Never mind the quality, feel the gigabytes

Here in England it's a Bank Holiday weekend, which for those of you outside the UK means a national holiday in which people tackle home improvement projects quite beyond their capabilities or queue in endless streams of traffic to go to beaches packed with people huddled miserably over sandwiches now containing real sand as the wind lashes them with the driving rain.  It's a cultural thing.

So as usual I'm having a Bank Holiday Bonanza and giving away free copies of Looking for Buttons on Amazon.

Which is fine, except I'm not really sure anyone actually reads them.

When books are so cheap, even free, you can pretty much download as many as you like, memory permitting.  Never mind the quality, feel the gigabytes.  But when it's so easy to pile up the words, it loses meaning.  You get the buzz of a download without the deep financial commitment of, say, an enormous hardback to compel you to actually read the books you've amassed so avidly.

I might shift a few hundred books during this promo if I'm lucky but those stats are meaningless if no-one gets any enjoyment out of it beyond those fleeting seconds of the download rush.

So if you're reading this I hope you're here because you've read the book and you've enjoyed it.

Please tell me if you have.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to find my adjustable spanner...

Happy birthday Kate Harper!

This week marks the first anniversary of the e-publication of Looking for Buttons, so it's obligatory for me to mark that by sharing some of the things I've learned from the experience:

1.  People like free stuff.

I've shifted hundreds of copies of the book.  I've sold far fewer.  Despite this, I did get my first UK royalty cheque earlier this year.  Should have had buns a la Nesbit for tea, bought fish and chips instead and the rest went on the rent.

2.  Being a writer is not 24/7 glamour.

See rent comment above.  And I still haven't had an opportunity to wear my frivolous shoes.

3.  People are fab.

People I have seldom or never met have helped me with technicalities and promotion.  Friends have read the book, bought the book, plugged the book, listened patiently to me fretting about the book and generally been very positive about the whole thing.  Complete strangers have sent me nice messages via Twitter, Facebook and the Kindle Users' Forum and posted reviews on Amazon.  As a shy and retiring hermit, I find this all slightly overwhelming.  Thank you, all of you.

I won't witter on.  You're busy people and I'm supposed to be writing an essay (being a mature (immature) student is a great way to put off writing the Difficult Second and Third Novels).  But it's been an interesting and sometimes fun year, so if you're reading this, thank you for coming to the party.

Do help yourself to tea and buns.

Never knowingly oversold

When you're an indie writer, you're something of a one (wo)man band.  You can rope in other people for some of it, of course.  I can't design covers for toffee (or for books, come to that) so I was overjoyed when a kind gentleman did it for me after a timely intervention by the wonderful Norfolk Bookworm.  But the bulk of it falls on the writer.  Ah, cries the voice of reason, you wrote the book, so why not?  After all, it's all your fault and it's entirely self-inflicted.  But, oh, I do have trouble with promotion.

Partly it's down to inherent bashfulness, which is why most of my family have no idea that the book even exists.  I've managed to overcome this to some extent, irritating my Facebook friends* with intermittent chirpy enticements to buy the book even though all the ones that are going to have done so already (a few are still talking to me).  But selling myself doesn't come easily.  The only way I can bring myself to tell people about Looking for Buttons is if I've got a free promotion running.  The Valentine one went so well I extended it into a four-day extravaganza and the book hit Amazon's humour top twenty in the UK charts.  I was bold that day and actually told a few colleagues, who got quite excited and told more people and so I shifted about five hundred books in a short space of time.  Word of mouth does work, and it's the best sort of advertising.

It seems I am going to have to work on developing an outgoing character.  This is going to be harder than writing the Difficult Second Novel.  Perhaps I should just strap on a bass drum and cymbals and march down the High Street blowing my own trumpet.

* apparently this still isn't an oxymoron, even though I never see most of them for years on end

Just because you think they're out to get you...

As Lexi Revellian wrote recently, Writer's Angst is a well-documented complaint.  I've moved up a gear.  I have Writer's Paranoia.

It's been coming on for a while.  I had a week where Looking for Buttons sold pretty well.  Then I had a week with no sales at all.  I panicked and held a three-day free promotion over the Bank Holiday weekend, which saw it climb to number 7 in Amazon's UK humour chart and number 29 (I think) in their US humor chart.  I waited, with the obligatory clichéd bated breath, to see how this would affect sales.

It didn't.  Nothing happened for a few days, then today, glory be, I had a five star review on Amazon UK (thank you, whoever you are!) and sold a respectable handful of copies.  When I checked a little later (compulsive checking of ranking and sales figures is an early symptom of Writer's Paranoia), two of these had been returned for a refund.

Well, that was it.  Crushed does not even begin to describe it.  While the calm-eyed scientist part of me was pointing out that it may not be that they actively disliked it, it may even have been an inadvertent multiple purchase caused by wobbly fingers, and anyway, does it really matter, the rest of me, the stressed majority that is already gibbering because I start a new job next week, is obsessing over those two returns.  Did they buy the book expecting haberdashery tips?  Fifty Shades-esque squelchiness?  Did they hate the prose?  The characters?  The plot?

I've taken some deep breaths and listened to my inner dispassionate scientist.  Sometimes you buy something and it's not what you expect so you return it.  I'm sure M&S don't weep because I've returned a jacket that makes me look like I'm wearing a cardboard box underneath it.  Why should I react any differently when someone returns my book?

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to check my sale figures again...

You know how to whistle, don't you?

If you'd asked me about feedback ten years ago, I'd have launched into an explanation of how amplified sound leaving a loudspeaker is picked up by the microphone, causing a cycle of further amplification until you get the whistling screech familiar at rock concerts or near a hearing aid wearer.  Possibly I'd have drawn a diagram.  If you'd asked me on a day when things were going particularly badly, I'd probably have gibbered into my copy of Fundamentals of Acoustics and lapsed into miserable silence while scrolling through the vintage jewellery listings on eBay.

But those days are behind me now and today I'm more concerned with feedback from readers.  Yesterday a friend told me I had my first US review on Amazon.  I was a little nervous.  I don't know anyone in the States so this was my first review by a complete stranger.  Eventually I plucked up the courage to read it and it was far kinder than I'd dared hope.  This was A Relief.

Writing is a solitary pursuit.  It's easy to lose all perspective over whether what you write is any good or not, and it gets worse once you've had a few knockbacks from literary agents (although I still cherish the rejection letter than described Looking for Buttons as "well-written and perceptive").  Until now, only friends had judged the book and, delusional though I am, I could not regard their opinions as totally unbiased.  But now Looking for Buttons is out there, fending for itself, being read and, I hope, enjoyed by people I will never meet.  I hope that some of them will tell me what they think.

Until then, I'll just have to whistle to myself.

Freebie Friday - the aftermath

I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I put Looking for Buttons on a free promotion yesterday.  I hoped to get some more readers and to get some feedback - and, with luck, some positive reviews.  (My sole, cherished, five-star Amazon review is very kind - but the reviewer is an old friend and I'm not sure how much her kindness can be put down to liking the book and how much to the fear that I  might turn up at her house and wail plaintively through the letterbox if she said she hated it.)  I suppose what I wanted was to find out if there was a market for the book at all.

I checked the book's progress mid-afternoon and it had shifted a couple of hundred copies.  I was pleased with that.

I checked again just before I went to bed.  Looking for Buttons was at number ten on Amazon's free Kindle book Humour chart.  As I stared, it moved up to number nine.  It was at number 147 on the general chart.

Through sheer ill luck I wasn't able to log on to check the book's performance before the promotion ended this morning, so I don't know where it finished in the Humour chart, but the stats I could access showed it ended the promotion at number 111 overall.  In one day, nearly a thousand people worldwide had downloaded Looking for Buttons.  I'm still boggling about that.  Hopefully, some of them will actually like it and recommend it to other people.

I'm told word of mouth is the secret to marketing an indie book successfully.  I really hope that's true.  If I start to see an improvement in sales, I'll consider holding another free promotion.  Watch this space.

Just something I lashed up

Today I'm going to write about Fifty Shades of Grey.  I haven't read it, but everyone else seems to have an opinion so I'd better jump onto the bandwagon while it's in town.

So here's my take on the female population's sudden desire to read about being tied down while a capable man does all manner of things to them:

For the past however many years, women have been trying to Have It All.  They're knackered.  It's no wonder their ultimate fantasy is to lie down while someone else does all the work.

Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking...

Looking for Buttons has been on sale for two days.  So far I've sold six copies, which might not sound like many but feels like a huge triumph.  That's six whole people who've looked at the cover, read the blurb and thought "Yeah, I'll give that a go, and what's more, I'll pay for the privilege."  I find that wildly exciting.  (It is true that I don't get out much.)

What's more, it's already taking on a life of its own, thanks to friends using Facebook and Twitter to spread the word.  Twinkle Mummy has been badgering members of her local twins club to buy it and Norfolkbookworm has blogged about it, not once but twice!  (Norfolkbookworm, I must confess, is not entirely impartial.  She's been a good friend for over twenty years, has been one of Looking for Buttons's staunchest supporters, and roped in her very talented dad to do the cover!)

While I'm handing out the laurels, I must thank the inspirational Lexi Revellian who has been so generous with advice and support.  Her books, including the best-selling Remix and Replica, are great reads and her writing blog is a goldmine of information for the aspiring self-publisher.

Lastly, I must thank my late aunt and uncle.  They gave me my first PC some years ago, thinking it would help me study.  I wrote a book on it instead.  This book.  They're not here to see it published but I hope they would be pleased.