Category Archives: General Wittering

Erk

My writing is going incredibly badly, not just a little bit out of kilter but oh blimey I think I’m going to have to re-write the first 50,000 words badly.

It does happen with every book I write but I’ve never had a two year old to look after or had my in-laws turn up to stay for an unspecified time until they find a house at the same moment. Usually I have time to concentrate, this time, not.

Hmm… It seems there are finally too many balls in the air and I’ve dropped the fucking lot.

Oh dear.

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Filed under General Wittering, winging author

Taking the plunge

Having discovered the lovely Smashwords is going to charge witholding tax I have been feeling, for some time, that my plan to e-publish my book has been a bit well… to put not too fine a point on it, pissed on. Now though, I have a plan.

So, here’s the deal.  I’m going to serialise my e-book for free, starting the last week in July. Anyone who gets bored reading the instalments can buy a copy of the e-book in advance for £2.50 or, if they really want to push the boat out, they can buy a paperback. Incidentally, the free, serialised, e-book will always be available. My aim is to get it printed for a price that will allow me to sell it for £7.99 and send it anywhere in the world for a tenner!

Terrestrially (is that the right word) I’ll try to sell the paperback locally, my local book shops, a signing, publicity in the local papers, radio and if I could swing it, TV, e-mails to friends, family, clubs etc. The angle being stay at home parent with two year old writes and self-publishes book – might add NCT or the like to the list for press releases then.

I’ve thought about Amazon but because they demand you sell it half price I’d have to list it at £15.99 in order to sell it for a reasonable amount and leave room for costs an their cut, let alone actually earn anything from it.  It all seems to be a bit artificial to me.

So there we go, that’s the plan… I took a big breath and sent off for the ISBNs today… one for each format of the serialised e-book, one for each format of the sold e-book and one for the paperback.

And yes, it’s a lot of money all this printing and isbns and gubbins and I could end up looking a real idiot. It’s sort of daunting and yet quite exciting too.

On a lighter note, scion pointed at my Dr Who mug today and, unprompted, shouted “Darlick”.

I did tell him what a Dalek was – when he was about 5 months old at any rate – but I don’t remember mentioning it since. Even so, clearly it went in.

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Filed under e-publishing, General Wittering, Other Creatives

Lorks!

Since yesterday evening, the download total for my second free e-short, Bog Man, on feedbooks has gone from 650 to 741… I dunno what’s going on but it’s brilliant! In the last hour 11 people have downloaded it… The other one’s still ticking along with 2 or 3 downloads a day, now, that’s what I consider to be a realistic expectation for both but this is… barking… in a very good and happy way!

The new e-short is in the pipeline and I hope to upload it in June… the actual book, Few Are Chosen is, I hope, going live in July… if I can manage it… so you all have something to read on holiday.

Smashwords have to do withholding tax now so I’m thinking I won’t sell my e-book, I’ll do the give it away free and hope some people will buy a paperback model… unless I can’t get a paperback printed cheaply enough to sell it to you all for £7.99 plus postage, in which case it’ll have to be a case of sod it, let them withhold it and do it anyway.

So… scores on the doors…

Is This Heaven? – 917 downloads since Christmas Day 09
Bog Man – 1,119 downloads since 12 March

Mmm…

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Filed under Author Updates, Blimey!, Encouragement, General Wittering, Other Creatives

I’ll have a P please Bob

A small envelope arrived today with a new p key for my knackered keyboard.

It fits.

Hoorah!

No more pinky blisters…

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The Value of Re-reading…

Hmm… here I am formatting my book for print, ordering actual bound copies to look at and evaluate and thinking that I am pretty much finished when I discover a massive and pointless continuity error…

I’d never seen it before so I’m delighted (not to mention relieved) to have found it now.  I suspect the moral of this story is that you can never proof read your stuff enough times.

On a completely different subject, the p key on my computer has broken. It still types, but the plastic lid won’t stay on so I have to put my pinkie directly onto the strange squishy rubbery mechanism… I guess the moral of this story is not to put your computer on the ground so your mobile phone falls out of your pocket onto the keyboard when you stand up.

Another small disaster was averted, too, yesterday when scion came rushing through my nice clean house shouting “egg” and juggling a real one from hand to hand – he is one and three quarters so this was… alarming. I did manage to rescue it and get it back into the pantry… I also managed to rescue the three other eggs he had dropped into the cereal box. Luckily none of them broke either… so no eggy cereal and no horrible eggy goop stuck, for ever, between the floor boards in the hall!

Points to the little one for manual dexterity, too, he’d unhooked and opened a wire egg basket and opened a cardboard egg box inside it.

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Filed under General Wittering, Good Advice

Kathy Lette says she admires me!

Yeh and even though she doesn’t know who I am, it feels good!

In an interview  on the writers and artists yearbook blog she was asked what female novelists she admired and said this:

“All female novelists who are also mothers. We should all just get a Booker Prize for finishing a book.”

The rest of the article is a great read, too – you can find it here but that particular bit made me feel all warm and fuzzy. And next time I am trying to sort out a problem with a plot in my head, while I am trudging up (0r down) the stairs with the latest clean (or dirty) mountain of washing to attend to; followed closely by small, huffing, puffing, scion carrying a large (full) plastic milk carton in each hand (cartons which are making worrying is-that-milk-going-to-stay-put-in-there-or-it-going-to-leak-out gurgly noises) I will think of that and feel part of a weird sisterhood of mother writers!

Mmm… Isn’t that a pip?

So, Kathy Letts thank you, thank you!

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Filed under Encouragement, General Wittering

Audio publishing…

Hmm… so what I really need to find is a Smashwords for audiobooks…

I was thinking I could read it, myself, Scott Sigler style.

He is the guy who gave his books away as podcasts and ended up getting picked up by Orion after he had 50,000 downloads.  Something like 60% of the people who downloaded his book for free went on to buy a paper copy.  He did put in a long day around the internet taking part in forums, writers’ groups and the like ‘soft’ selling his books.

For the moment, I think I will stick to the e-shorts for this.  I’m starting on another one so I would be reading the first… so long as the police cars who drag race up my street, my son and my husband could keep quiet for long enough to allow me to do so… yeh… it’s going to take a long time.

I do have a good programme for doing the recordings… It’s made by a company called CFB Software and you can find them here.

LP Recorder – really a specialist thing for recording records onto your computer so you can make them into MP3s.  HOwever, it works very well when you change the input channel to mic as opposed to line in.  If  you combine it with LP Ripper which helps you split the recordings up into tracks, you get something pretty powerful.  It’s a reasonable price, too.  They quote $70 for the two programmes together or $40 for LP Recorder on its own.

So, same deal as my current e-publishing venture, give away my short stories for free and try to build up a following.

About 250 people have downloaded my first short story from Freado, Scribd and Smashwords although it’s probably all my mates and acquaintances… not sure…  Clearly the next step is to read this and put the recording on a new podcast page, here, with a link from the entries on scribd, freado and smashwords.

I’m crap at short stories so it isn’t easy and it isn’t necessarily going to help sell my book, which is rather better, I hope.  Even so… it will be interesting to see what happens.

As always, I’ll keep you posted.

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Filed under audio publishing, General Wittering, Marketing Ideas, Useful Resources

Something Novel…

Yeh, as the title says, my novel!

Terry Pratchett’s right, writing really is the best fun you can have on your own.

Ok so I’ve finally written a book which I don’t wish was written by somebody else, so now to sell it… this blog is here so you can follow me on my journey to literary… um… stardom.   Step one will be to find an agent…

Let’s begin.

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Filed under General Wittering, Good Advice