Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • “Not just the funniest group in the world, but something serious and valuable, too”

    A lovely piece by Taylor Parkes on the genius of Half Man Half Biscuit:

    Even now, there’s still this perception of Half Man Half Biscuit as a comedy band: a post-punk Grumbleweeds, the indie Stilgoe. No group in history can have been so woefully misunderstood – Half Man Half Biscuit are, in fact, an antidote to wackiness, a bulwark against zaniness. Fiercely principled, highly literate, sometimes very close to angry, these are songs of open defiance; their real targets, more often than not, are stupidity as a leisure option, the hollowing-out of British culture, the slow death of the post-war settlement.

    This bit cracked me up:

    ‘Excavating Rita’ is – despite its wince-inducing title – a beautifully complex song about a grief-crazed Betterware salesman whose devotion extends to necrophilia. Poignant, tragic, grimly explicit, sympathetic and horribly funny, it’s hard to imagine anyone else attempting a song like this

    [Via TonyK]

  • Sex, violence and swearing in crime fiction

    I was at a book reading by Christopher Brookmyre and Mark Billingham a few weeks ago, and Billingham described some of the angry letters he gets from readers outraged that he uses the odd swear word – but not, it seems, outraged by some of the absolutely appalling things his villains do. It seems to be quite common in crime fiction: just last night, Allan Guthrie got a one-star review from somebody so outraged by the (minor) swearing in one of his books that they couldn’t continue.

    I’ve said elsewhere that writers should consider whether swearing is necessary if it isn’t relevant or appropriate – if Mr Guthrie wrote gentle Victorian-era whodunnits and used language such as “it was Professor fucking Plum, with a fucking lead pipe, in the fucking study, the fucking sneaky fucking fucker” then that might be considered somewhat gratuitous – but he writes contemporary crime fiction and police procedurals.

    You may not be aware of this, but policemen and women sometimes swear. Criminals too.

    Ray Banks, aka The Saturday Boy, has an opinion about all of this.

    Swearing is a vital part of human life, regardless of culture, and to indulge in vicarious murder as entertainment whilst eschewing the saltier language is nothing short of hypocrisy.

    I read a lot of crime fiction, and I’ve lost track of the various horrible things crime writers describe – and by crime writers I mean mainstream, your-mum-reads-them crime writers, many of whom revel in detailed descriptions of the most terrible acts. If you can stomach that but not the word “fuck” then there’s something seriously fucking wrong with you.

  • No more adventures in hi-fi

    I love REM, and while I’m not surprised they’ve split up – that’s been on the cards for a decade, maybe more – it’s still a wee bit sad. Unless there’s a reunion tour somewhere down the line I won’t get to see them live again, and there won’t be any more records as weird and wonderful as New Adventures In Hi-Fi. It, like most REM albums, was hit and miss, but when REM got it right they were astonishing.

  • 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.

    (more…)

  • Lulu wants to publish your ebook

    No, not Lulu the loud Lennoxtown song-shouter – I mean Lulu.com the print-on-demand publisher. The service’s new ebook wing offers “a best-in-class Word to ePub converter”, a 90/10 royalty split and distribution to other platforms such as the iPad and the Nook.

    It sounds very like Smashwords: it’ll provide you with an ISBN, act as a distributor and so on, and if you’re publishing to any site that uses ePub the free converter and eBook creator’s guide are worth having.

    There’s more info here.

  • Two years without a cigarette

    I stopped smoking two years ago today. I don’t miss the cigarettes, but I do miss being thin.

  • A tentative review of the Sony Cyber-Shot HX9V compact digital camera

    I’ve got two cameras, a wee Sony Cyber-Shot and a big Sony DSLR. The former’s a great wee camera but a bit rubbish in low light, especially as I have RSI-induced shaky hands, while the latter’s far too big and bulky for casual use. Could a single camera ever offer the best of both worlds?

    It turns out that the answer is yes, sort of.

    The Sony Cyber-Shot HX9V comes with the usual blah about sensors and intelligent this and that, but it boils down to this: it’s good in low light and it’s good if you have shaky hands.

    Here’s a marketing pic:

    I’ve only been playing with it for a couple of days, but so far I’ve discovered that it’s really good in Intelligent Auto mode and its image stabilisation is really, really good – it’s got an enormous zoom lens but the stabiliser does a superb job of keeping things steady. If it can do that with my shaky hands, it can cope with anything. Its HD video recording is pretty impressive, easily as good as my dedicated HD camcorder, and like other Sonys it has a very clever panorama mode that works flawlessly.

    The bad? It’s pricey – about £299, although Currys is currently doing £30 off compact cameras and Sony’s offering £40 cashback on this one until the end of October – and some features can be slow, with a noticeable delay between pressing buttons and anything happening. It has some gimmicky stuff (3D, despite only having one lens; really annoying beeps that, thankfully, you can turn off), the pop-up flash is in a really weird place and it’s big and heavy in compact camera terms. But so far, so good.

    I’ll do some proper shooting with it when I get the chance and report back.иконииконопис

  • A review’s a review for a’ that

    New Scots man-blog A Man’s A Man has written a very nice – and very nuts – thing about Coffin Dodgers. I get the impression Owen the editor liked it.

  • My big fat ebook pricing experiment

    Just a wee update: my month of cut-price ebook selling has been and gone, and I thought I’d share the figures (if you’re new here, I’ve been selling my debut novel online for £1.99 and decided to halve the price to see what would happen).

    • In June, I sold 90 books: 85 in the UK and 5 in the US.
    • In July, I did 76: 61 in the UK and 15 in the US.

    Sales hit a brick wall in mid-July, so I halved the price.

    • In August, I sold 115 books: 105 in the UK and 10 in the US.

    A couple of conclusions, then: first of all, price doesn’t matter if you don’t have profile. Changing the price has had little or no effect on my US Kindle sales or on my Smashwords sales. I suspect that part of the difference is that Amazon US doesn’t have as many ratings as Amazon UK, because something seems to happen when you reach ten reviews. My UK sales certainly began to climb when that happened.

    Secondly, more sales doesn’t necessarily mean more money. At normal prices I get a 70% royalty, but if you go below £1.49 (before VAT – the total’s around £1.71) the royalty rate drops to 30%. At full price I get about £1 per book; at cut price I get 30p. So how do my figures look if I concentrate on cash, not just sales numbers?

    • In June, my 90 book sales brought in around £90.
    • In August, my 115 book sales brought in around £35.

    I’ve deliberately skipped July because I sold books at full and half price that month, and sums are hard. Comparing June and August, it’s clear that cutting the price of Coffin Dodgers didn’t massively boost my sales, but it massively cut my income.

    I know price isn’t the only factor in selling ebooks, but it’s the only one that’s easy to analyse with a calculator.

    Time for a new experiment, I think. I’ve put the price back up (to £1.71, the lowest Amazon will let me charge while earning 70% royalties) to see what happens. What I think will happen is that sales will slide dramatically; what I hope will happen is that they don’t slide so dramatically that I’m getting 70% of sod-all.

    I’ll keep you posted.

  • Steve Jobs steps down as Apple CEO

    We’ll miss him.

    They reckon that we’ll never have another Beatles or another Rolling Stones: the world is too different, too fragmented, and the perfect storm that created them will not happen again. Jobs and Bill Gates are tech’s Beatles and Stones. I’ll let you decide which one’s which.