This Writing Life

This is lovely news. The reviewer who gave me a 5-star rating on the Red Adept Review blog has nominated Déjà Vu as one of the best science fiction novels of 2011. It’s a great honour.

A heads-up from Ben Johncock tells me that no less than Nicholas Clee has been writing in the New Statesman about the transition from tangible to electronic books. (I’ve been struggling to find an official link to the piece; here’s an unofficial-looking one.)

It’s fair to say that Nicholas Clee is traditional in his perspective.

Ebooks are destroying this economic model. …Will 99P become the optimum price for an ebook? If so, who is going to make any money out of publishing or writing books for such a market?

I agree with the first point here. The ebook is a disruptive entity. But anybody who has been around since the early 1990s has seen, in the music industry, an example of electronic merchandise destroying an economic model based on the physical. Perhaps ‘destroyed’ is the wrong term to use in this context. The market is still there. But how much growth does the CD market have? How much in the hardback market?

The second point speaks to a fundamental issue of business. One should not ask ‘How are all the employees of the legacy publishing industry – from receptionists to the CEO – going to maintain their income?’ because this leads to the problem that afflicts all publishers: they decide as a group, implicitly or explicitly, to act as a cartel. Prices are kept high. This creates situations where the electronic version of a book costs the same as or more than the tangible. Try explaining this to a consumer. It’s hard. ‘We need these prices because of the way our business was set up’ makes for poor advertising copy.

Now for the part that mentions your humble correspondent:

As for the financial implications – on the Me and My Big Mouth blog, the novelist Ian Hocking … has confided his sales figures and revenues from self-publishing ebooks with Amazon. Two of them have sold more than 8,000 copies. This is a figure that many conventionally published novelists would envy. But Hocking’s profit to date is only just over £300 (his revenue is just over £2,000).

Had Hocking chosen a conventional publisher, he might well have sold fewer copies, but he would have earned more, thanks to the publisher’s advance.

Yes, my profit is just over £300, but this figure is essentially meaningless (the revenue is more informative) as a proxy for success. First, I’ve ploughed virtually all the money from the first book into the second, and so on. ‘Profit’, then, in this context, represents the amount that I’ve decided not to spend. I might have adjusted that up or down arbitrarily. Second, my science fiction novels continue to sell in greater number each month, and unless I can find other book-related expenditure, this ‘profit’ figure will rise sharply. Overall, I believe it was more sensible for me (as a writer nobody has heard of) to price low and sell in quantity than opt for the preferred option of a legacy publisher, which, perhaps, is to price high and sell few.

The question of the publisher advance is an interesting one. It would certainly be in my short term interest to land a large advance, which I may not earn out. But, if I may say, the industry-wide behaviour of doling out these advances is one of the reasons the business model is unsupportable.

To return to this question: Is 99p too cheap for a book? I really don’t know. If you’re employed by a business that requires the new Ken Follett book to be £16 or more, you’ll probably think it’s too cheap and consider me an upstart who is undercutting you. If you’re an individual, creative person who is putting out a product and is in control of the consumer experience, you will think carefully about the impact that your price will have on the perception of the product. I think 99p for Déjà Vu represents good value. After all, you can get it from a library for free, and that doesn’t lessen its worth. Neither does picking up a second-hand copy from the church bazar.

Last word from Mr Clee, which requires no comment beyond a brief nod to its past tense:

An industry that paid unrecoverable advances for books, and then published them in formats that the public thought too expensive, had its eccentricities.

This is, I think, the first non-customer review of Déjà Vu for its current edition. Red Adept is a site where authors can submit their works for review. The administrators make clear that reviews are non-debatable, and always publish them to the book’s Amazon page after one month. I like the breakdown into ‘plot’, ‘character development’, ‘writing style’ and ‘editing’.

I wanted to share this excerpt:

Saskia enjoys a metric ton (or rather, tonne, as Mr. Hocking is British) of character development during the course of the story, since she begins from a point that’s worse off than a blank slate: the little she knows about her current life is a lie. As the plot progresses, she worries who she truly is, and if she’ll be lost to the resurfacing of her body’s violent personality. By the end, she’s far outstripped everyone else in complexity and sheer awesomeness.

Did you know that Déjà Vu’s price has been slashed by 16% to make it 72p? That’s 72p British pence, people.

I’m investigating this Kindle Select business, which is a new service offered by Amazon that allows Kindle authors to put their books forward for a lending scheme. The catch is that Amazon requires such an author to publish via the Kindle platform exclusively. Not such a catch for me, as I sell, on average, zero books elsewhere.

Once an author’s book is in the Kindle Select programme, it is eligible for five days of free promotion every ninety days. So, as an experiment, I’m making my novel Proper Job free for today and tomorrow, just to see what happens.

Update at 11:30

I was concerned about what would happen to the rank of a promoted book. That is, when being promoted, at what position would the book enter the ‘free’ chart? Would it even go into the ‘free’ chart, or just be marked as ‘free’ in the paid chart? After the promotion, at what position would it re-enter the paid chart?

Well, Proper Job has essentially had its ranking stripped. It no longer has a ranking according to its Amazon information page, and on the KDP dashboard (the back-end that authors have access to), the ranking information is marked as ‘unavailable’. So it looks as though promoted books are de-indexed.

However, this doesn’t mean that people can’t find the book. 14 copies were ‘sold’ in the US since it became free; and 26 in the UK. To put that in perspective, I’ve sold at 86p only 34 copies of Proper Job since it was published in November.

I’ll post more data here as it becomes available.

Update at 12:00

Amazon has now indexed Proper Job in the ‘free’ chart, so I guess there isn’t a ‘limbo’ chart after all. The delay is almost certainly a lag due to database updates and letting an hour’s worth of ‘sales’ accrue to compute the new ranking.

As a data point, Proper Job was ranked at position 8,299 in yesterday’s paid chart and is now at 1, 665 in the free chart. That’s for the UK. In the US, the ranking is still classed as unknown.

Update at 20:30

Now ranked at 862 in the US for free books, and 34 in the Humor chart. In the UK, it’s at 304 in the overall chart and 18 in the Humour chart. US sales: 183. UK sales: 92.

Several months after beginning the process, my novel Déjà Vu is now available in paperback. It’s identical to the Kindle edition (i.e. the second edition). If you’re really keen on buying a paperback of the book, you’ll see a link to the paperback on Déjà Vu’s Kindle page. Here is a direct link.

Now, the paperback costs £6.67 and the Kindle edition costs 86p. I’d advise you to buy the Kindle edition – and if you don’t have a Kindle, why not buy one? You’ll get access to free out-of-copyright books and a growing marketplace of contemporary fiction.

In the thrilling sequel to yesterday’s blog post over at Scott Pack’s blog, I’m back with some data about sales and income.

Today I’m writing about the research process at Me and My Big Mouth, the blog of Scott Pack (late of Waterstone’s; now of the Friday Project). If you think learning Russian for the Saskia Brandt novels is impressive, wait until you hear about the ice-cream I had to eat for Proper Job.

It has been a long time coming, but today I publish Proper Job, a comedy novel whose first draft I completed more than seven years ago (US). How do I feel? Exhausted. Pleased. Quite interested to see how well the book will do on the Kindle platform in comparison to Déjà Vu and Flashback. I feel that science fiction does well in ebook form; but Proper Job, being a comedy lacking in lasers, bug-eyed monsters and time travel, should have a broader appeal.

The book evolved on several fronts across the course of its development. The initial draft was edgier. Its main character – then called Fabe, not Andy – was a crueller individual. It was novel where the main character and the reader laughed ‘at’ things. Now, the novel is one where the laughter is ‘with’.

Structurally, too, I changed some elements to take it away from the somewhat Hollywood three-act structure. These explicit frameworks are well and good in retrospect, but my experience of writing Proper Job has confirmed my prejudice that they are best applied in retrospect to help fix problems. They cannot be used as a blueprint. (That is, I can’t use them like that.)

So here it is. The final draft is about 60,000 words, I believe. With revisions, I probably worked through 200,000 or more.

Subtext and – of course – schmubtext. However, Proper Job is also about my relationship with Cornwall.

Thanks to my stalwart editor Clare Christian and equally stalwart proofer Olivia Wood, without whom Proper Job would be a wibbly pile of kack.

Publish and be damned.

M’colleague Matt F W Curran recently sent me some questions about my adventures in the ebook trade. I thought my answers might be useful to others, so I’ve posted them here.

Did you e-publish via an e-publisher?

No, I decided that it would be best to control the process myself. One of the more frustrating parts of being an author is being unable to correct typos in the final book, blurb, and so on. Amazon makes this trivial. My research prior to going it alone also demonstrated that many ebooks published on an author’s behalf were horrendously formatted, presumably because the job was given lower priority and fewer resources than the more prestigious print edition.

If so, what is their commission and would you do it again?

I’ve left this question in because I did, a few months back, use the online service Smashwords. This service takes your book (formatted in Word – alarm bells ringing yet?) and spits it out to multiple online retailers, including Barnes and Noble. I used this because it was the only way I could get my book onto iBooks. Smashwords wanted the documented formatted according to some unusual conventions. I hired a nice American lady to do this for me. She trades under the name MediaWorx. I paid her $45 and she did a flawless job. Ultimately, it was for nothing, because Smashwords uses a generic tool to convert your Word document into different versions for the online services, and the output is embarrassingly cruddy. Fortunately, I’ve only sold about 4 copies via Smashwords. The vast majority of my sales have been through Amazon.

If you didn’t e-publish via an e-publisher and did it wholly alone, has it been easy?

I’ll interpret that ‘easy’ as a relative term. Yes, it was very easy. When I was published by a small press, I had to do all my own marketing. I had to wait months for royalty cheques that never came; had no clue where review copies had been sent; had to put up with a dodgy cover; had all kinds of issues with distribution; had to turn up in person and make myself a nuisance on a shop-by-shop basis to get word out.

And do you think there are any benefits to being published via an independent e-publisher regardless of the sacrifice in terms of profits? In other words would it add relevance or legitimacy to your work to be seen to be published independently rather than self-published?

My first response is a misinterpretation of your question, which I’ve left in. The question I thought I read was: “Are there advantages to being traditionally published?”

The simple answer is “Yes”. I grew up in an era where writers still used typewriters and my dreams of success (that is, selling a book to somebody) were all wrapped up in weighty, paper manuscripts, lunch meetings with agents, and seeing myself on the shelf of a bookshop. I still want that and I can’t help it. The desire, however, is irrational. I’m immeasurably better off now.

And now for the answer to your actual question:

There could certainly be benefits in terms of time-saving, but I think all the tools you need for a good book are at your disposal. Hire your own editor. I can suggest Clare Christian or Olivia Wood. Hire a cover designer, such as Emma Barnes. The trickier bit is the layout of your book, but you can probably hire someone to do that too. I’m not whether it’s a good use of money to hire a middle man (the ‘publisher’ again) to do this for you.

How much do cover-designs cost?

I’ve got three covers. The first, Deja Vu, was a stock photo from iStockPhoto.com, which I bought for about £50 and worked into my own design. Flashback was designed professionally by Emma Barnes for £699.13 (though I’ve since started using another design based on an iStockPhoto vector, which works better as a thumbnail; I’ll use the Barnes design for a paperback). The cover for my romantic comedy Proper Job is a combination of two vector graphics, totalling about £80, which I put together in my own design.

Are you making enough money for it to be a financially-worthwhile endeavour (of course, simply being read is worthwhile anyway, but for the extra effort and time put it to get it out there – was it worthwhile?).

In a word, yes. My current income from the books since March is £2,072.11 and $222. Outgoings are £1,268.40. Profit about £800 before tax. That’s not huge, but the initial costs are all fixed.

How did you come to the price point of the two books? I note that Flashback changed to a cheaper price – did that help?

I wanted the books to be free. (I’m lucky enough to have a full time job as an academic, so I was prepared to pay for the covers and editing myself.) Since that wasn’t straightforward, I made them as cheap as possible. This took a little nerve, I must admit, particularly when I saw the initial sales take off, but it’s important to remember that I’m in a position where nobody knows who I am. I want as many people to read my books as possible. Meanwhile, I’ll be making a brand of my name if I’m any good. There is room for increasing the price later on, but for now it’s as well to remember that the market is not demanding my books at all. They’re buying them on a ‘Why not?’ basis. If I increased the price significantly (say, into the 70% royalty rate, which needs a sale price of £1.70, I think), it’s very likely that I would flatten my sales.

Secondly, I’m in it for the long haul.

As for the price of Flashback, I did increase that briefly to £1.70. That was, in retrospect, probably an irrational move motivated by the price of its cover. I wasn’t sure at the time that the sales profile of Deja Vu would remain the same. Turns out it did. When Flashback earned back the cost of its cover, I dropped its price. The sales correlated very closely with price.

It was 1995 when I first saw a Macintosh computer for reals. It did not impress me. The monitor was monochrome; the mouse was clunky and had only one button. Its Graphical User Interface updated slowly. We had dozens of Macs in the Psychology Department computer room, which we called the cattle market. On these computers, we emailed using a Telnet client and performed statistical analysis by sending code to an SPSS server. I saw the sad Mac face often.

Back in halls, I had an Amiga 500 computer. My parents had given it to me for Christmas in 1987 and it still worked beautifully in 1995. The screen was colour. The mouse had two buttons. There were showcase demos written by European code-hackers that could make my Amiga perform graphical wonders beyond anything else I’d seen.

Steve Jobs.

Never heard of him.

I first saw a Macintosh in the American film Short Circuit, in which a military robot is struck by lightning and gains both sentience and a penchant for slapstick comedy. Steve Guttenburg…he picked up a Mac, I think, using the carry-handle. I remember pausing the video tape and looking at that computer. Macintosh? Like the raincoat?

Douglas Adams loved the Mac. I loved Douglas Adams.

Eventually, my Amiga was replaced by a PC. It seemed like a good idea at the time. It wasn’t. The PC ran Microsoft Windows. Over the course of ten years, the software had crashed so many times and the hardware crapped out so much that I was intimate with the countless ways in which an IBM PC compatible must be nursed and pushed through its short life. People relied on my Windows expertise.

‘You must really like computers, Ian.’

I hated them.

Bought a laptop around 2002. It was black. I paid about £600 for it, which put me in the red, but I had a PhD thesis to write and I wasn’t about to do it in the cattle market, whose Macs had been replaced with Dells. I bought a DVD: Contact, directed by Robert Zemeckis. Lights: turned down. Popcorn. The movie skipped frames every five minutes because the computer was not powerful enough to keep up. That is, the computer had been built with a DVD drive, and it had been endowed with a particular grade of CPU, but the manufacturer did not care that the two were incompatible.

My girlfriend told me she didn’t mind the skipped frames. I told her I did. I felt like a pillock.

Steve Jobs. Guy with a bow-tie, right? Didn’t Douglas Adams mention him in an interview once?

Steve Jobs died on Wednesday. I am surprised at how sad this makes me. There is the natural sadness, of course, that any man should die in his fifties. But I am surprised by the impact. After all, this man helped make some machines that I use; nothing more.

‘You must really like computers, Ian.’

Some people get confused by computers. The interface for a program like Word, for example, can seem overwhelming. I’ve always considered interfaces like these – and general interaction with a computer – as a communication with a programmer, not the machine. Your email client is one way another human being thinks you should send and read email. Human-computer interaction is not that at all; it is always human-human interaction. Who are the humans?

I called my girlfriend from my office yesterday evening as I was putting on my outdoor clothes. In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg’s Radio Four podcast, was playing on my iPhone. I squeezed the pause button. Melvyn’s voice faded away. I heard a chirrup. ‘Call Britta, home,’ I said. A pause. The phone replied, ‘Calling Britta, home,’ and connected me to our house. Britta was making a cake. I apologised for staying late at the office and told her I’d be there in five minutes. When I cut the call, Melvyn’s voice faded back up and the discussion of empiricism continued as though nothing had happened.

Human-human interaction.

Someone decided – and for me, this was always Steve Jobs, bow-tie man – that the iPhone needed to work. That is, if the job of the iPhone is to do something like make a call, it should make a call. The job of my microwave is to heat things up. It does. They do.

In 2005, I came home from a holiday. Next to a stack of unopened post on the dining table was a large, white box. My girlfriend scooped up the post and told me to stop acting so cool and just open the bloody box. I opened it. Don’t get your hopes up, I thought. Inside the box was a label that read ‘Designed by Apple in California’. I lifted out a white, iBook G4. It was beautiful. That’s just cosmetic, I told myself. It’s still a computer with a processor, hard drive, and all those other bits that can go wrong.

The keyboard did not sag when I typed on it. When I closed the lid, it did something called ‘sleep’, which meant I didn’t need to boot it up with each use session. In about a month, I was in love with this machine. It was the computer I had always wanted. It never got in the way of what I tried to do.

I watched Contact; it played flawlessly.

Don’t get your hopes up.

That’s what Steve Jobs did. He got my hopes up.