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The Penance Of A Pirate

April 14, 2011 in Reflections | 2 comments

Pirate


An operetta in five acts – with lyrics by Mr WS Gilbert.


‘Publishers cannot pay higher royalties because the money has to go to fighting piracy’ – TeleRead: April 12, 2011.


ACT ONE

When Alain was a little lad he proved so brave and daring,
His father thought he’d ‘prentice him to some career seafaring.

If you’d known me as a youth, you’d hardly recognize the wretch who stands before you today. With a stout heart and an unyielding arm, I fought piracy with the best of them. When someone offered to lend me a book, I steadfastly refused to accept it, preferring to buy my own copy. When our school started handing out photocopied pages from text-books, I poured sugar in the toner – and it wasn’t long before I could dismantle the drum and make off with it in less than 30 seconds.

From my lofty moral plateau, how far I was to fall!

ACT TWO

Oh, better far to live and die
Under the brave black flag I fly

How did I become a pirate?

Was it a thirst for freedom and adventure? Was it my love of words, the sensuous thrill of ‘swashbuckling’ as it surged forward in my mouth to break on my lips, then fell back exhausted? Was it Johnny Depp?

I’d served my apprenticeship and was an articled writer with a book of my own, written and reader-ready. It was then that Pirate-King Mark Coker came marching into town, recruiting for the bad ship Smashwords. His rallying-call had a beauty and purity I found irresistible. “God is dead.” Ah, Nietzche! “Big Publishing is built upon a broken business model.” And he pressed me to answer a question, neatly bringing the old JFK proposition into tune with the times.

Ask not what you can do for your publisher – ask what your publisher can do for you.

A few days later I was camped at the mouth of the Amazon with the motley Smashwords crew. Every morning we set sail, me and ten thousand other ragged writers with the wind in our faces, bent on mutiny and mischief. We hacked at prices, strangled the old trade-routes, thumbed our noses at authority and tradition. Pirates, of course, but good pirates, only intent on the redistribution of opportunity. Every evening newcomers flocked into the camp, ready to serve under the skull and crossbones.

ACT THREE

I can tell undoubted Raphaels from Gerard Dows and Zoffanies,
I know the croaking chorus from the Frogs of Aristophanes! …
In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I am the very model of a modern Major-General.

Unperturbed, the ships of the great publishers continued their stately progress, laden with the works of fine writers and Tony Blair. (No sir, ‘laden’, not ‘bin Laden’ – they’re still working on the terms.) Let Coker and his mutineers slash prices, and cut their own throats into the bargain. Quality and influence would win the day, as it always had. The croaking chorus would soon be silent.

And besides, there were more important battles to fight, against the age-old foe of my youth – the copy-pirate. Now he was digital and doubly dangerous. But with so many years of experience, this was a battle publishers knew they could win. What’s more, they knew who would pay: their own loyal authors of course, on whose behalf the battle was being fought.

ACT FOUR

Although we live by strife,
We’re always sorry to begin it,
For what, we ask, is life
Without a touch of Poetry in it?

I have a vision.

In dark Amazonian alleyways, heroes rub shoulders with villains. The New Pirates are now the New Publishers. There are no readers, only writers, and on every corner, they plead with one other:

- Read my book, guv? Please read my book. I’m sure you’re going to like it. OK, don’t read it. Just Like it. Or maybe you could just Like me.

What of the Old Publishers? They’re still fighting the Old Pirates, and they’re still winning. Copy-protection’s easier now they no longer work with living writers. And dead writers are far less likely to mutiny.

I have seen the error of my ways.

ACT FIVE

Resume your ranks and legislative duties,
And take my daughters, all of whom are beauties.

Is it too late to say I’m sorry? Too late to renounce my boorish behavior, and fall back into line with the good and the great?

Ever since ‘independent’ became fashionable, I feel like I’ve been losing my independence. A few days ago, word came round that we’re not to call ourselves pirates any more, we Smashwords people. We’re ‘Smashers’ – official! Institutionalized nihilism! I didn’t get into this to be an institution. Or to smash. Just to change, and to have some fun.

And another thing, it’s slim pickings these days, being a writer-pirate. With all the competition, you have to work so hard.

So, what about it publishers, you who are trying so hard to help writers by maintaining the old order? Won’t you take me back? I’m not even asking for much, not like that audacious Hocking woman. A few thousand would suit me just fine.

Ah yes. Yes, of course – I’d forgotten. This is where we came in.

# # #

If you expected to see me revealing the secrets of how to hypnotize your readers today, well I’m sorry to disappoint you. But my lips are sealed – as I said they would be unless we had at least 10 Likes for the post. No likee – no tellee. You’ll need to speak to a few of your friends if you want the lowdown.

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Shiny happy people

April 6, 2011 in The TwitFace Project | 4 comments

Thumbs-Up

A big thumbs-up to Amazon and Smashwords after they introduced a Like feature recently on their book pages. Many of us are so busy greading that there’s no time any more to read reviews, let alone write them.

What I like about Like is that it requires no thought or time at all. It’s an entirely involuntary reaction, like a smile or a wave. You’re out shopping or running an errand in WebLand: you can’t just stop and chat with everyone you meet, or you’ll never get home. But a Like just lets them know that you’ve seen them, that all’s well with the world, that you’ll get together and catch up sometime – even if you’re busy right now. It makes the world a better place, full of shiny happy people.

But it’s important not read too much into a Like. Just because I Like you, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to have your babies. Let me illustrate.

Yesterday was a special day for me, an occasion. As you know, my TwitFace schedule doesn’t allow me a lot of time for getting out. In fact, it was the first time I’d left the house for three months. But I’d been unlocked from my computer chair, and there I was, on the train, heading south, to visit my aged parent.

It was in London that I saw the girl. All the seats were taken, so I stood next to the door, rucksack at my feet, laptop on my shoulder. I scanned the passengers, reading newspapers, text-messages, ads, thrillers. I made a mental note. Write in 15-minute segments: aim for the commuter-market. ‘Short is more’.

But she was different. She was reading on a Kindle. I Liked that. Maybe she sensed it. She glanced up. I let her know. Thumbs-up and a smile.

I sensed her coloring as she went back to her reading. Perhaps it was my book! What a coincidence that would have been. Did she look like one of my readers? Did my readers look like her? As our eyes touched again, I gave her two thumbs-up.

She turned to the guy on the seat next to her, and whispered. He looked at me, curious, rose. We’d connected.

- Hey man, why you coming on to my woman?
- No, not coming on. I was just Liking her.
- You gotta be kidding me.
- I thought maybe we could be friends.

Well, clearly he wasn’t a Facebook user. Fortunately it wasn’t too long before the next stop, and although not having my glasses meant I couldn’t post last night, I’ve been able to get a new pair this morning. So no permanent damage, only bruising.

I never did manage to ask if it was my book she was reading.


References

If you’re a commuter-reader, you might Like 40kBooks and eCapris, thinking of people like you.

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Whisperings: birth of the e-novel

March 27, 2011 in Reflections | 9 comments

Just emerging

2010

A year ago, I wrote that April 3rd 2010 would be remembered as “the most important day in 570 years”.

Do you remember that day? The excitement and expectation as the iPad finally hit the stores after months of rumor? Of course by April 3rd 2011 no self-respecting technista would be seen dead with an iPad. Now it’s all about the iPad2 – ‘thinner, lighter, faster’, all manner of temptation to succumb to the Apple again.

But I wasn’t writing about the product. What happened that day was a turning-point in history – a watershed. The ebook had been rapidly emerging for a couple of years, but the iPad somehow legitimized digital publishing. It was the new cool. Bless my soul and whiskers, even Twitter millionaire Steven Fry was promoting the virtues of e-reading on this ‘game-changing’ new product. It was cooler than anything since …

1440

The last game-changer in the history of text – Gutenberg’s invention of the printing-press. No longer would the monk labor in his drafty cell, painstakingly hand-crafting the illuminated manuscript (“How I love the smell of vellum.”). Now a book (“Call THAT a book?”) could be produced in a matter of hours – thinner, lighter and faster than ever before. For the first time, books passed out of the hands of the Church into the homes of ordinary people (“How will standards be maintained if there are no gatekeepers?”). A social and cultural revolution was underway.

What changed? As literacy spread, learning was increasingly secularized. Books started to appear in the vernacular instead of the language of Christendom, Latin. There’s a strong case to be made that print was directly responsible for the Reformation, the Renaissance. The reliance on oral tradition died. Arguably, print brought about the growth of organizations and centralized businesses, created modern urban society. But of one thing there’s no doubt. Print created a market of private readers. And to satisfy this market, a new art-form emerged: the novel.

Fast forward

To today, a year after a new text revolution. What’s changed? Perhaps it’s not so much change as acceleration. Writing has been democratized: we write almost as much as we talk – some of us more so. A year ago, we sent 50 million tweets a day; today it’s 140 million. In the same time the number of WordPress blogs has increased from 10.5 million to 18 million. The number of books published on Smashwords has passed 40,000, with 5000 new titles added per month.

Those are the figures, but what’s the impact? We’re beginning to recognize the vernacular: this week OMG and LOL were added to the OED. (If OED is a new one to you, don’t worry – you really don’t need it for most texts.) We’re decentralizing: who needs to be in an office when you can message anyone on your mobile? The prophet of our electronic age, Marshall McLuhan foresaw this 50 years ago when he wrote of our return to the village – but now ‘the global village’.

But most tellingly, the events of the last few weeks in the Middle East are directly the product of the text revolution. I remember sitting on a beach in one of the Arab Gulf states 35 years ago, and asking how long their comfortably feudal systems could survive in a modern world. The answer was 35 years. After all those years of quiescence, the ruled have erupted against the rulers. And what’s driven their revolution – not the cause but the mechanism? Text messages, Facebook, Twitter.

Weren’t you supposed to be talking about the novel?

I’m coming to that.

So authors are publishing 5000 new books a month on Smashwords. On Amazon it’s probably more … plus of course all the previously published books re-released there. In the digital world, publishers realize, books never need go out of print. (Watch for proposals to change the copyright law.)

But almost without exception, books are still written first for print, then converted to a digital format. The iPad in particular perpetuates the illusion that we’re still reading a printed book, with a display that simulates a page turn. How long will it be before we start seeing books written to take advantage of the new medium? How long before an e-novel emerges, as radically different from the current literary form as the novel was from its predecessors?

Probably a long time. After all, it was 200 years or more after the printing press that novels in English began to take off with the work of Bunyan, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding.

Our friend Stephen Fry, it’s true, has already had a stab at it. In September last year The Fry Chronicles, a memoir, was published simultaneously in hardback, as an eBook and as an iPhone app. And it’s genuinely innovative: the app allows readers to skip through the book using color-coded categories to focus on different people and subjects.

But most writers have carried on as before, conceiving the novel as a print object, thinking in terms of the number of print pages, maintaining a print layout, telling the story as they would a print story.

Then this week, for the first time, I heard the faintest whispers that change is in the air.

First on an Amazon thread – that old chestnut, ‘What is literary fiction?’ In a fascinating series of posts, Stefano Boscutti claims to be working on stories that can change in reaction to a reader’s physiological responses – but admits that it’s ‘a stupid, crazy, ridiculously daunting project’. Maybe. But it will happen one day, to be sure. Then Stefano touches on something of particular interest to me, because it’s exactly what I’ve tried to do in my novel, The Lebanese Troubles:

I’m pushing for a hybrid of screenplay and prose to make my stories “read” better on screens. Increasingly the screen is how we consume text.

Then just this morning, I was followed on Twitter by 40kBooks.com – and their site was a real find. ‘Smart content for smart people’ was the message I got from their home page. And I have to say that these folks have a smart marketing strategy. They’re thinking about where their smart readers read, and how. It may be hard to get time to curl up with a novel, but there are times in the day when you’re waiting, maybe commuting, maybe taking a lunch break, and your mobile phone is already with you. So what kind of material are they publishing? Novellas, from both top and up-and-coming European and American writers. Essays, from leading thinkers. The sort of content that will keep the reader fully absorbed for around an hour. Because ‘short is more’ they say. That’s thinking outside the book.

And then, right there on the home page, two sentences that expressed my thoughts perfectly, from an essay by Thierry Crouzet:

We know today how to translate books from paper to the e-world. It is now time to learn how to write books which could not have been written on paper.

Whisperings perhaps, but the game really is changing. The e-novel is being conceived.

* * *

If you’re a novelist who thinks screen rather than paper, please check in here, with a comment. We could have fun exploring ideas together.

The discussion continues in ‘e-Novel: explorations in writing and reading‘, with discussion on the changing relationship between writer and readers, and a live e-Novel exercise.


References

The most important day in 570 years – my original post
MediaDigest – Twitter figures
ReadWriteWeb – WordPress figures
Smashword figures – see post for March 25.
Wired.co.uk – new entries in the OED
Stephen Fry‘s blog
Stefano Boscutti‘s website
The 40kBooks website
Thierry Crouzet on 40kBooks.com

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Go on! Lend my book!

March 21, 2011 in Activities | 2 comments

Forbidden to lend

Do you feel you’re treated as a potential criminal every time you download an ebook?

That’s how Andy Woodworth feels. In his eBook User’s Bill of Rights, he writes:

I am a reader. As a customer, I am entitled to be treated with respect and not as a potential criminal. As a consumer, I am entitled to make my own decisions about the eBooks that I buy or borrow.

And what makes him feel like this? The copyright notice that most of us add at the front of our ebooks. Thousands of us have followed the excellent Smashwords Style-Guide as we make multi-format versions available, using the suggested wording:

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient…

So who reads copyright notices? Well, clearly some people do, and you can understand Andy’s indignation. Just imagine if the same rules applied to print books, and you needed a separate copy for every member of your family. A library in every room!

But it’s not just that the demand is unreasonable. We indie authors need sales and income, certainly, but that’s unlikely to happen unless we can first create a buzz. What’s the best way to do that? With family members and friends. I remember 20 years ago, when my son was about 7, I spent weeks reading Lord of the Rings to him. He doesn’t hate me for it, although he still thinks he’s Aragorn today. We shared our delight in Pratchett together. And later, he introduced me to Wilbur Smith and Jason Fforde. Now, as adults we each buy our own copies.

So, maybe our copyright notice should be active, not passive. Not just allowing sharing, but encouraging it. Here then is my new copyright notice:

Treat this ebook as you would a printed book. If you enjoy it and want to share it with friends and family – as we hope you will – then please do so. The best support you can give is by helping to spread the word about a Rapscallion author or book. All we ask is that you respect the author’s right to make a living from his art: so please do not re-distribute this book in any format for commercial purposes, or modify the content in any way.



If you distribute through Amazon you might have noticed a new checkbox that appeared at the turn of the year as you upload your masterpieces. By default, you opt in to Kindle’s lending program. So, in effect, unless you uncheck the box, you’re probably nullifying any restrictive copyright notice anyway. (To set your mind at rest, if you’re worried this could mean you’ll never see another dime for your work, Amazon only allows each purchased book to be lent once.)

Again we can be pro-active about this and actually encourage our readers to lend. Booklending.com is a free site, not affiliated to Amazon, that makes lending and borrowing Kindle (or Kindle for PC) books a breeze. You log in and enter the details of the book you want to borrow. As soon as someone’s ready to lend it, the deal is done, and like all matchmaking sites, you both live happily ever after – well, for 14 days at least, until the title is automatically transferred back to the book owner’s Kindle.

You may not be a best-selling author yet. You may not have thousands or even dozens of your books in circulation yet, with people willing to lend. People may not be clamouring to get a copy of your book. So much the better – that’s why you need Booklending.com to help build reputation.

Just tell both the readers you have – who love your book of course – that you want them to think of someone whose life would also be forever changed after reading The Lebanese Troubles (er … you can substitute your title here of course, although I’m not forcing you). They both go to the site. One lends; the other borrows. Oh and you might also mention that the owner is welcome to leave a short Amazon review, and that the borrower can at least click the ‘Like’ button and check the content-tags at the bottom of the Amazon page – so that other potential readers will know you’re getting popular, and won’t be shy to buy.

I won’t detain you. You can start now.


Links:

Booklending.com’s FAQ page
The Smashwords Style-Guide
Andy Woodworth’s eBook User’s Bill of Rights

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New cover design for The Lebanese Troubles

March 15, 2011 in News | 4 comments


The Dog River – Nahr Al Kalb

Our little rubber boat swirled and twisted in the boiling, ice-cold water. Circling above us dizzily, the thick green pines and the mountain peaks, here and there flashes of snow gleaming in the spring sun. The Dog River – Nahr al Kalb. Somewhere up here last year, they said, a father had hacked his daughter to death because she’d run off with her lover. Now that same blind fury was sweeping us down from the primitive heart of Lebanon, down towards its narrow rich Mediterranean plain.


Well I’ve finally gone ahead and done it. Changed the cover design for The Lebanese Troubles. And this is it. I’ve left the original cover over on the right for you to make comparisons.

Why not until now? Two reasons. First, I absolutely love Tom Young’s painting which I used on the original cover. When I first saw ‘Twenty Years’, it seemed almost to have been painted for TLT, perfectly reflecting the mood at the end of the book, even if it shows a scene that never actually happens.

But what I’ve learned in the past year is that artistry and appropriacy is not enough for a good front cover, especially for ebooks. The reader normally only sees a thumbnail sketch of the cover; nevertheless the impression it creates will very often determine whether the purchase is made or not.

My problem was that the original cover was bleak, and it seems that readers don’t buy bleak. Worse, it gives the impression that the whole book is about war. Today’s readers want blood and guts, that’s true, but only when the perpetrator is a vampire. Reading for many is a form of escapism: they want to suspend their disbelief, not be confronted with grim realities.

I haven’t managed to slip a vampire into the story yet. But if you’ve read the book, you’ll know that there’s a good deal of humor and energy, and that was not reflected in my cover.

The second problem was that I couldn’t find a good alternative. But today I found it – the picture I’ve used – license free, in that great resource, Wikimedia Commons. A little bit of work to do with the titles, using the free design tool, Paint (here’s a tutorial on how to create your own book cover), and we were good to go.

Several readers told me they thought the book would sell better with pictures of Monique and Claire on the front cover. As you can see, I didn’t. I thought long and hard about it, but in the end decided that I just didn’t have the skill, the time or the money to do it well. I’ll consider that again in the next iteration.

Another thing I didn’t do was to change the title of the book, despite frequent criticisms. Again I thought about it: “Sinners in Paradise” perhaps; or “The Land of Nod”. My favorite was “East of Eden” … but that’s been done before. What about “An Apprentice Hero”? In the end I rejected them all. The things is that I’ve spent months building brand recognition and getting “The Lebanese Troubles” to the top of the Google listings. If I change the title now, all that good work will be lost … and I’ll immediately invalidate those oh-so-important reviews. And besides, TLT is really quite a subtle title, exploding into a new meaning towards the end of the book.

Back to the cover design, and you’ll see a new Rapscallion logo at the bottom left. Thanks here to my good friend from TNBW, Greta Stone, who kindly developed four alternative designs for me, all with a spiky humorous touch. At thumbnail size, we’ll hardly see the logo, bur at full size I think it works, don’t you agree?

Let’s hear your views on the changes. Will the new cover make customers more likely to stop and look again than previously? How does it work for you? And in the coming days, I’ll let you know whether it really does make a difference to sales.



Please note that TLT will not be available at Amazon for a few days while their version is updating. But Smashwords has already made the changes, and the book is available there as normal – just follow the link in the sidebar.

I posted yesterday a longish sample from TLT, describing the mood in Beirut on the first day of the civil war. It seemed particularly appropriate as Bahrain seems to be headed in the same direction. How I wish people would learn to accommodate and celebrate their differences instead of using guns to enforce a point of view. Anyway, if you’d like to read the sample, you can either click here, or use the ‘Sample’ tab at the top of the page.

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Readers’ Rights

March 11, 2011 in Reflections | 2 comments

Revolution, it seems, is all around us. Last time I talked about a publishing revolution, led by writers. But not to be left behind, readers are getting into the act too. Led by a fiery librarian, Andy Woodworth.

His blog post begins with a banner headline – “START A REVOLUTION”. Goodness, Andy, where did you get that typeface, with it’s dagger T’s, arrowhead V’s, and battleaxe L’s? This revolution promises violence.

But fear not, gentle reader. Andy’s not calling for blood – not yet, anyway. All he wants is a perfectly reasonable eBook User’s Bill of Rights. Essentially, these are the four demands:

  • eBooks should not be locked or limited, preventing readers from taking back-ups, or allowing publishers or writers to remove them at a whim. In others words, readers want to buy and own books, not receive a version under license.
  • When you purchase an eBook it should be available to you in the format of your choice. You should not need to buy a new copy if, for example, you decide to move your library from an IPad to a Kindle – or any new electronic reading device that may appear in coming years.
  • Readers should have the right to annotate, quote passages, print, and share eBook content within the spirit of fair use and copyright.
  • The eBook purchaser should be able to share and resell the book.

Is that a sharp intake of breath I hear from my friends up in the gods – the writers – after that last demand? What did you say? Something about a ‘dead body’?

Well, I’ll come back to demand four in a moment. But let’s look at the first three. From an independent writer’s standpoint, there’s nothing too outrageous here. I’m sure I speak for most writers when I say that I don’t want to lock my e-words away. I want them to float freely through the ether, available to potential readers at any place and at any time, unencumbered. And where my book seeds take root, I want them to grow. Sure, I want to make a fair living from my writing – a good living if possible – but unlike some operating system providers I could mention, I’m not interested in making my readers pay for an ‘updated’ version of the same book every couple of years.

I guess it’s different for the publishers and hardware suppliers. No soft and fluffy approach for them. There’s not the same emotional attachment to readers. They’re in business, they have stakeholders to satisfy, and in these straitened times, they need to make money every which way. Licensing, digital rights management, these are inventions hatched by the commercial folk, not by the artist.

The beauty of independent e-publishing is that authority remains in the author’s hands. We can choose, even when we publish with Amazon these days, not to lock our books with DRM. And we have a very important tool at our disposal. Smashwords.

Smashwords deserves all the recognition and support it can get, both from readers and writers. Smashwords may not yet be the sales powerhouse that Amazon is, but founder Mark Coker is clearly committed to the principle of author control. By following clear guidelines, our Smashwords books are available in all formats, for all readers, including PC readers. We can choose to distribute to any of the major outlets (except Amazon – I needed to make a separate version for them). We can sell at any price, including free. It’s easy to generate discounted or free vouchers.

And with this degree of control, here’s a way that we independents can meet Andy’s first and second demands. If we ask those who purchase to register their copy, then if their current copy is lost for whatever reason, or their hardware changes, we could issue a voucher via Smashwords for a replacement – in the format of their choice. It’s not quite as simple as it sounds. We need to think this through and perhaps develop a common approach or a simple tool … but it’s do-able. It’s on next week’s task-list.

But now let’s move to the final, and most contentious demand. A follow-up posting from Andy this morning How the Ebook Reader’s Bill of Rights Benefits Authors made a convincing case:

Sharing ebooks would be word of mouth on steroids for authors since it means making a recommendation and the ability to put the book almost instantly in the (virtual) hands of another. Sharing is not a lost sale, but a new marketing foray into a previously unrealized potential fan.

OK, sharing, but what about re-selling? Even Andy admits that ‘I do not have a perfect answer on this point’, and flounders a little, suggesting a ‘limited DRM’.

Writers will have different views about this – likely formed by where they stand in the market. Those who have already made their fortune from books will probably be perfectly happy to lend. Mid-market authors struggling to make a living will probably resist.

Where do I stand? I’m perhaps a rather unusual writer: I’m not intending to publish paper editions of my current novel because it’s been designed as an e-book: my approach to dialog for example, would work less well on a printed page with its spacing limitations. But no print copy means no bookshop displays, no book signings. For that reason, word of mouth recommendations, viral marketing, reader reviews are essential. Even more so because of The Lebanese Troubles‘ genre. If the novel has to be categorized, it sits on the ‘literary’ shelf. And that’s not exactly where readers are massing.

So for me, Andy’s advice is a no-brainer. It’s all about engaging with readers, gradually gaining their commitment and support. So yes, I will encourage readers to share, and even to sell on their copies – and I’ll be making changes to the copyright notices as soon as Read an Ebook Week is over.

And nothing would please me more than offering my book through libraries. Andy, are you listening?

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Revolution and the masses

March 9, 2011 in Reflections | 3 comments

“A revolution is brewing”, proclaimed Smashwords’ Mark Coker last week over at Huffington Post, “that will topple Big Publishing as we know it.”

And he went on to enumerate all the reasons why we indie authors are, or should be, Egyptian. Brilliantly. Autocratic, self-serving, money-grabbing traditional publishers forcing writers out of their garrets. Publishing last year’s books the year after next. Making us do all the hard work while they suck up the profits. Why do we need them, if, like Amanda Hocking, we can sell 93 trillion books in a weekend? “Great books plus low prices plus enthusiastic fans plus an author directly engaged with her fans equals viral readership”, Mark enthuses (he’s that kind of guy – don’t you love it!).

Shame really that a couple of days later, Amanda turned out wearing the other team’s colors:

I just don’t understand writers animosity against publishers. So much of what I’ve been reading lately has made me out to be Dorothy taking down the Wicked Witch.

Publishers have done really great things for a really long time. They aren’t some big bad evil entity trying to kill literature or writers. They are companies, trying to make money in a bad economy with a lot of top-heavy business practices.

Oops. Not quite Joan of Arc then.

But a lot of indie authors, I know, will be cheering on Mark as he rides off on his white charger. I’m one of them. Like the Egyptians, we have the web. Like the Egyptians, we’re beginning to get organized. This week for example, via Twitter, I came across the Independent Author Network, where writers (and readers) are encouraged to come together and promote one another’s work. I’m a member now, and the deal is that we all agree to tweet our #IAN member page every day, and to retweet posts from other members. Kudos to William Potter for putting this important tool together.

But there’s still a problem. Revolutions don’t usually succeed without popular support. In our revolution there are plenty of activist writers. I suspect we may have a way to go before we win the hearts and minds of committed readers.

Take last week’s initiative in the UK – International Book Night. A million books were given away. All of them printed books from traditional publishers. Three hours of TV time was devoted to books and reading, culminating in the selection of Britain’s 12 most promising new writers. How many of them were indies? None. How many references were there to the growth of the ebook market in the whole BBC2 broadcast? One. A nudge and a wink – and then move swiftly on.

Ah, we could say, they’re out of touch. But they’re the influencers. And so are all the column inches of book reviews appearing in the press each week. How many reviews of self-published or indie books have you ever seen in your favorite newspaper?

So here’s my concern. Are we writers fooling ourselves by selling mainly to each other? Are we impressing fellow-activists with the number and volume of our tweets (yes, I’m guilty too!) but turning off Joe Reader. Guesting on Jane Friedman’s ever-excellent blog There Are No Rules today, Meg Waite Clayton put it like this:

If you post jumbo-sized copies of your book jacket in places that rightfully belong to others—their walls on chat sites, their Facebook pages, their blogs —folks will recognize your cover in stores. But they will also think “that’s the obnoxious author who is spamming my space,” even if it isn’t on MySpace.

So just how do we win over gentle readers and make them willing and eager participants in our movement? Let’s go back to Amanda Hocking – remember her? She describes herself as an ‘obsessive tweeter’. But see how she begins her blog entry for March 7th:

I feel like I should update my blog, but I don’t want to talk about me. I’ve talked about me a lot and everybody else has talked about me and it’s just enough of me.

That, I think, is a clue. We need to interest people by being interesting. By doing more than blasting out another promotion. To talk to other writers, sure, and offer mutual support, but to spend quality time walking with readers too. Obsessively.

Are there any non-writers in the house? How do you see it?

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How to stifle dissent

March 7, 2011 in News | 4 comments

It’s been a while. A long while. I’ve ignored my poor novel for the past nine months, while giving birth to another creative baby in the real world. It’s no fun up there, let me tell you, in a place where an author’s ability to control people and events is absolutely zero.

In the meantime, reports have been filtering through to me about trouble in my novel – unrest amongst some of the main characters, demonstrations against Richard ( – who I left in control of things), calls for me to resign as the author, even a suggestion that the title should be changed from The Lebanese Troubles to Middle-EastEnders, in a misguided attempt to reach out to a mass-market audience.

So I did a deal with them, offering a few concessions that should keep them happy and me in power. I’ve promised to clean up this blog, making sure that all the links still work. I came to an arrangement with Smashwords, offering the novel free during the Read An E-book Week – that’s March 6 – 12): with lots of new tourist-readers coming visiting, that should keep all my characters busy and feeling self-important again. And I’ve given them the right to form a union with characters from other books – what they want me to do is go out and make contacts with lots more novelists.

Privately, I feel betrayed. After all, who would they be without me? But I’m biting my tongue and keeping my powder dry for now. Compromise isn’t such a bad thing, if it preserves my status quo.

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Use Your PC As An E-Reader

May 2, 2010 in Activities | 2 comments

Kindle for PC

Amazon announced an upgrade to its Kindle for PC reader yesterday.

Wait! You didn’t know that you could use your PC as a Kindle and get access to over 375,000 ebooks? Well it’s easy. And free. All you have to do is click on this link and then find the download button. (I understand that Kindle is only available for the Mac in a beta version so far, but apparently that will change soon.)

Then all you have to do is pop across to the Amazon site, set up an account, and navigate to the Kindle -> Books catalog. Lots of ways to navigate there: by genre, sales, price, number of reviews, publication date, author or title, topic tags. Or just browse till you find something you like (The Lebanese Troubles, plug, plug, plug – just click the Amazon link on the right), and then to test your PC Kindle, download the free sample.

That’ll take you back to your Kindle application. On the home page, you’ll see the book you’ve selected in your library. Open it up and you’ll be able to play with the features. What can you do? Select a font-size you feel comfortable with. Change the background color – white, sepia, or black. Bookmark a page or find a previous bookmark. Right-click to add a note or highlight a key passage. Review all notes. Move to full-screen. Nothing especially fancy, but everything I needed. And it’s a very comfortable, smooth read.

So why use Kindle for PC? First, because it is comfortable. Much more so that any other way I’ve found of reading a book on a PC. But for lots of other reasons too:

  • It’s a great way to discover new writing. (Check out the Amazon discussion groups or Kindle Boards – listed below – to find out other reader discoveries
  • Ebooks are much cheaper than printed books – and many cost almost nothing. (Amazon doesn’t publish free material, but Smashwords does.)
  • You can usually sample a book before you commit to buy
  • Delivery is instant.
  • Reader reviews – from people just like us – are pretty good guides to the quality of the book. Look for quality reviews.
  • You’ll kill fewer trees.


But what if you’re a really serious reader, and 375,000 books just isn’t enough for you? What if the book you want to read isn’t on the Kindle list? Many of the out-of-copyright classics are now available as free ebooks. And then there are all the free Smashwords publications. Well the good news is that, as well as Kindle, there are several other decent e-readers for the PC.

Not quite as polished as Kindle for PC, but still effective, is the Adobe Digital Editions reader. This will read any book released in an EPUB or PDF format. (Officially, EPUB is supposed to be the standard format for ebooks: there’s a movement to encourage all publishers and e-readers to use the same format, so that books once acquired can be read on any e-reader.)

Try it out with any of the Rapscallion releases. Go to Smashwords and download the EPUB version. Save the file in the Downloads folder on your computer. Then open up Digital Editions, click on the Books icon at the far left of the screen, and then on Library -> Add item to library. Find the EPUB file in your Downloads folder. For comparison, you might also want to grab a second Smashwords publication, but this time download a PDF version. This will open directly on your computer, but save it into your Downloads folder, and then copy it into your Digital Editions library just as before. Then open up your books and experiment with the controls.

What I don’t like so much in Digital Editions is the heavy black background around the text, which I find distracting. Also I’d like to be able to adjust the page margins in the EPUB files so that the text is not so close to the edge of the page. But I prefer the EPUB to the PDF version because it offers more flexibility with font size, and also scrolling down a page is more precise – it’s exactly one page at a time. I’m not sure whether I prefer the vertical scrolling of pages, which is what I’m used to on the computer, or Kindle’s horizontal left and right scrolling, which resembles a printed book.

Like Kindle, the Adobe reader, allows you to set bookmarks, automatically remembers the last page you read, and has a Find tool, so you can search for a word or phrase. But it differs from Kindle in two important ways. First Adobe offers a Print capability – which somehow seems to defeat the purpose. And it misses a feature that I think is an essential: there’s no capability for note-taking.

That’s my experience, but there are other free e-readers for the computer too. Perhaps you’d like to tell us about another you’ve tried. What’s your favorite way to read an ebook?


Useful Links

Download page: Kindle for PC

Main Amazon page

Amazon’s Kindle Discussions – Main Page

Kindle Boards – mix with Kindle readers and writers.

Rapscallion publications – so far – via Smashwords

Download page: Adobe Digital Editions

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Indie Writers – Freedom To Innovate

April 17, 2010 in Reflections | 4 comments

Over at the Kindle Boards site – where Kindle readers and writers exchange views – there’s been animated discussion in the last 24 hours about ‘How to get rid of the indie stigma?’.

Smashwords, Amazon (i.e. Kindle) and others have made it possible for writers to e-publish their books without the intervention of agents and publishers. Writers have responded with enthusiasm: Smashwords has published just over 10,000 books and half a million words to date, and they’re forecasting that the totals may double by the end of 2010. Readers too seem to have jumped onto the ebook bandwagon, particularly for budget books. In an illuminating article, mid-list author J.A. Konrath reports that he’s selling 180 $1.99 ebooks a day, and that although published research says that ebooks are only one-tenth of the total market for books, his ebook sales are keeping pace with his print sales.

But the problem is that if anyone can publish, then what happens to standards? Yes, inevitably there will be some great books self-published by great writers who might otherwise have been lost in the slush pile. But there will also be other books that should have been burnt before they even reached the slush stage. Who will protect the reader? And what if a reader comes across three appalling books in a row, and swears never to read an indie book again. There’s the stigma. If we ally ourselves with failure, might we not be labelled failures ourselves? Can anyone take our work seriously if it doesn’t have a proper publisher’s stamp of approval?

I saw the problem at first hand last night. I’d been telling an old friend about my novel – it turned out that he’d already bought it after spotting my LinkedIn announcement. He then wrote: ‘Have you ever come across XXXXX.com? Its a web-based bookshop site partially owned by a friend of mine – good ideas – but they need stuff that is already published – don’t know if it may offer a channel?’ Did you spot the stigma? He wasn’t meaning to be unkind, but because I’d released my novel as an ebook, he considered it still unpublished.

For a few seconds I was hurt. But not for long. Because this whole venture is not just about independence. It’s about innovation – about embracing innovation. And throughout history, innovators have always been treated with a wry smile, suspicion or outright hostility.

What happened when the printing press was invented? The Church felt threatened. Suddenly the world of knowledge and learning wasn’t their exclusive domain any more. Anyone could read books. There was a demand for Bibles in the native language for Heavens sake. Not in Latin, the language of the Church. Surely this was opening the floodgates too far – the democratization of learning was a threat to the status quo. Today they’d call it socialism – and we all know how dangerous that is, don’t we? The Church tried to get books banned – and burned printer/publishers at the stake. And we’re worried about a little stigma?

From that media revolution, the novel was born. And from today’s media revolution – electronic publishing – who knows? At the moment, we still think of the book like a printed book, and everyone’s trying to replicate the experience. For example, when we publish an ebook we include a static book-sized cover with the file. But when will someone realize that we don’t need to do that. Why does it need to be that size? Why does it need to be static – why not a sequence of images or a video, or like the Harry Potter’s photographs why can’t the characters on the cover be waving or chatting to each other? Stupid? Perhaps. But let me pose another question. Why does the book need to be a one-way experience, from writer to reader? Why can’t it be interactive, since e-publishing would easily allow that? And why oh why, has the iPad used the cheesy page-turning icon when you move from one page to the next? It would drive me mad … if they ever release the iPad here in the UK.

Who’s going to lead innovation? Not the traditional publishers, I’m almost sure of that. At a time when anyone familiar with the web knows the power of free and the impact of viral marketing, the big six are fighting to raise prices and are delaying their e-editions to protect the time-honored print model. Surely it makes sense to release the e-version first, make sure there is a market for a book, and then release the print version. Perhaps then they wouldn’t make losses on so much of their fiction list.

So I’m happy to live with condescension as I retain my freedom to experiment. But I’m not sure I’d go quite as far as Margaret Lake on Kindle Boards, who’s waiting, tongue in cheek, for the time when “we’ll be saying to authors with publishers and editors and agents and publicists … Couldn’t make it on your own, huh?” Retaining your independence doesn’t necessarily mean going it alone. There are advantages to hunting with the pack, as we’ll see next time.

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