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.

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.

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.

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.

Did I mention that I’ve been gate-crashing Scott Pack’s blog with some stats on my how well my books are selling?

Your friend and mine, Scott, left me a message at our usual dead drop – behind the third cervical vertebra of the diplodocus in the foyer of the Natural History Museum. In somewhat breathless prose, he asked that I furnish readers with the latest episode in my ebook adventure before they actually explode with curiosity.

I didn’t?

Say no more: it’s over here.

All the more perplexing for me, then, that there are now two editions of Déjà Vu available for iBooks. One published by Lulu, of course, and one published by Smashwords – bien sur.

It’s twice the fun! And both are 45p rather than the Kindle price of 70p.

If you’re going to buy a copy, please get the Lulu one. I was able to manually control its formatting, so it looks as I intended it to look. The Smashwords one is the product of an automated formatter, and looks rubbish.

There are many people to thank. Beta readers, those who helped me with research into air crash investigation and aeronautics, my editor Clare Christian and cover designer Emma Barnes of Snowbooks all get major, major props.

I’ve settled on the following blurb (thanks for your comments, Ed!):

A fifty-year-old mystery is about to be solved.

Summer, 1947: Airliner ‘Star Dust’ radios a successful trans-Andean flight from Buenos Aires to Santiago, and signals its intention to land. Four minutes prior to touchdown, it sends the letter sequence ‘S-T-E-N-D-E-C’, then silence. Star Dust vanishes along with all passengers and crew.

Winter, 2003: German Freedom Flight DFU323 crashes in the Bavarian National Forest. The only clue to its fate is the co-pilot’s final transmission, shouted against the roar of failing engines: ‘Stendec! Stendec!’

The enigmas of DFU323 and Star Dust will lead back to a startling conspiracy that reaches fifty years into the past – and one hundred years into the future.

How do I feel? I feel fine.

Flashback (The Saskia Brandt Series)

Here is Déjà Vu’s Smashwords page.

This might be my only chance to get Déjà Vu onto the iPad. Lulu, the company I’d prefer to use, is moving slowly on their iBooks integration. They’re not replying to my emails, either. Let’s hope Smashwords works.

A fifty-year-old mystery is about to be solved.

Summer, 1947: Avro-Lancastrian ‘Star Dust’ reports a successful trans-Andean flight from Buenos Aires to Santiago, and signals its intention to land. Four minutes prior to touchdown, it sends the letter sequence ‘S-T-E-N-D-E-C’, then silence. Star Dust vanishes along with all passengers and crew.

Winter, 2003: German Freedom Flight DFU323 crashes in the Bavarian National Forest. The only clue to its fate is the co-pilot’s final transmission, shouted against the roar of failing engines: ‘Stendec! Stendec!’

Jem Shaw, an English student, is now on the run in Germany. Her one hope is a woman who should have been onboard DFU323: the mysterious Saskia Brandt. Pursuing them both is a man called Cory. He might be a soldier. He might be a hitman. He wants to stop Jem Shadw and find Saskia Brandt – wherever she is.

The enigmas of DFU323 and Star Dust will lead back to a startling conspiracy that reaches fifty years into our past – and one hundred years into our future.

It’s shit, isn’t it? You can tell me.