Author Archive

Killing the Dream

Monday, December 27th, 2010

OK, so the post title’s a mite melodramatic, but it seemed fitting given the subject matter.

When I was working on my first attempt at a novel (unfinished, never going to be) I wrote a dream sequence in which the lead protagonist examines his plight and motivations. It made me feel cheap and nasty, and not in a good way, so after allowing it to live in my Word document for 24 hours, I deleted it. I’ve never written a dream sequence since.

Now, I know I’m biased; I have no interest in dreams. I rarely remember my dreams, and those I do remember are typically memories (which I can remember when awake) or fragments of data welling up from my subconscious, which you don’t need to be a psychoanalyst to interpret. I don’t look down on people who study dreams, or believe that they offer insights into character, personal issues, the past, or the future – it’s just that I don’t believe dreams mean anything to anyone other than the dreamer. You want to tell me about a dream you had last night? Why not tell me about your commute; it’s probably as relevant to my understanding of your personality.

So, yeah, I’m a bit anti-dream in books.

I just finished a book by one of my favourite authors in which the hero gains the answer to a riddle he’s been pondering in a dream. A dream character – who doesn’t exist in the “real world” of the book, points him in the right direction.

What the hell?

With the exception of any lucid dreamers who might be reading, have you ever dreamt a scene with such coherence it could convey anything worthy of understanding that you didn’t already know?

I doubt it, which is why dreams should never be used as a device to advance plot. Not only is it a painfully tired cliché, unless your narrative requires a character to understand the relevance of a fifty-foot clown beating an ice-cream replica of Winston Churchill to death with a steroid inhaler, you’re probably faking it, and you’re definitely out of ideas.

Tags: Cliché, Dreams, Lucid, Novel, Writing
Posted in Opinion, Writing | 2 Comments »

Make a Move – Christmas Pricing

Monday, December 20th, 2010

Make a Move is now available from Smashwords for $0.99, and will be available direct from the Kindle Store at the same price (plus delivery fee, if it applies) within 24 hours of this posting. The UK pricing on the Kindle Store will also reflect the discount.

I’ll be running this discount for two weeks; after January 1st, it will return to its usual price of $2.99.

You Said You’d Never Discount Your Book That Low

Yeah, I know, but I’m working this DIY publishing thing out as I go, so I have to be prepared to admit when I’m wrong. When Make a Move first came out earlier this year, things were different. There was no significant Kindle ownership in the UK, and eBook sales were still negligible, even if they were growing. In that market, I believe that discounting is bad for everyone, and I wasn’t prepared to be part of the race to the bottom. Now though, things are different, and I hope to see a lot of DIY publishers offering holiday discounts for the following reasons:

The Kindle Wifi model is sold out in the US. Although Kindles seem to have sold well this year (with no sales data to corroborate that, it’s just my opinion) I think this is the holiday shopping season in which they’ll finally go mainstream. Every publisher – DIY or otherwise – should be taking the opportunity to get their books onto Kindles as people load up after Christmas Day.
Traditional/Legacy/Mainstream Publishers aren’t in a position to discount that deeply without selling at a loss, which no one is going to do in this sales season, so this is a chance for DIY publishers to get a toehold in the market. By offering people the chance to try your books at reduced risk – while still making some money yourself – we can get people reading/discussing/recommending indie titles. DIY publishing isn’t going to eclipse the mainstream, but I do think we deserve a little more of the storage space on people’s Kindles.
Amazon is the only platform through which I can distribute directly from the UK; for all other retailers, I have to work through Smashwords. That’s fine – I love Smashwords – but the turnaround time on price changes with the other retailers is just too slow. Barnes and Noble is still an 8-week lead time to see changes I make at Smashwords reflected on the site. For the duration of this sale, Make a Move will be one third the price on Amazon as it is on B&N, iBooks, Kobo et al, and these retailers need to realise that agility is everything in this emerging market. If they can’t open their platforms to individuals, then they need to work with Smashwords to reduce those lead times.

So I’m going to swallow my pride and give discounting a try this season, and hopefully turn more of my browsers into readers, but I do think this Christmas will be a turning point for eBooks, and I’m hoping that all independent author-publishers get to share in that success.

Happy Christmas, everyone.

Steve

Tags: EBook, Indie, Kindle, Make a Move, Sales, Self-publishing, Smashwords
Posted in News | No Comments »

Writing Skills, Publishing Skills, Selling Skills…

Saturday, December 18th, 2010

Over the last year, one theme that’s recurred on a regular basis is that of indie authors vs indie musicians/filmakers; as in, how come the indie directors and songwriters get the respect, and we don’t? At first I dismissed the phenomenon as a by-product of timing – the independent movements in those industries have been around, or at least visible, for longer, and they’e earned the respect through a number of breakout hit releases. I still think that’s a factor. Recently though, as I’ve been involved in indie music and film projects of my own, I’ve seen the phenomenon from the other side, and it’s given me an insight.

Anyone Can Play Guitar

No, they can’t. As a musician, you’ll find yourself hanging out with other musicians, so you get the impression that everyone has a degree of musical talent. Most people, however, don’t. Not because they lack the raw ability, but because they lack the time, desire, or opportunity to learn. And, yes, some people will never be able to play, because their brains just aren’t good at that kind of thinking.

You tell someone you play guitar, they assume you’re good. The same is true of film-making at any level. You say you shot a roller derby video, people assume you know what you’re doing and that the end result is going to be awesome (it is, by the way – Steve). They don’t assume it’s going to suck.

You tell people you write, they assume you suck.

Not Everyone Can Write

Yes, they can. Not everyone can write well, but they can write. Most people use a computer at home or at work, so they all know their way around Word. They can use a web browser to research as well as you can. They can spell – maybe.

And this, I think, is the key to the different attitudes the three creative endeavours receive. Musicians and film-makers are seen to have technical skills that non-participants don’t, so even if the song or film is bad, it’s better than anything the unskilled observer could produce, which translates into a sympathetic view of the work. Add to that the significant financial investment in producing anything that can be played on an iPod or a DVD player, and the creatives are further elevated in perceived stature. Ignoring my computer, which I use for lots of things, my basic home recording setup – including instruments – cost over £3000, and I’m not quite done yet. My writing setup cost about £40. I could write an amazing book and record a terrible song, and the latter would still be seen as the greater achievement, as anyone can write a book, but not everyone can play guitar.

Customer Perception is Out of Our Hands

No, it’s not. Producing an eBook independently is never going to require a huge cash outlay unless you pay for professional editing, typesetting and conversion, but even if you do, that value perception won’t be increased, as readers won’t know. The book will be better for it, but readers won’t know why, or how much you spent. A professional cover designer adds visible value, but there are great designers working at all cost scales, so no help there.

But writers do have skills that non-writers don’t: namely grammar and typesetting/eBook conversion. The problem is, these skills are being aggressively devalued, and the group responsible is, well, us.

I’ve read way too many blogs/tweets stating that grammar is an evolving discipline – that it’s alive – and that as long as communication is maintained, anything goes. Anyone questioning this stance is branded a grammar Nazi (gotta love the internet) but a thorough understanding of grammar is what separates a skilled written communicator from the rest of the population that don’t understand even basic sentence construction. It’s a skill that makes our book understandable to anyone, and yet we seem hell-bent on throwing it away. Is grammatically correct prose seen as elitist? Condescending? Not to me. I think classical grammar combined with stilted writing can alienate readers with more modern tastes, but that’s just style; the underpinning grammar isn’t to blame.

Formatting an eBook isn’t easy either. Uploading a Word doc to Amazon is easy, but taking control of how your text is displayed on an eReader requires time, effort, and a steep learning curve. It’s a discipline most people would struggle with, yet it’s another skill that separates skilled eBook writers from the crowd. So why do so few independent authors try to do a proper conversion, or connect with someone who can help them? Even eBooks from my favourite mainstream authors are riddled with formatting errors, so this is one area in which a writer can elevate their standing, yet so few try.

As modern, independent writers/DIY publishers, we do have skills – skills we should be proud of – but as long as we’re happy to allow their devaluation, or to actively participate in that process, readers and outsiders will continue to look down on our independent trade while lauding others.

And right now, as a reader first and a writer second, I can’t say I blame them.

Tags: Amazon, Conversion, EBook, Grammar, Indie, Music, Self-publishing, Typesetting, Video
Posted in Music, Opinion, Typesetting, Video, Writing | No Comments »

Self-ish Publishing

Sunday, December 12th, 2010

I’m a big fan of self-publishing as a movement, and not just because I’m an active participant. Amazon’s recent moves to extend their reach as a content distributor can’t leave anyone in any doubt about their ultimate intentions – to eliminate the publisher from the writer-to-reader chain – but I’m not alarmed by that possibility. I’ve read some of the work of my self-publishing peers, and I know that the quality is out there. Worst case: if traditional publishing houses become marginalised, there will still be quality content for readers to buy.

The key benefit of increased access to self-published work is, in my opinion, the strength of the relationship that can be forged between author and reader. It’s the indie author’s unique selling point, and it has to be respected. In this internet age, if you’re working to build a fan base, and you take a wrong step and alienate a few readers, you’re done.

There is a fine line between DIY author and DIY publisher, and author’s need to be clear about what they’re trying to be. If you want to be a publisher, that’s great – although you’re entering a field with thousands of people who are better at it than you, and you’d better have a unique angle upon which to sell books. If you’re a self-publishing author, you have to maintain your integrity – or at least appear to – as the second you resort to typically publisher-like behaviour, such as release-windowing on key retailer websites in order to concentrate sales and reviews, the trust you’ve built up with your readers is gone.

There’s nothing wrong with being business-minded, but having “indie” status doesn’t excuse activities for which publishing corporations are regularly lambasted. Ask yourself why you chose to self-publish, and answer truthfully, as your readers will spot the lie even if you don’t. A writer with a quality, yet niche or hard-to-categorise product can justify their independence without losing respect; a “me too” publisher probably can’t, and you’ll eventually get found out.

Tags: Amazon, DIY, Indie, Publishers, Release Windowing, Self-publishing
Posted in Opinion, Publishing | No Comments »

A Wider Review

Monday, November 29th, 2010

I just wrote a Goodreads review for The Lie by Chad Kultgen, and it was the first time I’ve reviewed a book and felt compelled to comment on the conversion to eBook format. I felt compelled because it was the best conversion I’ve seen since I started reading eBooks. Aside from the error-free conversion, the digital typesetter had used some intelligent formatting touches that enhanced the appearance of the text without breaking the accessible nature of the Kindle’s default formatting. After the last-but-one eBook I read, which I returned to Amazon for a refund based on the poor quality of the conversion, it was reassuring.

A friend of mine shared her first Kindle experience with me last week, and although the story grabbed her, and the Kindle as a reading experience has snagged a new convert to the eBook cause, the formatting errors annoyed her and undermined the experience. And again, this was from a big publisher.

I remember when High Definition DVDs first hit the shops; the review magazines would review the content – the film – but would also comment on the quality of the conversion from the usually-celluloid source. They don’t do it any more, as the quality is now a given, but at first, when the distributors were dredging the back catalogue for titles to convert, there were some films that just weren’t of sufficient quality.

That’s where I see us right now with eBooks; titles are being rushed out onto the digital shelves, and quality is suffering. There’s no excuse; it’s not hard to produce a quality conversion, but the impact of a bug-ridden text on the reader can be enough to see them leave the book unfinished. Which is why I’m going to be reviewing both the book (the intellectual property) and the conversion in each of my Goodreads eBook reviews from now on. And in the hope that you’ll write a review that will reassure me or warn me off from a bad conversion, I ask that all of you Goodreads reviewers do the same.

Tags: Amazon, Chad Kultgen, Conversion, EBook, Review, The Lie
Posted in eBooks, Editing, Opinion, Typesetting | No Comments »

Plot: The Biggest Threat to Creativity

Sunday, November 14th, 2010

Make a Move: The Second Season has been unofficially on hold for a while now, and regardless of the number of people asking for more Freddy, Jay and Holly, the person most upset about the delay is me. The problem – the blockage – is the kind of thing I imagine affects a lot of writers, so I thought I’d share. I know this may sound obvious to some, but this is the first time I’ve tried to write a sequel, so my experience in this area is zero.

Pretty much straight after I put Make a Move out, one of my editing team suggested an idea for the major arc of book two – a multi-level plot involving assassination, betrayal, abuse of power, and media whoring. It sounded just the thing for Make a Move, so I put the idea in my back head and waited for the detail to well up from my subconscious.

And waited.

And you know the rest. The book’s dead in the water.

I was watching some great TV last night (The Walking Dead episode two, and the season finale of Dexter season 4, just in case you’re interested) and my mind was wandering on the problem with my book. I don’t know if it was the characterisation I was seeing on the screen (these really are two of the best shows in the last decade) or if I was jolted out of my creative mindset, but I realised what the block was. Although the story idea was great, and very Make a Move, it was a scenario into which I could drop my characters, but it didn’t come from the characters. The question I was asking myself was “what can Freddy do next?” instead of “what is Freddy doing next?”. It’s a subtle distinction, but to my characters, and my way of writing, it’s everything. With that idea locked in and generating no additional ideas of its own, there was no room for my subconscious to work – no creative space into which new ideas could arrive. Asking myself that question – “what is Freddy doing next?” – produced two results:

Firstly, it produced the answer “not this”, and that act of confirming the fallacy of the manufactured plot finally allowed me to let it go.
And secondly, it finally gave Freddy – that part of my subconscious that is Freddy – the opportunity to answer for himself.

And I liked what he had to say.

Tags: Dexter, Make a Move, Narrative, Story, Walking Dead
Posted in Inspiration, Writing | No Comments »

Where’s The Fun?

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010

It’s been a long time since I felt a twinge of excitement at the prospect of watching tv, but tomorrow night sees the UK first showing of season 4 of The Big Bang Theory – a new-found favourite of mine – and Friday is the UK premier of The Walking Dead, which could be the best show of the decade, if you’re into zombies. Most of my friends who would be interested in these shows have already seen them, having watched low-quality versions from the torrents/newsgroups/bloke-down-the-pub. I prefer to wait though, as the anticipation is part of the experience; I want maximum value from these broadcasts.

It’s got me thinking, though, about the perceived value of entertainment media, and how the work of teams of talented people, over a year or more, is now considered disposable when viewed in the context of the torrent of freebies available online.

Maybe the answer is in finding a way to monetise the experience surrounding the product, rather than the product itself, but that leads me to think that the only money is in the medium – the technology – and not in the message. The message used to be everything; now it’s the added value. As an amateur writer/filmmaker/musician, it pisses me off, as it makes me think there’s no point trying to build a career out of what I love; I have to accept a conventional day job – either working for myself or a company – and relegate my other endeavours to hobbies. I’m not at that point yet, but like I said, it’s on my mind.

Today, I was asked to shoot some video for youtube, and not wanting to do a half-assed job, I offered to record some music for the soundtrack too. I love this kind of project – pure creativity, and zero business. It’ll be fun, and nothing more than that, so I’m in. I am concerned about the devaluing of creative media, and its implications for me, but maybe the bigger question should be, ignoring the wider business world for a second, what do I want my creative life to be? And this video project, right now, is it.

Tags: Big Bang Theory, Film, Music, Newsgroups, Torrents, Walking Dead, Youtube
Posted in Music, Opinion, Video, Writing | No Comments »

Value = x

Monday, October 18th, 2010

Ignoring religious texts – which I’m not touching, even with a virtual ten-foot pole – it’s safe to say that if you saw someone burning a book, most people would react in a negative way. Disbelief, discomfort, anger, pity – whatever the extent, most people wouldn’t feel happy seeing the cover of even the cheapest, nastiest paperback curling as the flames took hold.

And yet most people will throw a magazine, with the same cover price as a paperback, into the recycling with no more regret than if it was used toilet paper.

Why is that? Seriously – it’s not a rhetorical question. I really need to know, as it might be the answer to my problem of having a houseful of books I’m unable to give away. I had to buy my first comic box at the weekend, as I’ve no more room on my bookcases for any more single comics. As in 32 pages. I don’t have room for 32 more pages, yet I can’t give any books away. They’re not worth enough to make the effort of selling them worthwhile, and I could re-buy any I wanted to re-read, so it’s not a financial decision. And it’s not about the pose-value of owning so many, as I happily display the complete shite alongside the classics. I just feel very, very uncomfortable at the idea of giving them away.

I’ll happily recycle a magazine, even though the (admittedly transient) content will be lost in its current form, unlike a book, whose text will live on, somewhere, forever. There’s just something about books – something that’s more than the sum of the pages and ink and glue and cover.

I don’t know what it is, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot, as I juggle books from shelf to shelf, trying to find an inch of space in a zero-sum game, looking at my Kindle, and its ultimately-disposable contents. And it’s something that other people should be thinking about, as it’s a property that’s missing from eBooks, and magazines, and electronic magazines, and pay-to-view news sites. I honestly dont know what it is – this value – that printed books have, but regardless of how the percentages of paper vs digital book sales skew, eBooks will never have it, and readers will never pay print prices for it.

Tags: EBook, Magazines, Print
Posted in eBooks, Opinion | 2 Comments »

Gutterball

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010

A common complaint aimed at self-published books is the lack of quality control, specifically in the proofreading and typesetting. I’ve not read enough self-published books to be able to definitively validate this complaint, but if you look at a page of new releases on Smashwords – any page – you’ll find at least one book with typos in the book description. Not just loose or minimalist grammar, but actual typos. Do you want to bet the purchase price on the quality of the manuscript? Neither do I.

Aim For Quality

Getting a book ready for sale is hard, and formatting for a particular eReader is a big part of that. The KindleGen tools Amazon provide are not intuitive, and it took me a long time to research the process online, learn the tricks and traps, and produce a product I was happy with. Even the Kindle Previewer application missed a bug in my HTML that didn’t show up until I tested it on an actual Kindle. It’s not easy, but I think it’s worth the effort, as the automated conversions available play towards the Kindle’s default formatting, and that doesn’t allow you the control you need to nail the layout. I don’t want first-line indents on the opening paragraph of each episode/scene, but the Kindle, by default, will add them, so I overrode them. The monospaced font is too big compared to the default font, so I manually overrode the font size for a script section, setting it -1 size relative to the current base font (and honouring the users’ right to adjust the size to their taste). Neat formatting touches are another way to add quality to the product – the kind of quality you’d expect from a “traditionally published” eBook. If you want to compete with the mainstream, you have to match the quality of their output. “Good enough” just isn’t, well, good enough.

Accept no Substitutes

I was so happy when I got my Kindle for my birthday; I’d been holding off buying/reading a list of books so I could fill it with content – traditionally published and self-published – and just dive in. In the first week I jumped between collections of short stories, novellas and non-fiction before finally choosing the first novel I woud read. I was about two pages in when I spotted the first typo; nothing major – just a missing opening quote. I shrugged it off and got back into the story. But not for long. A slow-burner, most pages were action/description until people started meeting up about 5% of the way in, so the errors weren’t as prevalent, but by the time the protagonists met and started to talk, I was counting five or six typos. Per page.

Large blocks of text were missing opening quotes, leaving you half way through a line before you realised the speaker had changed, and there were other typos – obvious formatting errors where letters had been replaced. Now, I know I’m not an average reader; I was a bit OCD about typos before I became obsessed about the quality of my own work and trained myself to hunt them down, but this would be distracting for any reader. Me? I was completely kicked out of the story, and didn’t know what the hell was going on. I persevered to 10%, but then called it a day. I was mad. I emailed Amazon support and asked for a refund and for them to scrub the book from my Kindle, and even though I was past the seven-day return window, they agreed. My argument was that the book was not of a saleable standard and that it should be removed from sale until a corrected version was available. They said they’d contacted the relevant party and had passed on my comments.

So, who was the DIY author who’s careless conversion so offended me?

It was…

Wait for it…

Not… an indie.

It was a book from a publishing house. A big publishing house. One of the biggest publishing houses.

And it wasn’t cheap.

Get Your Mind Out of the Gutter

I’m not going to say what the book was, firstly because I have a submission with the publisher in question right now, and secondly because it’s not the author’s fault – they had no part in the conversion – and they don’t deserve to lose any more sales (although, sharp-eyed friends on Goodreads may notice my to-read shelf is missing a book, but let’s keep it a secret between us).

I couldn’t understand what had gone wrong. The print version of the book could never go out in this condition, and conversion is surely a case of reworking the final manuscript draft into HTML, so what had gone so wrong in the process? I’ve been working as a professional writer for a long time, and I’ve used most processes involved in getting text onto paper, so it didn’t take long to spot the clues and work it out. Example: on numerous occasions, “ll” was replaced with “U”. Kind of looks the same if you squint, right? Another example: “some_word?” was replaced with “some_wordY“. Again, you can see that the characters are in the same league, if not the same ballpark.

I’ve converted a lot of text, and I know that basic characters – the core alphabet – are never changed unless you overwrite them on purpose. Mathematical symbols, accented characters, even things like double-quotes and em-dashes can easily get nuked across devices, but you’re safe with “ll”. The only way those mistakes made it into the text were from OCR – Optical Character Recognition – the process whereby printed text is scanned into a computer, which then converts the graphical interpretation of the characters into editable text. Usually by guessing, as I’ve yet to see an OCR system that’s even 90% accurate. Yep – somebody mashed that book flat onto a scanner or photocopier and scanned every page into a computer. You know how else I know? The character substitutions aren’t consistent; it only happens some of the time. This, in addition to the fact that it was opening – not closing – quotes going missing, is a result of the person scanning the book not being able to get the pages flat due to the spine curve; the more the text curves into the gutter margins, the less accurate the scan, and therefore the OCR.

So what? Maybe this is a perfectly legitimate way to convert a print book to electronic format? Maybe the original digital manuscripts of this (very recent) book were lost? Maybe it’s cheaper to farm out conversion to a third-party using unskilled labour to manually scan-in the books? Maybe I’m just being naïve?

And maybe someone at the publisher should have got it proofread.

The Weakest Link

I’m mad as hell about this, as you can probably tell, given the length of this post. But I’m not mad as a reader/consumer (like I said, I got a refund). I’m mad as a DIY author-publisher. I need eBooks to be a success in order to maintain my distribution platform. Without eBooks, I can’t sell beyond the UK. Hell, beyond Greater Manchester is difficult. Publishers are fighting to maintain revenues on eBooks, while customers are pushing to reduce cover prices. Perceived value is everything in this intangible market; when text is all you’re selling, it has to be correct, even if the story sucks. Anyone selling poorly converted content is undermining that value perception – whether inadvertently or not – and is directly impacting eBook adoption.

So many people point to the self-published books “flooding” the eBook market as the weak link in the business model, but anyone, no matter how well-respected, can step into that role, and the more respected the source, the more damage is done.

Tags: Conversion, Distribution, EBook, Indie, Kindle, Manchester, Proofreading, Publishers, Self-publishing, Smashwords, Typos
Posted in eBooks, Publishing, Typesetting | No Comments »

Why I Don’t Care About Piracy

Saturday, October 9th, 2010

I’m not at the level of sales and exposure where piracy is even an issue, but reading a lot of discussions about eBook piracy this week caused me to consider my position on the subject, and the upshot is that I don’t care. I care about piracy as a consumer, but I want this to be a quick post, so I’m not going to start a rant on that one, but as an author – a content creator – it’s just not an issue for me.

There are many reasons for piracy, from being cheap (actually, the least common I’ve noticed), to frustration with territorial release-windowing, to lack of easy access to content. Usually it’s some combination of the three.

As I released Make a Move myself, there is no release-windowing, and I’ve made sure it’s as widely available as possible. So that just leaves the prices tag. $2.99/£2.20 is the kind of price no one can argue with; if you think that’s too much, you’re not going to buy it at any cost. So I’m confident I’ve done everything I can do to make my book available and affordable.

I can see why publishers are worried though. I believe that the extent of piracy is directly proportional to your cover price or, more accurately, perceived value. As a reader, I hope they deal with the issue in a more mature way than the film distributers have (guys, you do realise that the only people forced to sit through your “don’t pirate films” stings are the people who paid for the DVD, right?) but they’re against the clock; the longer they wait in making books easily available on all platforms, the more chance they’ll alienate customers and devalue their offering once it is available.

Tags: EBook, Make a Move, Piracy, Publishers
Posted in Opinion, Publishing, Uncategorized | No Comments »