Barbarians At The Windows 8

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There's a wonderful moment in the film Barbarians At The Gate when the beleagured CEO of RJR Nabisco tries out the 'smokeless cigarette' that's going to save the company from a buyout and discovers it tastes like a toilet when it's lit with a match - the R&D team have been using lighters all along.

The moment when Nokia CEO Stephen Elop was told that Lumia was Portugese for 'lady of the night' must have felt similar. If you're going to bet the future of your company on a single product, you really want to get it right. Totally right.

October 26th is another such moment, when Microsoft launches its Windows 8 operating system in six cities across the world, including - Gulf News tells us - Dubai. Windows 8 is really about Microsoft's future - the company arguably can't afford another Vista scale disappointment but it desperately needs to stay relevant in a world where iOS and Android are the talking points and most people have either stuck with XP or wished they had. The days of everyone flocking to 'this year's Windows' are long gone now. Windows 8 is going to have to be special - I'd argue it's going to have to be as special as Windows 3.0 was - a true game changer. And there are major question marks about that.

Early reviews have been mixed, with a great deal of disappointment and frustration expressed by reviewers. The 'tablet friendly' interface is actually a highly dangerous move for Microsoft. It's an inflection point - if the burden of navigating the new interface is as great - or greater - than the burden of change, users are more likely to make that change. Especially those of us who have been vexed by Vista and living with the nice but dim Windows 7. Microsoft's saving grace may be that the options out there are limited right now, but it's doubtful Google will give them too much 'wriggle room'.

October 26th is a Friday. It's also the first day of the Eid Al Adha holiday. It's not the day I'd pick for a Dubai product launch, but then what do I know...

This rare technology themed post comes to you courtesy of sponsor the UNWired radio show on technology, online and all things digital I co-host every Wednesday with Rama Chakaki and Siobhan Leyden. Today we're broadcasting live from GITEX - 12-2pm Dubai time (GMT +4) on 103.8FM or streaming live at this here handy link. This'll be my 24th GITEX and also marks my first meeting the girl who would become the future (and long suffering) Mrs McNabb!

Liars

The Interview (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am never at my best in job interviews. I’m a disastrous candidate (I was once stopped in the middle of an interview to be told my ‘interview persona sucks’) and even worse as an interrogator. Never a great lover of formality, I find the stilted nervousness appalling.

The other day a candidate asked me what was the difference between PR and advertising. It struck me as an odd question to ask in an interview for a PR job, but I did my best to answer it. And my answer boiled down to this.

Public Relations - as I see it - is the communications discipline. It is about driving structured, benefit-led change. In my professional career, fifteen years now, in public relations I have never told a single lie. Never.

But advertising is all about lying. It's what they do, constantly. What amazes me is how we put up with it, consigning it to the dump bin of background noise when actually we should be protesting it. Look at HSBC's most recent radio ad in the UAE. "At HSBC, we believe that..."

No you don't. That's simply a lie. You do not collectively believe in personal loans with 'keen' (6.5% is competitive, apparently.) interest rates. It's not a corporate value. In fact, your offer is not driven in any way by a "belief", other than a commercial imperative. So why do you find it appropriate to so glibly misrepresent yourselves in this way?

Axe does not make men attractive. Oh, sure, it's an amusing way to highlight the 'brand essence' of the product. It's also a lie. It smells like toilet freshener. I have yet to meet a woman attracted by the smell of toilet freshener. Pantypads don't make you a more successful mum and microwave dinners don't mean more time to enjoy the family. Famously, I would contend a Mars a day doesn't really help you work, rest and play. It just tastes nice and is bad for you. There's no medical evidence to support the unsupportable claim.

It has long been a catechism for me that assertion without proof is a lie. And yet this is what advertising does constantly. Feel the radiance warm your skin, taste the joy of the open road. Dare to dream the dream. Oh, and while I'm at it, why does the 'Hundred reasons to buy a BMW' radio ad only ever feature reason 82? Do you think they even have a list of 100 reasons to buy their blasted cars?

And on and on we go through a litany that touches pretty much every commercial we see. A constant barrage of the untrue, indefensible and mis-characterised. And we let it wash over us rather than pushing back and asking brands to kindly just stick to the facts, the truth.

Which is what you have to do in public relations. Because if you don't, you'll get called out. In public. It used to be by journalists, now it's by every mobile phone in the country.

I can't say the interview was a great success. It contained some very long silences...

Book Post. Beirut And Prostitutes

   She was silk and she was jasmine, ivory and frankincense, her skin a pale golden slide for the smooth satin riding up her legs as she mounted the stairs. Her hips moving under the wrap were a provocation, her long hair cascaded down her mobile back.
   Reaching the top ahead of them, she strutted across the dance floor and sat on a high stool at the bar. Lynch ducked behind the counter and started to fix coffee at the gleaming red espresso station. This was obviously some sort of well-worn ritual – Nathalie noticed Lynch’s deft movements as he manipulated the machine.
   The white filter of Marcelle Aboud’s cigarette was reddened by her lipstick, her dark, kohl-lined eyes coolly gauging Nathalie as the younger woman waited, her hand resting on the back of a bar stool.
   ‘Come, sit,’ Marcelle purred, gesturing at the stool. Her very movements were languorous and sensual, her voice husky, rolling and dirty. Nathalie caught the flash of a full breast trying to escape the cascades of smooth bronze material as Marcelle turned her magnificent face to Lynch.
   ‘So you’re buying or selling, Lynch?’
   He brought the espresso cup over to her. ‘Her? You can have her for free.’
   Nathalie twisted off her stool. ‘Sorry, not putting up with this.’
   ‘Sit down,’ Marcelle’s languorous voice wasn’t raised, but her tone stopped Nathalie in her tracks. ‘Make her a coffee, Lynch, Play nicely.’
   Lynch busied himself with the espresso machine as Marcelle examined Nathalie, who met the dark brown eyes after they finished travelling lazily up her body like a slow touch. The clink of the espresso cup on the bar broke the moment.
   Marcelle turned to Lynch. ‘So what do you want, you and your assistant?’
   Lynch waited behind the bar with his hands laid on the marble top. Nathalie was surprised at how he eased into the role of barman and fancied perhaps he had worked here many, many years ago as a young man.
From Beirut – An Explosive Thriller

Who did you think of when you created Marcelle?
There was no inspiration as such for Marcelle, she just happened that way. Probably Jessica Rabbit. I suppose in the same way as Anne was a metaphor for Paul’s homeland and Aisha Jordan in Olives – A Violent Romance, Marcelle is Beirut. She’s beautiful, sinful, capricious and a little dangerous.

Why a prostitute? Could she have been doing something else instead and still be integral to the plot?
Perhaps, but she just wouldn’t have been the same if she was a welder, would she? Marcelle is part of Lynch’s seamy side, the underworld of a city and someone with power and contacts in her own strange way. She knows men, she knows Lynch and is perhaps a counterpoint to his intensity and anger. Their relationship is stormy and yet they clearly are very fond of each other.

Nathalie’s big contact is the wealthy and philanthropic Vivienne Chalabi, Lynch’s is the madam of a cat house. It sort of speaks to their respective approaches to life and, I guess, their work...

There’s a hint of a past with Lynch...
Oh yes. It’s not fully explored in Beirut, but Lynch first lived in Beirut towards the end of the civil war, sent undercover to track down some unpleasant IRA drug runners and close the gold seam. His ‘cover’ was working as a barman at Marcelle’s.

Lebanese politics is about religion, won't the Marcelle character create more controversy for you?
What, as much as a future president whose daddy was a warlord and who has a taste for nuclear warheads? There’s bound to be someone who finds something offensive in Beirut – An Explosive Thriller, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a by-product of the lack of fiction in the region, this inability to divorce creativity from reality.

I’m looking forward to the first person telling me there are no prostitutes in Lebanon. I already had one person point out that Marcelle couldn’t possibly be Christian, if she was a prostitute she’d be Shia. Which tells you more about Lebanon than I’d care to admit.

I also think you can approach this whole angle of controversy two ways. You could tiptoe around in a constant state of fear and dumb down everything you do so it couldn’t possibly offend or be contrary to anyone’s preconceptions or the way they publicly present themselves while acting differently privately. Or you can just get on and do your thing with integrity, making it as good as you can and perhaps even playing with some of the situations and personalities you encounter in this part of the world.

How did you research Lebanese bordellos?
Cheeky! I made it up. I’ve never been in one. Honest. Ask the Spot On girls, they keep me out of trouble.

Is Marcelle in the next book?
Now that would simply be telling...

Interview by Beirut - An Explosive Thriller beta reader Mita Ray.

The Beirut Website - Including Handy Links to Buy eBooks or Print Books is here!

Life Is Good...

One of my many reasons to be cheerful is co-hosting the weekly 'UnWired' radio show on talk radio station Dubai Eye. It's my idea of fun, radio - I love the pressure of the dreaded 'dead air', the mix of news analysis, banter and live guest interviews. You get to meet all sorts of strange and wonderful people and when you come across something admirable, interesting or deserving of a little publicity, you have that gift within you. Which is always nice.

This week's show is going to be a little bit special for me - and, I suspect many others. We're interviewing Len Chapman.

I have long been a fervent admirer of Len's work. He's the man behind wonderful website Dubai As It Used To Be - an archive of Dubai over the years made up of memories, photos and stuff from all sorts of people who have come to live and work here over the decades since Dubai was "A collection of mud huts on a creek" as a friend of my father's who was here during WWII described it to me - horrified I should be living in such a forsaken place!

Anyway, pop over to the site and have a wander in the past and do tune in at 1.30pm today to listen to Len - 103.8 FM in the UAE or streaming at this here handy link if you're anywhere else. You can text in comments or questions to 4001 in the UAE or tweets with hashtag #UNWiredFM always get to us.

The picture is the Sheikh Zayed Road in 1991, BTW. Howzat?

The Times They Are A-Changin'

The Man Who Fell to Earth (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This isn't really a book post, it just starts like one, so bear with me.

I've just heard that Beirut - An Explosive Thriller has been passed by the National Media Council in Abu Dhabi and I therefore have permission to print the book in the UAE. Many of my friends overseas have a hard time understanding why anyone would need permission to print a book and, in fact, have drawn parallels between this and the control of information by the Church in the dark ages.

The fact of the matter is it's something of a Catch22.In the Middle East it is generally assumed that the national media is controlled by the government and therefore speaks with the same voice. It isn't until you have a fully deregulated environment that you can afford to drop the regulation, and yet a fully deregulated environment is almost impossible to conceive here.

What has changed, however - and to a remarkable degree for someone who remembers how it was in the 1980s - is the lightness of the touch on the tiller. I remember Lawrence of Arabia being banned in the UAE and now a digitally enhanced recut of David Lean's seminal (if sometimes fanciful) film is showing at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival. I once had a DVD of Nicholas Roeg's 1970s art-house movie The Man Who Fell To Earth confiscated by the Ministry of Information in Dubai (and replaced in my Amazon sleeve by a booklet about finding the path to God). Today, bookshops in the UAE are selling EL James' books.

I'm not sure about selling 50 Shades of Grey and its two sibling titles in the UAE, to be honest. While I'm all for freedom of choice and expression, it rather flies in the face of a censored Internet and certainly is not in line with the cultural and moral environment here. I mean, we're asked to dress decently in malls and public places here. You sort of get the feeling that someone, somewhere hasn't understood it - that it has somehow flown under the radar. There was a period some years ago when one prominent bookseller in the UAE was selling George Bataille's scabrous work of porn, 'The story of the eye', much to colleagues' glee. It did not, of course, last.

Magic Menon (explained in this early blog post although I first mentioned the solvent abusing Black Marker Gang here.) must have retired now, too. It's hard to go on putting black pen on pages when they're iPad apps.The Ministry of Information is certainly no more. The dark offices where I was once brought in to be censured as a magazine publisher, all big desks and locked bookcases full of Jackie Collins novels, are now the friendly corridors of the National Media Council. I thought I was pushing it with Beirut - An Explosive Thriller - there was already quite a bit of controversy regarding the morality, or otherwise, of Olives - A Violent Romance. Beirut has a lot more contentious stuff in it. My reader in Abu Dhabi (He's much too jocular and friendly a chap to call a censor) did note the number of f-bombs, but explained he understood 'this is the British style'.

But when you've got 50 shades in tottering stacks in the malls, I suppose I'm pretty safe. Although I personally think it's only a matter of time before someone picks that book up and decides a light hand on the tiller is one thing, but enough is enough.

Book Post: An Interview With Gerald Lynch

Bob Studholme is a lecturer in English at the Al Ain branch of Abu Dhabi University. One of the beta readers who gave valuable and extensive early feedback on the book, he volunteered to interview Gerald Lynch, the Northern Iriish spy who plays such a key role in Olives - A Violent Romance (where all agree he is a complete cad) and Beirut - An Explosive Thriller (where readers learn that Paul Stokes' view of Lynch might have been somewhat skewed by circumstance).

Either way, Bob let himself in for this. And here's how it went:

An unnamed hotel in Beirut. Yesterday.

 

   A knock sounds on the door.
  'Come.'
  Bob Studholme slinks into the room with a nervous grin. A university lecturer, he’s been forced to adopt the role of journalist and, even if he lectures in English, the prospect of facing down a difficult subject in person is not one he had counted on actually having to physically endure. He feels sweaty. Difficult doesn’t quite do it justice, he thinks. Dangerous. He gulps.
  The man he is here to meet stands, brushing his trouser legs. Studholme advances, his hand held out. He bobs a little. The man shakes the proffered hand and gestures to the armchair opposite his own. Studholme sits.
  ‘Would you like a drink? Something for the nerves?’ says Gerald Lynch.
  Peering up, he nods. ‘Umm, yes please.’
  Lynch wanders to the sideboard and fixes two stiff scotches. ‘Here. You’ll take ice.’
  Studholme almost spills the drink, gulping it too fast and wiping his bearded chin with the back of his hand.
  ‘So they’ve sent you to interrogate me, is it?’
  ‘Well, not so much that as interview you.’ He finishes the drink and Lynch pours him another.
  ‘Let’s get it over with then,’ the Irishman sits back, his hands steepled and his blue-eyed regard on the English lecturer with his notebook and HB pencil. Studholme produces a voice recorder and places it on the table between them. His voice is stronger than he feels.
  ‘To start with the one that puzzles me most, Mr. Lynch. You are an Irishman.  A Catholic Irishman from the North, where it matters even more than it does in the South. So why are you working for the Empire?’
  Lynch waves his condensation-frosted glass at Studholme, his finger pointing. ‘You’re a cheeky bugger, aren’t you? That’s a fine start, that is.’
  Studholme, fortified by whisky, stands his ground. There is a long silence. Lynch turns to put his drink down.
  ‘Let me tell you something, Bob. It is Bob, isn’t it?’ Studholme nods his assent. ‘I grew up in an orphanage but they put me out to a family whose kid was on heroin. He died and they blamed me for the habit their son had and they didn’t know about. So I got sent back. A few years later I met the dealer who sold him that last hit and he was an IRA man. That was the day the truth first hit me. They didn’t mind how they made the money to buy guns, see? They became criminals, as bad for decent folk trying to get by as the Brits, even worse. I used to join in, throwing stones and stuff down on the Falls Road. But after that I sort of lost my appetite for people who deal heroin for their so-called fight for freedom. So when the Brits came calling, I answered.’
  ‘Still, working for the people that you do has got to mean working with the British Establishment. Forgive me for saying it, but I can't see that being a mix of personality types that is exactly made in Heaven. In fact, I think you'd piss each other off royally. How do you get on with your superiors?’
  Lynch laughs. ‘You’d be right on the money there. Look, you have to understand how these people work. They don’t really care too much for the niceties of life, they have a job to do. And I’m the guy they like to give the messy stuff to. Channing understands the Middle East is hardly what you might call a ...’ Lynch makes air quotes, ‘conventional environment. So we have conventional assets in the region but it suits him to have someone around who isn’t too ...’ Lynch reaches for his drink and takes a slug. ‘Prissy. As far as getting along, we rub along okay as long as we avoid each other.’
  Lynch leans back and favours the room with an indifferent glance as Studholme scratches away at his notebook with the pencil.
  ‘You writing shorthand there, Bob, are you?’
  ‘Umm, no. Just catching up.’
  ‘Thought they taught you journalists shorthand. ‘spose they just teach you Facebook now, is it?’
  Studholme grinns weakly, sips his drink and raises his gaze to meet Lynch’s intensity. ‘I can't remember who was supposed to have said it, but there is a story of a Lebanese whose reaction to Churchill's description of Russia (a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma) was to say that in Lebanon, such stories are told to little kids, who like simple tales. So how do you find working there? And, while we're on the subject, how do you get on with your counterparts in the Lebanese intelligence world?’
  ‘There’s one simple law in the Middle East. “My brother against my cousin, my cousin against the stranger.” Once you cop on to that, you’ll be fine. I like working here plenty, you don’t get bored easy here. Mostly my masters leave me alone, sometimes they remember me and throw some bones my way. I’m a dustman, me. I clean up mess. Lebanese intelligence? Most of their intelligence consists of blood and sawdust, let me tell you. Tony’s good people, but he’s a copper not a spook. If their spooks get you, let me tell you now, Bob, you’d better have non-conductive balls.’
  Lynch’s dry chuckle turns into a cough. He sips his drink, shaking his head at his own wit.
  Tongue protruding from his lips, Studholme toils away with his pencil. Lynch regards him with amused tolerance. Finally, the man raises his head from the notepad.
  ‘Someone once defined the stress that the police are under because of their work as: That feeling and desire, along with the ensuing bodily effects, experienced by a person who has a strong and true longing to choke the living shit out of someone who desperately deserves it, but can't. Get that much in your job?’
  ‘I usually just choke ‘em. Next.’
   ‘On the same line, the police are generally a reasonably honest group, but their divorce rate shows that they have difficulty in keeping relationships going. You, being a professional liar, can't have an easier time. At the risk of sounding like a Women's magazine, how do you keep relationships going?’
  ‘Professional liar, is it? Liar?’ Lynch’s smile is Siberian. ‘You’re a cheeky fecker, are you not? I keep relationships going or not as I see fit and by Christ that’s all I’ll tell the likes of youse about my bloody relationships.’
  His eyes drop to the notebook momentarily before Studholme faces Lynch, rebellion in the set of his shoulders. ‘In your job you might talk about sources and assets, but what you often mean is the people you lean on and use. Those people can't all have happy endings. How do you deal with it when bad things happen to good people because of you?
  Lynch leaps to his feet. He leans across the coffee table. He raises his hand, his two fingers together pointing at Studholme’s forehead. ‘I know precisely who you’re talking about and you can drop that line of questioning before you find yourself wearing a laser fucking bhindi, you understand me? I was not responsible for what happened to him. They told me to play nicely with you but I find my desire to conform to my empirical masters’ wishes is being very fast eroded. I hope I make myself clear to you. Bob.’
  Studholme drains his whisky, his face pale and crimson patches high on his cheeks. Perched on the edge of his armchair, his body weaves and he blinks a little. ‘Sure.’ He says, before burping. ‘Look, last question. James Bond always gives the impression that spying is about having the right gadget and a really nice suit, but there must be more to being a spy than that.  How much intelligence is involved in the intelligence business?
  Lynch ponders the question, then laughs. The tension leaves him and he curls back into his seat. ‘Intelligence?  There’s precious little intelligence goes on. Just shit and fear, small people trying to get by and big people crapping on them from a great height. Sure an’ you get the pure data from people like GCHQ and outfits like Nathalie Durand’s, but that’s no substitute for what the Yanks call humint. What you and I might call people. It’s all about people, scared people and happy people, bad people and sometimes even good people. People who care, people who’ve got things to lose. Loved ones.’ Lynch pauses, a puzzled look on his dark features as if he has even surprised himself. He stands, pulling down the lapels of his jacket. ‘Right. That’s us then. Here, I’ll show you the door so’n I will. You might want to get a taxi home.’

Fridays Is Now Book Posts Days

Novels in a Polish bookstore (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I'm going to reserve Fridays for book posts. This enables me to talk about Beirut - An Explosive Thriller without boring everyone to death (on a day when I usually don't post anyway) as well as resuming normal service on the blog.

I might still post the odd writing thing here or there if its of broader interest, but other than that, Friday is now book day. And we'll see how we get along with that for a while...

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.

A Year In Self Publishing

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Now Beirut – An Explosive Thriller is out, I thought I could afford to sit back a little and take stock of the past year and perhaps share some of the things I’ve learned since I decided to take the law into my own hands and publish Olives – A Violent Romance myself. I started to document them, then realised I was going to end up with a book about publishing books! I've put some of the top line things down here, but will post separately tomorrow on book promotion and marketing because it's such a huge topic in itself.

People are nicer than you think.
For someone with a generally low opinion of humanity, this has been a real eye-opener. The supportiveness and positivity I have encountered from total strangers has been breathtaking. I have been genuinely surprised at peoples’ reaction to learning you have written a book – it’s generally seen as something of an achievement. The next question is invariably ‘What’s it about?’ and I cannot stress enough how important it is to have worked out a snappy, crisp answer to that question.

Publishing online is easy.
Once you’ve got your head around things, it’s really just a few clicks here and there. While this is neat, it’s also dangerous, because you can get pretty glib about things – then find you’ve posted a document stuffed with errors. The great news is that it’s just as simple to upload updates – the bad news is you can lose hours or, in the case of print books, even weeks of sales availability.

Publishing offline isn’t.
The Middle East lags many other markets in e-commerce and this is very true of ebooks, with zero support for the region from retailers such as Amazon. This forced me to produce a ‘Middle East Edition’ of Olives, getting government permission to print a book in the UAE, finding a printer who could print novels and arranging distribution. I’ve lost a significant amount of money on that edition – printing 2,000 books has resulted in something like 300 sales (I still haven’t got sales returns from retailers beyond disitributor Jashanmal’s own stores, so can’t be sure of the exact number. Likewise, I haven’t got any money from them a year in!). I've made more money (and as many sales) with the online editions, by the way.

Editing is key.
The printed edition of Olives is a flawed work, with some awful errors in it. Apparently the average traditionally published book contains over 70 errors, but one is too much for me. The worst of these, IMHO, is two paras in which Lynch’s eyes change from green to blue. For the record they’re blue. Although the book was edited extensively, including an edit from pro Robb Grindstaff, it was also tinkered with post-edit. Send your final version to the editor and then leave it alone. This resulted in one snarling review on Goodreads – the only truly negative one I’ve had – which suggested Olives was a great story told by the wrong writer. Which was nice.

Book clubs are cool.
Don’t get me wrong – I could never belong to a book club. But they buy your book, read it then invite you to come and spend a couple of hours talking about yourself and your work (my two favourite subjects) then thank you for coming! Amazing. They’re also core readers and significant providers of word of mouth recommendation, so are worth assiduously courting. They are also a great way to get to understand your work from a reader’s point of view which, in my case at least, resulted in a totally new approach to the whole process of writing. It's scary when you first realise that people are actually reading your work, analysing your characters' motives, getting immersed in the world you made - and getting pitched unceremoniously out of it if you've made an error or flub. This has led to something of a catechism for me - there's a relationship in reading a book and it's two-way. The writer is an unwelcome guest in the room and it's his/her job to be totally invisible.

Book marketing is a bitch.
 Traditional publishers are struggling with book marketing in the e-age and I have some sympathy with them. I should stress when I say ‘some’, you’ll need nano-scale measuring equipment to quantify that. The good old days of stuffing bookshops have gone, you have to find new ways to bring your work to the public’s attention. Most of that involves putting yourself out there (so it’s lucky I’m not shy, isn’t it?) which can be unbelievably rewarding but is also exhausting.

An online presence is critical.
 Twitter, book websites, blogs, posts to Facebook. These things are wearying to maintain but critical to building engagement and pulling people in to your book. I’ll talk about them more in that post about book marketing tomorrow, but you absolutely need an online strategy. While I have come out of this with a huge amount of respect for the role of book reviews, I remain unimpressed by ‘blog tours’ as a tool for finding readers and selling books.

Book bloggers and media are frequently wary of self-published authors.
A professional, crisp approach and a website packed with glowing reviews help to get over that, but some simply won’t countenance self-published authors and I can actually relate to that because there are a huge amount of needy voices out there and, worse, there’s a great deal of dross. Finding the good stuff, however, is surely what book reviewers are there for, so it’s a shame that the volume defeats some. That volume is unlikely, BTW, to diminish!

It takes an awful lot to make people buy – and read – a book.
You’d have thought ‘buy my book, it’s nice’ would be enough, wouldn’t you? But it takes a great deal more than a single ‘touch’ to get people moving. In fact, it takes seemingly endless and relentless promotion, reminders and pushing. You’ve got to be like a literary Modhesh, popping up and wobbling your tentacles (sausages, whatever those things on his head are) at people. And it’s a fine line between engaging, nagging and irritating.

The most important book sales tool in the world is...
Word of mouth.

Beirut - An Explosive Thriller

Michel Freij is poised to become the next president of Lebanon. The billionaire businessman’s calls for a new, strong regional role for the country take on a sinister note when European intelligence reveals Freij has bought two ageing Soviet nuclear warheads from a German arms dealer.   

Maverick British intelligence officer Gerald Lynch has to find the warheads, believed to be on board super-yacht the Arabian Princess, before they can reach Lebanon. Joined by Nathalie Durand, the leader of a French online intelligence team, Lynch is pitched into a deadly clash with Freij and his violent militia as he pursues the Arabian Princess across the Mediterranean.  

Beirut – An Explosive Thriller sweeps through Lebanon, Hamburg, Prague, Malta, Albania and the Greek Islands on its journey to a devastating climax...

Well, you can now go here to the Beirut - An Explosive Thriller website and buy the book.

Buy Beirut here!

You can get either a printed book from amazon or an ebook to fit any reader device. Many people have expressed a desire to buy several copies and this is something I would heartily encourage.

Beirut is the book that landed me (finally) my very own literary agent. Friends and family had to put up with at least a week of me answering any given question with 'speak to my agent'. I admit, I'm hard to live with. Tragically, the book was subsequently rejected by editors at fourteen major publishing houses. That was the point where I decided to self publish my books - having previously resisted the idea robustly.

I am very glad indeed I took that decision, the past year has included many milestones, but the reception my first book, Olives - A Violent Romance, got from readers and reviewers alike was a wonder to me. I can't pretend I'm not worried about how Beirut's going to go down - I'm munching keratin. But that's all part of the fun.

In the meantime, I'm off down to favourite haunt Billy Blues this Wednesday to celebrate. You're more than welcome to join me - there won't be any readings or even any books. Just some pals having a few drinks and perhaps indulging in the guilty delight that is the Blues Platter. The Twitter invite thingy is linked here for your RSVPing convenience.