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

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.

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

This is wonderful.

I was at a Kurt Vonnegut talk in New York a few years ago. Talking about writing, life, and everything.

He explained why people have such a need for drama in their life.

He said, “People have been hearing fantastic stories since time began. The problem is, they think life is supposed to be like the stories. Let’s look at a few examples.”

[Via Spikemagazine.com]

A superb post by Famous Monster in a thread about self-publishing:

One of these days I will get around to writing just the absolute most loathsome right-wing Clancy-esque military scifi I can possibly muster. I mean somewhere between John Norman and John Ringo and maybe Terry Goodkind. Like all about a guy who is the best at everything and has the most sex with the hottest girls and kills terrorists and does the most martial arts.

I abandoned the idea initially because I was worried that people would miss the satire.

It is now clear to me that the folks who miss the satire may be a tremendous source of income.

We’ve been talking about publishing (or rather, not getting published), and G24 points out:

You don’t need a publisher these days any more than you need pulped up trees to print on.

I agree entirely, but I don’t think self publishing is the right road for me. There are lots of reasons for that, but the biggest one is this: I’d rather spend my time writing than marketing, because I’m bloody awful at marketing.

I think self publishing can work, but I think it only works for very specific kinds of writing and for very specific kinds of people. I think in most cases those kinds of writing are the ones that the mainstream publishing industry doesn’t serve particularly well – sci-fi and fantasy, for example, or erotica, or poetry, or books by famous bloggers. And I think in most cases those kinds of people are those so passionate that they’ll devote extraordinary amounts of time, effort and money for precious little reward.

One of the big problems with self publishing is that it can cost money. To do it properly, even if you’re online-only, you’ll need to be, or pay for, an editor, a proofreader, a designer, a publicist, a social media marketer and so on. If you can do all those things yourself, I’ve got nothing but admiration for you, because you’re much more talented than I am. And if you can afford to pay for all of those things yourself, you’re much richer than I am.

Another problem, to me at least, is that self publishing doesn’t give you the editorial process you get with a mainstream agent and publisher. I’ve spent thirteen-odd years being edited, and I can honestly say that with very few exceptions the editorial process has made my writing better. I don’t just mean proofreading here; I mean the whole process, especially the bit where the editor says “that’s a terrible idea. Why don’t you…?” In fiction, having the input of agents and editors who eat, sleep and drink fiction is enormously useful, I think.

I’m convinced that no matter how good the writer, they can benefit from a good editor.

Another big problem is that the money isn’t there yet. The Kindle Store, Apple’s iBooks and so on are good business for the companies that run them, because 1 million authors selling 100 copies each is a nice little revenue stream. But if you’re the author of one of those books, that’s bugger-all money.

The authors making money from ebooks are the ones whose books you see in ASDA – the Stieg Larssons and Stephenie Meyers. There’s a visibility problem with electronic publishing, which is why the ebook charts are dominated by writers with agents, big-name publishers and enormous marketing budgets. We’ve seen exactly the same thing with music: despite the democratisation of music from PC-based studios and Internet distribution, if you want to do big numbers you still need to have a big label behind you.

I don’t want to be online-only, incidentally: I like real, printed books, and my enormous rampaging ego would quite like to see my name on a poster in the window of Waterstone’s. And that means self publishing is even less attractive.

As Jane Smith points out on How Publishing Really Works:

it would be difficult to hire anyone competent to sell your books on percentage, as each bookshop visit would barely cover the travelling costs incurred even if every bookshop approached took half a dozen copies each.

Even if you do the legwork yourself you’re still likely to end up losing money because of those travelling costs, and because you will only be able to cover a very small part of the country.

Commercial publishers have their own sales and distribution networks in place. Their sales representatives frequently visit every bookshop in the country, and discuss their new and forthcoming books.

Commercial publishers also have publicity departments which routinely send out stacks of review copies to TV programmes, newspapers and magazines, to ensure that potential readers will get to hear about each book as it is released.

The self-publisher simply cannot match this vast sales machine, and so is unlikely to sell anything like as many books: few self-published titles sell more than one hundred copies, while most commercially-published books sell more than a thousand.

Incidentally, that also demonstrates just how much the odds are stacked against you: even with the backing of a decent agent and a good publisher, few writers sell lots of books. But the numbers are even smaller with self-publishing.

This takes me back to my first point, which is that I’d rather spend my time writing than marketing because I’m not particularly good at marketing. Having already spent the best part of two years writing something that, for now at least, mainstream publishers aren’t keen on, I think my time would be better spent writing something that will sell rather than doing a half-arsed marketing job that might generate a couple of hundred quid somewhere down the line. Self promotion, sadly, isn’t one of my talents.

Remember that book I was writing? I thought I’d post an update.

After a lot of work, eight drafts and two printers I’ve sent it out to some people, and I’ve had loads of feedback about it from agents and other publishing insiders. The dialogue is great. It’s really atmospheric. The characters are fun. The book is variously “quite funny”, “funny”, “very funny” and “extremely funny”.

Nobody wants to take it on.

Apparently it’s not the writing, but the genre*. It’s a comic thriller, and comic thrillers are the red-headed stepchild of the mainstream fiction business. Everyone knows they exist, but nobody wants them in their publishing house.

If I’d known that two years ago it might have saved me quite a bit of effort.

So here’s a top tip. If you want to write novels – that is, if you want to write novels that get published – then it might be an idea to do what Ian Rankin did before you start plotting. Rankin looked at what sold, and concluded that Books With Cops In was the genre for him.

As for me, I’m starting another one. I’ll tell you about it when there’s something worth saying.

* In most cases, anyway. A few agents told me that at 67,000 words it’s just too short; for mainstream fiction publishers apparently expect 80,000 words plus or they won’t even look at it. Unfortunately for me 67K is the right length for the story, and any more would make the story sag.

Update, June 2011: I decided to publish the book myself on Kindle, iBooks and so on. It’s called Coffin Dodgers, it’s doing quite well, and you can find out more about it here, if you like.