I would say that 98 per cent of my time using the mobile web is spent swearing at websites, hurling expletives at interstitials, unleashing angry utterances at URL shorteners and firing f-bombs at Facebook.
The single most fundamental principle of the World Wide Web – the mechanism by which you click on something and something then appears – is being deliberately and widely broken.
Author: Carrie
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“I am sick and tired of sites telling me that I’m doing the internet wrong”
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30,360 copies of Coffin Dodgers
It’s been a while since I shared figures about Coffin Dodgers, so here’s an update for anyone interested in the ins and outs of self-publishing.
Total sales of Coffin Dodgers are sitting at 30,360. That breaks down as 13,660 paid copies and 16,700 freebies; as more and more authors (and publishers) use free copies as a promotional tool, the power of the freebie is fading. When I gave away free copies in February I gave away 3,500 books and sold 8,978; when I did it last month, I gave away 948 and sold 364. Obviously Coffin Dodgers has been out for a while, so that’s a factor, but other people in the ebook game tell me that they’re seeing similar patterns with new titles.
It’s possible to spot a few patterns in the numbers too. They plummet whenever Amazon does a big Kindle promo – who’s going to try unknown authors when people you’ve actually heard of are just as cheap? – and there are noticeable peaks and troughs after good and bad reviews respectively. Kindle borrowing is becoming a thing – last month there was one borrow for every 10 sales in the UK – and refunds remain a very small but slightly annoying thing (am I the only person who reads samples before deciding to buy?).
I’m hardly rolling in cash here – typically I’ll bring in £100ish per month from book sales – but of course that’s cash I wouldn’t have at all if my book was just a manuscript sitting on a hard disk somewhere. It’s nice to see the book find an audience, and I’m still keen to finish the sequel.
I do wonder about the economics of it, though. Like many new ebook authors I’ve found that free promotions are the best way to get much-needed visibility to drive sales, and I’ve found that pricing above 99p kills those sales dead. That’s fine by me: I don’t expect people to pay the same as they’d pay for a guaranteed hit such as the new Ian Rankin, and I’m not pricing so low that I’d need to sell 10 billion books to afford a loaf of bread. However, if free promotions are becoming significantly less effective (which they are) and name-author books are dropping dramatically in price (which they are – seven of today’s UK top ten Kindle books are just £0.20 each, including Life of Pi) then the “give lots away then sell lots at 99p” model could be doomed.
That’s interesting, because at 20p – a royalty of about 7p per book, less VAT and other charges – you need to sell huge numbers of books just to cover your basic costs. Writers are usually the worst editors of their own work, and a quick scan through the Kindle pages demonstrates that they’re often pretty crappy cover designers too. If the going rate for an ebook drops to 20p, you’d need to shift 10,000 books just to cover the cost of your cover and a very quick edit. How many self-published books are going to sell in those quantities?
It’ll be interesting to see how this all pans out.
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Freelancing in interesting times
I’m finishing off my last few commissions for 2012 – I thought I’d finished yesterday, but Freelance Santa dropped off some last-minute work, a present that’s very much appreciated – and I can honestly say this has been one of the weirdest years I’ve had, work-wise.
There’s a famously sarcastic curse: “may you live in interesting times”. It’s certainly been an interesting year for freelance tech writers. Some much-loved magazines have closed (thankfully the people on them have found other gigs), many new titles expect everybody to contribute their efforts for free, and online cesspools such as Mail Online have crashed the tech reporting party because Apple stories generate enormous amounts of traffic. And like every freelance with a website, I’ve been approached by 432,728 PR companies wanting to publish their editorial on this blog.
I really didn’t think I’d end 2012 still working as a freelance – the summer was particularly worrying – but I’m still hanging in there, doing a bit of copywriting, a bit of blogging, my weekly BBC Radio Scotland thing and lots of magazine and online work.
I’ve been writing for some interesting new launches – if you haven’t already checked it out, the iPad magazine Tech. weekly [iTunes link] is essentially The Week for technology, so you can read that and get hard information instead of spending loads of time wading through linkbait headlines, and Creative Bloq is a cool mix of design advice, inspiration and stuff to drool over – and while many great magazines have folded, old favourites such as .net, MacFormat and Official Windows Magazine continue to do really nice work both in print and in digital form.
Then there’s Techradar, whose mix of fast facts, expert analysis and taking the piss – guess who does a lot of that last one? – is doing astonishing numbers. I’ve never worked on a daily newspaper, but Techradar’s internet-speed deadlines give me the kind of adrenalin rush I imagine print hacks get from going to press.
I’ve been doing this since 1998, and one thing’s remained constant throughout: I know how lucky I am to be able to do what I do. Journalism, whether print, online or broadcast, is an exciting industry full of really cool, creative people, and it’s a joy to be part of it.
If I’ve worked for you or with you this year, or if you’ve enjoyed reading or listening to anything I’ve done, then thanks. You’re awesome.
Merry Christmas, everyone.
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Changes to UK copyright law are coming – and they’re good
Changes to create greater freedom to use copyright works such as computer games, paintings, photographs, films, books, and music, while protecting the interests of authors and right owners, were announced today by Business Secretary Vince Cable. These form part of the Government’s response to creating a modern, robust and flexible copyright framework.
New measures include provisions to allow copying of works for individuals’ own personal use, parody and for the purposes of quotation. They allow people to use copyright works for a variety of valuable purposes without permission from the copyright owners. They will also bring up to date existing exceptions for education, research and the preservation of materials.
Given the lobbying that’s been going on over this, it’s a pleasant surprise to see that the private copying bits haven’t been torpedoed.
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The web we lost
A great post on tech changes by Anil Dash:
The tech industry and its press have treated the rise of billion-scale social networks and ubiquitous smartphone apps as an unadulterated win for regular people, a triumph of usability and empowerment. They seldom talk about what we’ve lost along the way in this transition, and I find that younger folks may not even know how the web used to be.
So here’s a few glimpses of a web that’s mostly faded away…
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Apple maps can get lost
Easy joke, I know. Me on Techradar: Google Maps is back on iOS, and it’s great.
There’s a famous bit in the classic film Crocodile Dundee when a mugger pulls a knife on him. “That’s not a knife,” he chuckles, and pulls out an enormous Bowie knife. “THAT’s a knife.”
Today Google is Crocodile Dundee…
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A quick plug for something really cool
I’m a big fan of The Week, a weekly digest of the world’s key news stories, and I’ve always thought a similar publication for technology would be a really good idea. Other people clearly think the same, and here it is: Tech., a weekly iPad magazine from the nice people at Techradar. I haven’t seen the finished version yet but I’ve seen some of the content, and I think it’s going to be really good.
Update, 30 November:
Tech. is now in the app store, and while I’m a little bit biased – I’ve written some of it – I reckon it’s really, really good. It’s cheap, too.
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Kinecting the kids
I’m writing this while my daughter explores Disneyland – not the real one, the one that resembles Hell with cartoon characters, but the Kinect one. Kinect Disneyland Adventures is really rather good if your child is the right age for it.
I bought the Kinect motion controller a long time ago, partly out of curiosity and largely because I thought it’d be fun for my wee girl. She was a little too young for it, though, so what I’d hoped would be fun was just endlessly frustrating. It seems that, for us at least, five is the right age – so instead of wandering around, getting lost and frustrated as she used to, she’s currently dancing with the space monster Stitch.
Get the age right and Kinect really is brilliant for kids: titles such as Pixar Rush and Once Upon A Monster are fantastic fun, their jumping around assuaging any parental guilt about letting the children play videogames.
For grown-ups, though, it’s the same kind of thing as the Nintendo Wii’s motion sensing, with the initial excitement and wow factor fading until it’s gathering dust. That might just be me – voice control of the console needs more volume than I can risk when the family is in bed, which is pretty much my only gaming time, and it’s patchy anyway; I don’t use my console for video so Kinect control of that doesn’t matter; Kinect fitness titles require the same enthusiasm as a trip to the gym, but unlike the gym I don’t have anyone forcing me to do it; I prefer to do my gaming from the sofa, in low light, not standing in the middle of the living room until I get gorilla arms – but I do think it’s clever tech that’s of limited appeal to grown-ups.
For kids, though, it’s great. If you have an Xbox, children and spare cash – and don’t mind buying something that’s likely to be revamped next year for the next Xbox – it’s not a bad investment now that lots of good titles are really cheap. It’s a good time to get the kids Kinect-ed.
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With tablets, small is beautiful
I wrote a wee thing about tablets for Techradar, in which I suggest that for most people, buying a full-sized tablet is an unnecessary expense.
You may be thinking that I’m having a Damascene conversion: when Apple didn’t make seven-inch tablets I said small tablets were rubbish, and now Apple does make a seven-ish-inch tablet I’m saying that small tablets are ace. But I’ve changed my mind because tablets have changed.
…The biggest obstacle to seven-inch tablet adoption was that seven-inch tablets were terrible. Now that they aren’t, for most people they’re the best choice. They’re more portable than their bigger brothers. They’re lighter to hold, easier to fit into a large pocket or handbag, easier for kids to handle – and they’re much, much cheaper too.I do hope I’m right, because if I’m wrong I’ve promised to buy and eat an iPad mini.
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He who pays the piper
There’s been a big scandal in the world of videogames writing, and the short version goes something like this: comedian Robert Florence wrote a column about writers and PRs being a wee bit too close together, legal threats were made, the column was edited and Florence quit. Then it all exploded.
Stuart Campbell has a detailed post about the whole sorry saga, which is worth a read if you’re interested in journalistic ethics and that kind of thing. I thought this bit was particularly true:
games journalists are merely serving the people who pay the bills, and that isn’t the readers any more, because they demand all their journalism for free. If you’re not even prepared to pay peanuts, you’re going to get something less than monkeys.