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.

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.

There are, to generalize wildly, two types of series novels. Let’s call them type (a) and type (b).

The type (a) series consists of books that follow the same protagonist(s) through a series of adventures or incidents — but in which each book tells a self-contained story. [...]

The type (b) series consists of books that follow the same protagonist(s) through a continuous, developing story/world. While they may be structured as novels, they do not stand alone and a new reader who tries to jump in the middle will be lost. [...]

What I’d like to put to you is that writing a type (b) series is qualitatively harder than writing a type (a) series.

I agree. I’ve written three novels that follow the adventures of a protagonist, Saskia Brandt: Déjà Vu, Flashback (working title) and The Amber Rooms (working title). The story has been somewhat recent at the beginning of each book. Saskia finds herself in a new situation that is not narratively connected (more than loosely) with what’s gone before. I’ve done this partly because spanning a story across multiple books doesn’t strike me as the right thing to do; and because there’s a chance that new readers can come on board at any point without being disoriented. Plus, writing a story that spans just one book is difficult enough.

► The art of being late

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service (e.g. on a cell phone), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook.

You’ll have noticed that I include my Twitter feed in the footer text of this website. So, when I’m drinking a coffee and feel that the world needs to know; or I’m stuck on a train outside Basingstoke; or I’m watching Dr Who…then I can tweet.

Twitter is one of those technologies that gives Web 2.0 a bad name. That is, whenever I explain it to people who don’t use social networking thingies, they look at me like I’m a complete idiot.

Just like you’re looking at your web browser right now, very probably.

For a long while, I’ve been interested in somehow capturing – live – the process of creating a novel. I’d like to put together a form of parallel art that mirrors the insertion, deletion and movement of words around the manuscript, and perhaps make a time-lapse film of it. I’m still a long way from being able to do this. Some species of screen capture technology pointed at my word processor might do the trick, but the bandwidth implication makes me dizzy.

So, as part of this experimentation with reflecting the ongoing development of a novel, I have created a Twitter account for my heroine, Saskia Brandt. The current novel (my third in this series; the first was published as Déjà Vu) is set in 1907. That’s where my time traveller has wound up.

Who is Saskia Brandt? (If you haven’t read Déjà Vu and think you might, look away now.) Saskia is physically fit, about 30 years old – nobody is quite sure of her age – and a former detective with the European Föderatives Investigationsbüro, a specialist organisation set up in 2019 to address EU-wide computer crime. She was forcibly put through an experimental procedure that left her with a small, glass-covered chip at the back of her brain. It contains a digital copy of a murdered woman’s mind. It contains what is, essentially, Saskia’s personality. The original personality of her physical brain is suppressed; though it can usurp control in her dreams and moments of stress. Various skills were flashed onto the chip before insertion, including weapons handling, language competency (she understands more than 6000 languages), and special programs that post-process sensory information. In 2023, she travelled backwards in time and is currently being hunted by her former employers. Now she’s in St Petersburg in 1907.

Saskia Brandt is going to tweet her ‘status’ as the current novel is being written. You’re very welcome to add Saskia to your Twitter friends, if you have an account. She’ll add you straight back. Her Twitter address is: http://twitter.com/saskiabrandt You don’t, by the way, need an account to follow her. Her status updates are now included in the page footer, and you can visit the above address manually.

Here are some rules:

• She will update her status about once a day; her time frame is ‘live’ in the sense that she will tweet about things happening to her in that day’s writing session
• Her statuses will contain teasers, not spoilers
• Though she is updating her status as though she had a mobile phone in 1907, the character in the final novel will not be stopping every few pages to send a tweet
• Saskia will reply to your questions if you ask them, but will not spoil the story

Interested? Then make Saskia a Twitter friend. I’m currently 4400 words into the manuscript (which will total around 100,000), so Saskia will be tweeting for the next few months. Here’s the latest tweet. For her, it’s November 1907 and she’s travelling into St Petersburg on behalf of a criminal organisation which (I think) she’s just betrayed.

I’ve made my own, modest contribution to this trend by bungling a description of firearms not once but several times in the original publication of Déjà vu. I described the cylinder of a revolver as the barrel (hey, it’s somewhat barrel-like!) and was very loose in my treatment of the term ‘firing pin’. Fortunately, an American reader pointed this out – in a genuinely kind manner – and I’ve put it straight for subsequent versions of the book.

Says Michael:

This cultural difference also results in some very palpable differences between writing about guns and gunplay by British authors versus American authors. With American crime and action writers – if you know what to listen for, at any rate – it’s easy to get a sense that they are writing from first-hand experience. With Brits, it’s equivalently easy to get a sense they are writing straight from research. This is because, generally, at some point in the book, the British writer will let slip one small but enormously glaring boner about the makeup or operations of firearms. When this happens, it’s like getting a brief glimpse around the edge of the cardboard building facade in a Hollywood set: nothing else has changed, all the other details are still right. But, suddenly, the whole thing just looks irretrievably fake.

I’ll get m’coat.

Hell, I am busting to fire a projectile weapon. I want to know how much it stings one’s palm; what it smells like; how loud it is; does it make that PEEEEOW(OW)(ow) sound liberally employed on the foley track for The Professionals? I also wouldn’t mind hitting something, as long as it’s made of clay.

I wonder if Michael has any in his cupboard.