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.

Tabloid-fuelled Twitter hate

The parents of missing child Madeleine McCann appeared at the Levenson inquiry into newspapers’ bad behaviour yesterday, and Twitter proved beyond doubt that it’s the original story, not the retraction, that many people remember. As the McCanns described some extraordinarily evil behaviour by newspapers and their hired help, all kinds of apparently respectable people posted all kinds of appalling allegations on Twitter. Where did they get such ideas? The Guardian’s Esther Addley knows:

Kate and Gerry McCann… do not appear to be afraid of the press. What, after all, is it going to do to them? Accuse them of killing their three-year-old daughter Madeleine and transporting her corpse in their hire car? They’ve done that already, many times over. Report that they were undergoing IVF to get a “new” child to “replace” Madeleine? Done that too.

Suggest they were taking part in orgies and swingers’ parties? That they had kept Madeleine’s body in their freezer after murdering her? That they had sold their daughter into slavery to pay off family debts? They’ve seen it all before. Each one of those allegations appeared in a British newspaper in the months after this ordinary couple from rural Leicestershire became the victims of the most terrible crime any parent can imagine, the kidnap of their child.

I’m no fan of media regulation, but you can’t read that and think “yes! Self-regulation and the Press Complaints Council really does work!”

1,000 copies of Coffin Dodgers

Update: Coffin Dodgers hit the 10,000 mark in February 2012. I’ve broken down the numbers here.

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.

“EU says water is not healthy”, says made-up man

The Express:

EU SAYS WATER IS NOT HEALTHY

In a scarcely believable ­ruling, a panel of experts threw out a claim that regular water consumption is the best way to rehydrate the body.

The bizarre diktat from Brussels has far-reaching implications for member states, including Britain, as no water sold in the EU can now claim to protect against dehydration.

Any producer breaching the order, signed by European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, faces being jailed for up to two years.

The Guardian:

This isn’t really a rule so much as a piece of advice, which member states are free to interpret as they wish… The claim wasn’t submitted for a genuine product, but was created as a deliberate ‘test’ exercise by the two professors, who were apparently already unhappy with the European Food Standards Authority. The panel were well aware of it’s absurdity too, noting drily that “the proposed risk factors,” the conditions addressed by the hypothetical product, in this case water loss, “are measures or water depletion and thus are measures of the disease (dehydration).”

Executive summary: the EFSA decided to be pedantic, and point out that water alone doesn’t prevent dehydration; you need sufficient water, as well as various other odds and sods such as salt.

The Guardian, again:

So the ruling seems pretty sensible to me, or at least as sensible as a ruling can be when the claim being tested is vexatious in the first place. It’s accurate advice, and it prevents companies selling bottled water from making exaggerated claims for their products, which is a good thing.

Comment on the Express article:

This must be the same group of so called scientist that made the false claim that man and CO2 is causing global warming. No wonder no body has any respect for science anymore.

In which I compare Internet Explorer to Sugababes

Oh yes.

On the face of it, Internet Explorer doesn’t have much in common with Sugababes: IE isn’t beautiful, doesn’t sing and isn’t likely to dress in a primary-coloured PVC dominatrix outfit to perform at G-A-Y.

However, they’re not as different as you might think.

The angry face of DCI Banks

I’m hopeless at catching programmes when they’re actually broadcast, so it’s taken me a while to get round to watching the DCI Banks adaptations of Peter Robinson’s books. I like the books, but I encountered exactly the same problem I had with the recent dramatisation of Mark Billingham’s DI Thorne novels. No, not the annoying sidekick, or the maverick cop breaks the rules but always gets his man blah blah blah… the problem I had was overacting. It was bad in Thorne, but even worse in Banks.

Put it this way: if you created a drinking game where you had to down a shot every time DCI Banks made this face:

You’d be very pissed very, very quickly.

That face put me off the programme. I mean it. It’s not just his “I’m angry at a suspect” face. It’s his “I wish I’d had some toast before leaving the house” face, his “I wonder what I’ll have for my tea” face and his “I’m feeling quite chipper today, actually” face.

I don’t get it. Was there a memo that says all TV detectives are allowed two facial expressions, Really Pissed Off and Absolutely Fucking Furious?

Not Nokia-ing on Heaven’s door

Nokia’s keynote this morning wasn’t quite what I was hoping for. 

“Our ambition is to surprise you at every turn,” said Kevin Shields, a man whose job title – senior vice president of program and product management for the smart device – is longer than many people’s lives.

And then he started shouting.

“It looks AWESOME!” he bellowed, channelling his inner Ballmer and scaring the hell out of the first six rows. “It feels GREAT in your hand!” he added, frightening everybody again. “It SCREAMS premium!” he screamed.

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!

Bye, Steve

Steve Jobs’ obituary on Techradar. I was getting a bit teary as I was writing the end of it. We’ve lost a giant.

The next iPhone needn’t be fancy

Me, at Techradar:

It’s Apple’s new iPhone event tomorrow, and we know what that means: most of the internet is publishing “ten things Apple will announce tomorrow” articles, most of them split into eleventy-nine pages to rip off advertisers.