Wise advice for freelance anythings

The most excellent John Walker has written a wee bit of advice for aspiring games journalists, and I reckon much of it is relevant to all kinds of freelancing.

 This job is a not a privilege. It’s something you got by being good at what you do – you earned it. Anyone who tells you it’s a privilege is trying to get something from you they shouldn’t have. That’s the language of those who want you to do just a little bit more work than they’re paying you for, or put up with conditions that don’t feel appropriate.

…Make a fuss. Good grief, the number of times I’ve not been paid for work, or screwed over in some way, is awful. It’s generally down to incompetence rather than malice, but it’s unacceptable.

1,000 copies of Coffin Dodgers

A wee milestone: Coffin Dodgers just sold its 1,000th copy, and to gladden my heart further it’s just outside the humour top ten (it’s number 12) and number 440 in the UK Kindle Store. The charts are updated hourly, but the book has been in or around the humour top 20 for more than a week now. As ever, I’m very grateful to everyone who’s said nice things about it or recommended it to anybody else.

I’d love to say I’ve learnt some really important lessons about publishing, but I haven’t. I’ve noticed a few things, though.

* First and foremost, ebooks don’t follow the “big splash then slow decline” sales model: my sales appear to be accelerating. In its first month Coffin Dodgers sold 89 copies; so far this month I’ve sold 260. That’s happening without my involvement, so I’m assuming there’s a positive feedback loop where Amazon spots books that are doing reasonably well and recommends them to readers.

* People don’t read free samples. That might be a side-effect of 99p pricing – people think “oh, what the hell”, because 99p isn’t very much – but it’s clear that people aren’t going “new author, eh? I’ll download the free sample to see if I like it” before hitting the buy button. I’ve had a few refunds and at least one one-star rating on Goodreads.com, which I’m not going to obsess about. Oh no. (For what it’s worth, the total number of refunds is about six, which isn’t a lot.)

* One star. One! No explanation. Just one star. One!

* Amazon’s Kindle is where it’s at: it’s to books what iTunes is to music. Last month I sold 272 books on Amazon UK, 3 on Amazon US, 3 via Smashwords and one via Apple. The difference might be sheer luck – maybe iTunes would show the same feedback loop as Amazon if I’d sold more there – but for now at least, you could concentrate solely on the Kindle without losing much sleep or many sales. It’ll be interesting to see if that changes now that the Kobo reader is selling in WH Smith.

* As I’ve mentioned before, pricing is key when nobody knows who you are. Whether you like it or not, 99p is the price people expect to pay for ebooks from unknown authors. If your objective is to be read – and mine is – then pricing higher is probably counter productive.

* One!

* This isn’t a living. Assuming sales of 300 copies a month, which is pretty good, that’s around £90 in royalties per month – it’ll keep you in Moleskines, but it won’t pay the mortgage. What it does do, I think, is prove that no matter how niche your book, it’ll find an audience. And it encourages you to write more by flattering your ego, and by making you think things such as “okay, one book doing 300 a month is ninety quid, but if I had ten books doing that…”

* I really need to get my arse in gear with my other books. A non-fiction one is imminent, and I’m swithering between two fiction titles: one’s a sequel to Coffin Dodgers and the other one isn’t. Time to commit, I think. Or two write two books simultaneously.

The iPhone 4S: “the best thing Apple has ever made”

My friends at Techradar like the iPhone 4S, it seems, and they’ve put together a typically exhaustive review.

Executive summary: if you have an iPhone 4, there’s no real need to upgrade once you’ve installed iOS. If you’ve got an older iPhone, however, the 4GS is a huge upgrade.

I’d like to get my hands on one to play with the Siri voice recognition and see how it copes with my accent, but my car needs an MOT and service. Damn you, reality!

“Self-doubt convinces us that our own failure is inevitable, an unavoidable recourse based on our own screaming lack of talent.”

Chuck Wendig wrote this post for writers, but I think it’s relevant to any kind of creative activity:

Suddenly Old Mister Doubt is jabbering in your ear.

You’re not good enough.

You’ll never make it, you know.

Everyone’s disappointed in you.

Where are your pants? Normal people wear pants.

…self-doubt is the enemy of the writer. It is one of many: laziness, fear, ego, porn, Doritos. But it is most certainly one of the worst, if not the worst, in the writer’s rogue gallery of nemeses.

The A to Z of ebook publishing

I thought it might be an idea to do a huge ebook-advice post based on the various discussions we’ve had here and on other sites, so that’s what I’ve done: an enormous A to Z of ebook publishing aimed at would-be ebook publishers. If there’s anything I’ve missed or got hopelessly wrong, I’m sure you’ll let me know in the comments.

Read more

Digital data insurance, or: don’t let your memories die when your hard disk does

My Apple Time Capsule packed up yesterday. One minute it was working fine; the next, it sounded like a washing machine full of hammers. The hard disk is gone, which is a pain – it had my iTunes library, three years of home movies and ten years of digital photos.

I had a backup, of course, so it’s just a pain in the arse rather than a complete disaster. But if I’d put my trust in my Time Capsule, if I hadn’t assumed that it would pack up eventually, I’d be up Shit Creek without a boat – and quite possibly divorced. Losing every single video of your daughter is not the sort of thing that makes you popular with your better half.

I can’t stress this enough: hard disk failures are more common than you might think. I’ve had two in the last six months. If you don’t have a backup of all your irreplaceable files – the digital photos, the footage of baby’s first steps, the novel you’re going to finish this Christmas – Murphy’s Law says that sooner or later you’ll lose the lot.

So I’m down to a single external drive, which leaves me with a choice: buy another external drive to mirror my libraries (my MacBook Pro’s hard disk is too small for iTunes, iPhoto and videos; even an upgrade would run out of room pretty sharpish), or sign up for a remote backup service.

I’ve gone for the latter: Mozy. It looks good, it’s reasonably priced, it’s encrypted, it’s offsite and it does incremental backups (so you’re not hurling tens of gigabytes around the place every time you update), so it appears to tick all the boxes. More to the point, at just under five quid per month it’s a pretty cheap way to protect priceless files.

I’ll let you know how I get on. I just have to upload 282 gigabytes of data first.

Ready, fire, aim! Something to check before you write a novel

Remember that book I was writing? I thought I’d post an update.

After a lot of work, eight drafts and two printers I’ve sent it out to some people, and I’ve had loads of feedback about it from agents and other publishing insiders. The dialogue is great. It’s really atmospheric. The characters are fun. The book is variously “quite funny”, “funny”, “very funny” and “extremely funny”.

Nobody wants to take it on.

Apparently it’s not the writing, but the genre*. It’s a comic thriller, and comic thrillers are the red-headed stepchild of the mainstream fiction business. Everyone knows they exist, but nobody wants them in their publishing house.

If I’d known that two years ago it might have saved me quite a bit of effort.

So here’s a top tip. If you want to write novels – that is, if you want to write novels that get published – then it might be an idea to do what Ian Rankin did before you start plotting. Rankin looked at what sold, and concluded that Books With Cops In was the genre for him.

As for me, I’m starting another one. I’ll tell you about it when there’s something worth saying.

* In most cases, anyway. A few agents told me that at 67,000 words it’s just too short; for mainstream fiction publishers apparently expect 80,000 words plus or they won’t even look at it. Unfortunately for me 67K is the right length for the story, and any more would make the story sag.

Update, June 2011: I decided to publish the book myself on Kindle, iBooks and so on. It’s called Coffin Dodgers, it’s doing quite well, and you can find out more about it here, if you like.

How to write about science

This has been doing the rounds on Twitter, but just in case you missed it: Martin Robbins shows how to write a newspaper article about science-related topics.

In this paragraph I will provide balance with a quote from another scientist in the field. Since I picked their name at random from a Google search, and since the research probably hasn’t even been published yet for them to see it, their response to my e-mail will be bland and non-committal.

“The research is useful”, they will say, “and gives us new information. However, we need more research before we can say if the conclusions are correct, so I would advise caution for now.”

If the subject is politically sensitive this paragraph will contain quotes from some fringe special interest group of people who, though having no apparent understanding of the subject, help to give the impression that genuine public “controversy” exists.

Waterhouse on Newspaper Style is out again

Great news for journalists and anyone else interested in newspapers and language: Waterhouse on Newspaper Style, by the late Keith Waterhouse, is back in print.

This is a typical Waterhouse quote:

When Sam Goldwyn advised that cliches should be avoided like the plague, he forgot that the plague, by its very nature, is almost impossible to avoid. That is what gave the Black Death such a bad name.

Waterhouse on style

The late, great Keith Waterhouse had some very strong opinions about journalists’ writing. Press Gazette has published some of them. I liked this one.

The standard Fleet Street excuse for shoddy or silly writing has always been that the offending story was written against the clock.

It usually isn’t so.

Deadline fever encourages taut, crisp writing with a maximum of facts and a minimum of frills. The straightforward hard news story, phoned virtually straight on to page one, rarely displays any of the faults discussed in this book.

The truly awfully-written story, of the kind that ought to be hung on the walls of schools of journalism as an example of how not to do it, demands time.

The puns have to be sweated over, the laborious intro has to be reworked again and again until it cannot possibly be any more forced, the jocular references have to be carefully strung together like blunt razor blades dangling from a magnet.