Tuesday 24 December 2013

A vaguely seasonal post

Yes, you're right, I haven't been very active on here this year.  Look, it's not easy being a jet-setting multimillionairess best-selling author.  Or so I imagine.  It's certainly complicated enough being a disorganised (im)mature student and semi-professional hermit.

And no, I'm not going to make up for my absence with an extended post full of seasonal jollity.  You know where you keep the mince pies and alcohol, you can fend for yourselves, seasonal jollity-wise.

What I can do is offer you a Festive Freebie, with Looking for Buttons available to download for nowt but the price of your internet connection from Christmas Day until 29th December.

Ho ho ho.

Monday 26 August 2013

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...

Sunday 21 July 2013

My true identity

Just to make it absolutely clear, I am not J.K. Rowling writing under a pseudonym.

Thank you.

Sunday 16 June 2013

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.

Sunday 26 May 2013

Another cover story

Yes, you're right.  It has been a while.  And while I'd love to have something exciting to report, it's actually all been terribly mundane.  Life as an author is not all one giddy social whirl, you know.  However, I do have a few nuggets of information to impart:

1. If you have nothing to say, don't say it.

It's not terribly helpful when one has a book to plug, but as I hadn't anything worth posting, I didn't.

2. The Difficult Second Novel lives!

It has revived and, what's more, I'm off to work on it in a minute so I can't hang around here chatting all day.

3. Looking for Buttons has had a facelift.

Now I'm against facelifts on principle (putting a bag over one's head is so much cheaper, and reversible).  On the other hand, marketing Looking for Buttons as a romance wasn't doing it any favours, so I'm putting the emphasis on its humourous side, with a recategorisation on Amazon and a new cover.


(A new cover, pictured sometime today.)

It's an experiment to see how these changes will affect sales, if at all.

4. And it's FREE!

To kick-start the new look, I'm holding a three-day Bank Holiday Bonanza from today until Tuesday, so get it while you can.  (Or wait until Wednesday and pay for it, that's fine by me.)

Right, that's it for now.  I've got another book to write.  Over and out.

Sunday 10 March 2013

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

Tuesday 12 February 2013

I'm only doing this because I love you

It's that time of year again, a time for love, a time for hearts and flowers, a time for showing affection through little, or not so little, tokens of esteem, a time for being sold overpriced tat by ruthless flint-souled commercial bloodsuckers exploiting your panicked need to conform to an artificially inflated non-festival.  And I know you feel that need to buy something, anything, no matter how pink, how tacky, to show you care.  So, yes, you could shell out thirty quid on six crispy roses and a card that will go straight in the bin because she really doesn't want to date a man with no imagination.

Or you could gift your beloved a copy of Looking for Buttons.

It's FREE to download from Amazon on February 14th, but I won't tell them if you don't.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Sunday 10 February 2013

Getting technical

No matter what non-scribblers may think, writing is a technical occupation.  You don't just dream up characters and storylines and nurture them into a novel.  Before that happens, you have to get to grips with the tools of the trade.

I suspect as long as people have been writing, there have been writers muttering dark imprecations about those tools.  There must have been stone tablets that shattered just as the chisel was reaching the good bit.  For every breathtakingly illustrated medieval bible, there must have been countless sheets of screwed up vellum lobbed into the fire by a frustrated monk.  The advent of the printing press must have created so many new ways for things to go wrong that Caxton must have been cursed in the same way as a Windows fatal error that occurs just as you were about to save that crucial file.

Which brings me (clumsily) up to date: the writer's relationship with modern technology.  Now you may have noticed by the paucity of illustration and zippy effects on this blog that I am not the techiest of people.  For all their shiny futuristic glamour, computers are merely tools, albeit less straightforward than a hammer, sometimes to the point where I am tempted to juxtapose the two.  But when you dip a toe or ten in the chilly waters of self-publishing, you need to get to grips not only with word processing but with creating a cover image (OK, I ducked that - thanks Graham!), maintaining an online presence and grappling with uploads and downloads, all the time suspecting something somewhere has gone arwy (I'm yet to receive any royalties from Amazon, not sure if that's because I haven't earned enough or because I did something wrong when I put the book up for sale).

Regular writers have publishers to worry about that sort of thing.  When you're a one (wo)man band it can start to creep in and suck out the time and enthusiasm you were saving for the actual writing.

So what I think I need is something to take the next book out of my head and drop it straight into yours, for a small fee of course.  I'll see what I can dream up.

PS Looking for Buttons will be FREE from Amazon this Valentine's Day.  That's got to be better than some wilting roses and an overpriced box of chocolates.

Wednesday 16 January 2013

This passes for a thought process, apparently

I was going to write something terribly interesting (or perhaps merely terrible) about writing and technology but that can wait.  I'm going to rave about someone else's book instead.

There are many ways I choose what to read, ranging from browsing idly to discovering something by an author whose work I've enjoyed before to a sudden craving for an old favourite.  And then there's the method which is more me than any other: going off at a tangent.

In the past this has led to some fantastic finds, particiularly when I've applied the priniciple to music (an interest in David Bowie's more obscure work leading to Iggy Pop singing Belgian jazz, for example).  The book I'm reading now is one I came across originally as part of a gift set when I was a student, which I suppose comes under idle browsing because I liked the look of the set but couldn't get to the blurb.  And it's an old favourite, establishing itself as such on first reading as one of the books I wish I'd written (although to have done so I'd have to been a) much older and b) deceased by now, which would make this blog marginally more interesting).  But I've come back to it through a classic piece of tangentery.  I shall take you through it in stages so you can tell if you too choose books by this method.

1. Over the Christmas holiday, the 1983 film Wargames was on TV.  I knew I'd loved it as a kid but couldn't remember enough about it to know why.  About ninety minutes in, John Wood turned up and I realised that was why, he'd made a huge impression on me when I was about nine.

2. So after the film I tried to think what else I'd seen him in, which meant a browse on the Internet Movie Database, very useful for settling 'oh, it's whatersname from thingy, oh you know, no, not her, you fool' arguments in our house.

3. And I saw that in the 1960s he'd been in an adaptation of Edmund Crispin's The Moving Toyshop, playing the poet Richard Cadogan.

4. Richard Cadogan is one of my Fictional Men For Whom I Have A Soft Spot.

5. John Wood would have been excellent in the role.

6. The series does not seem available to watch now.

7. Therefore I am rereading The Moving Toyshop and it is every bit as good as I remembered - and it's been a while since I read it so a lot of it is coming to me almost as new and it is a huge treat.

So, in a roundabout way that is no kind of useful review at all, I recommend that you try Edmund Crispin's Gervase Fen novels, solving Oxford crimes decades before Inspector Morse while wearing an extraordinary hat.  Except Swan Song because that wasn't as good as the others.

Which brings me back, in a tortuously roundabout way, to my original question.  How do you choose your books?  Do tell...