual end of the book, propelled by death metal and much musical mayhem. I sent it off to my agent and when he responded, weeks later, that he wasn't even going to try shopping it to publishers, I terminated our relationship.

Boy, did that feel good.

Shemlan was published on 1 November 2013. I didn't publish a book in 2014, I spent the year wrestling with A Simple Irish Farmer and quite a lot of existential self publishing angst. Olives and Beirut have sold quite well, but Shemlan - easily the best of the three books - was plagued by the fact I didn't do a UAE print run and was too exhausted by the whole farrago of promotion to actually get out there and market the thing. Shemlan has been terribly - and unfairly - neglected as a consequence.

Seriously. I can't even look at a book blog now. If I see the words, 'I love books and...' one more time, I'll burn the puppy. Big brown eyes or no big brown eyes...

I've written a screenplay for Olives since. I just don't know what to do with that, so it's in a desk drawer. It was fun to do!

So here I am, fifteen years into my journey as a writer of books. I have one more book now finished, being steadily rejected by a number of agents. That's taken, as I have documented earlier, a year to write. And I have another new book to edit now, which took about a month to write. If traditional publishing turns both books down, as I confidently predict they will, I shall self publish them in September this year (A Simple Irish Farmer) and March next year (the newnew book) to coincide with the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature.

And after that, I reckon, I'll be hanging up my literary shoes...

Gormenghast and the Future of Publishing

Image via Wikipedia

Longer-suffering readers of this silly little blog will know about Harper Collins’ authonomy website and my opinion of it. For those that weren’t around, this post pretty much explains things. The post was something of a bombshell in its time, BTW.

Authonomy was Harper Collins’ attempt to harness the process of change that the Internet is undoubtedly going to bring to publishing in a similar fashion to the change it is bringing the music industry. Although the company scrupulously avoided outlining any strategy, it is my opinion that the overall gameplan was to create a website that would attract authors and encourage them to put their books online (Authonomy), a website for readers (Book Army) and then allow the authors to ‘self publish’ for the readers by using a POD (print on demand) supplier. Today’s POD systems can create high quality single books at near-market prices.

The Authonomy deal was this: if you made it to the top five books each month on Authonomy, a Harper Collins editor would read and critique your manuscript, or MS. Getting an MS in front of a Harper Collins editor is a bit like getting ten minutes with Warren Buffet to chat about your new business proposal – and just as difficult. So it’s no wonder that the site soon attracted something in the region of 6,000 writers. You’d be surprised how many carvers there are living around Castle Gormenghast.

My ‘generation’ on Authonomy (before anyone starts squealing ‘sour grapes’, I made it to the top five and got a ‘gold star’ as well as a crit from an HC editor. You’ll have to read the ‘backstory’ linked above to see what I thought of it) was pretty much the first ‘wave’ of writers to discover the site and consisted of a heck of a lot of really talented people. With all the energy of a group of kids in a huge playground, we invested a huge amount of time and effort on the site, vying to get to the top and using fair means and foul to do so. At the core of it, though, was a sincere belief in quality – the majority of users adhered to a principle that they’d only ‘back’ books that they would genuinely buy in a bookshop. Although there was a huge element of popularity and ‘plugging’ of books, we reasoned that if you could market yourself on Authonomy, it just proved you could market yourself in the real world too, so was fair game as part of the mix that makes a book.

It looked very much as if HC had created a site that was intended to do what the Internet does best – improve access and disintermediate the gatekeepers, in this case the agenting system that means that only books with obvious mass market commercial potential get through to publishers. Now it looked as if readers could actually vote for the type of book they’d like to see in bookshops – and if HC was to add authonomy winners to its lists, there’d be a new and wonderful outbreak of crowdsourced work to choose from. I can honestly say, BTW, that I read more work that I would buy on Authonomy than I have seen in bookshops all year. Really.

Of course, it was not to be. The POD plan lurked and I ‘outed’ HC when they sent a private email to some of us offering us beta list status. I accused the company of being insincere, in offering a clear ‘get published’ carrot when in fact it only ever intended to create a POD site to hedge against the tide of innovation. It is still my humble opinion that this was the case.

But something else has happened as a result of authonomy, something rather wonderful. In fact several things.

One thing is that I have stayed in touch with a relatively close-knit group of writers I admire and respect, and we’re just as much in touch a year after we all wandered away from Authonomy muttering darkly (A huge number of people have left the site, disaffected with the whole game and the way HC has chosen to play it).

A much more important thing is that the disaffection and annoyance at the ‘traditional’ publishing industry and the way it treats writers has resulted in two groups of writers from authonomy creating real, truly important (IMHO) initiatives that I believe are much more about the true future of publishing than Authonomy.

Year Zero Writers

Dan Holloway is a lecturer by day and maverick by night. Actually, he’s probably pretty maverick by day, too, but we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

The author of the evocative and hauntingly beautiful Songs From the Other Side of the Wall, Dan founded the Year Zero Writers group as a collective designed to pool resources and talent in a way that would enable writers to reach out to audiences with their books. You can find out more about Year Zero here. Dan’s Year Zero projects include Free-e-day (see the BookBuzzr link below) and (to my knowledge) the first ‘FaceBook book’ (The Man Who Stole Agnieszka’s Shoes was written in weekly instalments on a FaceBook group, taking the input of readers to mould the plot). has seen Year Zero growing in popularity, attracting readers and participants and spawning a vibrant writers’ blog that is attracting readers in a most satisfactory manner.

Four books have been ‘published’ by Year Zero and more are planned - one compilation of short stories (Brief Objects of Beauty and Despair) and three novels. You can go to the Year Zero site, interact with the authors, find out more about their work (it is excellent) and then either download a PDF (free - in other formats here) or order a printed copy (paid for) of those books (the links are to Dan's 'Songs'). Although not the most active member of Year Zero, I am deeply proud to be associated with it.

Dragon International Independent Arts

Diiarts is a small independent imprint founded by writer Sarah Jane Heckscher-Marquis, which on November 14th will ‘conventionally’ publish four books that were hugely popular on authonomy and that represent, along with the three books that Year Zero has announced, some of the first books to have been published as a result of the authonomy project.
SJ has taken the highly unusual step of getting so frustrated at seeing great fiction (and I would personally, having read large amounts of all of them, commend them most highly to you, particularly Paul House’s stunning work, Harbour) mouldering on the slushpile and being overlooked by the Groans that she has put up her own money to publish some of her favourite work from the site. With the avowed intent of creating and maintaining her own small list of high quality fiction, she has had the pick of the best stuff on authonomy and has, I believe, chosen wisely.

As SJ says in the diiarts.com launch press release, “We believe there is a great deal of high quality, distinctive writing out there, which the larger publishers are just not picking up. Not only are readers missing out, but we’re losing something of the richness and diversity of the English language. We’re in danger of losing the spirit of innovation and thoughtfulness that’s been the hallmark of the English novel since we invented it. What we’ve seen is that more and more authors are expected to compromise on their vision, their voice and their artistic values, to cut their work down at whatever cost to fit supermarket display racks. We believe—passionately—that our authors should be in control of their own work. When they are, great books are the result.”

What has me chuckling evilly is the fact that both of these initiatives came about as a result of Authonomy. And, of course, I believe they both represent different facets of the change that will eventually lead to the flooding of Gormenghast - 'e-books' and small, independent publishers who are passionate about books, not shareholders, together will forge what I believe to be the future of publishing.

Come With Me From Jerusalem

Kamal Abdel Malek and I are sharing the stage at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in a session entitled 'Tales of Two Cities' on Friday the 8th March from 3pm. The session's name reflects the fact Kamal's novel is set in Jerusalem and my latest is, at least in part, set in Beirut. Tickets for that session are moving fast I'm told and can be got here. We're both pretty lippy, so it's going to be fast, furious and fun for sure.

I first met Kamal a couple of years ago at the LitFest. He's an intelligent, engaging and thoroughly likeable character who loves nothing more than good-natured disputation and banter. He's also a talented writer - published conventionally as an academic author, he took the decision to go straight to self-publication with his first novel, Come With Me From Jerusalem - a love story recounting the adventures of Egyptian Copt Sami, who becomes the first Egyptian student to study in Jerusalem after the 1979 peace treaty and  falls in love with American Jewess Lital. When Sami is accused of murdering a call-girl, his and Lital's love is tested beyond reason.

I'm still reading it - it's an amazing book I am thoroughly enjoying. Kamal's work mixes elegant prose and strong characters with real 'voice' and a narrative that hooks you by the nose and drags you forwards. It's wilfully different, witty and well observed and, thank God, avoids those 'obvious' pitfalls of books that attempt to give a new treatment to the Arab/Israeli narrative.

So I thought I might have a chat with Kamal prior our session and perhaps take the opportunity to highlight  that today's McNabboGram emailer carries a FREE copy of the ebook of Come With Me From Jerusalem - even before its official launch! There are more specials in store, so if you didn't sign up before, you might want to get clicking on this here link to sign up to the McNabboGram!

Onto a chat with Kamal:

What made you decide to put your heart and soul into a work of fiction after a lifetime of academia? 
I have two answers: one modest and the other arrogant. The modest answer is this: the life of the academic is austere in many ways; he spends years poring over research topics, writing papers and books in as objective a manner as is humanly possible. These writings are by and large of interest to him and at best a handful of other academics, so he decides to try his hand at something else, something less objective and more personal, something that is not engendered from the brain cells but from the folds of one’s own guts. This can be a liberating exercise.

The arrogant answer is this: well, Kamal, my man, if you are so good at chess, you can be equally good at swimming, besides, you’ve got a talent in the use of the English language; glib and quite the raconteur at parties, impressive and attention-grabbing as you exhibit with ease your storytelling wares. Yes, English is not your native tongue but English was not the native tongue of Gibran and Nabokov, and before them Joseph Conrad, and look how they fared! So one day three years ago, I said to myself, “Kamal my man, just do it!”

What is Come With Me From Jerusalem about? Not the plot, but the substance, the essence of the book. What are you trying to achieve through this story? 
Come with Me from Jerusalem tells the story of Sami, the first Egyptian student in Israel, who falls in love with Jewish classmate Lital. Sami’s life is shattered when he finds himself arrested and tried for the murder of a Tel Aviv call girl. Only a miracle can save him from a certain life sentence as he and Lital come together, offering hope for reconciliation and a shared future.

So what does this really mean? As an Arab novel, Come with Me from Jerusalem is unique in many ways. It is perhaps the first novel by an Egyptian author which presents a Christian Copt and a Jewish woman as the main characters; minority figures are all of a sudden placed in the center of action, in the spotlight of drama. The setting is Jerusalem, not Cairo or Alexandria, not an Egyptian village or an oasis, and in the novel Jerusalem is viewed in a different light, not as a holy city but as a livable city with streets and cafes and rundown houses with TV antennas burgeoning on their roofs like alfalfa sprouts.

Besides, Sami and Lital, lovers from opposite sides of the conflict, are ideally placed to constitute a microcosm representing divergent views of the Arab-Jewish conflict and the desire to achieve genuine reconciliation.

Come With Me From Jerusalem is about an Egyptian in love with an Israeli. Now you've lit the blue touch paper, how far back do you intend to stand? 
Technically, Lital, Sami’s beloved, is not Israeli but a Jewish-American woman planning to immigrate to Israel. Well, now that I’ve lit the blue touch paper, I intend to stand as far back as I can. This is bound to be a huge explosion, figuratively speaking, of course. In our Arab world we are not used to reading novels in which a Jewish or Israeli character is a real flesh-and-blood human being with feelings, let alone an object of love and sympathy. There is something disarming about a reference to a handicapped Israeli child. Have we Arabs ever thought that an Israeli can be handicapped? We are more used to him as a predatory soldier, an aggressive land-grabbing settler, a religious fanatic of one stripe or another. But a handicapped child? So I better get myself a good medical insurance policy because the explosion is bound to be a huge hellhole. 

There's a danger of 'conflict fatigue' with Arab/Israeli conflict books. Having read Come With Me From Jerusalem, I know this is a vividly original, smart and fascinating story. How are you going to get over that 'oh, another Middle East Arab/Israeli book' attitude? 
I stand by my work of fiction. I pitch it to the readers and let them decide. I say “Listen folks, this is not part of the usual stuff written about the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is first and mainly a love story.”

“Hatred stirreth up strife;” the Bible tells us, “but love covereth all sins,” (Proverbs 10:12)

Arabic literature has produced a scant volume of works of fiction dealing with the sensitive topic of interethnic and interreligious liaisons. The most celebrated love story between a Palestinian man and a Jewish-Israeli woman is the story of Palestine’s national poet Mahmud Darwish and his Jewish beloved, named “Rita” in some of his poems. I find it strange that Arab audiences in musical festivals such as the one in Jarash, in Jordan, would listen with rapture to the tuneful song “Rita” as sung by the Lebanese Marcel Khalifeh, and not show awareness that the “Rita” of the song is really a Jewish-Israeli beloved and that their rapture is focused on the taboo love between a Muslim-Palestinian and a Jewish-Israeli. Can love conquer all, really? Well, I urge readers out there in the real or virtual world of cyberspace to read Come With Me From Jerusalem and judge.

You're the professor of Arabic Literature at AUD, so your deep literary expertise is rooted in Arabic. How did you manage to write a novel in English - and why English not Arabic? 
Arabic is my mother tongue but English is my step-mother tongue. In the world of languages, and as it happened in my case, step-mothers can be and at times are kinder and more affectionate. We don’t choose our mother tongues, do we? They’re imposed on us; they are like our names and our facial features. Like a mother, our mother tongue often yells at us; she’d wag her figure in our face and harshly reprimand us when we make mistakes, when we use the wrong end-vowel, when we replace the nominative noun with the accusative, when our verbs are in the jussive instead of the subjunctive.

But step-mother tongues? They may be at times introduced to us as part of our school curriculum but to continue to live with them and to adopt them as our own mother tongues is a voluntary act. We do this of our own accord, as an act of volition, an act of love. I am speaking for myself here but I bet you 1001 Emirati Dirhams that writers whose step-mother tongue was English must have felt the same way, writers like the Polish Joseph Conrad, the Lebanese Gibran, and the Russian Nabokov, or the Egyptian Ahdaf Soueif.

You're a published author of non-fiction works in your academic capacity - did your work on Arab/Israeli literary portrayal inform the way you managed the characters and their interplay in Come With Me From Jerusalem? 
Undoubtedly. How people from different cultural backgrounds relate to one another without losing their authentic selves is what has preoccupied my scholarly and fictional work alike. America in an Arab Mirror: Images of America in Arabic Travel Literature, 1688 to 9/11 and Beyond (2011), examines Arab images of America: the unchanging Other, the very antithesis of the Arab Self; the seductive female; the Other that has praiseworthy and reprehensible elements, some to reject, others to appropriate.

But my passionate interest is in the historical and cultural encounters between Arabs and Jews as depicted in literature and the cinematic art. You could say that The Rhetoric of Violence: Arab-Jewish Encounters in Contemporary Palestinian Literature and Film (2005) was a prelude to my fictional work, Come with Me from Jerusalem, in which I tell a story of star-crossed lovers caught up in the vortex of Arab-Israeli conflict.

As I mentioned, you're already conventionally published. Did you look for agents and publishers or go straight to self publishing? And why? 
Finding publishers for one’s academic work is far easier than for one’s creative writing. I think that some literary agents out there are darn harsh in their prejudgment of authors’ samples, sending off rejection letters as cowboys shoot from the hip in a Western movie. It is time to challenge these guys whose agencies have become virtual abortion clinic for literary talents.

Have you ever seen their storage areas of rejected MSs? A graveyard of human creativity as a result of wanton death sentences, uttered in the absence of jury and the city folks. I say it is time to revolt against this oppressive oligarchy. Time for the Authors’ Spring! Let my outcry here be the first drum-roll in our holy crusade against the talent-abortionists.

What are your hopes for the book? And are you truly ready for the controversy? 
Will there be controversy surrounding my novel? No doubt and I say Ahlan wa Sahlan! I am ready with my bullet-proof jacket and my helmet, and my F-16 fighter plane is being now equipped with laser-guided verbal missiles. So this is a fair warning to the Tatars at my city gates. So much for war and battlefields.

On a happier and more optimistic note this is what I want to add: I used to say to my erstwhile beloved, “My sweet kattousa, ‘lana l-ghadu wa l-mustaqbalu l-wa’du’ - Tomorrow is ours; we are bound for glory!” Ever since I watched this wonderful movie, “Bound for Glory” about the life of singer Woody Guthrie, I’ve always felt it in my guts that someday, somewhere somehow there’s going to be a dramatic turn-up, a big breakthrough in my fortunes. This book is bound for glory because it is an eloquent dream of a brave new world where love rules as a supreme but benevolent sovereign.

GET YOUR COPY NOW!

Come With Me From Jerusalem is available from amazon.com as both a Kindle book and printed book and also from Smashwords for iPads, Android tabs and other ebook readers. It'll soon be available on other platforms such as Kobo and iBooks and a UAE print edition will be available in stores soon. If you've got $95 going free, you might be interested in Kamal's 'Rhetoric of Violence' or for a mere $105, his America in an Arab Mirror.

If you're REALLY fast and sign up to the McNabboGram today, you might be in time to get today's mailer and get Come With Me From Jerusalem for FREE! :)

More Talks? Yes! More Talks!

Did you ever hear of a boy doing more talking? Dubai's favourite purple café thingy has started a series of talks by talkers which is has named, with remarkable prescience, More Talks. On the 17th April at More DIFC, starting from about 6.30pm I will be gibbering in tongues, foretelling the end of the world and otherwise acting in a publicly disgraceful and disreputable manner as befits this age when men walk backwards and cats bark like dogs.

I'll likely be talking about writing books, the impact of self publishing on the global publishing industry and our  own reading habits - as well as perhaps looking at how social media communications is changing the consumer, the reader and the whole business of marketing publications.

But then again, I'll be guided by the audience - if they'd rather talk about why PR is doomed unless it goes digital, the moral challenges of the Internet age, why the Arab World has a fraught relationship with fiction or perhaps even what my new book's about, I'll be only delighted to do that.

Anyway, you have to RSVP to come, so here's the link for you to do just that.

Oh Noes! More Bookery!

English: The second generation Amazon Kindle, showing the book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's all about books this week, but then it's London Book Fair week, so why not?

Not least of this week's book news is I'll be publishing a new book over the weekend and it's not quite what you'd expect. more below.

Meantime, I've been tweaking the MS of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy as feedback comes in from beta readers, with quite a bit of work to do over the coming week or so. I've had to shelve it because of other commitments, of which more below...

I spent a happy 45 minutes cackling, screaming and talking in tongues in front of a mildly horrified audience of about 40 people at Dubai's More Cafe last night. I talked about books, writing, publishing and creating narrative and enjoyed myself thoroughly, as usual. The audience didn't throw things, which is always a good sign.

As I mentioned the other day, I'm trawling my way through Edward Rutherfurd's 'Paris' in readiness for my co-hostin' slot on Dubai Eye Radio's Talking of Books this Saturday. I can't say I'm getting to grips with it terribly well, but it's probably me. It's odd having to read a papery booky book rather than my preferred Kindle format - and I'm finding the whole bulk of the thing rather unwieldy to tell the truth.

And, of course, Saturday afternoon I'm giving two booky workshops at The Archive's 'Day of Books' event. Just in case you're interested they are, respectively:

3:00pm-4:30pm – ‘How Not to Write a Book’: So you’ve written a book, or you want to write a book. What DON’T you want in there? What needs to come out? How can you self-edit your work? What can you avoid ever putting in there in the first place so you don’t have to bother taking it out? Alexander McNabb guides you through a bunch of useful self editing tips.

5:00pm-6:30pm – ‘How to Publish an E-Book Step by Step’: Putting an e-book online in print and electronic formats is as easy as pie. Alexander McNabb takes you through the process step by step using a practical MS file to book example!

Here's the event link again - there are workshops by writers like Kathy Shalhoub, Frank Dullaghan,
Zeina Hashem Beck and Rewa Zeinati all through the day, with kids' stuff in the morning, more grown up stuff in the afternoon and 'readings under the stars' into the evening. Do come by!

The 'practical MS file to book example' in that second workshop I'm doing, by the way, is a compilation of my favourite bits from the first two years of this very blog. It's the easiest way I could find something at least vaguely practical or viable to publish as an e-book. Going back over the Fake Plastic archive was quite fun - it reminded me of a number of moments in the past I'd simply forgotten - it's not a bad record of that odd period when Dubai was at the height of its property-boom fuelled madness, throwing itself pell-mell at materialism, consumerism and all sorts of other isms before it smacked into a brick wall like Tom chasing Jerry as he makes it to the mousehole. That transition from quaffing bubbly to scrabbling for pennies is quite nicely covered.

I'll be publishing Fake Plastic Souks - The Glory Years for pennies on Amazon, so do look out for it! :)

Beirut - I Got It Covered

Isn't this all exciting? So the final edit of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller is back from proofreading and ready to be formatted for CreateSpace, Smashwords and Kindle. I promised Jordanian tweep John Lillywhite a post on platforms for self publishing, so I'll do that later this week as I work on putting the book into its different formats.

In the meantime, here's the cover. It's a wee bit more stark than Olives, isn't it? I'm also now looking at a refresh of the Olives cover to come into line with this style. It ticks my boxes for a cover, which are as follows:

Thumbnails
A book cover these days needs to survive as a thumbnail. While the real estate of publishing in the age of the bookshop was shelves (and spines were vitally important), these days an idle click on catchy icon is what you seek.

Impact
Your book will rarely be presented alone on a screen, so if you can make it thoroughly eye-catching, so much the better.

Mono
On an e-paper Kindle, it'll display in mono, on a Kindle Fire or other tablet, colour. (It has to work in a 1.6 to 1 ratio and be 2500 pixels high for a Kindle cover) So, ideally, it should also work in mono.

Sell the book
This is where I had huge problems: many of the cover treatments I had considered just reinforced the annoying and outdated 'Looks like Beirut' syndrome - choppers over the mountains, revolvers et al just brought 'war' to mind. So I was looking for a cover image that was cleverer than that. I came up with a crude lipstick  bullet, but art director pal Jessy came up with this much more sophisticated image. It's supposed to make you do a mild double-take, to resolve clearly as lipstick and bullet. It's about sexy and violent, which are two words I would definitely pin on Beirut. And Beirut, come to think of it!

Print
It's got to be sensible as a print book cover, too - that means for POD like Createspace, a clear 5mm around all page edges for trim, unless you're 'bleeding' (material that's designed to run over the cover edge), in which case you need a 5mm margin all around.

It also ticks a rather esoteric little Font Nazi box for me - it uses Eric Gill's stunning Perpetua, a true serif 'stonecutter's font' and a true design classic by that most fascinating of typographers and artists.

For those who care about such things, the slug's a 9mm parabellum, which would be nicely compatible with Lynch's weapon of choice, the versatile Walter P99. The lipstick is a... just kidding.

I also tested the cover with quite a few people to guage reactions - I'd love to know yours, so do feel free to drop a comment!

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.