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Adventures in e-publishing Part Seven - have your say!

I’ve been canvassing the views of authors and publishers involved in e-publishing. But I thought it was about time I heard from the people who really matter, the readers. So I’ve put together a short(ish) questionnaire. It’s really designed for people who have an e-reader of some kind, but I would also be interested in hearing from people who don’t have a kindle (or equivalent). The question for you, I suppose, is are you intending to get one, or will you never succumb?

So here are the questions. Please leave your answers in a comment. Feel free to answer as many or few of the questions as you like. Or if you prefer, just leave a general comment about your views on ebooks. I just want to hear from readers (this includes writers who are also readers, of course!). Thank you!

What type of ereader do you own? Eg Kindle, Kobo, Sony, iPad, Android… (Are there any others?)
Do you buy more books overall now that you have an e-reader? Or fewer?
What was the last ebook you bought and when was that?
When was the last time you went in a bricks and mortar bookshop?
How many ebooks do you buy per month? 0-1; 2-4; 5-10; blimey -how many books can you read in a month!? Or “don’t know”.
Have you stopped buying print books entirely since owning an ereader?
If no, what is the ratio of ebooks to print books? Mostly ebooks. Mostly print books. About half and half. Don’t know.

Why does it hurt more, the closer you get?

f you've been collecting standard rejections (wonkily photocopied, unsigned, spelling your name wrong) for your novel it's easy to believe that any squeak of interest would have you celebrating. And the maths and psychology of submissions (very well described here by Sarah Davies and Julia Churchill of the Greenhouse Agency) mean that you know you should celebrate - you DO celebrate - being asked for the whole manuscript. And you celebrate more if you get a long email about the novel, or are taken on by an agent, or hear a publisher is interested... Each step, if you've got any sense (and your fellow-aspirers will remind you of it even if you're weeping and kicking the cat), says more about just how good and saleable your novel is.

And yet anyone who's been through all that, only to hear that yet another acquisitions meeting has turned down their novel, will tell you that the closer you get, the more it hurts.

The art of apple eating to illustrate the passage of time

In the beginning, all action was fast paced. If you could have been in the Garden of Eden, before that unfortunate incident with the apple, you would surely have seen Adam zipping about like a child overdosed on Sunny Delight, hurtling from one screwball caper to the next...

Boredom in the Stalls : Murder on the Nile at Richmond Theatre

I saw this Agatha Christie play in a beautiful theatre, tucked away near Richmond Green, and a complete contrast to the modern theatre-in-the-round called The Orange Tree, nearer the station.

It was good to spot Carolin Kopplin at the end of the performance. She's a fellow fringe theatre critic whom I met only last week to chat with on press night for 'Sense and Sensibility' at The Rosemary Branch.

She confirmed that despite the efforts of cast and creative team the play itself was a let-down. As she stated in her own review for the UK Theatre Network, she'd spotted one or two elderly patrons nodding off during the first half.

Adventures in e-publishing Part Three

Dr Ian Hocking is the author of two techno-thrillers, D� jà Vu and Flashback, as well as a rites of passage comedy, Proper Job, and a short story collection, A Moment in Berlin. All of them self-published though amazon. In fact, his self-publishing exploits – and more particularly his sales success – have brought him to the attention of Nicholas Clee writing in The New Statesman.

Just to get this out of the way, any relation to Amanda Hocking?

Yes, we’ve been happily married for years. No – wait! We’re completely unconnected.

So congratulations on those sales, Ian. The last time I looked, D� jà Vu was number 6 in the amazon.co.uk technothriller ranking – for all book formats, not just kindle. That’s quite an achievement. To what do you owe your success?

Like most authors, I only have clues but no definitive answer. D� jà Vu itself was first published in 2005 by the UKA Press. There, it was edited by the talented Aliya Whitely. The UKA Press angle didn’t work for a variety of reasons. Meantime, I kept working on the book. I genuinely thought it was good – or, at least, that it was the kind of book I wanted to read. The next step was a near-miss from a larger publisher. I picked up literary representation on the back of this. Along the way, I recorded D� jà Vu as a podcast, and kept reworking the material. Eventually, when my agent couldn’t place the book, I gave up writing. There’s a post on my blog about it. I redrafted D� jà Vu again in line with a short report from Scott Pack, hired Clare Christian to give it a proper edit, and put it out for the Kindle. What I’m saying, in a roundabout way, is that I never tired of returning to the story of D� jà Vu and polishing it. Those years in the wilderness paid off in terms of the quality of the book. I don’t know how it compares to other publications out there, but it has certainly received more attention than most, both from the writer and its editors.

Adventures in e-publishing Part Two

Lee Jackson is the author of a number of fine historical mysteries, including London Dust, A Metropolitan Murder and The Mesmerist’s Apprentice. His most recent novel is The Diary of a Murder, which is published by Snowbooks, though it first appeared as a self-published e-book. Alongside his fictional crime-writing activities, Lee is a well-known and respected authority on the Victorian age, in particular Victorian London. He is the founder and curator of the Victorian London website www.victorianlondon.org, an invaluable resource for anyone interested in researching the period. Recently, he has set up a publishing arm to Victorian London, Victorian London Ebooks, re-issuing electronic editions of rare Victorian (and Edwardian) texts. I recently read one of his publications, Journal of a Disappointed Man, and can honestly say it is one of the most extraordinary and moving books I’ve ever read.

What first made you decide to become an e-publishing magnate?

Magnate? The canny reader may surmise that Roger is flattering me here; but he will still not receive a discount on his next purchase. I should also point out that, at the moment, I’m just publishing via Amazon – not via Kobo, Sony, Apple or elsewhere.

I’ve always been fascinated by the possibilities of publishing historical material on the web. I’ve been using the internet since 1993 (when it still looked like this) and I’ve been digitising material for my own site for the last ten years. That, of course, was gratis – but the rise of Amazon, Kindle and Twitter seemed to offer a new model for self-publishing.

Also, I really needed the money.

Adventures in e-publishing Part One

More and more writers are doing it. Putting their work directly out there, without the intervention of the middleman. Self-publishing through kindle.

I imagine that most of the writers who choose this route are ones who have been unsuccessful in getting a conventional publisher to take them on. They’ve grown tired of waiting for the Man from Del Monte to say “Yes!” (seventies advertising reference) and have decided to take matters into their own hands. A few have found phenomenal success this way. Many more, I suspect, have not.

But good luck to them all, I say.

But it’s not just those who haven’t broken through the normal way who are deciding to self-publish. Many writers who have been published are either self-publishing additional books alongside their “legacy-published” work, or ditching the conventional model entirely and turning themselves into their own publisher.

Michael Gregorio is a successful crime-writer (actually a husband and wife crime-writing duo, Michael Jacob and Dani de Gregorio, he English, she Italian), the author of a wonderful series of historical crime novels featuring Hanno Stiffeniis, a magistrate in Napoleonic-era Prussia.

Lit crit of the week, #3

"I didn't fall asleep - I just started to think about death."

Borgen thoughts.

Perhaps I shouldn�t admit this, being a crime writer. But I think I am actually enjoying Borgen even more than The Killing. And I loved The Killing. (Just to be clear, it�s the Danish The Killing I�m talking about here, not the American; I didn�t watch that, so I can�t comment.)

The real heresy for me, as a crime writer, is that what I admire about Borgen is that it doesn�t rely on an ever-increasing body count to keep the viewer�s interest. In fact, so far, there have been no murders in it all. Just one death by natural causes.

Now such an admission may end up getting me thrown out of the CWA. And it�s not to say that I don�t still enjoy a good, twisty, grisly serial killer thriller. But it is interesting to see how the writers have managed to maintain the drama and tension without recourse to gore. The political shenanigans are of course fascinating. But more than anything it�s the fantastically well-written and superbly performed characters that keep us hooked.

Work in regress?

When I asked Twitter last night what I should blog about, one suggestion was "How do you know when to give up on a work-in-progress? Or when to stop and come back? Or when to re-conceptualise the project?". It was a good question, so thank you Damon Young, although I'm absolutely sure there isn't a clear-cut answer, because it's always going to depend on you and the night and the music.... Sorry, you and the write(ing) and the novel. So, I think the best I can do is suggest some things to ask yourself and the novel, in the hope that things get a bit clearer.

Sequels - the temptation to 'Tell'

After a well earned break of sorts, one that saw me restless and writing both a short story, and trying to tackle something of a plan for the rest of the Delve series, I�ve started to get down words for the second book in the series, aptly named Evolve. I always think of a tag line for each of my novels, something to capture the essence of the book, and to keep me on the straight and narrow as I write it. This one is simple � Rowan�s powers begin to evolve, but she soon learns that she can�t save everyone, not even those close to her heart.

Having said that, it�s my first time tackling a sequel and whilst I have a rough outline in mind which no doubt will develop along the way, I�m pondering over the whole area of sequels and the temptation to �tell� i.e. to reveal backstory from Delve so that anyone picking up the second book without reading the first will have some idea of how Rowan, my main character, and the rest of the crew got to the point that they�re now at

SW - The Birds and the Bees

So it recently hit me that my novel will be published on (don�t snigger) April 1st and that the file labelled Marketing, which has hitherto sat on a shelf above my desk in a floaty, non-threatening, futuristic kind of way, has begun to jump up and down and beckon me � or whatever a marketing file without hands or feet does to signal Urgency.

New (Gentle) readers start here.

It’s possible that every now and then someone stumbles on this blog entirely by accident. Looking for something else – I can’t begin to guess what – you find this. Me. I can only apologise.

In all likelihood, you will speed-click back to google. Get the hell out of there! It’s some writer’s blog! If that’s the case, you won’t be reading this now. So if you are reading this, the chances are you decided to spend a moment or two exploring. Trying to find out who the hell this R.N. Morris guy is.

So maybe, every now and then, I should take a little time to say a bit about myself and what I’m doing here. On the internet. With a website and blog. And everything.

So yes. I’m a writer. Of fiction. Crime. Mostly. Murder stories. Set in the past. In Russia. Sorry, I tend to come over all inarticulate when I try to talk about myself and my writing. Awkward. Especially when every writer these days has to be his or her own publicist.

Blog on website.....

My blog is on my website. www.deborahfreeman.co.uk

Meeting the Challenge - 37k words in 9 days

Finally I can say that I've actually to stuck to one my New Year's resolution. On 2nd January, I set myself the challenge of finishing the first draft of 'The Curse' (working title). I'd already pushed my way through December to 40k words, but the challenge was to finish the rest of the manuscript in 9 days. At an average of 5,000 words per day, I saw it as a tough but achievable challenge. After all, I have a demanding full time job as well as a family. Of course, I could have used that as an excuse, but I didn't.

Putting on the Ritz? Try putting the Ritz on

In the days when I had au pairs, they would often ask me for help with their English homework. Most of them were doing pretty advanced work, so I'd have to deal with things like, "Emma, when do you say, try to light the fire, and when try lighting the fire?" As so often with the idioms of your mother tongue, I could usually only work it out by demonstration, and it was all good for the writerly brain. But the thing which they struggled with most is what are usually called phrasal verbs.

Phrasal verbs, according to [my slightly-edited version of] David Crystal in Rediscover Grammar, are

full verbs which consist of more than one word. The most common type consists of a verb followed by one or two particles. come in - sit down - drink up - get off - put up with - look forward to - look down on. A few multi-word verbs have a less predicable structure, and thus have to be taken as idioms: take pride in - break even - lie low - put paid to. What can be a particle? Some spatial adverbs such as aback - ahead - aside - away - back - home - in front. Some prepositions, such as against - at - for - from - into - like - of - onto - with. Some words which can act as either adverbs or prepositions, such as by - down - in - on - over.

All Indo-European languages, at least, work like this but English is particularly rich in them. On a family holiday in Greece my teenaged sisters and I spent a long, hot drive from Nafplion to Sparta working out that the verb which shape-changed most, depending on which particle it was teamed up with, was put. Put off alone can mean discourage, postpone, or remove, while put up can mean raise, accommodate or dare and put on can mean dress, fake or ignite. And then there's put over, put upon, put by, put through, and the relatively recent sexual meaning of put out, to go with disconcert, extinguish, display and eject.

Now the great joy of phrasal verbs for a writer is that even though the two (or three) parts belong together grammatically, they don't have to be kept together syntactically: there's huge flexibility available to you.

A novel is not the singular of data

Recently, I came upon a neat phrase to use on those people who refuse to hear the fact that there has been net emigration of central Europeans from Britain, because all the waiters in their local Pizza Express come from Warsaw: "Data is not the plural of anecdote." But it reminded me of how a writer friend wanted her ancient-Persian heroine to start up a cottage industry making dyestuffs in her kitchen. "But it wasn't done like that," said the friendly expert at the British Museum. "The evidence is that dye production was on an industrial scale, and they wouldn't have employed a woman anyway." My friend's plot was dying (not dyeing), about her: she couldn't possibly do something that was "wrong". No doubt the general picture of the expert was true, but it's hard to believe that at the domestic, individual level, no "industrial" things were done; just because the only remains after Armageddon will be the McVities factory, I suggested, doesn't mean that no one ever set up a small business making cakes in their kitchen. My friend's plot was restored to health.

And then few weeks ago, Jerusha Cowless suggested that to find the energy in a passive, put-upon heroine, without being anachronistic to a period when women weren't suppose to be act-ors, it would help to research the period more deeply.

New Year - Fresh Start

Well my Twelve Days of Christmas challenge floundered right around Christmas Eve. The bottles of plonk sitting under the stairs, and the obscene amount of food that we buy every year and then wonder why, lured me away from the laptop.

Still for a novel that I began in July of last year, and which had only reached 17,000 words by December, I found that the fact that I'd laid the gauntlet down to myself spurred me that much further on. I managed 15,307 words in total over 5 days which is almost as much as I'd done in 6 months!

SW - For the journey...

We writers need all the support we can get on what can be a lonely journey. No wonder we join writing communities and writing groups, sign up for writing classes and follow writer�s blogs. It helps to know that others like ourselves are out there, rooting for us, encouraging us, teaching us and supporting us. The tribe of writers is a vast one, spanning the globe and almost every age-group and circumstance.

So as we embark on this new year, I thought I�d write about the resources which have been most helpful on my own writer�s journey. Perhaps you�d like to add your own.

2012..Going Down?

An account of a lift attendant