Stuff I’ve read or helped to write
I’m a big fan of Malcolm Mackay, whose Glasgow Trilogy – The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter, How a Gunman Says Goodbye and The Sudden Arrival of Violence – had me gripped through three successive novels. The Night The Rich Men Burned is his fourth novel, and it’s as good as the Trilogy. I devoured it in a single session last night.
Great cover, too.
A superb post by Baldur Bjarnason:
There’s this tendency among advocates to compare the absolute worst of the enemy with the perfect, best case scenario on your own side… [but] In terms of marketing, quality, distribution and design the difference between a competently published book and a competently self-published one is now less than you think.
I thought the new year would be a good time to post a wee update on book sales: to date, I’ve shifted 35,284 ebooks. That’s mainly Coffin Dodgers, which has sold 14,679 copies against 18,461 promotional giveaways.
Looking at the figures there’s a definite downwards trend when it comes to the effectiveness of freebies: in 2011 giving away one free book generally led to two sales (because of the improved visibility via “people who bought X also bought…” links and so on), but by early 2013 that was down to one sale per three to five freebies. For the US, the figure had dropped to one sale per sixteen freebies in early 2013, and I’m sure it’s even worse now. Clearly unless you’re giving books away to promote other paid-for titles, giving ebooks away only works for a very short space of time.
One of the weird things about ebook publishing is the effect pricing has on royalties: by upping the price from 99p to £1.99 I’ve halved my sales figures, but I’ve doubled the royalty I get per book. It’s hardly shove-your-job money – CD is bringing in around £80 per month lately – but it’s still nice to have. As ever, thanks to everyone who’s bought or blabbed about my stuff.
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I’m a big fan of crime series. There’s something particularly enjoyable about opening the pages of a brand new book and encountering a familiar face, a familiar world, a familiar cast of characters. Take John Rebus, for example: while Ian Rankin’s non-Rebus thrillers are perfectly well written and exciting bits of crime fiction, there’s a Rebus-shaped hole all the way through them (he’s back in Rankin’s latest, Saints of the Shadow Bible, and there’s a delicious bit in it where Rankin’s clearly spotted a way to keep him around the police: Rebus was written in real time, and was forced to retire just like real policemen).
It’s not just Rankin. There’s a tingle of anticipation when I’m about to start a new Tim Dorsey and discover what Serge A Storms has got up to now. I’m really excited about the third in Malcolm McKay’s superb Glasgow Trilogy featuring hitman Calum MacLean. I was sad to see the end of Ray Banks’ Cal Innes novels, and I’m always a bit disappointed when Michael Connelly brings out a legal thriller instead of a Harry Bosch one. But sometimes familiarity brings not delight, but disappointment.
I’ve just given up on the latest Peter Robinson book, Children of the Revolution. It’s one of his DCI Banks books, and it suffers badly from two related problems: the crime and its investigation isn’t very interesting, and the hero’s a bit of an arse. I’d noticed the arse thing in previous books – like many fictional detectives, Banks appears to be at least partly an exercise in authorial wish fulfilment: he’s the super-smart man who all the laydees want to have sexy time with because he has an awesome record collection and an interesting car – but I’m usually enjoying the ride too much to get too irritated by it. This time out the ride wasn’t much of a ride.
I suspect publishing may be rather like the music business used to be: there’s a certain timetable to follow, a treadmill of write/release/tour/write/release/tour that can mean product must be produced even if the product isn’t quite there yet. That often resulted in dreadful albums – the famous “difficult second album” written on tour about how horrible it was to be on tour – and I’m sure it’s the cause of dreadful books too. That, and the other danger of success, which is of course ego. If you’re going around the world, playing to packed rooms – rooms where people are actually paying to see you – that’s bound to mess with your head a little. “The little people lap this shit up!” the author might cry as he bashes out another bestseller.
I wonder how authors avoid it. Ian Rankin seems to have managed it – the books are still superb and he appears to remain one of the nicest, most well-liked people in publishing – and there are countless other examples, I’m sure. Any names spring to mind – and if they do, any explanation for why they didn’t go off the boil?
I’ve been pretty quiet about my fiction writing lately, and there’s been a good reason for that: I haven’t been doing any fiction writing.
The sequel to Coffin Dodgers has stalled because the central crime I came up with was too horrible for a fairly light-hearted read, and the other, more serious book I was doing stalled too. That latter one stalled for various reasons: motivation, confidence, plotting issues, worrying what the hell I’d write after it was finished, obsessing over Breaking Bad, making music, jumping around the room shouting “this is shit! I am shit! Everything is shit!” and so on.
Hurrah, then, for the Bloody Scotland crime writing festival. I dropped £80 on a day of writing workshops, and over the course of the day the events – a workshop by Liam Murray Bell, another by Alex Gray, a panel featuring agent Jenny Brown and a keynote by Val McDermid – unlocked various book problems in my head. The best way I can describe it is like picking a lock: each bit of the day picked another tumbler until the entire lock was picked.
I’ve spent the last year looking at this word count menu, which has been stalled at 13,000 words. Since Bloody Scotland:
Still a long way to go, but progress at last. I’m excited about it again.
It’s worth noting that I hate workshops, being in a room with other people, having to act like a responsible adult and so on – so if a miserable sod like me can get something out of a writing workshop, then more normal people might benefit even more.
JasonW informs me that Coffin Dodgers is actually being pirated (as opposed to being listed on sites that don’t actually have it). It’s here if you’re interested, although the download links try to get you to sign up for things you don’t need and install things you don’t want.
The book is also available legally on Amazon, of course. Only 99p!
Traditional publishers promise quality: you can be sure that when you buy a real book it’ll be properly edited. Increasingly I’m finding that isn’t the case. For example, I’m reading the current Peter Robinson paperback (Watching The Dark) and there are jarring typos and comma abuse that really shouldn’t have made it through the editing process.
This is a real sentence:
The place was busy, a popular destination for the post work crowd on a Friday, but a lot of people liked to stand at the bar and relax, so they found a quiet round, copper-topped table looking out onto the market square, which was in that in-between period after work, so few shoppers were around, but after play, so the young revellers hadn’t arrived yet.
John Scalzi on dodgy ebook business models:
This shit’s been around, my friends. It’s been around for decades, and writers groups and others who make it their business to warn aspiring authors about scams and pitfalls have been raising flags about it all that time. The idea that that because it’s now attached to electronic publishing, that somehow makes it different (and, more to the point, better) is highly specious, to say the least.
Sprinkling the Internet on a bad business model does not magically make it a good business model. It merely means that the people who are pursuing a bad business model are hoping you are credulous enough to believe that being electronic is space-age zoomy and awesome and there is no possible way this brilliant business plan could ever fail. Or even worse, that they believe that being electronic means all these things, which means they are credulous. Which is not a very good thing to have as the basis of one’s business model.
Scalzi’s post is relevant to most kinds of creative job, not just books. Creative industries are often seen as glamorous, and that glamour often blinds people to the reality of what’s happening when money’s being discussed. How many times have you heard musicians moan about their terrible record deals, the contracts that they signed not just willingly, but happily?
you can’t blame the publisher for then taking you for every single thing they can. Because, remember, that’s their job. They don’t even need to be evil to do it; they just have to be willing to take every advantage you let them have. That’s business. This is a business negotiation.
It’s been a while since I shared figures about Coffin Dodgers, so here’s an update for anyone interested in the ins and outs of self-publishing.
Total sales of Coffin Dodgers are sitting at 30,360. That breaks down as 13,660 paid copies and 16,700 freebies; as more and more authors (and publishers) use free copies as a promotional tool, the power of the freebie is fading. When I gave away free copies in February I gave away 3,500 books and sold 8,978; when I did it last month, I gave away 948 and sold 364. Obviously Coffin Dodgers has been out for a while, so that’s a factor, but other people in the ebook game tell me that they’re seeing similar patterns with new titles.
It’s possible to spot a few patterns in the numbers too. They plummet whenever Amazon does a big Kindle promo – who’s going to try unknown authors when people you’ve actually heard of are just as cheap? – and there are noticeable peaks and troughs after good and bad reviews respectively. Kindle borrowing is becoming a thing – last month there was one borrow for every 10 sales in the UK – and refunds remain a very small but slightly annoying thing (am I the only person who reads samples before deciding to buy?).
I’m hardly rolling in cash here – typically I’ll bring in £100ish per month from book sales – but of course that’s cash I wouldn’t have at all if my book was just a manuscript sitting on a hard disk somewhere. It’s nice to see the book find an audience, and I’m still keen to finish the sequel.
I do wonder about the economics of it, though. Like many new ebook authors I’ve found that free promotions are the best way to get much-needed visibility to drive sales, and I’ve found that pricing above 99p kills those sales dead. That’s fine by me: I don’t expect people to pay the same as they’d pay for a guaranteed hit such as the new Ian Rankin, and I’m not pricing so low that I’d need to sell 10 billion books to afford a loaf of bread. However, if free promotions are becoming significantly less effective (which they are) and name-author books are dropping dramatically in price (which they are – seven of today’s UK top ten Kindle books are just £0.20 each, including Life of Pi) then the “give lots away then sell lots at 99p” model could be doomed.
That’s interesting, because at 20p – a royalty of about 7p per book, less VAT and other charges – you need to sell huge numbers of books just to cover your basic costs. Writers are usually the worst editors of their own work, and a quick scan through the Kindle pages demonstrates that they’re often pretty crappy cover designers too. If the going rate for an ebook drops to 20p, you’d need to shift 10,000 books just to cover the cost of your cover and a very quick edit. How many self-published books are going to sell in those quantities?
It’ll be interesting to see how this all pans out.
Me, going on about the evils of the internet again…
A big scandal’s kicked off in the world of books: big-name authors RJ Ellory and Stephen Leather have been writing fake reviews on the internet, bigging up their own titles and damning their rivals’ books.
They’re not the only ones – John Locke appears to have forgotten to mention “paying for hundreds of fake reviews” in his “how I sold lots of ebooks” guide – and if you think it only happens with books I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you.
Online reviews are utterly broken.