Writing Plans For The Coming Year
This is partly here so people know what will be coming up on this blog, but mostly so I have an aide memoire I can refer to myself. These are the projects I’m working on at the moment or planning to do this year:
Finish proposal for a traditionally-published novel in a series in someone else’s world. May or may not ever get past the proposal stage. If it doesn’t, I’m going to rework the ideas into a new novel of my own.
Get PEP! 3 out the door – possibly as early as next week, if all goes to plan. (I know I’ve said that before)
Finish the Kinks book. Probably by March
Finish How We Know What We Know – hopefully by the end of next month
Finish Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years – before Xmas.
Finish Bigger On The Outside – some time in the next few months.
Finish Time Detective to novella length
Write books two and three of the Beach Boys series, and if necessary a second edition of book one – waiting for details on the reissues and new albim before I do anything definite.
Book on Cerebus. I’m scrapping what I did last year, and restarting this in the style of my Seven Soldiers book.
A second and third Doctor Watson Investigates, to make enough of them to fill an omnibus paperback.
Possibly a second Time Detective novella if people like the first one enough.
More short stories.
I also want to write more political stuff, but I don’t think I could do a book on that. Politics is too depressing right now, all things considered. I’m actually more politically active now than in a long time, but have very little to say…
On Ebook Pricing And Promotion
This post will really only be of interest to other people who self-publish or plan to. The rest of you can ignore it. It’s a little addendum to the post I made last week.
There is nothing more likely to get arguments raging on self-publishing discussion boards than the question of pricing one’s book (and it’s almost always ‘book’ singular. Very few of the people involved have written more than one). One group insist that the right thing to do is to publish books at 99 cents – or give them away for free – for ‘exposure’. The other group think their work is too valuable to give away at such a low price – “my book is worth more than a chocolate bar.”
Both sides are, ultimately, arguing from a lack of evidence. The first side can point to the occasional success story – writer X whose first novel sold 100,000 copies, and she sold it for only 99 cents – while the other side can say “the major publishers don’t sell anything for under $10. If I sell mine for $5 that’s still only half their price.” But basically they’re going from instinct.
My case is a little different from many of these people. I write entirely for pleasure. But I publish for business. This is why I post almost all my writing to my blog first and let people read it for free if they want to. But if they want to have a physical copy or an ebook of it, then they need to pay me for the time and effort I put in for cover design, typesetting, formatting, uploading and so on, because unlike the actual writing that stuff is hard, tedious work that I don’t enjoy and am not very good at. So I’m looking at pricing entirely from the point of view of what will maximise revenue.
The tactic most often endorsed by self-publishers is to write a book, put it out cheap, for ninety-nine cents, and promote the hell out of it on all the social networks for as long as you can, and only then start writing your next book.
Now, this tactic would be painful for me, because I find it almost impossible *not* to write. I can’t always write the thing I intend to write (I’ve got my half-finished MindlessWho post that should have been up a week ago as proof of that), but the only time I’m not writing something is when I’m physically incapable of doing so. But imagine that I could.
So you have your ninety-nine cent book and you spam everyone about it. Let’s imagine a best case scenario here, and say that you don’t get blocked by everyone on Twitter and Facebook. We’ll further imagine that pricing at ninety-nine cents is actually an effective way of getting noticed at this point (it isn’t, because literally millions of people are doing the same thing now). So let’s be optimistic and say that your book sells a thousand copies a month for the year you’re promoting it.
Many of those sales will be to people who won’t particularly enjoy it, and will give it bad reviews. The sales are mostly coming from social networking, so once you stop that to write the next book (if you ever do), sales drop to zero or close. So we can take the first year’s income from that single book as being a year’s income from writing. 12,000 ebooks at ninety-nine cents, at a 35% royalty, comes to $4200.
So write a single book a year, sell it for ninety-nine cents, spend the rest of the year promoting it, you can get $4200 a year, in an ideal world.
Now let’s look at what I do.
I wrote five full-length books last year, for which I’ve priced the ebooks at $5. I did essentially no promotion for any of these – one blog post, a tweet and a facebook post is about it. I did do a couple of guest blogs promoting my fourth book, but that’s all. I spent the time writing instead.
Now, none of them are selling anything like a thousand copies a month. But this month, between them they sold 87 books as ebooks alone (not counting for the moment either paper copies or revenues from stores like Apple which haven’t reported for this month yet). Admittedly, this is one of my better months, but also I write stuff for *incredibly* niche audiences in most part. And those books sold that much without any additional promotion on my part. I used that time to write instead.
Eighty-seven books at five dollars a pop, at a seventy percent royalty (actually some are at a higher royalty because Smashwords pays better, but let’s keep this simple and stick to Kindle royalty figures) is $304.50 . The single-book author who’s promoting rather than writing makes $350 from her single book.
I’ll actually surpass what she makes with her thousand downloads, because I’ve also got a couple of short stories up for ninety-nine cents and a longer story up for three dollars (I’m not saying never to price something at ninety-nine cents – I use the price if the ‘book’ I’m selling is under ten thousand words or so, because it would be cheating the readers to charge more), and I’m selling paper books (most of the ninety-nine centers don’t) but even if we take that figure as all I’ll make, I know I can write at least five more books this year. (In fact I’ve got at least eight that are either in the planning stage or partly written, most of which should come out this year, along with a few more short stories and novellas. I’m aiming to get *something* at least e-published every fortnight this year).
So next year, assuming the average sales stay the same and I do another five full-length ebooks, I’ll be on $609 a month from ebook sales. The year after, $913.50 . Meanwhile, the natural audience for the ninety-nine cent book by the one-book-a-year (or less) author has already been exhausted, and that author is essentially starting from scratch with the next one.
Now, not everyone can write as fast as me – I’m lucky in that I write extremely clean copy, and I’m very good at structure, so I don’t need to rewrite much, and I think very, very fast. My books are also mostly on the short side (my natural medium is the essay or the short story, rather than the novel or series, though I think my two best books are the ones where the essays build and reflect on each other in a novelistic structure). And these numbers obviously don’t apply to everyone. But I think this shows that there is certainly a *very good case* for the best strategy for self-publishers to pursue being to charge a relatively high amount, but to write a lot, and let the promotion take care of itself.
Opinions?
New Faction Paradox!
It’s really starting to look like this Christmas is some kind of great dream for me. Not only have the Beach Boys reformed, and I’ve seen a great Paul McCartney gig, but the disability benefits we’ve been fighting for for my wife for two years have finally come through (and been backdated). And now this announcement from Obverse Books on the JadePagoda Doctor Who Books mailing list:
Following not terribly protracted negotiations with Lawrence Miles, Obverse will be taking over the Faction Paradox prose license in its entirety from 2012, as a result of which we’ll be publishing this lot next year…
*Novels*
Against Nature – Lawrence Burton
“*Goralschai, a first wave veteran of the House Military, returns from the front bearing a death wish the size of creation. The spiral politic, he decides, cannot continue, and on Earth, in the Mexico of 1506, he finds a means to his twisted end; and so, egged on by the Celestis (who find this sort of thing amusing), he lays plans to turn one small corner of history into a weapon*.”The Brakespeare Voyage – Simon Bucher-Jones and Jon Dennis
“*The Maw, a wound in the fabric of the universe, forms. House Lineacrux claims to have constructed it, but this may be a lie. To exploit it House Lineacrux creates two ships with the intention of harvesting Leviathan biodata from outside the totality of the Spiral politic. The first the San Grael is a scout the second, the Brakespeare…*”*Novellas*
The Moontree Women – Kelly Hale
“*Some people have timelines in their palms instead of lifelines..*.”Opus Majus – Jim Mortimore
*”In 1267 the Fransiscan monk Roger Bacon made such a fuss about the
innacuracies of the calendar that Pope Clement IV ordered he be sent on a quest to find the missing time. This ridiculous but hardly refusable mission is something of a problem for Bacon – but an even greater problem for Faction Paradox.*”*Short Stories*
Faction Paradox 2: The As Yet Untitled Collection – editor, Jay Eales…
Available either as hardbacks individually or a subscription or something
else entirely…
And that’s on top of the previously-announced City Of The Saved short-story collection. I will, of course, be buying every one of these. Simon Bucher-Jones and Lawrence Burton are both friends of mine, but they’re also both extremely good writers, and the rest are all good too. This is very, very exciting. Obverse are an excellent publishing house anyway, putting out good-quality hardbacks and DRM-free epubs of their books.
(Proper update later – spent the last couple of days travelling, and am now staying with my in-laws).
Read Debi’s Book! And Draw Pictures!
My friend and sometime PEP! contributor Debi Linton has written a children’s book, a very sweet, funny short story about coping with anxiety. She’s not yet got an illustrator for it, but has posted the text as a PDF on her blog, and is looking for someone to draw the pictures (unfortunately it won’t be a paying gig, as Debi’s as skint as all my friends seem to be).
I know at least three or four very good illustrators read this blog, and a few of them would fit the style of the book perfectly. But even if you can’t draw at all, it’s well worth a read if you have any taste at all for children’s books.
Review: Monkee Business by Eric Lefcowitz
Rather surprisingly for such a hugely successful band, there are very few actual books on the Monkees. Other than annuals and fan cash-ins from the 60s, some ebooks that appear to be just articles culled from Wikipedia, some self-published fan-fiction on Lulu and a notoriously-inaccurate book called Monkeemania that at one point confuses Micky Dolenz with Micky Kantner from Jefferson Starship, there are only six real books I know of, and luckily for Monkees fans they all cover slightly different areas.
Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz have both written insubstantial autobiographies, there’s an unauthorised biography of Michael Nesmith, there’s my own book (a song-by-song critical analysis), there’s Andrew Sandoval’s day-by-day look at everything the band did (Sandoval has actually written probably another book’s worth of text on the band in his extensive liner notes for the band’s reissues), and there’s this book, the only narrative biography of the band I know of.
Originally published as The Monkees Tale, this was reissued in an expanded version this year – unfortunately just *before* the Dolenz/Jones/Tork reunion tour was announced, thus making what was an up-to-the-minute biography instantly dated.
How interesting it will be for fans will depend on how familiar the reader is with Lefcowitz’s source material. While he conducted a long interview with Peter Tork for the original book, and apparently interviewed Michael Nesmith on more than one occasion, almost every quote in the book from a band member appears to be traceable to two documentaries from the late 90s – Hey, Hey, We’re The Monkees and E! True Hollywood Story.
This may not, though, be Lefcowitz’s fault – all the band members, especially Jones, have spent the last forty-five years telling anecdotes about the same two-year period of their lives, and they have refined everything into smooth, streamlined, versions they can rattle off without thinking. Whenever he’s asked about Tork, Jones will say “Hare Krishna, brown rice and waterbeds”, Dolenz will always say of his trip to England “I’m told I had a great time”, and so on. It’s entirely possible that Lefcowitz’s interviews ended up revealing little that was not already available on the public record in the same words.
Rather less forgivable are the occasional factual errors – errors that access to Sandoval’s book would easily have cleared up. Lefcowitz claims, for example, that Tork had little involvement in Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn And Jones, Ltd, when Tork is on almost every track on that album. He also claims that Jones appeared in Coronation Street only after moving to London, when in fact Coronation Street is filmed in Manchester, where Jones grew up, and that Hal Blaine was a member of the Candy Store Prophets (he wasn’t).
The book also has a large number of typos and proofreading errors, possibly because it’s been published by a small press. Coronation Street is, for example, a ‘soap operation’. There are also some unusual stylistic quirks, like an overuse of hyphens, that a professional editor would probably have smoothed out.
Nonetheless, this is an engrossing book. Lefcowitz pulls everything together into a narrative, and one that does justice to the facts (rather than, as all too often, claiming the Monkees’ commercial failures began as soon as Don Kirshner stopped being involved). He is clearly passionate about the band and the music, and while this can be a double-edged sword (he dismisses outright everything the band did post-Pisces, with the exception of the Head soundtrack, and regards some of Nesmith’s best work as attempts at sabotage), his very personal viewpoint allows him to tell this as a story, rather than a recitation of dry facts.
This does, however, mean Lefcowitz plays favourites. The story that clearly comes through in most tellings of the Monkees’ career is a battle for dominance between Nesmith the artist and Jones the star. Here, though, Nesmith’s manipulation of the band (which at times can appear to have been near-psychopathic, though he appears to have mellowed enormously in the ensuing decades and may now be the most well-adjusted band member) is excused at every turn, as Lefcowitz appears to have a huge respect for him. Jones, on the other hand, is pilloried as a talentless, deluded narcissist, quisling and shortarse. It’s not surprising that Nesmith is the only band member who is thanked in the acknowledgements.
In this battle of the egos, the (comparatively) more modest Dolenz and Tork don’t get a great deal of discussion, though Lefcowitz’s admiration for Dolenz’s vocals is apparent. In particular, the Tork/Nesmith feud seems barely dealt with. It’s always seemed odd that the two band members who most wanted the band to be actual musicians fell out so completely, and Lefcowitz never explains this, just stating in passing three-quarters of the way through that the two loathed each other.
Tork seems, in fact, to be a fascinating character, and it’s a shame that he’s the only band member not to have had any kind of biography out, as he’s intelligent, articulate and musicianly.
It might seem that I’m being unduly harsh on Lefcowitz, but overall I was very impressed with the book. Yes, it has faults, and it’s not quite a definitive biography, but compared to some of the utter drivel that has been published about some of the band’s contemporaries, it’s a minor miracle that the one Monkees biography is this readable.
It won’t tell the die-hard fans much that they don’t already know, and I’d advise anyone reading it to have a copy of Sandoval on hand to double-check the facts against, but for anyone who wants to read the Monkees’ story, we can be glad that the one place to do it is as decent as this is.
Nobody Is Stealing Your Book!
I’ve been unwell since finishing work yesterday, so I’ve not got anything prepared for the blog today (I still haven’t replied to most of the emails I’ve had since Tuesday for that matter). Since I’m going to be away at Thought Bubble over the weekend, I’ll just post this, about two related but opposite things I see self-publishers doing over and over again.
The first, and most bemusing, is going to ridiculous efforts to lose money. $3 to $5 is a reasonable price for a full-length ebook, most readers are agreed. Certainly Amazon are trying to encourage that price – $3-$10 is the price range they want, and you get the highest royalties at that price.
But a few people noticed that they could sell more books at 99 cents, and that by doing so they’d sell enough more that they could make the difference up. And that worked for a few people. But now everyone’s doing that, except those like myself who’ve realised it no longer works. I can sell a hundred copies of a book at $5 and make $350, or two hundred copies at 99 cents, and make $70. The maths isn’t hard.
So now people have noticed that selling their books for 99 cents doesn’t work, they’re trying to force Amazon to give them away. Amazon have a minimum price of 99 cents, but Smashwords (who distribute to Barnes & Noble, iBooks and so on) don’t, so people will put their books on both, set the price on Smashwords to free, then report a lower price on Amazon, who have a price-match policy.
The idea is supposed to be that you can gain additional publicity from this, and thus stand out from the crowd and sell copies of all your other books. That’s standing out from the crowd of other people doing this, and selling copies of all your other books to people who think even 99 cents is too much to pay for a novel. There may be a flaw in this argument. And those of us who know the phrase ‘tragedy of the commons’ can expect people to be paying readers to get their books within a year, for ‘exposure’.
Weirdly, some of these people are also the prime advocates for DRM. Now, I’ve already explained why Digital Restrictions Management is a horrendously bad idea. Without even getting into its immorality, or the impossibility of what it’s attempting (seriously, every DRM scheme by its nature amounts to giving someone a locked padlock, a key, and a note saying ‘do not put key in padlock on pain of prosecution’), DRM makes it more difficult for readers to pay for your work than to ‘pirate’ it.
It is impossible to compete with ‘free’ on price, so we have to compete on ease of use.
But a lot of self-publishers are absolutely terrified, beyond all reason, of ‘piracy’, of plagiarism, and of some filmmaker stealing their idea and making a billion dollars without giving them any.
Now, there is, of course, no evidence that ‘piracy’ has any negative effect on sales at all, and some anecdotal evidence that it increases sales. For example, I heard good things about the SF writer Greg Egan, so I torrented one of his books, Permutation City to try it (I would have borrowed from the library, but I have a habit of losing library books and getting massive fines). That was in April. As a result of that, I’ve bought Egan’s books Permutation City, Quarantine, Schild’s Ladder, Axiomatic, Oceanic and Luminous in paperback and Incandescence, Zendegi and The Clockwork Robot as ebooks. (I since discovered that Mr Egan has a lot of free stories available on his website. I would have tried those instead rather than torrenting had I known about them).
But assume I’m wrong. Assume ‘piracy’ matters. Assume every copy on a torrent site is a lost sale, pure and simple. Are your books going to be ‘pirated’?
I had a quick look at the top twelve Kindle bestsellers (as of 11:33 PM on the 17th November) on Amazon’s US site (where the vast majority of sales come from). I searched for each on two top torrent sites. I won’t link those sites here, but one ends in ‘bay’ while the other ends in ‘noid’.
The Journey Home by Michael Baron
Search terms – Baron The Journey Home
Results on site 1 – nothing
Results on site 2 – 28 hits, including Star Wars comics, DangerMouse cartoons and a documentary series by Jonathan Miller on atheism. The book doesn’t show up.
Rescue Me (a quirky romance novel about secrets, forgiveness and falling in love) by Sydney Allan
Search terms – Allan rescue me
Results on site 1 – nothing
Results on site 2 – 16 results, including a 1917 Douglas Fairbank silent film, a collection of albums by jazz-fusion musician Allan Holdsworth and a collection of 882 NES games. The book doesn’t show up.
Best Friends by Consuelo Saah Baehr
Search terms – Best Friends Baehr
Results on site 1 – No results
Results on site 2 – One result, the jazz album Moment To Moment by Roy Hargrove
Last Breath by Michael Prescott
Search terms – Last Breath Prescott
Results on site 1 – No results
Results on site 2 – One result, a collection of books by someone called Lisa Marie Price
Ghost in the Polka Dot Bikini (A Ghost of Granny Apples Mystery) by Sue Ann Jaffarian
Search terms – Jaffarian Polka
Results on site 1 – No results
Results on site 2 – A hit! A palpable hit! – one result, a torrent containing this book and the other book in this series.
Double Exposure by Michael Lister
Search terms – Lister Double Exposure
Results from site one – nothing
Results from site two – nothing
The Wounded Heart: Hope for Adult Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse by Dan B. Allender Ph.D. and Dan B Allender
Search terms – Allender Wounded
Results from site one – nothing
Results from site two – nothing
The Mill River Recluse by Darcie Chan
Search terms – Mill River Darcie
Results from site one – nothing
Results from site two – Another hit – several copies of the same torrent, containing this and other bestsellers.
Come Back To Me by Melissa Foster
Search terms – Foster Come Back
Results from site one – nothing
Results from site two – one hit, a solo album by the former lead singer of Hootie And The Blowfish
Flat-Out Love by Jessica Park
Search terms – Flat-out Park
Results from site one – nothing
Results from site two – Another hit, a torrent of this book.
How to Be a Writer: Building Your Creative Skills Through Practice and Play by Barbara Baig
Search terms – Baig writer
Results from site one – nothing
Results from site two – nothing
WIRED by Douglas E. Richards
Search terms – Wired Richards
Results from site one – nothing
Results from site two – another hit – actially in the same torrent as Mill River Recluse
Just for fun, I also searched for myself, to see if any of my books showed up. On site one, nothing showed up, and on site two I saw the DVDs of the three Transformers films, and a copy of The Name Of The Rose in Italian.
So, of the twelve biggest selling books on Kindle, each of which must be selling hundreds of thousands of copies, only four of them are even available at all – so if you make it to the very, very top of the best-seller list, you still only have a one in three chance of having anyone bother to torrent your work.
There are currently 887,909 books in the Kindle store. If the books at the top aren’t being torrented, what do you think – really – that the chance is of your book, when it enters at 887,910, being pounced on?
As far as I can tell, the most sensible strategy is the one I follow:
Make at least some of your work available for free, like I do through this blog, so anyone who wants a taster can have it.
Make it as convenient as possible to buy your books in whatever format people want. Have them available as paperback, ePub, Kindle, PDF… as smoke signals if someone wants that.
Don’t give anyone a reason *not* to buy. DRM is a reason not to buy.
Sell for a reasonable price. Ideally you want to sell for a price where every sale will net you a noticeable amount of money, but not enough to put anyone off. I go for $5 for electronic copies (except short stories, which are 99 cents). The paper copies have to be more expensive because they cost much more to produce, but I get the same money (or less) from them.
Put the book out and tell people about it. And by ‘tell people’ I mean ‘tell people who are interested in your writing and/or the subject matter’, not ‘spam forums whose only readers are other self-publishers and then complain that you’ve got no sales’.
Then write the next one, and don’t worry about who’s doing what with the last one. If it’s good, people will pay for it if you charge fairly. If it’s not, people won’t even take it if you give it away.
Caveat – I’m not a full-time writer, so I’m obviously not *that* successful. But I *am* doing well enough that my income from writing makes up a significant percentage of my income.
I’d be interested, therefore, if anyone had any better strategies, or any refinements on the above.
Pissing In The Pool (Or Why Readers Hate Indie Writers)
I recently took a minor part in a discussion on Amazon’s Kindle forums. This started because some of the people on there were looking for a way to filter out self-published authors (like me) and only see ‘proper’ authors. This would obviously not be something I’d be keen on.
But the thread I was drawn into was started by someone – another indie writer – complaining about this. And these were some of his complaints:
I’ve also read thousands of pieces of literature, mainly trad. published, and I’ve seen all types of mistakes in the writing — spelling errors, bad sentences, bad grammer, plots that didn’t add up . . . all and all, for me personally, I’m not a nazi, it’s no big deal, it’s just a story . . . when you see a play or a concert or some type of live show and the performer is a little out of key or makes a mistake, is it that big of a deal? So why are people so hard on indie writers?
This is an attitude I see all the time. There are two parallel lines of thought among self-published authors, both of which are pernicious but which when combined come close to being actively evil.
The first is “Those evil traditional publishers are just trying to keep us indie authors down, with their pesky rules about ‘writing good English’ and ‘not plagiarising’ and ‘bothering to be vaguely coherent’. Real talent like mine doesn’t need those things.”
That is then coupled with an attitude that can be found on the Kindle author boards, which says that anyone giving a self-published author a bad review is ‘jealous’ – or in extreme cases that bad reviews are obviously the work of the evil publishers, trying to knock the competition, and that the last thing you should do is pay attention to those nit-pickers who point out problems with your work.
Let me put this as simply as I can:
If you are charging for your work, you have an obligation to be professional.
This is particularly true in the case of publishing. When you put your book up for sale on Amazon, you’re in direct competition with every other work of literature ever published, near enough. That means *you have to be that good*.
You don’t have to have written the single best book ever written, of course. But there has to be at least one person in the world, who doesn’t know you, for whom your book is the single best way they could spend their money and reading time.
Can you make a convincing case that there is *someone* out there who will get more out of reading your book than out of reading Hamlet, or Ulysses, or the Feynman Lectures In Physics, or Huckleberry Finn, or Catch-22, or Orwell’s collected essays, or Thank You Jeeves, or any of a million other books? Is there someone out there who, if presented with all those books, you could tell with a straight face “you’ll like mine more”?
There don’t have to be many of them. The numbers could be in single figures. But if those people don’t exist, then *YOU HAVE NO BUSINESS PUTTING YOUR WORK OUT FOR SALE*. You are, fundamentally, trying to perpetrate a fraud on your readers. You are telling them “this is the book you should read next” when you know full well that they shouldn’t read it at all.
I don’t make any great claims for my own work’s quality, but it does meet that standard. I know it does, because people I don’t know, with no reason to care either way, have said to me “I enjoyed your stories, I hope you write some more” or “I liked the Beach Boys book, when’s volume two coming out?” or “I bought the Beach Boys book and liked it, you should all buy the Monkees book” or “I loved that essay, if you collect it in a book, I’ll buy it”. I wouldn’t be ashamed of telling any of those people to buy any of my other books in the same categories.
But the reason for this is that I *make the effort*. I get several people, with different levels of knowledge and different skill-sets, to read what I’ve written and check that it makes sense. I spend many hours proof-reading. I get good covers. I do my utmost to ensure that not a single error of fact or of language slips through. Errors nonetheless occur, of course – I am human, after all – but not one person has ever emailed me with a problem, even though I include an email address for errata in the books.
That’s not me boasting. That’s the *minimum* standard which you should be reaching before you put a book out for sale.
If you put out a book that is not the absolute best work you can do at the time, you are causing harm in three ways:
You’re harming the people buying your book under false pretences. Doing this to them is a species of fraud.
You’re harming yourself. Your reputation will suffer, as will your chances of ever having a career in writing (which presumably you would want).
And you are harming those authors like me, or my uncle, or Simon Bucher-Jones or Andrew Rilstone or Lawrence Burton or Chris Browning or hundreds of others who actually *do* put the basic effort in to make our work competent. Every time someone buys something like this or this, they are going to be that much more likely to want to avoid any further self-published authors for fear it’ll be the same.
And that goes double if you get involved in ‘review swaps’, artificially inflating the review scores of terrible books. And triple if you spam readers’ forums about your books. And quadruple if, on those readers’ forums, you start talking about how “we self-publishers aren’t bound by your Nazi rules of grammar, it’s all about free expression.”
Every time you do this, you’re not only sabotaging yourself, but you’re hurting everyone else, too.
There are a lot of very, very good self-published authors out there, with good reasons for publishing their own work rather than going through publication houses. But as long as we tolerate – and even encourage – incompetence, illiteracy and unprofessionalism in the name of solidarity, or sticking it to ‘the man’, or even just being kind to someone who means well and tries hard, sensible readers are going to lump everyone in together and avoid all of us.
If you read self-published books, please leave honest and accurate reviews, both good and bad, on the books you’ve read, so people know what they’re getting. The good reviews help books with no marketing budget, and the bad reviews help sink the rubbish more quickly.
If you *write* self-published books, please take the same care you’d take in your day job (or greater), and treat readers as potential customers rather than antagonists.
If you hang around on self-publishing forums, please don’t encourage obvious incompetence and laziness. Please do provide constructive – but thorough – criticism for those who need it.
If we all do this, then with a little luck the people writing drivel will realise that Amazon isn’t an infinite money-tree, and readers can get back to reading books they want to read, and writers to writing them, without having to worry about who’s self-published and who isn’t.
Kindle Sale
I’m off work ill at the moment, and while I’m feeling a little better today, I’m not well enough for a full post. I’m also away on Thursday night, so don’t expect much until Friday (when I’ll be reviewing the Beach Boys gig I’m going to on Thursday).
However, I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get the Seven Soldiers book out by Saturday, when I’m starting the blog tour, and so to accompany it I’m starting a sale – my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!, which covers some of the same themes, will be available for only 99 cents on Kindle until the end of the month, after which it’ll be returning to its $5 price. The price in other formats will remain the same. It can be bought here (UK) and here (US). The price change may not have taken effect yet, but will do soon.
(Apologies to those who bought this full price, but I’m still feeling my way with this self-publishing thing, and trying different things out. I do think the book is worth at least $5 though…)
Hugo Blogging 2: Grandville, Feed, Blackout, Cryoburn
Continuing my reviews of this year’s Hugo entries. Remember, if you want to get a ton of SF ebooks for $50 and vote in the Hugos yourself, you can get the Hugo packet here.
One point here – the four books I’m reviewing here are a sequel, part one of a two-volume story set in a world where that author has apparently set several previous books, part one of a trilogy, and part of a ‘saga’. The Best Novel candidate I’ve not yet read is also part one of a trilogy. Since when did SF writers become physically incapable of writing individual, stand-alone books?
Grandville Mon Amour by Bryan Talbot
Nominated for Best Graphic Story, while this is far from the best comic released during its year of eligibility, it’s still a Bryan Talbot comic, and therefore deserves to win.
The sequel to Grandville, this has the same strengths and weaknesses as the previous book. The art is still gorgeous (though reading it as a PDF on the computer means you can’t see his masterful layout work in full) and it’s still as fun to play spot-the-reference as with the early League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen issues (I especially like the cameo by the misogynist aardvaark). But like the earlier work, the plot is a bit lightweight – and while the first one was roughly based around the conspiracy theories around the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, this one is *very* roughly based around Jack The Ripper conspiracy theories. This means it invites comparisons with From Hell, which are unfair, as this is a deliberately light, pulpy comic.
It’s no Luther Arkwright or Alice In Sunderland, but even when he’s just having fun Talbot is always worth reading.
Blackout by Connie Willis
This was really, really, really annoying. Five hundred and eleven pages long, this is all set-up with no resolution at all, because the resolution is in another book (I didn’t realise this til I was up to page 507 and the major plot point hadn’t happened yet). It would be an exaggeration to say that nothing at all happened in the book, but certainly the actual *events* in it could be compressed into a short story. Well, half a short story. The Wikipedia page for the book has a nine-line plot summary – and a nine *paragraph* summary of the sequel.
Willis writes well, but fundamentally this is like if someone had taken just the World War II parts of Cryptonomicon (say), removed all the discussion of ideas so you were just left with the painfully accurate research about the war years, and put that out as a book. Except have all the fiddly little details right about the war but totally wrong about the country in which it’s set. Yes, it’s part one of a two-part novel, but it’s still not structured *at all* as a single volume – it just stops, and after 511 pages giving the reader no reward whatsoever seems more than a little unfair.
Over and over again Willis assumes that the UK is really just exactly the same as the USA except for us all drinking tea and loving the Royal Family. It’s a minor point, but the biggest problem I had with the book was that everyone speaks in USian dialect – they say “I’ve got to go get that” rather than “I’ve got to go *and* get that”, and “January thirteenth” instead of “January *the* thirteenth”. If you’re going to go to the trouble, as Willis obviously has, of researching dates of bombings and the names of shops on Oxford Street in the 40s, you could at least bother to listen to an English person speak. Maybe even get one to read the book before you put it out. Judging from these posts, the ePub has actually been revised and the most egregious errors fixed compared to the original paper publication. Christ alone knows how bad this was before that. Utter, utter, unmitigated crap.
The Dervish House by Ian McDonald
The ePub file for this crashes my e-reader, so I’m just mentioning it so people know I’m not ignoring it.
Feed by Mira Grant
While I’ve had more than enough of zombies at the moment, seeing on the title page that Grant also writes as Seanan McGuire gave me hope, even despite this being ‘part one of the Newsflesh trilogy’ – McGuire’s piece had been the one piece I’d really enjoyed in Chicks Dig Time Lords, so I expected this to be at least decent.
And while hardly great, it was a pleasant, enjoyable read. The worldbuilding is deftly done – set a few decades after a zombie outbreak, the anti-zombie precautions are very much in the same mould as our current ‘anti-terror’ laws – though I’d question the idea that blogging will still be regarded as ‘new media’ at that time, rather than hopelessly antiquated. All the characters were well sketched, the plot, while predictable, does have one twist that I at least didn’t see coming (though I really should have) and the prose style is very easy to read.
In fact, this reads like what we are now euphemistically supposed to call ‘Young Adult’ books (they’re not for young adults. I’m a young adult – I’m 32 – and they’re not aimed at me. Call them what they are, children’s books – or use the old term Heinlein used, ‘juveniles’). This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – it makes the book very, very readable. But the end result is something lightweight and lacking substance.
That sounds a harsher judgement than I mean it to. I enjoyed this (and despite it being part one of a trilogy, it had a proper structure and ending. It can be done, Willis) and while I’m not going to eagerly seek out parts two and three of the trilogy, nor am I going to avoid them. Definitely the most enjoyable of the ‘best novel’ candidates I’ve read so far.
Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold started with so many strikes against it that I almost didn’t even get through the first chapter. It’s part of a ‘saga’ (I don’t do sagas, and I’m certainly not normally going to start reading something that’s part nineteen or whatever of a story). The characters have odd names in what appear to be multiple different orthographies, causing extra cognitive load to keep track of them. It’s set on a planet where people address each other with -san or -sensei endings but in all other ways behave like Westerners, and its main characters are important in some sort of Galactic Empire (unless you’re Asimov, I want my viewpoint characters to be fighting against hereditary dictators, not helping keep them in positions of power) and have hereditary titles themselves. Were I not trying to read everything so I can vote honestly in the Hugos, I wouldn’t have read this if you’d paid me.
However, *despite* all those things I ended up quite enjoying this. It seems to be riffing off Clifford Simak’s Why Call Them Back From Heaven? and its main effect was to make me want to reread that book, but I found myself almost unwillingly drawn into the story. Admittedly, the plot runs on rails so obvious that I predicted one twist ( “Gung’f abg zl zbzzl!” (ROT13 to avoid spoilers)) two chapters in advance down to the precise wording, but it’s still a *decent* plot, and it’s well-written. I won’t be seeking out any more of Bujold’s work based on this, but am pleasantly surprised by how decent it seemed given that it’s very, *very* much Not My Sort Of Thing.
Faction Paradox: A Romance In Twelve Parts
The Faction Paradox series of books has been one of the most consistently good and interesting series I’ve ever read – certainly the best multi-author series, but it’s had a relatively troubled history. Starting out with a series of novels published by Mad Norwegian (a small press in Iowa, devoted mostly to ‘cult TV’, but with a surprisingly high hit-rate of decent books), when Mad Norwegian stopped publishing new entries in the series, a small SF publisher in New Zealand, Random Static, took over.
However, Random Static have only published one novel in the series, the excellent Newtons Sleep. and their FAQ says “When’s the next book coming out? We can’t say yet, but expect an announcement early in 2009.”, so we’ve been waiting a while for anything new.
Luckily, another small press, Obverse Books, which specialises in short stories rather than novels, has stepped up, and the result is this, my favourite book so far this year.
For those who are unfamiliar with Faction Paradox, the series is originally the creation of Lawrence Miles (who, with Stuart Douglas, co-edits this volume) , although it’s had much input from other writers. The books don’t share a setting, characters or background, but all take place in the same shared universe, which provides a certain consistency of tone.
This universe is dominated by the Great Houses, a race of near-gods who can travel through space and time in their Timeships, but who prefer to simply exist on their Homeworld. In a very real sense, they *are* the universe – they embody its physical laws and history, and the universe mostly exists just because they have chosen to observe it in this form.
However recently the Great Houses have gone to war… to War, in fact, against an Enemy as powerful as them. Nothing is known about the Enemy, except what can be found by reading between the lines, except that they are the Enemy, and that for them to win might well mean not only the Great Houses ceasing to exist, but it might completely rewrite the whole universe – not even just its history, but its fundamental logic. The War covers all of space, all of time, and quite possibly those regions beyond either.
The War is in a kind of stalemate, but it has led to the involvement of several minor powers, including the Celestis (a race of malevolent conceptual entities), the various posthuman races, and Faction Paradox, a time-travelling voodoo cult who delight in playing both sides off against each other.
Faction Paradox: A Romance In Twelve Parts is a collection of twelve stories set in this universe. While the twelve stories are very different, they share a few themes. Primarily, they’re about story and its power – fans of Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman might well enjoy this book (despite its co-editor’s well-known antipathy towards Gaiman’s work) – but here story is seen as a far darker, more malevolent force than their comparatively safe work.
Many of the stories also seem Lovecraftian – not by using words like Cthulhu or shoggoth and hoping people get the reference and feel geeky, but by evoking the same feeling he did at his best, of existing in a world fought over by blind, impassive forces that can crush you without even noticing. In fact, some of the stories remind me even more of Lord Dunsany, the great 19th century fantasist who inspired Lovecraft, than of Lovecraft himself. Certainly most of the writers here have a prose style far removed from Lovecraft’s ponderous overwriting.
The stories here are a mixed bag, of course, as in any multi-author collection, and many of the best stories have only a tangential relationship to the Faction Paradox back story – several of them could have been published with only minor changes in a non-FP collection – but they actually feel, to me, more evocative of the Faction Paradox spirit than the ones that concentrate more directly on the Faction and its doings.
Storyteller by Matt Kimpton is one of those. A pseudo-Viking saga about what happens when a storyteller goes looking for stories to be part of, this is one of those “I wish I’d thought of that” stories that feels like an old folk tale. Gramps by Jonathan Dennis can similarly be read with no previous Faction knowledge, though this creepy little short-short about a cat called Gramps with a missing leg is *definitely* a Faction Paradox story.
I won’t deal with every story in the book, but what I will say is that those I enjoyed less are just those I enjoyed less, rather than bad stories – the quality level is remarkably consistent. In fact, the stories I enjoyed least tend to be the ones that were the kind of thing I was expecting when I bought the book – the good ones were just *better* than that.
That said, I don’t have as much to say about every story, so I’ll just look at a handful to give a flavour of the book. Mightier Than The Sword by Jay Eales, about the prison where they put the writers and a very familiar-seeming comic artist, Now Or Thereabouts by Blair Bidmead, which starts as a satire of The Apprentice before turning somewhat stranger, and Print The Legend by Daniel O’Mahony, which manages to have Charles Dickens and John Ga(u)lt team up with a shoggoth without, astonishingly, turning into AWESOME!, are all standouts.
But best by far is the closer, A Hundred Words From A Civil War, the long-awaited sequel to Of The City Of The Saved by Philip Purser-Hallard.
A Hundred Words… is a ‘drabbleplex’ – a hundred separate one-hundred-word stories that work together to tell a much bigger story. In Of The City… Purser-Hallard established an incredible setting, a city between this universe and the next where all the dead humans live forever. Here death has come to that city, and so has civil war – though not The War; this only involves the death of four trillion people, and is nothing like as all-pervasive, though it’s clearly a small part of the overall War.
A couple of examples (I hope PPH doesn’t mind me sharing these bits – if he does I will of course take them down):
Remakes make lousy soldiers.
I tell you, you build a person based round a character from some media fiction, they’re gonna have some pretty odd ideas about reality.
They’re terrible strategists. They make big, symbolic gestures, then act surprised when that doesn’t win the war outright. They abandon vital operations just to rescue one person. Usually a kid.
Yeah, sometimes it’s a dog.
They sacrifice themselves heroically over and over, knowing someone’s gonna Remake them every goddam time.
Did you know the rebels run an entire POW camp just for John Rambos? There’s something like 500 of him there now.
When the most sophisticated of the posthuman civilisations are co-opted into the Civil War, it becomes a rarefied affair. Five Districts are carrying out hostilities entirely through the medium of music, exchanging shifting tonalities and rhythms which delightfully reprogram the senses with revised systems of aesthetics.
Representatives of two more rival cultures are vying in Flautencil’s Plaza, their societies’ respective destinies invested in a single combat which appears to the ordinary human spectator (of whom there are thousands assembled) to consist of sniffing orchids and exchanging significant glances.
The apparent flirtation is in its seventh month, and approaching no resolution.
Purser-Hallard’s story also contains short stories featuring many characters from other stories in the book, giving many of the stories a final extra twist. But even without that, this pushes so many of my buttons it might as well be called “ten thousand words to excite Andrew Hickey” – a piece of eschatological science fiction which references the ideas of Nick Bostrom and has Philip K Dick talking about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, along with the final deaths of all the dying-and-resurrected gods? That’s my kind of thing, as regular readers will no doubt realise.
And the ending of Purser-Hallard’s story, and of the book, is absolutely chilling and puts the whole book in another light. I won’t spoil it for you, but… just read it, OK?
Faction Paradox, A Romance In Twelve Parts, is available in hardback for £11.99 from Obverse Books.
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