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The Most Important Day In 570 Years

April 4, 2010 in Publishing | 2 comments

Printing Press

I’ve been wondering what Marshall McLuhan would have said about the iPad, if he’d still been around for the launch yesterday.

McLuhan – one of the high-priests of 1960s pop culture – with his catchphrases that are now part of the language – ‘The medium is the message’ (well actually ‘massage’ – McLuhan loved his puns), and ‘the global village’. It’s almost 50 years now since his groundbreaking study of mass media, The Gutenberg Galaxy.

The importance of the printing press, McLuhan argued, wasn’t just a matter of speed – that a Bible a monk had lovingly hand-written and illustrated for a year could now be produced in a day or two. It certainly wasn’t a matter of aesthetics – on that count the monk won hands down. But printing transformed the way we lived. Not just read. Lived.

For a start, books and learning were no longer in the hands of a privileged few – the Church. Almost immediately there was a demand for the unthinkable – for the Bible to be published not in Latin, but in modern European languages. This was dissent – it was dangerous. Rome tried to ban books (just as states try to deny access to the internet today); printers were burned at the stake for their heretical ideas. The democratization of learning was a bad thing – how could you control the quality of the message if anyone could publish (sound familiar?), and if the whole population could read?

But media are unstoppable. They won’t be denied. Whether directly or indirectly, Gutenberg’s invention gave rise to the reformation of the Church and the growth of secularism, the spread of universal education, the belief in individualism and self-expression … the novel. Not everyone agreed these were good changes – certainly not those whose authority was threatened. But that’s another thing about the media, says McLuhan. They don’t have feelings. They don’t regret, or necessarily respect the past.

His thinking went deeper. Before printing, most people didn’t read. Passing information involved an oral / aural transfer. When stories were told, the teller and the listener needed to be together – in a room, in a village, round a fire. And all the senses came into the act.

But after printing, how quickly everything changed. The eye became the primary sense. Information transfer could happen over a distance of time or space – we no longer depended on the village. And we learned to be linear, organized. With the printed word, thought was best expressed in structured sentences and paragraphs. So, McLuhan explained, the printing press spawned business organizations, mass production … schizophrenia (well, his thinking was always quirky – you try to explain that one!)

All this was history. But what really excited this media prophet was the future. For 500 years from 1440, nothing much had changed. Print continued to exert its influence over every aspect of our lives. And then suddenly there was a technological revolution – with the invention of radio, TV, the cinema, the phone. Years before the first personal computer was even thought of, McLuhan knew that we were on the threshold of a new age – an electric age.

The new media realigned the senses, moved back away from linearity. Sure, TV and the cinema are visual media, but not in the same way as printing and the book. Once more we’re watching story-tellers, but this time they’re not around the campfire. They’re in Karachi, Johannesburg, Washington. And they work for the BBC or CNN. It’s a different kind of village – a global village.

Apple's iPad

So what would McLuhan have thought on April 3rd as our friends from Cupertino rolled out their all-singing, all-dancing, finger-clicking new machine? With a full-color e-reader, ibooks with pages that flip to try to pretend this is a real book you’re reading, a free sample of Winnie the Pooh just to get you started? Like me, he might have shaken his head and muttered something about this year’s wannabe becoming next year’s has-been. Because we should know by now, machines are temporary .. but technology is permanent.

And if he’d been sitting next to me, he’d have smiled as we tried to post my ebook to the Apple ibooks store the other morning and discovered that even before breakfast, mine was the 107th electronic book that had been posted by one smallish publisher THAT DAY. He’d have pointed at the Twitter messages fluttering across the top of my Tweetdeck screen from friends in writing and publishing. ‘Don’t try to read them all’, he’d have said. ‘That’s not what they’re there for. They’re just environment, background, to give you a sense of the mood of the day, what the tribe are talking about. Don’t try to read the messages like a book.’

What was my tribe talking about? E-publishing. Every single one of them. Ebooks, just a small – though rapidly growing – fraction of the market a few months ago are suddenly big business. That’s what we’ll remember April 3rd 2010 for. It was the day when e-publishing came of age … the iPad just happens to be – perhaps for only a few days, or weeks, or months – the standard-bearer.

And suddenly, in a few hours, the publishing world has turned upside down. Publishers fear for their books and their profits – they’re trying to drive prices up when inevitably they must come down. Distributors are flexing new muscles and forcing publishers into a corner. New e-providers have suddenly emerged, looking for an opportunity, offering dubious services and terms for e-publishing that writers would be fools to accept. Writers can foggily see new opportunities but don’t know which way to turn. Readers are jumping on bandwagons, loving this and hating that.

And McLuhan says – or it might have been a tweet: ‘Once a new technology starts to roll, if you’re not in the steamroller, you’re on the road.’ He looks me up and down, appraising me. ‘Just make sure it’s the right steamroller.’

 

This is the first post in a series on the changing publishing landscape, explaining the guiding principles behind Rapscallion – our own new imprint.

If you’re an iPad user, please check out The Lebanese Troubles in ibooks and tell me how it looks.

And if, like me you’re living in a country where the iPad is off-limits, then here’s a look at what you’re missing.

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Not Just A Pretty Face

March 27, 2010 in Activities | 1 comment

Mirage - Cover

Someone suggested on the tNBW site the other day that if I included pictures of pretty girls, I’d attract more readers to the blog. Well, just to show I’m listening, I have a real beauty for you today (Dave), from the second front cover I’ve worked on this week – for Suki Michelle’s new short story, Mirage.

If she’s your sort of gal and you’d like to get to know her better, just click on the picture, and Suki will tell you the full story: it’s a free download on Smashwords.

What I originally intended to do in this post was to explain how I created the cover, but I’ll save that till next time, and give you time to enjoy Suki’s great story.

But I also wanted to tell you that there’s more to this than meets the eye. Notice that little imprint in the bottom left-hand corner of the cover – Rapscallion? Yes you’ve guessed it. This has been coming for a while. I – no, I should say, we – have started a ‘publishing’ operation.

Why the coy inverted commas around ‘publisher’? Because this is not conventional publishing. Once again I’m taking a left-field view. These are the guiding principles.

  1. Instead of being a gatekeeper, serving as a barrier to publication, the publisher is a curator, lovingly nurturing and displaying great work.
  2. Instead of waiting for submissions, the publisher actually headhunts new talent.
  3. The publisher actively helps the author to prepare a book for publication and to build a bigger readership, but leaves control in the hands of the author – including copyright.
  4. The publisher serves the writer instead of the writer serving the publisher.

Naive, impractical, unworkable? Insane? Well I hope some of you will think so, because I’ve always found that when people tell me that, I’m probably on the right track – or at least close to it. Of course, Rapscallion will never be one of the major publishing houses. But that’s not the intention. My vision is to serve as a seed publisher – to help talented writers get a head-start with their career. Success would come if some of the people we work with are eventually signed up by some of the majors.

Rapscallion logo

There’ll be a lot more on the Rapscallion philosophy in the next few weeks including – because I know you’re going to ask – how we start making money from Rapscallion after releasing the first stories for free. But for now, it’s a big thank-you to Suki for working through the whole process with me this week – from finished manuscript to public release. We now have two stories in Rapscallion’s Amoral Tales collection.

If you’d like to contribute to the success of our new venture, then there’s a very easy way you can. Head on over to Smashwords now, read our stories, and if you like them, then leave a brief review – it doesn’t need to be more than a couple of sentences. And then mail the links to a couple of your friends if you think they’d enjoy the stories too. Do that, and you can say you were in on this with us right from the beginning. It’s all about teamwork.

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Designing Your Own Book Cover

March 24, 2010 in Activities | 3 comments

The Lebanese Troubles - Cover

Let’s get this straight. I can’t draw for nuts. Ask me to draw a picture of someone and you’re going to get Mr Blob.

That doesn’t stop me from enjoying art. Perhaps it even increases my enjoyment because I see creativity which is way beyond my skills. And it doesn’t stop me from attempting to create my own book designs, because with the tools now available, even the complete bumbler, like me, can create something that looks pretty good.

In the next two posts I’m going to explain how I created two covers this week, as well as taking a close look at the work of a professional.

At the top left, there’s a thumbnail of the cover for my forthcoming novel, The Lebanese Troubles. If you click on the thumbnail, you’ll be taken to a full-size version, the way the cover would appear on the front of a paperback. Try clicking now, and take a look in detail.

Now in fact I’ve broken a few basic rules with this cover design. Take a look at the Book Design Review’s Favorite Book Covers of 2008 and you’ll notice that many of the designs are very simple, minimalist -- a single object dominates the cover, asks a question, and tries to draw the reader straight in. Colors and fonts are bold. Font orientation appears to be important too -- sideways, downward, tilted, anything to capture the potential reader’s attention.

My cover couldn’t be more different. The central image (seen much more clearly in the full-size version) is tiny, overshadowed by buildings. It’s an oil painting with a great deal of subtlety in the coloring, and the fonts are all straight on.

So why did I make such an unusual choice? Well, the starting-point was to find a design that captured the essence of the novel. The Lebanese Troubles is set in the Lebanese Civil War … but this is no action-hero shoot-em-up. Instead, it’s the story of the steady disintegration of human relationships mirroring the collapse of civilized society. The protagonist gradually becomes isolated, an outsider, uncertain where he belongs, confused about moral values.

I trawled through Google looking for appropriate images, and found nothing that really suited. Plenty of pictures of shattered buildings and bombed out neighborhoods -- but where was the humanity? And then suddenly, I found exactly what I was looking for. I came across a portfolio of work by a British painter called Tom Young, who, as it happened, went to live in Lebanon 4 years ago -- and when I saw his picture, ‘20 Years‘, my jaw just dropped. He’d captured exactly the feeling that I’d tried to convey in my novel.

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of meeting Tom, when he was back in the UK for a few days, and it was no surprise to find that we shared a love of Camus’s novel, L’Étranger. I guess I hadn’t realized until then how much that book has influenced The Lebanese Troubles.

So I had a picture that I loved. But would it work as a cover design, when it was so different from most others? I remembered one of the comments on the BDR’s selection of favorite designs.

I picked one of the three covers that inspired me to click through to find out a bit more about the book itself (and to me, all three are equally intriguing, perhaps because of some amalgamation of my own interests and the cover design)

My mind was made up. Marrying the reader’s interests with the cover design. The Lebanese Troubles is unashamedly literary. So the type of reader who might enjoy it is likely to enjoy literature as art. Choosing a painting for the cover rather than a formula book design would be sending all the right signals. OK, perhaps the subtlety of the painting might escape the casual browser. Perhaps I could draw in more readers with the weapons of war featured somewhere on the cover. But I’d be making false promises, raising false expectations, and possibly leaving the reader disappointed.

Having reached my decision, designing the cover was fairly straightforward. First I saved a copy of Tom’s painting (with his permission of course). The next step was to decide which part of the picture to use. As you’ll see as you look at the original, it’s in landscape format, and I needed to convert it to portrait. The tool I used was something I’ve used for several years for cutting an image, resizing it, and then saving it in an appropriate format (.jpg, .gif, or .png) for printing or screen display -- IrfanView.

Next I needed to think about the title, and it was at this point that important marketing decisions were needed. I’m preparing my novel for two possible editions, a print edition at some point, but firstly as an ebook, in order to minimize the risks and maximize the income. But as I explained in an earlier post, the cover design is just as important -- perhaps more so -- when we’re e-publishing. And when we’re promoting an ebook, the details, including the title, need to be perfectly clear, even when the cover is reduced to a thumbnail.

These were my next steps. I copied the selection of the painting I wanted and pasted it into Microsoft Powerpoint. I thought about where I wanted the title to appear. Not within the design, I thought. I didn’t want words floating in the sky, or hatched out on the road at the bottom of the picture. Let the painting stand and speak for itself. So I was going to need a border. What color? Well, The Lebanese Troubles is a tragedy, so let it be black. Black would offset the painting well too. So I created a black background in Powerpoint, and laid it under 20 Years.

Then which font for the title? I liked the look of ‘Papyrus’, one of the standard Microsoft fonts I had available. It had a distinctly oriental feel, and I liked the way the capital letters descended below the line. So the next decision was font size. After a little experimentation I found that a 36-point font, using bold, meant that the title was still readable even with a small thumbnail. But that gave me a new problem.

At that point-size the title would need to be set over two lines. Then of course, there was the author’s name to think about. This meant that I would need to further reduce the height of the painting … or shrink it, so that the tiny figure became completely invisible.

For a while I played with the idea of using a different title. Suppose I just called the book ‘The Troubles‘? But that would hit my marketing campaign. I need the word ‘Lebanese’ to appear to appeal to Middle East expats. And it would hit the Search Engine campaign I’ve been carefully building. If you do a Google search for ‘Lebanese Troubles’, you’ll see that of nearly 7.3 million matches, my novel is already in positions 3 and 5. That’s going to be extremely important later. Drop ‘Troubles’ then? No, for the same reason. And because I really like the double entendre -- political troubles and my protagonist’s family,relationship and moral troubles. So the title had to stay. And it would have to be over two lines -- centered, I thought, looked best.

If I’d added my name at the top as well, the whole cover would have looked top heavy, so I decided to add it at the bottom. Another decision. If the book was called The Lebanese Troubles and there was a picture of devastation in Beirut, some readers would think it’s non-fiction -- an account of the War. I needed to make it clear it wasn’t, so the cover needed ‘A novel by Alain Miles‘. I’d decided to use a more straightforward font. (I read somewhere that every book should have two fonts, no more, no less -- I have no idea why, but too many fonts certainly gets messy.) But a 36-point size would mean two lines again. I really couldn’t afford to take more space from the painting, so I reduced the point-size until I could fit it onto one line. It’s a compromise. The name isn’t so clear in a thumbnail, but as an unknown anyway, I think I can afford to live with that. People won’t be buying because it’s me. (Except my Mum.)

One last decision. What color was the text to be? I was tempted to go for red. The war, red-hot emotions etc … but, on a black background this just got lost in the thumbnail. I needed something much lighter. In the end it was a pale gold, classy I think … and there is after all a reference to Lebanese Gold in the novel!

And that was it. I copied the complete cover back to IrfanView and created two .png versions, one in paperback size and the other in thumbnail size. My book cover was ready for publication.

Nothing I’ve described here requires any great technical skill. The difficulty was only finding the right material in the first place, and then making the right decisions. The beauty of e-publishing the book first is that if my cover doesn’t make the impact I expect, I’ll be able to spot the problem almost immediately, try something different if necessary -- and then implement the changes in just a few hours. But I hope I’m not wrong. Now that you’ve read this long description, you’ll no longer see the cover in the same way that a newcomer to my work would, but I’ll be interested to hear your comments anyway.

The process of designing your cover isn’t always quite as straightforward as my description here. Take a look at a professional designer at work by playing the outstanding video from Orbit Books below. Think it looks hard? Well, join me next time and I’ll show you how you can do most of this yourself. Using free software.

 

 

Posted Previously: What Scribd taught me about book design

 

Don’t forget to check the front page of Resources, which lists the new material added each day -- and remember that your contributions are welcome here too

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Finding Readers At Smashwords

March 13, 2010 in Activities | 2 comments

Smashwords Header

The day didn’t start too well. I’ve been working hard on building my web presence, and for the last couple of days I’ve started to feel junked out. As soon as people begin to notice that you’re a serious web-dude, they all want to sell you something.

I’ve been following writers, agents, web experts on Twitter, and posting sensible, well-directed entries – just as all the experts advise – 3 or 4 times a day. But what do I get? Invitations to join Donald Trump selling Viagra to all my friends – any takers? (It might not be Viagra – but it’s some kind of health care thingy and I couldn’t be bothered to hang around and watch for details.) I know what several literary agents had for breakfast and how much fun they’re having with ‘the 4yo’ – I think that must be a brand-name for the latest model of child. I came close to signing up for Wealth for Teens but when I tried to enter my year of birth, it wasn’t in the drop-down list.

What I was really looking for from Twitter was some evidence that someone might have noticed my tweets on the short story I’ve published here on the blog, and had then come to join us here. There wasn’t one – not one.

I now have around 75 Twitter followers, more than my target for the month, but it’s certainly not an effective tool for me at the moment. There have been occasional gems, and far too much dross. But I’ll keep working on it, starting with eliminating the dross.

But hang in there. Today, just after noon I posted Waiting for Orders to Smashwords, probably the leading e-publishing site for independents. And the results have been FAR better than I expected. After 8 hours, just look at how many readers have downloaded the story – here’s my Smashwords dashboard around 8 hours after the original posting:

Smashwords Dashboard

45 new readers in 8 hours – that’s a lot. And since I haven’t mentioned Smashwords here until now, I assume that most of these will be new readers, not my blog-friends

Now to be fair, I’ve cheated. I’m giving away my short story for free. I’m sure the numbers would have been much lower if I’d set a price – which I’m at liberty to do with Smashwords. And I was particularly pleased with the cover design I managed to put together, and the introductory blurb. These first impressions are so important to just pull in your ‘customers’ in the first place. What do you think of the photo and the blurb in the left-hand panel? Would they have drawn you in.

Smashwords is extremely important to my strategy. I want to devote the whole next post to explaining why and how.

But in the meantime, if you like my story and you’d like to give me a little support, then here’s how. Head over to the Smashwords home page, and sign up – it’s free. Then Search for Alain Miles and you’ll see the title page for Waiting For Orders. If you download, you’ll be adding to the buzz. Better still, add the story to your library. And best of all write a couple of sentences as a Smashwords review – nothing extensive – and please don’t give too much away about the actual story.

Next you could start posting a few of your short stories on Smashwords too, to build your readership. We’ll talk about how to do that next time.

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Short Stories To Build Readership

March 12, 2010 in planning | 3 comments

I made a big decision a few days ago. I’d entered a short story, Waiting For Orders, for a competition. I was really pleased with the story, and the competition results were due to be announced any day. The top 10-15 stories would be published in an anthology, and I knew there were fewer than 100 entries. Reviewers were pretty positive. I had a reasonable chance.

But I pulled the story out of the competition. Why? Because with my evolving marketing plan, it just didn’t make sense to keep it there.

Of course, I might not have won through. When we enter our writing for any competition, it’s always a gamble. What if you just don’t connect with the judges? But let’s suppose my story had been selected. What would I have gained?

  1. Publication. A GOOD THING because:
    • I’ll like it. It proves that someone else thinks I can write. And it gives me something to brag about to agents and publishers later.
    • My friends will like it. They’ll tell me that now I’m featured in a proper book, I’m a proper writer.
    • My mother will like it – once she’s recovered from the shock of the swear-words, the heresy, and the unwarranted, unkind attack on poets in the story.
  2. Money. The winners will be paid $50 on acceptance, and there’s a chance there might be more later if the book does well. But I’d be surprised if any of the contributors ended up making more than $200.

I’m sorry. It’s not really a very convincing list. But I can think of lots of convincing disadvantages.

  1. If accepted, I would have to give up my rights to the story for 5 years – the length of the contract. I would have no right to publish anywhere else – whether in print or electronically. But I need this story in my portfolio.
  2. I would have no control over the publication date. I want to use the story now – but in the hands of a publisher, it’ll probably take at least another six months before it appears in print.
  3. I’d lose control over pricing. If I want to distribute the story free of charge in order to build my readership, I won’t be able to do so.
  4. I’d like to experiment with different publishing formats – including audio-shorts for the IPod. This story, with its distinctive ‘voice’, is a good candidate for audio treatment, but if accepted, this might have been difficult to negotiate.

My decision has allowed me to start using Waiting for Orders to build my readership right now – today. You’ll notice that I’ve added a new page for Short Stories to the blog, and if you open the page, you’ll see that I’m encouraging you – if you like the story – to share it with friends and to promote it by posting it to social-sharing services like Stumble Upon, where you can also review it.

If you have a blog and short stories ready to show the world, why don’t you join me to help to build your market too? It doesn’t matter whether you’re following the traditional agent/publisher route or, like me, are planning to publish electronically. In either case this should help us to build our readership. And if we let each other know what we’re releasing, then we can all indulge in some beneficial cross marketing.

There’s an important quality control rule though: none of us should recommend a story unless we believe it’s of the highest standard, and that our friends would be bound to enjoy it. If we don’t keep our standards high, our friends will think we’re spamming them when we share.

And if we notice that our stories aren’t being shared, that’s probably a sign that they are not making sufficient impact.

Note that my intention is not to sell stories at this stage. The time for that will come when people are consistently reading what I publish. As ever, I’m going to set a measurable objective. I aim to release a new short story at least once a month. Once I see that these releases are consistently being read by at least 100 people, then I’ll introduce a small charge for new stories … and we’ll then be able to study the impact of different pricing levels.

I’ve also posted a short Twitter message this evening: ‘An environment-unfriendly short story for your reading pleasure – http://www.arealwriter.com/short-stories/waiting-for-orders/’. Will this result in any new readers? I don’t know, but I need to test it – at present I have around 70 Twitter ‘followers’. Will this boost their numbers? Will it bring new people to the blog? I’ll be monitoring the results in Google Analytics very closely, watching to see the source of new readers. And then in coming days, I’ll also test-publish the story on various other writer sites, and check the response. I’ll take just one different site each day to make it easy to measure the results. If you’ve previously worked with any sites which e-publish short stories, I’d be interested to hear your experiences.

Finally, I’m aware that some of you still have entries in the competition I’ve opted out of. To all of you, the very best of luck. The decision I’ve made is right for me, but may be completely wrong for others. I read a lot of high quality submissions, and I’m sure the anthology will be great – I’ll certainly be reviewing and promoting it here when it’s published.

 

Related reading: Two time winner of the Faulkner Award for Fiction, John Edgar Wideman explains why he has decided to self-publish from now on: ‘I like the idea of being in charge. I have more control over what happens to my book. And I have more control over whom I reach.’

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A Writer’s Objectives

March 5, 2010 in planning | 12 comments

 

In my first post I mentioned that my objective was not simply to see my name in print. What I want is:

To be a full-time creative writer engaging enough readers and generating enough income to support myself and my family.

In business, that would be called a mission statement.

I’ve chosen the words carefully. ‘A creative writer‘. That rules out taking on writing and research assignments for others. Plenty of writers do supplement their income like this, but it’s not for me: I know I’d lose focus and there wouldn’t be enough hours in the day for my creative work. That’s always been the problem – finding enough time to do the writing that really matters to me.

‘Engaging readers‘ is different from ‘winning fans’. We saw in the previous post that Josh Woodward has used the web to attract huge numbers of fans, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that he has huge sales. In the age of viral marketing, all of us are signing up, subscribing, following – it’s a fad. How many times this year have you signed up for a site? How many do you continue to follow? How often have you parted with money?

Engagement is converting brand recognition into brand loyalty. More important than the number of fans is the number of people who come back and read again, the amount of time they spend reading. And ultimately whether they’re willing to put their hand in their pocket for the work I sell. As Gary Stein explains in a recent post, the most effective interactive marketers are ‘forcefully evolving their engagement strategies away from a simple number of who-has-the-most-fans to something that actually has some value: what-do-my-fans-get-me?’

There’s much more to say about engagement; in my next post I’ll explain how I propose to build it, and how I’m going to measure it. But now I need to expand on my mission statement. It’s still too vague. The stated objective is to generate income to support my family. How much income – and in what timeframe? Without real numbers, there’s no way to evaluate success or, later, to judge whether the strategy needs adjustment.

What I’m doing here is to apply to myself the same rules I’ve been using in my professional career for the past few years. As a business consultant, I’ve helped businesses and individuals to define their objectives and then manage achievement. The golden rule is always to set up measurable targets. When individuals say they want a career-change, I ask them to write their resumé – as they want it to look in three years time. Then together we work out a route-map to get there, with clear milestones.

I’m not giving myself the luxury of a three-year plan. I know myself too well. When I dive into a project, I find it very difficult to focus on anything else – I’m not a multi-tasker. So if I’m going to get serious about writing, I need writing to support me within one year. Support – what does that mean in real money? Well let’s not get over-ambitious or write in too many luxuries. In fact, let’s depersonalize it, by setting as a target the equivalent of the UK minimum wage for a 40-hour week. That’s around $18,000 per year. Of course I’m not going to start earning right away. But by March 2011, I need to be earning a net income from writing averaging at least $1,500 per month.

If I was stacking shelves in a supermarket it would be a breeze. For a writer it’s not so easy. But by setting my objectives, I’m already sensing the shape of the plan.

  1. At this stage in my career I won’t be looking for an agent or a publisher. Even if by some stroke of good fortune I was signed up quickly, it would take months before a book appeared on the shelves. Any advance for an unknown first-time novelist would be relatively small – certainly lower than $18,000. Assuming I earned a 10% royalty on a $14.99 book, I’d have to be selling 1500 books a month to meet my target. That very rarely happens – not at the beginning of a career.

  2. E-publishing looks a better bet than self-publishing or print-on-demand. It’s faster – and I need to get started as soon as possible – less expensive, less risky, easier to distribute, and while a novel would be priced lower (typically around the $4.99 mark – anyone like to research this?), the royalty would be 70% or greater. This would leave me with only around 425 books to sell per month to reach my target.

  3. But even this sales target is high. There will need to be other sources of creative-writing income. So what might they be?

(Now it’s time for you to put your thinking caps on: let’s have some left-field thinking – can we learn anything from musicians, artists, business, politicians … did you hear today that Tony Blair is getting a £4.5 million advance from Harper Collins for his forthcoming autobiography?)

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