This Writing Life

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.

Probably not.

But the data for sales of my novel, Déjà Vu, which I’ve published on the Kindle, iBooks and Smashwords, point to a sales ratio of about 1000:1.

Kindle Sales

Déjà Vu unit sales per month, beginning in March, are: 320, 938, 915, 738, 844, 643 and 581.

Smashwords (this includes Barnes and Noble, and a billion other ebook stores)

For the same period: 4.

iBooks

For the same period: 1.

Overall, then, the ratio of sales Kindle:other is 4979:5. Call it 1000:1. If Déjà Vu is representative of more general trends (it won’t be; but it’s in the ballpark, I expect), the Kindle store could be around 1000 times more successful than the other stores combined. Remember that the blurb, cover image and price are identical across stores.

What Leads to These Differences?

All of my marketing – if you can call it that – has pointed people to the Kindle store.

Amazon has a larger customer base to begin with, so cross-promotion will be more effective. That is, when Déjà Vu is recommended to people who have a history of buying similar titles, there are more of those people around to see the recommendation. It could well be that many people see Déjà Vu on Amazon when they’re not looking for it; few see my book on Smashwords or iBooks.

Amazon has a mature chart-based shopfront. I don’t think Smashwords does this very well. And when I (rarely) look at iBooks, the charts seem to be full of odd books, and they are all written by Jeremy Clarkson. Nothing wrong with that; but it suggests a smaller number of readers.

For the version of Déjà Vu sold on Amazon, I can control the look and feel of the ebook precisely. The version sold on Smashwords is produced using a Word template and, frankly, it looks like a piece of crap. Blockquotes don’t work properly; indentation is shot to hell. Likewise, the version for iBooks looks awful. Now, ebooks aren’t meant to look beautiful – but the creator should be able to provide a well-designed document whose structure melts away so that the reader can enjoy the story.

A Caveat

It’s worth noting that both iBooks and Smashwords are pushing huge numbers of books. Scott Pack recently reported large sales numbers for Confessions of a GP. And my friend Stephen J Sweeney has been selling his Battle for the Solar System books like gangbusters across many platforms. But Amazon has the lion’s share of this market for now.

In 2008, I wrote an entry on this blog entitled The End.

About a year and a half ago, I finished the second Saskia Brandt novel, Flashback. My thoughts for the third one centred around Imperial Russia. I was particularly interested in placing Saskia – who derives her advantages from an almost direct connection between her nervous system and the Internet – in a situation where she could have no real advantage beyond her knowledge of the future.

I don’t remember much about the experience of writing that book, The Amber Rooms, so it’s interesting to continue reading this entry.

[The Amber Rooms] was a pleasure to write. I wanted to produce something that reminded me of Alistair MacLean, where the story’s structure reflects a heist and the reader not entirely informed about how much the protagonist knows. To help get this right, I plotted much of the novel in advance.

I think about my life at that point. In short: Publishers weren’t buying my books; I felt redundant as a writer; I knew I would soon abandon my goal of writing books. That abandonment – that realisation of the toxicity of my situation – was brief. I am writing again. However, I considered The Amber Rooms to be a last waltz. The manuscript would remain on my computer, keeping the unpublished Flashback company, while I turned my back on the one thing I do very well: write.

The point of writing a book, I suppose, is to get it published. I’m not confident that it will be picked up by a publisher – not because I lack confidence in the book, but because the second book hasn’t found a publisher yet. The third book isn’t likely to shift if the second one hasn’t.

And:

Do I think I deserve to be published? No. That’s too strong. I mean this: I don’t write books so I can put them in a drawer.

Let me turn back to an earlier entry. This is dated 1st November, 2007, five days before my birthday:

At the moment, I have some ideas that refuse to tessellate. I hope my gentle readers won’t be offended if I don’t go into them in too much detail. Suffice it to say that I’m reading some excellent oral histories of women anarchists in 1870s Russia. An intriguing architectural folly known as the Amber Room will feature.

I have stood in the Amber Room. The Russian government would prefer visitors not to take pictures there, so I did not. But I stood within it. I studied its panels and frowned into its mirrors. I closed my eyes and breathed in; it did not smell of pine, which was unexpected. The moment I remember most clearly is my girlfriend looking at me as though she loved me. So we made it to the Amber Room. This strange thing I do – fiction – has not been quite destroyed by my failure to convince a traditional publisher to take a chance on it.

I tried to imagine Saskia Brandt reflected in one of those tall mirrors between the amber panels.

I made it to the end point of the creative process for Flashback. That is, I got the book to readers.

Yesterday, someone in America called Suki read Flashback and wrote:

Hocking does not make a misstep in this beautifully constructed novel, and when his talent for plot meets his talent for prose, the result is extraordinary. I look forward to the next Saskia Brandt adventure!

On the 17th March, 2008, I wrote:

So what is it? What’s the story, Saskia? Why are you standing on the threshold of the Amber Room, and what does it have to do with going home?

The story is…well, it’s another adventure. All stories are adventures. And going home.

Sailing into St Petersburg via the Gulf of Finland – 6.30 a.m., 23rd August 2011

Scott Pack, of The Friday Project, has been sharing some sales data on one of his most successful titles, Confessions of a GP.

Last week an ebook by an author you’ve probably never heard of celebrated one full year in both the Kindle and iBooks bestseller charts, and did so firmly ensconced in the Top 10 of both.

I’m still not sure about the ethical grounds for this book – which is a polite way of saying that I don’t see how it could have been written without compromising patient confidentiality. Is it fictional? However, the data are interesting.

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.

When I wrote Déjà Vu, I wasn’t sure if it was any good. Certainly, it was 120,000 of sustained narrative and kept me entertained, but I couldn’t be sure about the effect on other people. Turns out they liked it.

The novel I wrote after Déjà Vu was a very different one: a coming-of-age comedy based on my experiences of being an ice-cream man, which I did to help pay for my university studies. I laughed a great deal when I wrote it. I thought it was good. I sent it to agents and publishers, and instead of the form rejections I’d received for Déjà Vu, I got hand-written replies. More than half those agents and publishers enjoyed reading it. However, because of the demands of modern publishing, full lists, and so on, they could not proceed with it.

I wasn’t quite ready to give up. Since 2005, I’ve returned to the manuscript, tweaked the gags, added colour, and generally improved it. I wrote a film script of the story in 2009.

When I first got together with my agent, I sent him the manuscript for Proper Job (along with Déjà Vu and Flashback). I knew that most of the people in the industry who had read the book enjoyed it, so I was more confident in Proper Job finding a publisher than my two science fiction novels.

A year passed, during which Déjà Vu almost, but not quite, got picked up. I asked my agent how he was getting on with Proper Job. He told me he had never received it. This puzzled me because I’d been careful in naming it in the body of the email. Anyway, my heart sank. If I’m honest with myself, this is one of the reasons I thought my agent and I should part ways.

Over the years, whenever I came back to the novel, it sucked me in. It made me laugh. No mean feat when I’ve read some of the gags more than twenty times. Plus, the marketing part of my brain – you know, the bit that never kicks in until I’m months into a project and realise its potential readership is, like, five – that marketing part told me this is the kind of book that anybody might pick up. It won’t elicit prejudice in quite the same way as a science fiction work. It’s a boy-meets-girl comedy set in Cornwall during the eclipse of 1999, that’s all.

Now, of course, I’m in a position to say the hell with it and publish the thing myself on the Kindle.

On Monday of this week, I went to The Grand, a well-preserved Victorian hotel overlooking the Leas in Folkestone. I spent every morning, afternoon and evening working on a final draft. Next week, I’ll send the thing off to my favourite freelance editor, Clare Christian, and get her take.

I’ve just realised that one of the major changes I’ve made in this latest drive is to introduce an element of faith – not religion, exactly, but faith – in the main character. I wonder if this is my unconscious mind telling me to have faith in the story. If so, it needn’t have bothered. I’ve always had faith in it.

If you’re interested in the creative process at all, you’ve probably come across a blog called The Creative Identity, run by Stephanella Walsh. It comprises great essays on the issues involved in writing. Stephanella also conducts interviews. This morning, there’s one featuring me.

Almost a year ago exactly, in my second Creative Times, I linked to a fabulous, if slightly perturbing, post by writer Ian Hocking. In it, he talked about giving up writing.

Later on:

Q: What is the writing tendency you most deplore in yourself?

A: I haven’t learned to fully switch off the Evil Editor on the shoulder. This is probably because I spent so long switching him on.

This week, I’ve published my third Kindle book, A Moment in Berlin and Other Stories. It’s shorter than the first two, and falls into both the ‘story story’ and ‘literary fiction’ domains, so I don’t expect it to generate anything like the sales or reader feedback of Déjà Vu and Flashback. However, it feels good to get it out there.

I bought the cover image from iStockPhoto, searching for “Berlin”. It cost me £50 to purchase the image at a good resolution. I’m allowed to reproduce it no more than 499,999 times – which is certainly doable. I blew up the image using Pixelmator, applied a depth-of-field filter to blur out the top right and bottom left portions of the picture, and increased the saturation along the diagonal.

It’s currently on sale at the lowest price Amazon offers (86p). I would prefer something lower, given that Déjà Vu is selling for the same amount, but I think 86p is a fair enough price for four short stories.

The stories are, of course, horribly depressing.

Enjoy!

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.