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...

My true identity

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

Thank you.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.