The Next Big Thing

writing

I’ve been meme-slapped by m’colleague Roger Morris, writer of the Porfiry Petrovich mys­ter­ies and other enter­tain­ments, includ­ing one of my favour­ite books of a few years back, Taking Comfort. I have to answer ten ques­tions in ten minutes about my cur­rent book. It’s very cur­rent indeed, as I’m plan­ning to release it on the 21st December.

1) What is the work­ing title of your next book?

The Amber Rooms. I went through a few dif­fer­ent titles before I arrived at that one. My favour­ite was the St Petersburg Paradox (which is a conun­drum drawn from prob­ab­il­ity theory).

2) Where did the idea come from for the book?

I hon­estly don’t remem­ber. I’ve always wanted to write a novel about Russia, and there are ele­ments of Russia scattered here and there through­out both Déjà Vu and Flashback. I have a feel­ing that Russia will fea­ture again in future nov­els, if they’re written.

3) What genre does your book fall under?

It’s sci­ence fic­tion, prob­ably steam punk. Historical sci­ence fic­tion might be a bet­ter term. If I actu­ally had time to read any­thing these days, I’d have a sharper idea of the genre.

4) What act­ors would you choose to play the part of your char­ac­ters in a movie rendition?

Saskia Brandt could be played by Franka Potente, Alexandra Maria Lara, or Olivia Wilde. Kamo: Gael García Bernal. Stalin: Jake Gyllenhaal. Ego: Robert De Niro.

5) What is the one sen­tence syn­op­sis of your book?

Time trav­el­ler Saskia Brandt is trapped in Russia in 1908, try­ing to get home, but she’s stolen a great deal of money that belongs to the Bolshevik Party. They want it back.

6) Will your book be self-published or rep­res­en­ted by an agency?

It’s self-published.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

About nine months, but that the was second or third attempt. I got about 10% into two sim­ilar nov­els before I real­ised they weren’t working.

8) What other books would you com­pare this story to within your genre?

I can only think of The Man in the High Castle.

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?

The main char­ac­ter, Saskia.

10) What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

During the story, Saskia stays in a house that is mod­elled on the St Petersburg home of Prince Felix Yusupov, who con­spired to murder Rasputin.

I have to nom­in­ate three more people, so how’s about comedy-crime-scifi-horror-nonfic writer Aliya Whiteley, scifi nov­el­ist Stephen Sweeney, and tech­no­thriller (and now Kindle best-seller) Michael Stephen Fuchs. (Blast, it looks as though Aliya’s already been in the meme-wash. Check out her Next Big Thing here.)

Where Am I? Readers, Progress, and Free Books

writing,

The Amber Rooms

This morn­ing, I received an email beginning:

Well, it’s 2.00 in the morn­ing and I’ve just fin­ished your book.

The email made me laugh out loud, and I reflec­ted that it’s con­sid­er­ably easier to write these days in the know­ledge that people might want to read the final product.

This cor­res­pond­ent raised an issue. Am I still retired from writ­ing? I thought I’d update this blog with the answer. As usual, I’ll try to avoid obfuscation.

I worked with my agent on an updated ver­sion of Déjà Vu over the sum­mer. (With her per­mis­sion, I used this text to revise to the ebook, so it’s effect­ively a new edi­tion.) She then sent the book to vari­ous pub­lish­ers. As is now becom­ing typ­ical, I had pos­it­ive com­ments from all of them, but no bites. There’s a small chance that one might come back to us at this point, but I’m not hold­ing my breath.

Tracking my sales is becom­ing dif­fi­cult because some income is through Amazon’s lend­ing pro­gramme (US-only). As a rough guide, I’ve sold about 16,000 books through the Kindle, and about the same num­ber again (I think) has gone in free promotions.

I’m still writ­ing. My goal is to fin­ish a final draft of The Amber Rooms but the end of October and pass this to my agent. She’s prom­ised to edit it through­out November (though I’ve just real­ised that I haven’t men­tioned the length of the length, which is about double Déjà Vu), and I’d like to release it for Xmas. The pic­ture at the head of this post is the latest ver­sion. What do you think?

I heard a stat­istic a couple of years back that aca­dem­ics top the UK chart for unpaid over­time. Whether or not that’s still true, my writ­ing is very squeezed at the moment. It’s get­ting harder to sit down at a com­puter after a day’s work. I’m pretty con­fid­ent I can fin­ish off The Amber Rooms by then, but there’s a chance it might fin­ish me first.

Under the aus­pice of Thirst eDi­tions, a writerly con­glom­er­a­tion and child of Matt F Curran’s brain, I’ve just pub­lished a short book that exam­ines some of the philo­soph­ical issues that arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence research­ers need to address. It’s writ­ten for under­gradu­ate psy­cho­lo­gists but the lay reader should enjoy it. If you’re intrigued about the extent to which Saskia Brandt is human, knock your­self out with Down to the Wire: A Short Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.

Finally, I’ve made Déjà Vu, Flashback, and Proper Job free for the next five days. There’s no scheme behind this decision other than the nat­ural cycle of the Kindle pro­mo­tions mech­an­ism for self-published authors; essen­tially, you have five days of free offer for every ninety, and I’m still in the busi­ness of get­ting my books read. I’m plan­ning to make them free again at Christmas, partly to coin­cide with the launch of the Amber Rooms, and partly because it’s Christmas and I want to bring down everyone’s mood with tales of my heroine trapped in time.

On Reviews: “This Book is Bloody Awful”

reviews

I’m com­ing late to the brouhaha that sur­rounds cus­tomer reviews. The social web, it seems, is crawl­ing with examples of sharp prac­tice, where reviews are not writ­ten in good faith. If you want more back­ground on the present storm, read this art­icle from the New York Times about reviewers-for-hire and this from Forbes about the beha­viour of author Stephen Leather.

Customer reviews are import­ant. Without them, products with estab­lished brands would have too great an advant­age. The Stephen King brand shifts many books; the Ian Hocking brand shifts few. The sources of pro­fes­sional review — news­pa­pers, and so on — can help, but if I want to buy a product, I’ll be happy to know what other buy­ers thought.

As a writer, I do soli­cit reviews. I have after­words in Déjà Vu, Flashback, and Proper Job that point out that I pub­lish without the bene­fit of a pub­lisher, and I need all the push I can get. People do try to help me out. Many of my reviews begin with ‘The author asked me to write a review, so here I go’.

Here’s one such, from a reader called Kvsir:

I’m no critic. I’m just a guy with who like his SciFi/Fantasy stor­ies — a lot! Ironically, con­sid­er­ing my open­ing sen­tence, I gen­er­ally buy on the strength of the cus­tomer reviews which is what promp­ted me to down­load Déjà Vu in the first place so after read­ing Ian’s acknow­ledg­ments and blog excepts at the end of the book I felt moved to add one here for him as I know he’s going to read it. …I’m off to down­load Flashback, hope you make enough coin off that sale to go buy your­self a beer. Cheers!

So I soli­cit reviews in gen­eral. I also reply to tweets and emails ask­ing for reviews. I keep to the form: ‘Hi, this is Ian Hocking. Thanks for tweeting/writing. If you could pop a review on the Kindle store, I’d appre­ci­ate it. No wor­ries if not’. I try not to ask them for a pos­it­ive review, but my replies are typ­ic­ally eli­cited by tweets that praise the book in the first instance.

If someone emails me to say that they liked a book of mine, I’ll often ask them to post up their thoughts as a Kindle store review. Here’s an email I received two days ago:

I just want to tell you, [Proper Job] is one of the fun­ni­est books I have ever read! Last night I was read­ing it in bed and almost chok­ing myself with try­ing to laugh silently so I wouldn’t wake up my hus­band. I can’t remem­ber the last time I read a book that made me laugh so hard!

I asked this reader to post up a review, and she did so — almost word for word. So there’s cer­tainly a pos­it­ive bias in these reviews, and I help to cul­tiv­ate it. Do I feel any eth­ical qualms? Some, since my actions are help­ing to engender this pos­it­ive skew. However, I don’t know these people; I offer them noth­ing in return ; and they’ve already estab­lished that they like the book.

Like any writer, I have fam­ily and friends who want to see me do well. I have ten or so reviews from these, er, ‘inter­ested parties’. They are rarely five-star reviews, how­ever, and those friends/family who did not like the book remained silent. All reviews in this sub­cat­egory are truthful.

I have a simple rule for reviews of my work: they need to be an hon­est reflec­tion of what a per­son thinks, so that a pro­spect­ive reader is get­ting an accur­ate pic­ture of how the work has impacted upon a sample of people. No money should change hands. Any prompt­ing from the author should be of the ‘It would be nice if’ variety.

A word about neg­at­ive reviews. I hate it when a critic writes one, because (i) they haven’t paid for the book, and may not be one of the tar­get audi­ence, (ii) they assume a pos­i­tion super­ior to the writer, and (iii) the effect of their words are pro­por­tion­ate to their reader base. I’m much more inter­ested in neg­at­ive cus­tomer reviews. They are — most times, but not always — genu­ine, unadorned thoughts, and use­ful. Here’s a neg­at­ive review of Déjà Vu, this time a one-star review from Goodreads:

Sub-adolescent prose fails to lift the ped­es­trian plot. Where there were attempts at twists, they were obvi­ous and sig­nalled to the reader in neon lights from sev­eral miles away. Cardboard char­ac­ters per­form series of actions in loc­a­tions described in halt­ing state­ments. They have stil­ted con­ver­sa­tions with each other and the reader is left hard pressed to care what hap­pens to any of them. The crass back­story provided for the (beau­ti­ful, sexy, female) lead prot­ag­on­ist is unne­ces­sar­ily graphic and reads like filler mater­ial while the author is try­ing to work out how to proceed.

An irrit­at­ing thing for me to read, to be sure, and it annoys the hell out of my part­ner, but there is some use­ful feed­back here — not feed­back I agree with, but com­ments I’ll drop into the melt­ing pot of exper­i­ence from which I’ll draw sub­sequent books. If this were a critic, I’d be annoyed, but he’s a pay­ing cus­tomer and he has every right to share his opin­ion. You should have heard me mouth­ing off about Tom Hardy’s accent in the latest Batman film. I’d be embar­rassed if Christopher Nolan heard me.

A second point, which need not be made, is that reviews do not neces­sar­ily reflect the qual­ity of the work. I’ll head over to Amazon right now and pick a review of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.

I dont know who decided Hemingway was a great writer but it couldnt have been a decision reached on the basis of this book because its bloody awful.

Writers! I need YOU

psychology, science

My day job has the title ‘psy­cho­logy lec­turer’, which means dif­fer­ent things to dif­fer­ent people. Part of my time is spent con­duct­ing research. I’m involved in quite dis­par­ate top­ics: one minute I’m help­ing prove dogs can be a bit thick; the next I’m try­ing to fig­ure out fun­da­ment­als of the lan­guage pro­cessing system.

Since September, I’ve been look­ing into the psy­cho­logy of fic­tion. It’s a vast topic. From the per­spect­ive of the writer, one small part involves the cre­at­ive act of get­ting words on paper. What pro­cesses are involved?

Writers! I need YOU.

Are you inter­ested in con­trib­ut­ing to the wobbly, baroque edi­fice that is sci­ence? I’d like to run a study look­ing into cre­ativ­ity and writ­ing. I can’t say much more at this stage. But if you’re inter­ested, please let me know. This won’t involve any great time invest­ment, and there’s no need to visit my lab.

Small print: You’ll need to be over eight­een, have nor­mal or corrected-to-normal vis­ion, and be a nat­ive English speaker.

My Desktop

prouctivity, writing

[See the lar­ger pic­ture]

I’m fas­cin­ated by the series My Desktop, which is a Guardian column by my friend and writer-abite-tine Ben Johncock. The series fea­tures a snap­shot of a writer’s com­puter screen, which allows the word-botherer in ques­tion to riff on their work­flow and habit; some­thing all writers itch to know about, I would suggest.

Here’s mine. You’ll notice that I use a Mac. This is OS X Lion run­ning on my dad’s old Mac Mini. My writ­ing is done within a sep­ar­ate user account. (I have an exact duplic­ate of this account on my MacBook Air.) This means that (i) I can set it up in a way par­tic­u­lar to my wordly habits (it does not, for instance, have a con­figured email cli­ent) and (ii) it provides an uncluttered envir­on­ment that I can rely upon, no mat­ter how untidy my main user account gets. The back­ground was a mono­chrome grey until last year, when I changed it to a more friendly, phys­ical grey. The text ‘Be ori­ginal’ is a reminder that I would like to write books that stand apart from oth­ers. The image itself comes from InterfaceLift.

At the bot­tom of the screen, in the OS X dock, there are no ‘pinned’ applic­a­tions. Minimally does it. The blue com­pass is the Mac browser, Safari. I keep this run­ning for quick checks of Google maps, Wikipedia, and vari­ous pages rel­ev­ant to the cur­rent work. I try to observe Stephen King’s excel­lent rule that you write with the door closed and edit with the door open, so Safari gets an out­ing only when I’m edit­ing, as I am now. Otherwise, I enter [’TC’] in the text if I feel that I need to insert some­thing that I can’t at that moment. ‘TC’ means ‘to come’. For instance, I can never remem­ber the full name of one of my char­ac­ters, so I often write ‘[TC Pasha’s name’], which I’ll replace with Pavel Eduardovitch Nakhimov later.

The pen-and-ink icon is Pages, where I keep the text of the work. I’ve tried writ­ing in applic­a­tions like Byword (where I’m writ­ing this post) but I prefer the feel of Pages. To the right of this is a strange, double-paned icon: OmniFocus.

OmniFocus is a task-manager applic­a­tion that I find use­ful for main­tain­ing lists of edits. Although I haven’t opened it for a few weeks, it was great for work­ing through the edits sug­ges­ted by my agent. I cat­egor­ised them as major or minor and kept a record of what I’d done.

On the left of the desktop, in the win­dow called ‘Amber Rooms 101′, you’ll see three files. One of these is my cur­rent draft. Another is the pre­vi­ous draft, which I’m ran­sack­ing. The third is a text file con­tain­ing notes about what I want to do with the cur­rent draft. This folder is actu­ally a search. It’s look­ing for ‘AR101’ in the title of the file. When I move onto another draft, I’ll cre­ate new files with ‘AR102’.

In the Finder bar at the top, you’ll see a small blue box icon. This is DropBox. I use it to syn­chron­ise files between my machines. I have a Writing folder access­ible to this user account, but my other DropBox files are hidden.

Music? Never listen to it dur­ing writ­ing or edit­ing. The only other things on my phys­ical desk, at which I stand rather than sit, are late-nineteenth-century maps of St Petersburg.

The Cabinet of Curiosities

writing

Some cen­tur­ies ago, it was com­mon for wealthy indi­vidu­als to indulge their appet­ite for the strange using so-called cab­in­ets of curi­os­it­ies. These were not cab­in­ets in the mod­ern sense. They were rooms arranged with arte­facts for which cat­egor­ies had yet to be inven­ted. Narwhal horns. Fossils.

There is a sense in which my cur­rent novel, The Amber Rooms (Saskia Brandt 3), is a cab­inet of curi­os­it­ies. Even now, I can­not be sure how the ele­ments will cohere. They simply interest me. There is the Amber room itself. There are ele­ments of Soviet pro­pa­ganda, such as songs ded­ic­ated to Josef Stalin. To this list I could add another six or seven ele­ments; how­ever, to do so here would spoil the book.

From Wikipedia:

The jux­ta­pos­i­tion of such dis­par­ate objects, accord­ing to Horst Bredekamp’s ana­lysis (Bredekamp 1995) encour­aged com­par­is­ons, find­ing ana­lo­gies and par­al­lels and favoured the cul­tural change from a world viewed as static to a dynamic view of end­lessly trans­form­ing nat­ural his­tory and a his­tor­ical per­spect­ive that led in the sev­en­teenth cen­tury to the germs of a sci­entific view of reality.

I am cur­rently two thirds of the way through the final draft. In six weeks or so, it will be com­plete. The meta­phors at the sen­tence level, scene level, and the level of the story itself will have come together. Their jux­ta­pos­i­tions will be set. It might sur­prise you that I do not know for sure when this will hap­pen, or even if. What is the book about? How does this qual­ity of ‘about­ness’ inform the plot? Which impres­sions will be left in the mind of the reader six months after the book is closed?

The curi­os­it­ies for my novel Déjà Vu made little sense to me at the close of the first draft. It was only later, months later, that I changed the research pro­ject of Jennifer Proctor from some­thing inter­est­ing but them­at­ic­ally irrel­ev­ant to time travel. That was the eureka moment for Déjà Vu. Curiosities, which I had been col­lect­ing for years, came together.

For Flashback, the eureka moment arrived early. I was read­ing a fairytale in which a char­ac­ter cut her fin­ger and fell into a bewitched sleep. Then I under­stood how the recon­struc­tion of memory uni­fied stor­ies of Saskia, Cory, and Jem.

Right now, whenever I open the file con­tain­ing the latest draft of the Amber Rooms, I feel like an 18th-century man of inde­pend­ent means brows­ing his cab­inet of curi­os­it­ies. Why are these things inter­est­ing? How should a vis­itor be intro­duced to them? What are they doing in this room any­way? Back to the basic ques­tion: why are these things interesting?

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.

Wheat, Meet Chaff. Chaff, Meet Wheat.

ebooks,

Scott Pack on the influx of self-published work to ebooks:

So I wel­come this influx, these pre­vi­ously unpub­lished hoards.

There’s more:

And here’s the thing: a ‘tra­di­tional’ deal is still the goal of most of these authors. OK, so there are many who have eschewed the sys­tem and will con­tinue to do so but the major­ity would love the cred­ib­il­ity, sup­port and, er, lower roy­alty rate that a deal with one of the major pub­lish­ing houses would bring. Most do feel that pub­lish­ers add value and see the self-publishing option as a new route to being ‘dis­covered’. And if they remain undis­covered they are still able make a few quid, which can soften the blow.

I guess I’m one of these authors look­ing for a tra­di­tional deal. Frankly, I’d rather have pro­fes­sion­als take care of the cover, copy­ed­it­ing, and so on. Many e-self-published writers feel this way. That’s the major plus against the minus of lower royalties.