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...

Looking for Buttons is free for Christmas - oh yes it is!

The curtain rises to show a simple domestic scene of pre-Christmas pandemonium.  Downstage a young(ish) woman (LUCIE) sits amid a sea of wrapping paper.  She has bits of sticky tape in her hair and is sobbing brokenly into a piece of tinsel.

LUCIE:  Less than a week until Christmas Day!  How will I ever get it all finished in time?  I must wrap all these presents and get them to Father Christmas without delay, yet there is also the laundry and the cleaning and to do that I must find the floor under all this paper.  The tree is drooping and the Christmas cake is not made.  All I want to do is read a book!  (She sobs.)

Enormous flash, stage left.  Enter FAIRY GODMOTHER, with Kindle.

FG:  Oh, do stop snivelling, woman!  Buck up and pull yourself together.  You'll get it all done, because you always do, and if you don't, well, quite frankly, does it matter?  You don't even like Christmas cake and there's a packet of Cadbury's chocolate fingers in the cupboard.

LUCIE:  I've already eaten most of them.

FG:  There were two packets, so nil desperandum.  Unless you've already eaten both, in which case you are a glutton and I have no sympathy.  Now put down that sticky tape -

LUCIE:  I can't, it's stuck to me.

FG:  I shall ignore that remark.  Shut up and listen.  While you shall not go to the ball -

LUCIE:  Why not?

FG:  You're a hermit.  You hate parties.

LUCIE:  Oh yes.

FG:  Where was I?  Oh yes.  While you shall not go to the ball, you shall have a good book to read over the Christmas period, for - tra la la and abracadabra - Looking for Buttons will be free to download from Amazon for five days, starting on Christmas Day!

LUCIE:  Oh.

FG:  You're supposed to leap about for joy at this point.

LUCIE:  But I've read it several times.  I wrote it.  And I don't have a Kindle.

FG:  Flaming heck, you can't please some people.  All right, here's a second hand boxed set of Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense.  You can have an hour off from the chores to watch the one with David McCallum and then you'll have to get back to work.

FAIRY GODMOTHER waves wand and turns LUCIE into a teapot before turning to beam at the audience.

FG:  Meanwhile, those of you who love romance, happy endings and aren't whinging hermits can download Looking for Buttons free from Amazon, 25th-29th December.  Merry Christmas!

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...

Friday Freebie!

Only time for a quick post today, but it's a good 'un.

From 9 a.m. (if I've got the conversion right - midnight if you're on Pacific Time in the USA) on Friday 3rd August, for one day only, Looking for Buttons is free.

DOWNLOAD IT FREE ON 3rd AUGUST

Such stuff that dreams are made on

My subconscious is a strange place.  I don't know if everyone does this, or it's just me, but I dream in narrative.  Several times I've woken in the night lunging for a pen before I lose whatever gem of a plot has just spooled before my mind's eye.  Occasionally it still holds up the next morning.  Once I got a half-decent opening scene for a thriller and on another maddening occasion I awoke knowing I'd just imagined an entire episode of Spooks.  It had been rather exciting (which perhaps should have alerted me to the fact that I was dreaming) but I couldn't remember anything else about it.

Now it seems the shadowy (and probably very dusty) recesses of what passes for my mind are dwelling on the world of e-books.  When I woke at half past three this morning I had been dreaming of reading an article on e-books.  There were two points that struck me:

1. Any woman seen with an e-reader in public at the moment will be assumed to be reading porn.
2. What are the long-term implications for charity shops?  Second-hand bookshops, too, although those seem to be like hen's teeth round my way.  If e-books come to dominate the market, donations to charity shops will dwindle.  I still haven't got an e-reader (hypocrite! I hear you cry) but I imagine that once you've read a book you don't want to read again it's just deleted.  If it was a paper book (I was going to write 'proper book', but that's surely opening up a can of worms best left undisturbed by an indie author) it would, I hope, end up being passed on rather than binned.  I don't have any statistics, but I should think books bring in a steady revenue for charities.  Even people who actively avoid manically over-familiar persons in aggressively bright tabards may end up handing over a fair bit of cash to charity in their thirst for reading matter.  What happens when they no longer have a reason to cross the threshold for a browse?

I was so struck by these points that, in my dream, I began to read the article aloud to my mother.  As is the way of dreams, at this point the article became one about market gardening, written phonetically in an obscure Scottish dialect, and as such became irrelevant to this post.

I'm still worried about what reading a Kindle on the train would do for my street cred, though.