Category Archives: publishing

Creating an Animated Banner Advert

advertising, publishing, self-publishing,

There are sev­eral joys pecu­liar to the inde­pend­ent writer. One of them is the respons­ib­il­ity of advert­ising. A few weeks back, I made the decision to plough more of the earn­ings from my books into these adverts. One of the places I wanted to advert­ise is a site call kboards.com, a busy hub full of Kindle writers and readers.

What Goes into the Ad?

It needs to cap­ture interest with min­imal inform­a­tion. I kicked around some ideas using the ‘rule of three’: this, that and the other, or ‘not this, not that, but the other’. Since I don’t really have graphic illus­tra­tion skills bey­ond cre­at­ing book cov­ers, I’d need to use text. I came up with:

One heroine

Three books

Lost in time

Overall, I’m happy with them. They’re short. They tell you that the main char­ac­ter is a woman, that there are three books (so far) worth of story, and that the genre is sci­ence fic­tion (time travel).

My girl­friend looked at a draft of the fin­ished GIF and said that read­ers wouldn’t know any­thing about the qual­ity of the books. I agreed, and added a quote from an SFX of Déjà Vu as a ‘zero slide’ at the beginning.

How Does it Look?

The stand­ard dimen­sions for a ban­ner ad is 728 x 90 pixels. Once I’d stuffed that full of my text, there was no room for the book jack­ets, and it gen­er­ally looked shite. #advertfail

Fine, I thought. I’ll just cre­ate an anim­ated GIF.

For the unini­ti­ated, an anim­ated GIF (pro­nounced ‘fish’) is a little video.

Creation: Keynote

I don’t have any fancy anim­a­tion soft­ware. I do, how­ever, use Apple Keynote to give psy­cho­logy lec­tures. Keynote is a par­tic­u­larly advanced present­a­tion plat­form that has text effects, slide trans­itions, and tim­ings. Crucially, it can also export a present­a­tion as a Quicktime movie file. That file can then be dropped into a Mac app called GIFBrewery to make an anim­ated GIF.

  • Open Keynote and select one of the stand­ard templates

  • Next, you’ll want to have Keynote change its slide size to 728 x 90. Guess what? It won’t, because 90 is too small. You will need to cre­ate a slide with the ban­ner ad pro­por­tions but more pixels. I’d sug­gest 2184 x 270.

Keynote slide size

  • Create as many slides as you like. Each one of these will be a ‘moment’ in your anim­a­tion. For my own ban­ner, there were seven moments.

Slides

  • Set the tim­ings and trans­itions between the slides. You’ll see that, for the example below, I’ve set the trans­ition between the first slide and the second to be the ‘sparkle’ effect; the sparkle moves left to right; and the trans­ition activ­ates auto­mat­ic­ally after three seconds.

Transitions

  • Once you’ve set up auto­matic trans­itions between slides, Keynote should be able to play through the ‘present­a­tion’ without manual inter­ven­tion. About five-ten seconds long is prob­ably enough—but if your ban­ner ad is awe­some, maybe people will watch it for longer. Who knows.

  • Now export the present­a­tion as a Quicktime video. Go to the File Menu > Export > Quicktime. Keynote will offer the fol­low­ing options, which are set accord­ing to those I used for my own banner:

QT Options

Creation: GIFBrewery

The Quicktime file is some­thing that GIFBrewery can hap­pily use to pro­duce your banner.

GIFBrewery has many options, which you can explore. The two main things to point out are:

  • ‘Resize’ will allow you to reduce the pixel dimen­sions of you video. If you’ve impor­ted from Keynote, these dimen­sions will be too large, so here is where you can reduce it to 728 x 90 pixels.

  • The ‘GIF prop­er­ties’ pop-up allows you to tweak the frame-rate (and there­fore over­all speed) of the GIF. You will also find options for redu­cing the num­bers of col­ours. Remember that the webpage host­ing your advert needs the GIF to have a very small file size. In the case of kboards.com, this is less than 60K.

GFBrewery

Wrapping Up

Here is the fin­ished GIF:

2013 05 20 22 24 09 SB

I hope that’s help­ful. It took me a couple of nights of pokery, not to men­tion jig­gery, to real­ise that I could use Keynote to pro­duce a movie file, and then a good piece of soft­ware to gen­er­ate the GIF.

If you want to use my files as a head start, here they are:

The GFBrewery set­tings file

The Keynote present­a­tion file

The Keynote Quicktime export

Waterboarded by an Angel

publishing

M’colleague and gen­er­ally excel­lent writer Aliya Whiteley is cel­eb­rat­ing the launch of her new short story col­lec­tion, Witchcraft in the Harem. How to describe it? Well, World Fantasy Award win­ner Lavie Tidhar says:

The exper­i­ence of read­ing this col­lec­tion is like being water­boarded by an angel. Shocking, heart­break­ing and laugh-out-loud funny, this is some of the best writ­ing I’ve ever seen. If you like Aimee Bender or Etgar Keret, you will love Witchcraft in the Harem.

I had a high old time on Monday night at the launch. Given that I’m talk­ing occa­sion­ally on this blog about the cre­at­ive pro­cess, I thought it would be nice to ask Aliya about how you get the full world feel in some­thing as small as a short story. Take it away, Aliya.

How do you make a short story feel full?

Thomas Hardy was an amaz­ing nov­el­ist. You only have to read the first pages of The Mayor of Casterbridge to real­ise you’re enjoy­ing the powers of a mas­ter of descrip­tion. And there’s a lot of descrip­tion to get through. I mean enjoy. There are long para­graphs about the Wessex coun­tryside and the mean­ing­ful weather. However much you love Hardy, you have to admit that the mod­ern taste in prose has moved away from such lov­ing build-up. A book that starts with three thou­sand words describ­ing the land­scape is unlikely to meet with the approval of a big pub­lisher nowadays.

Description gives depth, but if you’re work­ing on a short story, then you need to provide that roun­ded feel­ing in other ways. And if you write flash fic­tion, then you need to cre­ate the entire world in under 1000 words and lose none of the real­ity. So how do you do it? Here’s some help­ful advice. Bearing in mind that I don’t give good advice and can­not be trusted.

Set your story at the bot­tom of the ocean.

Deep, see? No, okay, that’s not entirely ser­i­ous. But do set your short story in some place that will be evoc­at­ive with very little work from you. The Orient Express, for instance. Or choose one really good detail and describe that rather than going large-scale. Describing the swivel of the golfer’s hips as he hits his first shot is as mean­ing­ful as writ­ing about all eight­een holes.

Don’t bother to set it anywhere.

If you’ve got bril­liant char­ac­ters, amaz­ing dia­logue, and an excit­ing plot, then let them do all the work for you and for­get describ­ing the col­our of the car­pet. The set­ting doesn’t always mat­ter. Sometimes it’s more power­ful if we’re not provided with a framework.

Piggyback.

The first story in my new col­lec­tion is called Galatea. It’s a piece of flash fic­tion about a lonely orphan boy who grows up to be obsessed with naked flesh. There’s no men­tion of the Pygmalion myth in the story but the title brings with it a whole myth­ical set of expect­a­tions that say more than an extra thou­sand words could manage.

Avoid the nat­ural world.

If you find your­self describ­ing the types of trees in the field behind the house the char­ac­ters live in (and they aren’t even look­ing out of the win­dow) then you’re not keep­ing the word count down. Unless you’re writ­ing a story about killer plants or the passing sea­sons or some­thing, obviously.

Use default settings.

When it comes to describ­ing what people look like, there’s very little point unless it’s remark­able. We all assume people look a cer­tain way. Alas, Hollywood-style pleas­ant beauty has won over our ima­gin­a­tions in this regard, so instead of wast­ing time with hair and eye col­ours con­cen­trate on the way the char­ac­ters respond to each other. If they’re attract­ive, don’t bother describ­ing your idea of attract­ive. A reader might hate muscled men or women with long legs. But what hap­pens when they enter the con­ver­sa­tion? That’s more inter­est­ing, and it tells us all we need to know. Then the reader becomes the detect­ive of the story, solv­ing the clues you leave behind. Artfully arrange your bread­crumbs rather than sup­ply­ing a whole loaf of bread. It keeps them hungry and takes up less word­count too.

So that’s what I know about turn­ing a short story into a sat­is­fy­ing and roun­ded exper­i­ence. I’ve set stor­ies in the Canadian Rockies and in Viennese Concert Halls; I’ve used myth­ical fig­ures and fairy tales; I’ve pared back the weather reports and the nat­ural world. Except in the one story that’s set in a cab­bage patch, obvi­ously. And I’ve kept them all short and sweet. Even the one set in the Mariana Trench.

No, okay, I made that bit up. I told you I couldn’t be trusted.

The Amber Rooms Out Now

publishing

In May, 2008, I cre­ated a Twitter account for the heroine of my sci­ence fic­tion nov­els, Saskia Brandt. Her first tweet:

Entering St Petersburg via train. There are men from the Third Section in the next car­riage and I think I might need to jump off.

Cut to yes­ter­day after­noon, when I uploaded the final ver­sion of The Amber Rooms to the Kindle store. I still can’t quite believe that the book is out in the world and no longer in my head. For the past five years (begin­ning drafts in 2007), I used most of my spare brain power—and some that wasn’t spare—to fig­ure out solu­tions to plot and char­ac­ter­isa­tion prob­lems. Now, I get my even­ings and week­ends back.

You can down­load The Amber Rooms from the UK or US Amazon stores. Until 25th December, books one and two are free.

Cut to 1907, night, and a train approach­ing St Petersburg. On that train, Saskia Brandt is run­ning for her life.

The Amber Rooms by Ian Hocking

Kindle Select Tips

publishing, self-publishing, ,

It was late after­noon yes­ter­day when I remembered that I’d signed up Déjà Vu for a one-day stint as a free­bie. This is pos­sible as part of Amazon’s Kindle Select pro­gramme. There isn’t a huge amount of data avail­able on this, so here are mine.

For the last three months or so, sales of Déjà Vu had been slow­ing (oh so tra­gic­ally, but you’ll hear no com­plaints from me about how well the book has done). In the UK, it’s March-May sales were 426, 124, and 96. For the US, those fig­ures are much smal­ler: 45, 21, and 26. The over­all sales stand at 9000 UK, 1487 US, totalling 10, 505 (the extra 18 come from Germany).

I’ve inter­preted these sales as show­ing suc­cess in the UK and, well, show­ing a lack of it in the US. One of the nice things is that 50% of the people who read Déjà Vu want to buy Flashback, even though it’s £1.20 more expensive.

By the time I remembered about the one-day free­bie, yes­ter­day, Déjà Vu had been ‘selling’ for a few hours in the US. At that point, 576 cop­ies had been moved in the US and only 126 in the UK. This puzzles me a little. Whereas the book doesn’t really sell in the US, there are more people ready to grab it for free. Perhaps, then, it is reas­on­ably attract­ive to the American con­sumer but not so attract­ive that they’re keen to pur­chase in large number.

When I went to bed that even­ing, 2854 had moved in the US and 288 in the UK. This morn­ing, tot­ting up the final fig­ures, the US total was 5713 and the UK total 358. Déjà Vu reached at least num­ber four in both (free) sci­ence fic­tion charts each side of the Atlantic. With caveats, that sug­gests the US Kindle mar­ket is around ten times the size of the UK market.

Overall, then, I’d call it a suc­cess­ful pro­mo­tion. It’s worth bear­ing in mind that not many of those read­ers will read the book. Fewer still, maybe none, will post a review. The last pro­mo­tion I did was for Proper Job, my first — and per­haps last — com­edy novel. That shif­ted many free cop­ies but got no reviews.

How has the Déjà Vu pro­mo­tion impacted on sales? There’s a small effect. It might last a day or two.

I’ve sold 20 cop­ies in the US so far this month, and that com­pares with 26 cop­ies for all of May. Oh, and I see one refund! Flashback sales are up a bit to 5 cop­ies this month; last month it was 15.

In the UK, I’ve sold 25 cop­ies of Déjà Vu in June (cf. 95 last month) and 13 cop­ies of Flashback (cf. 73 last month).

For rank­ings, Déjà Vu is now at 1,997 in the UK, whereas pre­vi­ously it was float­ing around 10,000. It’s at 7,564 in the US, and has been hov­er­ing at 35,000 or so.

There are some stats I could prob­ably com­pute for the effect of the Kindle Select pro­mo­tion, but that would be overkill. Right now, I’d say it’s worth it, and the Kindle Select pro­gramme remains a great tool for authors pub­lish­ing on Amazon.

In terms of max­im­ising the bene­fit of the pro­mo­tion, you should — obvi­ously — try to get the word out on your social net­works without being too much of a tit about it. I try not to be a tit but my Twitter fol­low­ers could prob­ably tell you whether or not I’m suc­ceed­ing. Yesterday, I was lucky that SF Signal retweeted a mes­sage about the pro­mo­tion to almost 7000 fol­low­ers, and I’d be will­ing to bet that con­trib­uted a great deal to the final US fig­ure of 5713.

I guess this is mar­ket­ing, but I prefer to think of it as let­ting people know about a book they might like. A Tweet is a tran­si­ent thing. I’m no fan of spam, and I don’t do newsletters.

Well, peeps, there’re the data. Not sure whether they gen­er­al­ise, but there they are.

Thirsty for Bytes?

publishing, , , , ,

It’s not easy being an inde­pend­ent author. By inde­pend­ent, I don’t mean ‘attached to an inde­pend­ent pub­lish­ing house’. I mean hir­ing a proofreader, editor, cover designer, and not being invited to pub­lish­ing shindigs. M’colleague Matt F Curran doesn’t think it’s easy either. He is the brains behind Thirst Editions, a new, vir­tual pub­lish­ing out­fit under whose aus­pices Matt, Aliya Whiteley, Roger Morris, Frances Garrod, and Tim Stretton will be put­ting out a title or two. These authors are not all inde­pend­ent by the above defin­i­tion, but they’ve all had work passed over on the grounds of mass mar­ket appeal rather than qual­ity — and with ebooks and the long tail, qual­ity can now count.

There is no ‘i’ in team. There are, how­ever, three in ‘Thirst Editions’.

I think you know what I mean.

If you don’t, take a look at this post, where Matt out­lines the ethos behind Thirst Editions.

Monday, 23rd April is launch day. My novel Proper Job will be re-published as a Thirst Editions book (reserving Writer As A Stranger for the Saskia Brandt books) at the crazy price of 77p, along with Tim’s Dragonchaser and Aliya’s Mean Mode Median. These last two are also cheap-as-chips.

What are you wait­ing for? We’d appre­ci­ate your support.

Signed by Kneerim & Williams

publishing

Well, spin my nipple nuts and send me to Alaska if it’s been almost two weeks since I signed with the Kneerim & Williams lit­er­ary agency. What? Me? A lit­er­ary agent? With my repu­ta­tion for going-it-alonery?

But I am two-and-twenty, gentle reader.

What happened was: Just prior to Christmas, I found myself cor­res­pond­ing with a UK pub­lisher about Déjà Vu. He loved the book, which was hur­ray. But he thought that there was no mar­ket left in the UK, which was boo.

Like the Spanish, I decided to approach the New World.

Given that life is short, I con­tac­ted rather more lit­er­ary agen­cies than I should have; within a few hours I had received one or two offers of rep­res­ent­a­tion and sev­eral more requests for the manu­scripts of Déjà Vu, Flashback and The Amber Rooms.

By the end of the week, I had taken two phone calls — one with each of the agen­cies I wanted most — and was won over by Katherine Flynn and Ike Williams.

So it’s with Kneerim & Williams that I’ll be rest­ing my hat. Katherine will be get­ting back to me with edit­or­ial notes on Déjà Vu quite soon, and we’ll take it from there.

Terribly.

Terribly exicted.

The New Statesman on Déjà Vu Sales

publishing,

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.

★ Ebook Q & A

ebooks, publishing,

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.

The Digital Peninsula

ebooks, publishing

Lee over at the Digital Peninsula writes:

No, not that Hocking. I’m talk­ing about Ian Hocking. He’s a science-fiction writer, when he’s not a psy­cho­logy lec­turer. He nearly gave it all up.

It’s true. I nearly did.

[the] industry now needs to under­stand they’re not just com­pet­ing with each other, but with every author, pub­lished or not.

If you’re look­ing for an art­icle that links to and sum­mar­ises some of my more import­ant (i.e. use­ful) posts over the past few months, this is a good place to start.