Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • 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.

  • iTunes Match: get a better music library for £21.99

    iTunes Match, Apple’s music-in-the-cloud service, is very good – but it’s worth a look even if you don’t want or need cloud-based music. For your £21.99 you get two things: a backup of your entire music library (more than 10,000 songs, in my case, saving me the hassle of getting a bigger backup disk) and an upgrade for all your low bitrate music.

    If you’re anything like me you’ve been ripping CDs and buying downloads for years, and back in the day file sizes mattered – so you’d rip at, say, 160Kbps to get as much music as possible on your player. Now, though, space isn’t the issue it used to be, and if you listen on good speakers or good headphones you can hear the flaws.

    The problem is that actually re-ripping all that music (assuming you still have the CDs) is an enormous job: as of yesterday I had 6,500 songs at lower bitrates.

    That’s where iTunes Match comes in. It takes a while, but it works brilliantly.  Jason Snell explains how to do it.

  • Interesting, inevitable: buy the content and get the e-reader for free

    I spotted this little nugget yesterday:

    Barnes & Noble said Monday that it will offer discounts on its Nook devices to customers who buy a digital subscription to People magazine and The New York Times.

    For New York Times subscribers, it’ll offer a free Nook Simple Touch, a 6-inch e-reader that is priced at $99, or take $100 off on Nook Color, normally priced at $199.

    It won’t be the last time an e-reader comes bundled with a digital subscription, especially as the devices are getting cheaper and cheaper. Tablets will inevitably follow – the Nook Color mentioned above is similar to the Kindle Fire tablet. I’m surprised Amazon isn’t giving free devices to its Amazon Prime members already.

    The business model already exists: if you subscribe to cable or satellite TV, you essentially get the hardware for free; many mobile phones are free on contract, and so on. It isn’t hard to imagine somebody such as News International giving away a “free” Kindle Fire if you subscribe to the full-fat version of its digital service.

  • I’m making my books Kindle-only

    At the risk of helping to perpetuate Amazon’s vice-like grip on electronic publishing, I’ve decided to enrol my books in its KDP Select programme. There are various upsides to that, but it does mean that the books must be exclusive to Amazon.

    I don’t think I’m going to upset too many people – of the 2,100 copies of Coffin Dodgers I’ve sold so far, about 2,000 of them have been via Amazon – but if you really want to read Coffin Dodgers or Bring Me The Head of Mark Zuckerberg and don’t have a Kindle device or one of the many Kindle apps, then drop me an email and I’ll send you the book(s) in the right format for your device.

    I’ll blog more about KDP Select and my ongoing e-publishing adventures soon.

  • Illegal downloading and Adele

    Simon at No Rock’n’Roll Fun has written a typically excellent piece about the BPI’s latest sales figures.

    Despite all this “chronic” piracy going on, Adele’s album has sold more copies in a year than any album has ever sold. More than a Michael Jackson album managed in a year, even the good one. More than a Beatles album ever managed to whisk out the shops in twelve months. More, even, than the third Charlatans album sold in a year.

    So, how come Adele’s album was not only immune to the chronic piracy, but thrived in a world so stricken? Had there been secret umlauts sewn into the hemlines of the choruses, rendering it impossible to torrent?

    Were any of the many pirate-busting measures deployed? Did the pre-release circulate solely on a tape glued into a Walkman? Was every copy watermarked? Did a fleet of fake files get launched onto the internet to foil downloaders? Did Derren Brown hypnotise the world so that if they typed ‘Adele 21 free’ into Google they’d die?

    Nope. The success of Adele’s album seems to be nothing to do with avoiding piracy, and more to do with sticking out an album that people liked and wanted to buy.

    Worth remembering the next time you see the entertainment industry demanding new laws and filtering to fight the menace of piracy.ikoni

  • 1,500 ebook sales

    I sold my 1,500th ebook today – it wasn’t the 1,500th copy of Coffin Dodgers (that’ll happen later tonight), but I’m delighted all the same.

  • I made another ebook – non-fiction, this time

    I know what you’re thinking. “Man, if only Gary did more blog posts in which he tried to flog his bloody ebooks!” Well, have I got a happy surprise for you!

    Bring Me The Head of Mark Zuckerberg is a new ebook by yours truly, and it’s available right now from – yes! – Amazon UK and Amazon US. This one’s non-fiction: it’s a collection of various tech pieces I’ve written in recent years, some of which are funny and some of which aren’t. Hopefully we’ll all agree on which ones are which.

    Ready for some blurb? Let’s go!

    Things move fast in technology. In 1998 Google was still in a garage, Microsoft ruled the world and the internet was made of wood. iPods, YouTube and Facebook were years away. Phones were rubbish, getting online cost a fortune and Gary Marshall tried to convince the readers of .net magazine that the Hitler Diaries had been written by a small dog. 

    Luckily for him, the dog didn’t sue. 

    Gary Marshall has been writing about technology like a pixelated PJ O’Rourke since 1998. In this collection of tech journalism from titles including .net, PC Plus, Techradar.com and Official Windows Magazine Gary picks through the PR nonsense, inflated claims and the reality distortion fields of the tech industry to concentrate on the big issues – issues such as, “does Google’s Eric Schmidt really own a coat made of human skin?”, “just how evil does Facebook need to become before people stop using it?” and “why are we being chased around the internet by adverts for horrible shirts?”

    As ever, comments, Amazon reviews and offers of six-figure book deals would be very much appreciated.

  • A brief review of the stupidly expensive SuperDarts headphones from Atomic Floyd

    Part 1: Thoughts on listening to music with Atomic Floyd’s SuperDarts 

    Shit, I’ve just wasted the best part of £200 in Amazon vouchers. They sound okay, but you don’t spend that much money for something to be okay.

    Part 2: Thoughts on listening to music with Atomic Floyd’s SuperDarts after turning the volume right up

    HOLY FUCK!

    Yes, they’re stupidly expensive, but the sound is really quite extraordinary. They were recommended by my Techradar colleague James Rivington, who reviewed them here. I think he quite liked them.

     

  • 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.

  • Modern Warfare 3: “all the way up the bombast-o-meter”

    John Walker is always worth reading, and his review of Modern Warfare 3’s singleplayer campaign is just superb.

    Videogames often allow us to live out fantasies, to be who we could never be with our saggy, regular-person frames and lives. A soldier fighting in a near-future war, with access to the finest in military hardware? Maybe I could be the squad leader? Maybe I could be the hero? Maybe I could be the one who’s allowed to open doors? But no, of course not, you are – as ever – the grunt, being barked at throughout, forced to do whatever the game/game characters tell you to, which is usually to sweep up after them and the party they’re having in front.

    It fascinates me that this is the successful formula, the secret behind being the biggest FPS series of all time.