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Monday 28 November 2011

REJECTION IS A FOUR-LETTER WORD.

Posted by RLL for REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE. © RLL, 2011.

And the word is NEXT. Though it could also be written using the alternative spelling, GOOD. As I move into electronic publishing, I have to deal with many things. The rejection slip is not one of those things. I wonder what the young persons are thinking.
   Well, young persons, this is what I’m thinking when I’m thinking of you as potential writers. These young persons may never face a rejection slip. EVER. Already, I suspect that many of the young persons, interested in writing, will never use a manual typewriter.
   Harsh truth. These days, you no longer need the arms of a Viking to be able to type stories about a Viking’s arms. I don’t regret ditching the typewriter. But I do still carry all the harsh lessons I absorbed in learning how to use the damned machine.
   That is true of the rejection slip. Every rejection slip I received made me better as a writer. Made me think NEXT. Fell over, stood up, dusted myself down, moved on. Is it good to be rejected? It concentrates the mind, shall we say. That is a good thing. If there’s an awkward damnation-bound element of I’ll-show-the-bastards to the receipt of a rejection, make it work for you. NEXT. GOOD.
   Electronic publishing. What does it mean? It means writing electronically. There are still ways to write using a manual typewriter that could lead to electronic publishing. Optical character recognition of a typed page, scanned and stored on a computer, might be the first in a long line of steps from manuscript to Kindle.
   Maybe someone out there does it that way. (A thought that is boggling my mind as I struggle to wade through the idea. It may be worth writing a story about…) Electronic publishing means writing electronically. Unless voice recognition software takes the writing out of the process. Let’s leave the technology of electronic publishing out of this. (Call that a Lenny Bruce moment, and wonder at my mosaic mind in action.)
   Beyond all that, electronic publishing, via Amazon’s Kindle process, means there’s no rejection slip. It’s gone. Rejection, often impersonal on a slip, shifts to the point of sale. The audience vote decides. Suddenly, it’s personal. Because suddenly, it’s financial in an immediately apparent sense.
   So will the young persons lose out, for failing to acquire a wall papered in rejection slips? I think the battle has simply raged across to the far side of this field. Feedback, from disgruntled customers in disgruntled reviews, could serve the same purpose as the rejection slip.
   Few sales? Rancid reviews? Has your mind suddenly developed that awkward damnation-bound attitude? I’ll show them, next time. How personal will electronic point of sale rejection be? Personal enough to inspire you, never personal enough to flatten you.
   Occasionally, rejection was personal. I’d have a nice rejection. Positive feedback. Even negative feedback can be turned to your advantage, becoming positive feedback. Remember that positive rejection is still rejection.
   No more letters, saying no. Just reviews. Good reviews. Bad reviews. No reviews. What is a good review? Someone thinks your story is cool. That tells you more about the reader than it does about your book. What is a bad review? Someone thinks your story is very far from cool. That tells you more about the reader than it does about your book. No reviews. That tells you nothing. Or something you don’t want to tell yourself.
   A review outlines your plot. I’d like to think you know that bit yourself. So the review tells you nothing. Except…a product review on Amazon is written by a purchaser. Therefore, it carries literal currency. In that sense, the review is important. Only in that sense. You made coin.
   I like to check product reviews. Get a feel for the item under consideration. Read the most helpful positive review, with its inevitable five stars, and read the most helpful review of a critical nature. Down there with two stars. Purchasers have thought it worthwhile to spend time writing reviews.
   An Amazon review means a sale. With the proviso that a customer could return an Amazon e-book within seven days. This bit, about worth, is worth repeating. A review tied to the Amazon purchase site means a purchase. Don’t knock that, good or bad. Opinions are opinions.
   A good review will automatically boost your confidence, unless it’s packed with backhanded compliments. The good review may aid sales. A bad review might leave you in the dumps. It may hinder sales. Caustically, it could eat at you. As though some flesh-destroying disease. If you let that disease in. And that’s your choice. However, no review at all may be the worst review of all.
   A bad review could help you sell books. In the sense that you are spurred to make your work more worthy of purchase. There’s the other thing. As a customer, I’ve sometimes read a bad Amazon review and realised that the reviewer was talking out of the old backside. (If a reviewer can’t get facts right, why trust to opinions cut from the same cloth?) So a supposedly bad review won’t automatically put me off something. The customer sifts opinions in reviews. Then decides. It’s a grown-up world.
   Obviously, a torrent of bad reviews saying avoid like the plague…that torrent might indicate something. Even then, for a Kindle publication, there’s a free sample…so customers can STILL make up their own minds beyond reviews.
   Just checking to see if you are awake by prompting a thought. Remember this. I’m no publishing guru. There is a vested interest in selling to you, but I’m selling fiction. Not flogging How to Succeed in Publishing Electronic Doorstoppers.
   You too can have a body of work like mine!
   For every statement I throw into this blog there must be a dozen questions milling around in my mind. Some even happen to be relevant to the business of publishing electronic books. Do I have a plan? Kiddies, I ALWAYS have a plan.
   It may not be a great plan, or a complex one. Time to empty my bladder. I’ll go to the shops in that order today. Now I’ll work out a series of six blogs, leading up to publication of my e-book. To avoid caring what my blogging audience thinks, affecting what I plan to say next, I’ll plan what to say next in six chunks that are finished before the first one goes out.
   Always know how it ends. That’s just the way I work. You may not care about that, for several reasons. One. Maybe you have no intention of writing fiction. Two. You do write fiction, but not that way. Three. The manner in which a story is constructed won’t show up under ultraviolet light. (Quote me far and wide on that one, if you are to quote me at all.)
   Four. You really genuinely believe that the elves come out of the attic at midnight and leave the story, fully-formed, for the gracious author come sun-up. It’s all magical to you, as a reader, and you’ve never given the construction of tales a single thought.
   More than that. You are so caught up in the magic that you can have the magic pointed out to you as I’m pointing out now…and you won’t feel any different after walking away from these sentences. Bless your heart. We need people like you. Not as neurosurgeons, obviously. I’m just saying.
   There are two married neurosurgeons reading this, laughing away. One is agreeing with my statement. The guy doesn’t want elf-believers in his line of work. His wife is chortling and saying that’s him all over. She declares that he believes in the elves. His retort takes on a technical gloss as he talks about delusions. I think we’ll leave them to it.
   So now you know that I wrote these six pre-publication blogs before I put the first one out there. The clue was in my first blog, on starting a blog. I’m here to talk about my writing. That’s what this blog is about. My own mini-advertising campaign, serving two purposes.
   Though I only covered one of those purposes. Advertising. All writing is time travel. Look at this blog. Before you tackled this blog, I wrote it. (No elves required.) Some of you reading this blog will be reading this blog in the build-up to publication of Neon Gods Brought Down by Swords. Let’s hope that generates a sense of anticipation. Doesn’t matter, though…
   For there are readers of this blog who will be able to read these words after the book is published. They can go through a few clicks and buy the book, with no sense of having to wait. Beyond that, there are readers who are going over these words in a book. They’ve never encountered the blog. For completeness, I’ve placed the six blogs in my INCOMPLETE UNCOLLECTED SHORT WORKS.
   All writing is time travel. The initial readers of the blog won’t be able to purchase Neon Gods, INCOMPLETE UNCOLLECTED, LYGHTNYNG STRYKES, or slim*thriller. Not immediately. The blog serves two purposes. One is advertising. How things are coming along. The other purpose comes later. A sense of how things went along. Or didn’t go, if life intruded on my plans.
   Many things made me the writer I am today. Wayward fingers on the computer keyboard, for starters. I typed many thongs at the start of this paragraph. Occupational hazard. One of those things was the rejection slip. And now, it’s gone. Will I miss it? Yes. Like toothache.

NEXT BLOG: SOURCES OF INSPIRATION ARE MEANINGLESS.

Monday 21 November 2011

WHAT IS THE NATURE OF MY WORK?

Posted by RLL for REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE. © RLL, 2011.

Storytelling, plain and simple. Except when I’m writing advanced and complex plots. Those consist of plain and simple plots flying in close formation, giving the illusion of complexity. The nature of my work is writing. Notes, written by hand. Large chunks of text, generated by typing.
   The nature of my work involves reading. Swilling around between reading and writing is the skill of cross-referencing. After the horse of a story has raced from the starting line, I whip it into shape and edit the damned thing all the way to the finish.
   No horses were hurt in the preceding paragraph, though some animal-lovers may have had their sensibilities bruised. This is a pre-publication blog. I decided to write on several topics, blogging away merrily, before I self-published my book on Amazon Kindle. The first book I’m putting out is called Neon Gods Brought Down by Swords.
   This is the third blog in the series, and I’ve mentioned Neon Gods in every blog so far. In each blog, I’ve had the temerity, the audacity, to spout opinions. I’m sure some of you find that shocking. Not even published by the company, yet daring to have opinions on writing. Well, kiddies, ’twas ever thus.
   I’m not here to give advice – I have nothing to teach, and a great deal of fun to be had with so much to learn. If you love to rush headlong into things with nary a pause for thought, love it to bits and run on. I’ll catch up, or take a different path. Send me a postcard from Valhalla or wherever you stop, if stop you do. I’m pausing, taking a deep breath, then reaching for the handle. FINISHED WITH ENGINES. For reach, I must.
   (Because I’m on a timer. I was the one who set the alarm. The pin on this grenade is missing. That can only mean one thing. Countdown to publication. While these blogs go out weekly, and while I’m writing and editing other things, I’m having some tax matters tidied away.)
   Why blog about an unpublished book? To generate advanced publicity. This is always preferable to degenerate publicity. What’s that? Oh, I think I can provide an example. Just to show you how not to do things.
   Several people prompted my blogging career. One person who strongly hinted that I should blog was the Canadian author Karen Woodward. That is a blatant plug. Go to Amazon Kindle and type her name. I started to write to her about the poisonous nature of some of what I was looking at on the web. Truly desperate attempts to generate publicity. Beneath and behind the call of duty.
   This blog also constitutes a truly desperate attempt to generate publicity, but it doesn’t feel poisonous. I stopped writing to Karen about it, and decided to drop my comments into the blog instead. This is the sort of thing that troubled me, though not to the extent that I lost sleep…

I was wondering how much of the web we should invade, as writers. Some of those forums feel a bit poisonous. There’s a smack of desperation. A writer chips in with a comment, and some other poor sod acts like a spam-bot. To some, it’s akin to a gag-reflex. No way around it.

FICTIONAL KAREN: As a Canadian writer, I sometimes feel intimidated by the vast body of top-notch fiction written by many deceased Canadian authors. Oh, and a few still living. Any thoughts out there?

WRITER IN SPAM-BOT MODE: That’s an excellent question, Karen. One I feel is answered in the first of my Vampire Whoremaster novels, Slutolika, available now on Amazon Kindle.

SAME WRITER POSTING FROM A FRIEND’S ACCOUNT: Wow! I’ve just read Slutolika, and couldn’t help but notice the Canadian themes. Gave it five stars on Amazon. Will you be exploring Karen’s Canadian themes in the sequel, Verminators of Slutolika

WRITER IN SPAM-BOT MODE: I hope to explore more of what Karen posted, but first I have to check sales figures on Franken-Karnage, my latest shot at historical romance set in the mystical world of Plugging.

FICTIONAL KAREN: I’m speechless.

WRITER IN SPAM-BOT MODE: As is the Verminator General, in book three of…

READER: I really must check out this review on Amazon…

Slutolika.
1 of 0 people found this review helpful:
Five Stars. Put the SLUT in SLUTOLIKA, 30th Feb 1902.
By AUTHOR POSING AS AUTHOR’S FRIEND, PRETENDING TO BE GENUINE CUSTOMER. (Bide-a-Wee Rest Home, Englandland.) – See all of my reviews of my own work.
Bottom fifty reviewer.

What a triumph! This book cured the lamb, raised the blind, healed the dull, parted the Dead Sea Scrolls, and changed my life for all time up until the point at which I dropped dead. Why the author of Franken-Karnage isn’t in charge of the world, I don’t know. But I’d get my vote. He’d get my vote.
   Is your life empty? Buy this book. Then buy multiple Kindle readers so that you can buy this book again and again. Slutolika is the best female character ever to traipse her way across an electronic book-reading device. She’s more than a force of nature. Last night, reading chapter three, I was shocked to see her step from the Kindle into my bathroom, where…(Edited by Amazon on grounds of taste, decency, purple prose, length, and sheer insanity.) And the goldfish was so inspired that he’s writing his own novel too.

This review is from: Slutolika. (Kindle e-desperate edition.)

I think I’ve taken that as far as I care to. It’s difficult to type while I’m laughing this hard. From my end, it’s all in Scottish dialect. So the books would be part of the Vampirrre Hoormaister series. Just that bit funnier, to me.
   Is this blog poisonous? I hope not. Several times, I found myself directed to Amazon titles on the subject of e-publishing. The reviews for those books seemed crammed with plugs for titles by the reviewers themselves. That, to me, was unseemly. Fair play to the people who advertise in that way. If it works for them, it works. Good luck with it. Wouldn’t be me.
   Lesson I picked up. If you feel uncomfortable about advertising your work in a certain way, find another way. Initially, I thought blogging would be uncomfortable. It has proved painless, I am happy to report. Okay, back to the main theme.
   What is the nature of my work? Well, self-publishing electronically…the nature of the work now includes publicity. Reading, writing, editing, publicity, cross-referencing, legal matters, cover design, boiling the kettle for a coffee, and, vitally, retaining a sense of humour.
   Though the proof of the pudding is in the eating, sometimes the proof of the pudding can be determined by catching a whiff of the dish from the kitchen. This pre-publication blog acts as a whiff from the kitchen. You are sensing my style. Especially by checking out the sample chapter of Neon Gods Brought Down by Swords.
   What does all this businesslike activity make me? Penny scribbler, writer, editor, cover photographer and graphic designer, publicist, publisher, kettle activator, legal beagle. (That last one flies considerably lower than the legal eagle.) Author. Yes, author.
   There’s a terrible stigma attached to the word author, and I’d like to address that in this blog. Too often, I’ve heard it bandied about as though an insult. It’s the self-loathing sort of insult used by writers who depict authors as sneering villains at parties in telly shows, strangely enough.
   The writers of those telly shows must loathe themselves, or other writers they’ve crossed words (if not swords) with over the years. That’s fiction. Thinly-disguised fact, sometimes. The party-loving author is invariably murdered, propelling some dastardly plot. This is done to make the act of typing seem glamorous, dangerous, and unbearably exciting.
   On a side-note, I understand that it is beyond difficult to depict authors in visual fiction. A writer in a movie may spend a scene at a typewriter. Two hours spent typing is nothing to me, but two hours spent watching an actor typing would be enough to make me hunt the director down and kill his babies.
   As Neon Gods nods in the direction of Robert E. Howard, try a movie called The Whole Wide World. I’m with Mrs Soprano in that I’m not really a big Zellweger fan. Zellweger acts her socks off in this movie, though, playing the writer Novalyne Price…Howard’s on-off girl.
   I claim the word author as a badge of honour, relating to the business of being a writer. As an author, I have the AUTHORity to AUTHORise financial exploitation of my © material. Just me. No one else. I’m the one who agrees to the deal. So I’m the one with the authority. The author.
   What does that mean? I sign on the line, or click the clickable thingy online. After reading the terms and thinking those terms over, I make the decision. Yay or nay. (Translated from the Scottish. Aye or naw.) Amazon’s terms will do me. They might not do you. Hell, they might do me today but not tomorrow…as the industry changes technologically, come sunrise. Consider everything. Reconsider everything periodically. The only view that’s set in stone is the view that no view is set in stone.
   I’m still a writer, as I write notes. Am I a typist? Of course. And an author? I have the authority to authorise. Any bad deals I enter are bad deals of my own making. Hard lines. The same is true of any good deals I enter into – they are of my own making. Accept responsibility. Claim the authority.
   Now I’m fixated on that dial, with the handle. FULL SPEED AHEAD. That’s a good setting. I heartily recommend it, as it quickly leads to FINISHED WITH ENGINES. There are other ways of dealing with things…
   MAN THE LIFEBOATS – that one’s not printed on the dial. If you hear seven blasts on the whistle, it’s time to abandon a project that’s rapidly gurgling beneath you. It’s not just rats who have the smarts to jump a sinking ship. Not all books are meant to be written. Live and learn from disasters at sea.
   This lowly vessel, a blog carved into a canoe, isn’t on an epic voyage. I’ll leave it here, with my readers cursing me for talking about the nature of my work and not my work. The nature of my work has many facets to it.
   That’s what I’ve been trying to say to you. All these facets are facets of business. What does all this businesslike activity make me? Money, I hope. Nature of the work. My actual work, though, is typing. I tried to write to you about typing.
   As I wouldn’t force a movie about typing on you, I had to veer off into the nature of my work. Which is not the same thing as the work itself. I can advance the plot in my head by reading a handy bit of information. And that’s the nature of my work. Reading handy information doesn’t directly advance the word-count. Typing does.
   I’m thinking about wool. If you ravel wool, are you doing anything different from unravelling wool? Yes/no/maybe. The first word, ravel, has that history of meaning to entangle and to disentangle. You’ll have to look at the words surrounding it to determine what the user is trying to say.
   What am I saying? This is text, kiddies. I’m not saying anything at all. That’s a lie, of course. I’m one of those demented writers. Oh yes. I read my work aloud. Even the silly voices? Hell, especially the silly voices. Now off with you. Go and ravel, or unravel, mysteries elsewhere. I have work to do. And by that, I mean unglamorous, non-dangerous, and bearably unexciting typing.

NEXT BLOG: REJECTION IS A FOUR-LETTER WORD.

Monday 14 November 2011

LET’S TALK ABOUT MY FIRST BOOK.

Posted by RLL for REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE. © RLL, 2011.

There isn’t one. I looked at the electronic pile of rejected novels, and decided to convert files from Microsoft Word to the Kindle format. What was in the pile? There were books I’d written on a whim under a time-constraint, just to prove to myself that I could. To jolt myself into doing those, they were books written using other people’s toys.
   TV tie-ins. Right. I’m going to rattle those out. The characters belong to some organisation. So I can’t afford to waste endless oceans of time constructing the stories. If the organisation says no, I’ll have spent…a week on a book. And a week on the sequel. Do two, to prove the first one is no fluke.
   If the outfit says no, I’ll have picked up a lot of information about how I work under harsh constraints. On top of that, I think it’ll be fun. I used the word rattle. What do the blog readers make of that word?
   Some people think there’s no skill involved in rattling a story out. I’m here to tell you that my use of the word stems from the days when I’d rattle stories out on a manual typewriter. Skilfully. Do I miss those days? Of course not. I have a decent heating system now, for one thing.
   Yes. Writing by typewriter in a cold room works wonders for the concentration. I no longer possess the muscle memory for manual typewriting. If pressed back into it, I’d be forced to take double-handed sledgehammer blows to the typewriter keys. All the while yelling WHY IS THIS LIKE LIFTING BOULDERS?! YE GODS! WHYYYYYYYY…
   Younger readers may be forgiven for failing to understand the effort required of manual typewriting. Let’s quiz the audience. Test your age. Look at a keyboard. Now turn your attention to the big button. No, not the long thin one. That’s the space bar. Where tipsy astronauts pretend they are walking through high orbit, hanging around in low company. Nothing to do with the rocket-fuel-expensive cocktails imbibed.
   The other big button. It resembles an upside-down L. If you call that the carriage return, you have served time in the trenches of manual typing. It is likely that you are of a certain age. This is a euphemism. However, if you call it the enter key, you are, in fact, a young person.
   Writing evolution. Let’s look at the cave-paintings, stage by stage. In school, I started with pencil and paper – writing to a time-constraint. Later, the pen was forced on us. I wrote with pen and paper – to a time-constraint. The evolutionary leap to a typewriter slowed my speed as I picked up the memory patterns required to access keys without jamming the mechanism.
   Did anything change in my writing? No. Writing by pen, I couldn’t alter the story. This forced me to think about what I wanted to put down on paper, to a time-constraint. Working by typewriter, I knew that I would have to REPEAT a COLOSSAL effort if I changed ANYTHING. So I never developed the habit of rewriting material. Even in the pencil days, there was only time to flip the pencil over to the un-business end, erase a shoddy word, fix an awkwardly-scrawled letter, and move on.
   What of Tipp-Ex, you cry? A proprietary name for typewriter correcting fluid reliant on brush-based technology. I used this goo in the same way as I used the un-business end of a pencil. To fix an error. No more than that. Strike the wrong key. Utter exclamation. Remove the errant letter by performing a peculiar ritual akin to painting The Last Supper. Pause to admire handiwork. Hit the right bloody key. Stare at result. Move on.
   In schools, there was a ban on the fluid for a time. To discourage pupils from engaging in unwholesome nasal-based activity. Did that edict suppress the sniffers? Hard to say. In my day, school was awash with hay-bales of marijuana, weapons-grade LSD, and other contraband substances I needn’t spend time listing. If the asbestos didn’t get you, the clouds of smoke from illicit cigarettes wafted in to finish the job. Tipp-Ex was never a priority. Enough of that. Time to ponder an evil lie.
   There was an evil lie circulated by young writers, foisted on old writers, with the advent of electronic writing machines. You should definitely buy a computer. It’ll make your writing faster. The old gunslingers would eye the new dudes and mutter under their soup-catchers. Just what I need. Some young punk kid coming along off a dude ranch, telling me my writing needs to be faster.
   I knew this was a lie. As a young writer I made the evolutionary hop from typewriter to computer, and had to learn a whole new set of skills. Slowing my writing down, for a time. There I was, learning how to use a typewriter, all over again. (I’d liken it to a cyclist becoming a motorcyclist. Don’t start your very first motorbike journey at 150 mph. It’s likely to be your last.)
   On top of that, there were new options at my disposal. More choices, slowing me down until I was up to speed. Cutting and pasting text. Extra tools. Spellcheckers, and grammar machines. I’ll say this of spelling – I’m good at it. Regardless of that, I always carry a dictionary. Just in case. And I’m prepared to dip into any number of dictionaries and word guides, just in case. Doesn’t matter how good my spelling is. Dictionaries are tools. Make use of them.
   My spelling’s better than my typing. Flailing around on keyboards generates mistakes. Typing creates patterns that don’t occur when actually scribbling. So I’m grateful if an electrically-powered tool spots a typo or format glitch. I’m not so grateful when some bolshie feature of the computer adds awkward clutter to my work. For that reason, I say this of the grammar checker. Caution.
   The grammar checker is likely to be alien to your small part of the world. For, in your small part of the world, grammar always operates at the local level. With local meaning. Try this on for size. I doubt it’s going to rain. Obviously, I’ve cleaned that up a bit for international consumption.
   Ah doot it’s gonnae rain.
   This is a contrary statement in many parts of Scotland. It means I DON’T doubt it’s going to rain. In terms of local grammar, the fishwife is saying…it’s going to rain. An electronic grammar checker has no more notion of this intended meaning than it has of the taste of milk.
   Eventually, I developed a speedier pace when using the computer. There were things about the manual typewriter I was glad to see the back of. (All things. The whole effing machine, basically.) But I still carried the notion in my head, that I could rattle out stories.
   Those TV tie-ins were rejected. No big deal. I hadn’t spent years writing them. The © in other people’s toys belongs elsewhere. For that reason, when looking for a self-publishing candidate, I looked closer to home. Once more, I had to learn new skills. In formatting.
   The potential candidate for conversion had to be wholly © to me. Uncomplicated. slim*thriller had loads of technical issues requiring resolution, on top of the Kindle formatting. That technical mess informed my choice.
   Go with the shortest book that is © to me. Neon Gods Brought Down by Swords. That is my first book to be released on Amazon Kindle. Is it my first book? No. LYGHTNYNG STRYKES was written around the same time. There was my Hamlet adaptation to consider. It didn’t matter which book I chose to convert to Kindle. These were all later books.
   My very first book was written to a time-constraint for a competition. Well, why not. A treble goal. Complete a manuscript, to a deadline, and win a publishing deal. Cheating? No. There’s a Berlin Wall of snobbery relating to certain types of publishing. Drive a tank through it, I say.
   Famous writer’s famous offspring writes. It’s not what you know, but who you know. Conveniently overlooking the possibility that it’s what Senior drummed into Junior about writing and about the business that played a part, more than any oleaginous publishing contact ever could.
   Winning a writing competition will never lead to a career in writing. Alistair MacLean won a short story competition, kick-starting his career. I’ve enjoyed almost all of his novels. That’s a compliment, and a great one. The compliment would have made no difference to him, of course.
   Self-publishing is evil. Well, publishers with a vested interest in not missing out will say that when they miss out. I’m reminded of the view that a defendant who acts for himself in court has a fool for a client. A statement most-often made by lawyers missing out on fees.
   Anyway, that first book of mine was awful. To the extent that I demolished all but one memorable passage that had potential. First book? It’s gone. Believe me, you weren’t missing anything. Did I learn from it? Hell, yes. And did I still try the odd writing competition? Of course.
   Your writing isn’t judged in a writing competition. (I mean the judges aren’t standing over you, cheering or jeering. Keep it distant. Take emotion out of the picture.) The entry wins, or doesn’t. Winning isn’t automatically success. Not winning isn’t automatically failure.
   slim*thriller was a story I kept in my head for years as I wrote other things. Ah doot it’s gonnae rain. That phrase comes from chapter six. A writing competition popped up. Same challenge as before. Time is against me. I must set the work down on the page and finish the damned thing. Win the deal. The snobbishness remained. Winning a writing competition will never lead to a career in writing.
   Did I win? No. Did I see the potential for a larger canvas? Hell, yes. With technical concerns relating to illustrations, I couldn’t jump in and convert the book directly to Kindle. Not immediately. I had to get a feel for the Kindle format with something simpler. Learn.
   The moment I overcome the problems with the illustrations, I’ll convert slim*thriller to Kindle. A lot of things came together in that book. So I think of it as my first book, even though it followed one disastrous attempt, one over-ambitious experiment, and one valiant effort. Oh, and dead ends? A labyrinth of those. All grist to the cliché.
   On Kindle, I think I’ll divide slim*thriller into four volumes and serially release it – just to see how many readers I hold with each issue. Insane? Self-publishing is what you make of it. And that’s what I choose to make of it. What will I learn? Much. That famous quantity that’s never quite enough.
   slim*thriller represents unfinished business with the publishing world. I felt like stating that in my blog. In case people clamour for more stories about Neon Gods. Let me work my way through the pile of really good rejected stories first, kiddies. Every single one of which feels like my first book, if I’m brutally, scar-baringly, honest. Do I feel that way about books-as-yet-unwritten? Aye.
   That’s Scottish for yes. It is not a contrary statement.

NEXT BLOG: WHAT IS THE NATURE OF MY WORK?

Monday 7 November 2011

YOU SHOULD START A BLOG.

What the (long unprintable sequence) should I start a blog for?!
   The history of the world shows that even an irate, ill-mannered, question can be a good one. Blogging. Isn’t that just writing letters via electricity? As with Chairman Mao’s view on the impact of the French Revolution, it’s too soon to tell.
   What is this blog about? Well, what’s anything about? A blog about the blog itself would transform into a frumious creature determined to swallow its own tail. I was told I should start a blog, as…I was doing that anyway. Really?
   Is that what I’ve been doing? Blogging without realising. Offline blogging – oh, writing letters. Blogging. Sounds awfully like logging with some unspecified edible component thrown in. Logging thoughts on the web, web-logging, is not new…not even to me, if you adopt the stance that writing letters is a low-watt version of the same damned thing.
   Well, kiddies. It is new to me. I will lie and say that I have been dragged, kicking and screaming, from the sixteenth century, where I was more than comfortable with the cutting-edge concept of the vellum download…and I’ve been dumped here, to talk about my non-book. A book not made of paper.
   It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that an unpublished author in search of an electronic audience must blog. Is that the case? No, of course not. And yet…the only entrepreneur who ever sold anything from the bottom of a well was the well-bottom megaphone salesman. It’s a niche market, but he’s getting by.
   I’m here to talk about my writing. That’s what this blog is about. My own mini-advertising campaign, serving two purposes. This blog kicks off in the pre-publication stage. I’m going to release a book on Amazon Kindle. It’s called Neon Gods Brought Down by Swords. Check out the cover. I’ll say a few words about design, before I say a few words about the words.
   The earliest version of the cover was in blue from top to bottom. One of the major design considerations, when thinking of putting out an electronic book, involves coping with the nature of the shop window. In the case of Kindle, that’s an Amazon window.
   Amazon’s window is white. The Amazon page itself is packed with white space. For that reason, the recommendation is that covers shouldn’t be white themselves. A white cover on a white background simply fades into the snowy wasteland.
   Knowing that, why would I hack away at the top part of the cover, creating white space, destroying the solid blue rectangle? I wanted the book to be noticed. Does that mean I was a little devious in altering the design? Perhaps. The title is something that customers should be interested in. Clear? Easy to read? Curious about?
   All three, naturally. I grasped the last point in line and shook it by the scruff. Curiosity. If potential customers want title clarity when straining to check out a thumbnail view, then they can always click on the product’s thumbnail for a larger view. Reeling them in. So the perfect cover design may not be the perfect cover design, after all. (I want the book to be noticed for its writing, not its cover.)
   The author’s name is the written part that should be clearest, on the cover. Reaching over to gander at a copy of Santorini, I see Alistair MacLean’s name takes up a MONUMENTAL amount of space. In gold, no less.
   Is the title going to sell the book? Possibly. The author’s name should, once the author is a known quantity. Who draws the short straw? The publisher. Wisely, the publisher of a hardback or paperback book knows that it is foolish to festoon the cover with an all-devouring company logo.
   Customers don’t normally buy books based on choice of publisher. Oh, I’m sure it happens. In some arcane way that I am struggling to contemplate. Now I’m picturing a fan, purchasing Marvel comics alone. Though I suspect the fan is interested in the setting run by Marvel, rather than Marvel as a publishing entity. As the publisher of my book, I get away with prominent display twice over.
   The cover is set up. Now I wax all nostalgic, and long for a rear cover I know I won’t create. For I am not publishing paper. Paperless data is my thing, as an electronic publisher. Would it serve any purpose, shoving a rear cover into an e-book? Well, it could be made to serve a purpose. Once upon a time, a rear cover served as inspiration.
   Though not quite in the design-sense. I’d have to be doing something dreadfully wrong to muck up my name on front and rear covers. See the 1963 Fontana paperback imprint of MacLean’s novel, FEAR IS THE KEY. Or the novel by McLean, if you’re reading the blurb on the back cover.
   When I spotted that inconsistency, I knew I’d most likely find the right spelling on the copyright notice page. Not true. The work was © to some shady cove named Gilach. Which brings me right the way round to Neon Gods Brought Down by Swords.
   There are many characters in the story. You might look on the main character as Gilach Mac Gilach. (I’m sure Sorcha will have her fans, clamouring to have her take that title. By force. Whether necessary or not.) Should I have called him MacLean? I’d already done that in a story – slim*thriller. Twice over, as there are two MacLeans in that tale.
   Inconsistency spotted on a rear cover led to the naming of a character. This is background material of potential interest to blog readers. I’m plugging the book, before it is out. But I feel that I must do more than just plug the book in a robotic manner. (Penny for the starving scribbler.)
   I insist on wondering if I’ve done the right thing in setting up the cover that way. Looking at the cover image, size of a thumbnail as it would appear on an Amazon page, I like the notion that I can just make out the title. Generating curiosity. The end of the blade is cropped deliberately.
   In throwing off the shackles of the vellum download, I’ve concluded, as I type, that I’ve come to like this blog for its place in space and time. Perhaps I’ll be forced to change the cover back to its solid blue rectangular state. Before publication, before sales, before customer feedback, there is the blog. Setting out some of the steps I took to reach this point. Self-publishing, I’m blade-keen to learn by doing. Judging a book by its look is up to you.
   I have studiously avoided mentioning the plot. Check out the blurb and sample. Sample, you say? What, you’ve written words that you’re not charging money to access? True. The Amazon Kindle format is set up to give a sample to potential customers in any case. Try before you buy.
   As long as I’m not providing a sample larger than the one given away by Amazon, I’m not hurting my business. Further thought? Even if I did provide a sample a bit larger than Amazon’s taster did, I doubt I’d be hurting my business.
   Taste. What of the customer who doesn’t care for the sample? A potential punter who doesn’t like the story may think of a friend who might. Many large bookshops encouraged casual browsing by dotting chairs and sofas around the shelves. Sauce for the paper-selling goose certainly applies to the digital-selling gander.
   What is worth saying about the nature of my fiction in this pre-publication blog? That I’m a fan of flashbacks, stories within stories, twists upon twists, deliberate mistakes that turn out to have deeper meaning on further reading, ambiguity in motive, motive in ambiguity…
   And I’m definitely a fan of the view that a writer should know how it ends.
   Once you know how your story ends, you are in a position to write in any order you please. Start at the end, have a flashback to the middle, and work your way around to the beginning. If you want to write that way. I know how the story ends. After I’ve worked that out, it’s just a matter of typing and not falling asleep at the wheel. If you’ll pardon the wild swish of images.
   Always know how it ends. Some writers never work that way, and the work works out in the end just the same. Not how I tackle the problem, but good for scribblers who do. I fall somewhere between those who plan novels as though orchestrating an assault on the Normandy beaches, and the writers who are stunned when they meander to a conclusion that must have come from someone else’s fevered scuba-conscious…so freeform is their approach. No matter your method of writing, knowing the end or not, I’ll emphasise this…
   Always know when it’s finished.
   Kipling makes the poetic comment that every single way of telling stories is right. (In the Neolithic Age, 1895.) If you are the sort of writer who scribbles away not knowing how it will end, that’s your business and that’s just fine by me. I’m not blogging to piss people off, or to please them. Two important points of note to potential bloggers.
   Though I’m likely to piss off some and please others, I cleave to the view that I don’t care what people think of my work. Did you buy it? Yes. Good. Did you buy it? No. Would you like to buy it? Amazon does free samples…
   Back to my work. Flogging by blogging. Another thing you’ll find, as these stories emerge, blinking, into the electronic daylight, is that I deliberately repeat images across books. Doesn’t matter what the setting is. Little things, here and there. Some major themes. A few names. The marketing people will tell you this builds brand-awareness, or consumer-familiarity. (Which, if taken too far, presumably breeds consumer-contempt.) I’m just telling stories, folks.
   This blog is powered by the memory of listening to Alistair Cooke on his weekly radio broadcasts for the BBC. (I was sorely tempted to open with the phrase good evening.) In 1997, Cooke observed that the manual typewriter was viewed as impersonal when it strode onto the world stage. Authors eyed the typewriter warily, and spent the first fifty years of its existence getting to grips with the beast. Blogging managed to take off and gain acceptance over a somewhat shorter period.
   How long should a blog be? I thought I’d try a minimum of 1,500 words. Long enough to say something. Not too long to be classed as a novel by stealthy blogging means. Are there any rules for bloggers? Blogging etiquette? I suspect there are certain inviolable codes. Who knows, I might even discover I’ve shattered a few of those as I blog along.
   You should start a blog.
   And with that, I started a blog.

NEXT BLOG: LET’S TALK ABOUT MY FIRST BOOK.