Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Britain’s got ebooks

    A new study on behalf of KPMG suggests that the UK’s getting the hang of this ebook malarkey. Some interesting numbers:

    consumption of e-books has doubled since September 2009 as people increasingly purchase these products to use on tablets and e-readers like the Amazon Kindle.

    According to the research, monthly spend on these goods is almost equalling the amount of money splashed out on music via the internet.

    The average shopper spends £4 per month on e-books, which is double what is spent on online games and four times as much as what people pay for streamed TV. On average, downloaded music accounts for £5 of consumers’ monthly disposable income.

  • Facebook is the Windows of the Internet

    Oh yes it is. Me on Techradar:

    Social networks also benefit from lock-in. I hate Facebook: I hate its horrible UI, its overly complex privacy settings, its photo albums, the algorithm that seems hell-bent on hiding important and interesting updates. Given the choice, I wouldn’t use it. Unfortunately I don’t have a choice, because for now everybody I know does use it. Cutting off Facebook would mean cutting them off.

    Sooner or later, though, a strategy of “ha ha! We’re the only game in town!” will bite you in the backside.

     

     

  • Now wash your hands

    Probably not one for lunchtime, but here’s one for the men: why one man has decided that he’s going to start washing his hands after he urinates.

    Fidopiastis says he’s heard all of my hand-washing protestations before, and to all of them he has the same response: “Perianal sweat.”

    Fidopiastis’s message isn’t getting much attention, it seems: I’ve had entire nights out where as far as I can tell, I’m the only person who bothers washing after using the bathroom.

    [Via The Browser]

     

  • The iPad concert theatre

    This really made me laugh: take one shoebox and one iPad and you’ve got everything you need to make a concert venue. Skip the pics and go straight to the video.

  • Probably the last thing I’m going to blog about The Scheme

    I’ve blogged about fly on the wall documentary series The Scheme a few times here, but the news that it’s now going to be broadcast in the rest of the UK made me want to add another bit.

    Having seen the whole series now – including a final episode that made it very clear that the media attention had made some participants’ lives worse – the thing that struck me most about The Scheme was the sheer hopelessness of it all. The families weren’t entirely representative – the programme makers have chosen the most TV-worthy people, so you get people whose lives are slow-motion car crashes – but I’ve met enough people from similar situations to know that life for some people starts off shite and gets progressively worse.

    It was summed up for me in one throwaway remark when a teenage boy was being sent back to prison – he hadn’t expected to be sent back so soon. Going back to prison was a given. The only thing that he could even slightly influence was the gap between incarcerations.

    There’s an argument that by showing people rotating in and out of prison, trying and failing to get off drugs, self-medicating in various other ways and trying to find things for the local kids to do The Scheme was providing an important service: asking us to look at the affordability and availability of alcohol, for example, or the effectiveness of anti-drug legislation, regulation and intervention, or the links between unhappy childhoods and adult substance abuse, or the way in which some parts of Scotland have effectively been left to rot.

    Then again, I know of somebody with real money and real power, riches of the “oh I don’t know, my butler takes care of that” variety. And to that person, The Scheme is quite simply the funniest programme ever made.

  • Get the British Library on your iPad

    This looks like fun: a free iPad app that lets you browse the British Library’s collection of 19th Century books. From the press release:

    The app takes advantage of the form and function of iPad, bringing a renewed sense of wonder to the discovery and enjoyment of antiquarian and historical books.

    Currently the app features over a thousand 19th Century books, but it will provide access to more than 60,000 titles by later this summer when details on pricing for the service will be announced. The 60,000 books, which are all in the public domain, are part of the British Library’s 19th Century Historical Collection and span numerous languages and subject areas including titles such as “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley and “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” [with plates] by Charles Dickens.

  • 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.