Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Some interesting ebooks and blogs

    I’ve been speaking to some interesting people in ebook-land over the last few weeks, and it’s only fair to give them a mention here. So in no particular order, here goes:

    Mark Edwards and Louise Voss are doing extraordinary things – as I write this, Catch Your Death and Killing Cupid are at numbers 1 and 6 in the Kindle charts, which is an incredible achievement. I believe they’re the first indie authors to top Amazon’s charts. Mark’s blog at IndieIQ.com is well worth your time.

    Scots thriller writer Lin Anderson was on the BBC with me the other day, and seemed awfully nice. She’s a traditionally published (and successful!) writer who’s become enthralled by ebooks, and you can find her books online here. Lin blogs about ebooks here.

    Last but not least, Dan Holloway has some interesting thoughts on the whole e-publishing thing and he’s all over the net. His latest novel, The Company of Fellows, is on Amazon here. His personal website is giving away free copies of his next book until the 14th of June.

  • This is a plug

    I made a thing!

     

    So here it is: my debut novel, shiny and new on the Kindle store (or at least, the UK one. The US one needs another couple of days).

    I’ve set up a page to talk about it without filling the entire front page of this site, but put it this way: it’s a scientific fact that people who buy Coffin Dodgers are better dancers, better lovers, better drivers and better all-round human beings than the rest of the population. If you fancy telling other people about that, I’d be very grateful.икони

  • Pricing ebooks: dollars and sense

    As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m about to put my novel online in various ebook formats, and part of the process is working out how much to charge. It’s a controversial topic, so it was nice to see this post by John Rickards (which came to me via the superb Loud blog). As Rickards points out, joining the “buy my book for 70p!” movement isn’t necessarily a great idea:

    You’re pandering to a dangerous kind of hysteria that sees the stuff that we produce as a commodity with almost no inherent value. Any kind of industry that drives its prices down as close to zero as it can get, and which has no other revenue stream at all, dies on its arse. How long do you think superstores would stay in business if all they had were their loss leaders on the shelves?

    If you’re interested in electronic publishing, the whole post is well worth your time. I particularly liked this bit:

    I’ll reiterate: this is the same as the cost of a cup of coffee. And of so many of those cheap smartphone apps you and I purchase like candy.

    That’s pretty much my thinking too.

    If I can ever persuade Amazon to charge the right price (I’m having a few issues with Amazon just now, so if you spot Coffin Dodgers in the Kindle Store before I tell everybody that it’s on sale you may end up with a not-quite-perfect version) I’m going to be charging $2.99US/£1.99GBP for the ebook of Coffin Dodgers.

    For what it’s worth, my cut of that is around a pound per book (and that’s taxable, of course). The likelihood that I’ll even recoup the cost of the beers I drank while writing it, let alone the cost of time spent editing and formatting it, is pretty slim.

    At 70p, your cut is even smaller: after VAT, Amazon’s delivery charges and Amazon’s 65% cut, you’re left with pennies. In the unlikely event that you sell even 10,000 copies, you’ll be lucky to make two thousand quid. Do a much more likely 1,000 copies and you’ll make around £200. That’s £200, before tax, for two years’ work.

    I don’t think £1.99 for a book is excessive, particularly as (unless I’ve made a complete arse of things) I’m letting readers on every ebook platform sample the first fifth of the book for free. If you’re that far into the book you can be pretty sure of what you’re getting for your two quid. I’ve also gone for the DRM-free, go-ahead-and-lend-it options on Amazon, so I’m hardly trying to persuade people to hand over cash for something they can’t sample.

    I could charge less, but I don’t want to. As Rickards puts it, if you’re selling too cheap you’re saying:

    “Buy this, it’s cheap!” rather than “Buy this, it’s good!”

    I completely understand the rationale behind charging less – I’ve spoken to authors for whom that’s worked – but it’s a game I don’t want to play.

    More to the point, it’s a game I can’t afford to play. Writing Coffin Dodgers was fun, but it was fun that took every second of spare time I had for five months – and if you’re a parent, you’ll know how precious spare time can be. And writing was the easy bit. Writing the first draft took a few months, but the next seven drafts took a year and a half of RSI-inducing extra-curricular work. Believe me, that wasn’t fun – and neither is buggering about with ebook publishing platforms, checking formatting and wondering why Amazon’s system is so bloody frustrating.

    I’m not doing this for the money – I’ve junked another, much more commercial novel because Coffin Dodgers’ world is the one I want to spend time in – but I’m not an idiot either: time spent writing (or editing, or formatting) a book is time I could be spending on paid journalism, or on pitching for paid work, or recording stuff in Logic, or on killing space monsters on Xbox.

    This turned out a bit longer than I intended, so I’ll wrap up: I’ll be plugging my book in a day or two. If you’d like to buy it, that’d be great. If you don’t, I hope the plugging isn’t too annoying.

  • Apple’s cloud music service sounds good

    This could be interesting. Businessweek:

    Armed with licenses from the music labels and publishers, Apple will be able to scan customers’ digital music libraries in iTunes and quickly mirror their collections on its own servers, say three people briefed on the talks. If the sound quality of a particular song on a user’s hard drive isn’t good enough, Apple will be able to replace it with a higher-quality version. Users of the service will then be able to stream, whenever they want, their songs and albums directly to PCs, iPhones, iPads, and perhaps one day even cars.

    Sounds good, but of course price is going to be the key factor. The article suggests that it might be rolled into MobileMe, the£60-per-year cloud sync service Apple currently offers. That makes sense: MobileMe’s been due a revamp for a long time, and the rumours have been suggesting a music angle for a few months now.

  • “128 seconds that made people so happy”

    I spotted this on MetaFilter: a superb and desperately sad article about the rise and fall of Bill Haley.

    After ten minutes or so Billnitzer would bring him his food. But usually he was thinking about something, so he ignored it. After a while, though, he’d start to shift in his seat and look around. And then he’d start to hum. Billnitzer, refilling his coffee cup, knew the tune—everybody knew that tune. It was “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock,” the best-selling rock song of all time. She smiled, because she knew what he was doing. He was giving people around him clues. He wanted people to hear him and say, “You’re Bill Haley, aren’t you?”

    But they rarely did.

     

  • Cloud computing and Pippa Middleton’s arse

    Me, on Techradar, about Google’s brand new Chromebooks:

    Ah, says Samsung. “With nothing stored directly on the Series 5, malicious spyware, trojans and viruses are a thing of the past.” They’re a thing of the past on my Windows 7 PC too, because I’m not an idiot who opens unsolicited files that claim to be details of tax refunds or photos of Pippa Middleton’s arse.

  • Coming to a Kindle near you very soon

    The book isn’t ready yet but I thought Ronnie Brown’s cover design was too good to keep under wraps. More soon.

  • A wee plug for some nice guitar people

    I don’t play as much as I used to, or would like to – RSI tends to rear its ugly head fairly quickly – but one of my most treasured possessions is my electric guitar, a 1989 Fender Telecaster. I bought it second-hand a loooooong time ago, and I’ve been meaning to get it sorted out for several years now: the pickup switch was wonky and the guitar itself needed some serious TLC. And of course, the longer I left it the more work it needed.

    I finally decided to bite the bullet a few weeks ago and asked around for recommendations, because I don’t even know which guitar shops are still going in Glasgow. I was pointed towards Strung Out Guitars, a wee place across the road from the 13th Note venue. They’re very, very busy – my repair and setup took a fortnight because they had so many guitars to get through – and I can see why: my Telecaster came back looking and playing better than it has since the day I bought it.

    They’re a nice bunch of people too, and they clearly love what they do. If you need guitar-y things done, give them a shout.

     

  • This is why some of us worry about copyright cops

    When people like me get worked up about ISP censorship, national firewalls and other wonderful ideas, it’s not because we condone theft. It’s because the people who do the censoring are often idiots. Here’s yet another example: the UK Music Publisher’s Association (MPA) managed to get an entire public domain music site taken offline because it – wrongly – believed that the site was hosting an illegal music score.

  • Record companies: sell records? Us? Don’t be silly

    An illuminating piece by David Hepworth:

    When you have built up some anticipation around the release of anything, what on earth is the use of delaying that release and allowing that anticipation to fade into disinterest? Public attention is a finite resource and it is quickly diverted on to something else.