Tag Archives: author choices

28 Mar 2020 · 4:11 pm

Sweeping the cat for tinfoil and other adventures …

Still no zombies … every cloud has a sliver lining eh? It’s quite surreal though, which means your world might be a bit more like mine right now … probably.

This week I have been mostly searching my cat’s guts for tin foil. Mostly, but not entirely. We’ll get to it. In the meantime.

Slightly blue this morning, I expect I’ve stuffed up my HRT dose, in fact, I reckon I’ve forgotten to do the evening one for a couple of days, although, needless to say I can’t be sure because I can’t remember. Mwahahaargh!

A big part of it is that, now we are in lockdown, I can’t visit Mum. Sure I ring her every day but that’s not the same. She definitely has some form of dementia and it’s definitely getting worse. At the moment, although she can’t remember which way is up or what day it is most of the time, she’s still able to follow a conversation and still retains her personality as Mum. But … I’ve walked this path before with Dad and I have to accept that it isn’t going to stay like that. I have to accept the fact that maybe, by the time lockdown is over, my Mum – my real Mum, I mean – will be gone. And that makes me feel incredibly sad. Indeed, I’d probably be blubbing a bit as I write this, but McOther is sitting the other end of the table.

It feels as if each week I will lose another few precious hours of time with Mum by missing our lunch. I phone her every day but it’s not the same, and I can see, or at least hear, her deteriorating day by day. I’m not alone. For example, hardly anyone with a loved one in a home is able to visit them right now. Some have family members in hospital who are stuck there, some have loved ones who were in a home for recovery after say, a new knee op, and they are now stuck there apart from the people they care for until this is all over. It’s mightily grim and we just have to live with it, but I guess I was just hoping, against hope, that I could squeak another visit in before lockdown this week. In the event, lockdown came on Monday night. The temptation to drive down there and see her on Wednesday was almost overwhelming and it’s only the first week.

Bugger.

Other news, I’ve finally finished going through the alts of One Man: No Plan on audio. This has taken me way longer than I expected because there are a lot of blips and half breaths in it which weren’t there in the first two – one of the reasons this has taken me so long is because I re-listened to the first two beforehand, really carefully, to check. Gareth has at least three other audiobooks to do, to my certain knowledge – there may well be more – so I have a little while before he’s likely to be able to look at the alts, and plenty of time to get the fourth finished.

I confess I was horrifically nervous sending the alts for the blips/plosives and audible breaths. I am not 100% sure if my noticing these things was gimlet-eyed helpfulness or pedantic twattery. To be honest, even after checking with some narrators I know on t’interweb who reassured me that any comments like that are always welcome, I’m still a little unsure. It’s a fun listen though, so I hope it all works out OK.

This week more excitement in Lockdown Towers. Run with me on this one, it does get to the point. I have a desk in our dining room. Underneath it is a bag of foil-covered chocolate sweets which I give out at book signings. There are three types, chocolate oranges, chocolate eyeballs and chocolate sprouts. They all come in plastic net bags of about forty. They are spherical, marble-sized and individually foil wrapped. I had two bags of orange ones, about half a bag of eyeballs and four bags of chocolate sprouts.

On Monday evening, just after discovering that we were all in official lock down, I decided that I would ameliorate the impact with chocolate. I went into our dining room, intent on liberating a packet of sprouts for consumption over the coming weeks. However, when I got in there, I and found four plastic net bags with holes in spread across the floor.

Uh-oh, I thought.

I checked the bag and discovered a hole had been eaten in it. Yes. There were teeth holes around the … other hole. Not my son then. Checking the other bags I discovered the holes in those looked more … chewed than cut.

Hmm …

Upon further exploration, I discovered that both the eyeballs and the sprouts were all but gone. The orange ones, however, had been left. They were still in their bags although one bag had clearly been chewed, small pieces of foil removed from the chocolates inside and a couple had teeth marks. These ones had been tested and found wanting then, worse tested enough for me to not be able to eat them with confidence. The others … 520 grammes of chocolate, minimum, had gone.

Turning to Dr Google, I typed in, ‘does chocolate kill cats?’

OK, look, I’m not going to blind you with the technicalities of science here but the basic gist of it is, yes it does. Milk chocolate is less poisonous but 520 grammes in one sitting is lethal. About 30 grammes in one sitting is.

Shit. Now what?

I was wearing my pyjamas. The vet was closed, I knew. That morning I’d had a dental appointment which had been cancelled pretty much as I arrived. I’d tried to buy some cat food from the vet’s on the way home and discovered that it was locked and the customers were all standing in the car park, 2 metres away from one another. McCat’s constitution is pretty bomb proof but I felt that a poison overdose of such gargantuan quantities might be a bridge too far, even for him.

OK, calm, breathe. He hadn’t started throwing up yet.

Then I remembered. I’d found one of the chocolate sprouts on the doormat the week before. Could McCat have been quietly eating them over the three month period, since the Christmas Fayre, that the chocolate had been stored there. Were the scattered string bags merely the culmination of several month’s pilfering, a last hurrah now that the lovely edible balls were gone … well except for the orange ones he doesn’t like.

McOther checked under other furniture but there was nothing to be found so it’s clear that all 520 grammes of chocolate sprouts and eyeballs – minus a handful – had been eaten. The one million dollar question was … when?

McCat. Butter wouldn’t melt would it? Not ill and no fucks given, clearly.

I had a think.

McCat clearly wasn’t ill at that precise moment. I began to wonder if a ready cache of chocolate might explain his greatly relaxed approach to food since the beginning of the year. Not to mention the recent resumption of his tendency to be less relaxed and obsessively request each meal a few minutes after eating the last one. But if he had just eaten all the pies chocolate, we needed to get him to a vet, fast. How to find out though, preferably before he started throwing up, at which point, it would have been too late, Dr Google had told us. That’s when I remembered my pinpointer and had An Idea.

The chocolate was covered in foil. He’d peeled some of that off, clearly but it was equally clear that not all of it had been removed. Some had gone down his greedy fat cat gullet with the chocolate. If he’d eaten them all in one sitting, nearly all the foil had been eaten too. This meant that he contained almost as much wrapper as chocolate and, that being the case, if I ran a metal detector over him the signal from all that foil would blow my ears off. The detector, itself was too sensitive, it would pick up nearby stuff as well and I’d never be able to narrow it down reliably. The pinpointer, however … that was a different case entirely.

Yes, ladies, gentlemen and everything beyond and in between, when you go detecting and you’ve heard a signal and dug a hole, should you have any trouble finding the thing giving off that signal, if it’s really small, say, you can narrow down its whereabouts with a pinpointer. This is good for me because I tend to dig in fields that are bristling with coke, which gives off a large and loud signal. As a result I end up ignoring big signals, because there are that many hot rocks in the fields on which I dig that I find very little else. The little signals, are a different matter, but the things you find are also little, and that means you need to pinpoint them, fast, or you’re sifting about in the clod of earth you’ve dug out all day.

That’s how I ended up with a pinpointer, and that’s how I ended up running my Garrett carrot over the pooh in McCat’s earth box – without touching clearly – along with the cat shit bin – not touching that either – and not forgetting his lardy stomach. Despite a hitch, to start with, when I realised it was picking up the nearby washing machine, I did finally manage to get him in a position where I could reliably detect any foil in his innards. There was none, luckily. We stood down. I didn’t need to get dressed, leap into the car and brave lock down to find a vet. What a relief for everyone.

How many detectorists end up searching their pets? Who knows but I’d guess there are more than we might think.

So that was my week, sweeping my cat for tin foil. I am agog to see how next week is going to out-weird this one.

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22 Mar 2020 · 10:12 am

Still living the dream …

A while ago I wrote a book called, Escape from B-Movie Hell (it’s free right now on Kobo if anyone’s interested). It was a story about an impending meteor strike, meddling aliens and our hero, telepathic, gay art student Andi Turbot, is all that stands between the human race and total annihilation … Yeh, OK look, it’s not as wank as it sounds. When you read it, it makes sense, alright?

The point I’m trying to make is this. I don’t expect my books to come true in any way shape or form. I don’t expect anything remotely similar to the bizarre ideas in my head to actually well … you know … happen. Yes, it’s one thing writing a piece of jokey apocalyptic fiction,  ]=[ – sorry that’s a message from my cat – it’s quite another to be … how can I put this tactfully? Living the dream? Yes. Living the fucking dream. OK it’s not the same dream, but it feels like a similar one.

We are in almost lock down. For my international readers – folks here will know – all pubs, bars, restaurants, theatres and gyms have been ordered to close as soon as they can. At least now they will get some insurance and hopefully, the ones that were soldiering on will be able to pay some compensation to all those folks working for them who are now facing the not zombie apocalypse unemployed.

In theory, Mum should be isolated. She is eighty six, after all. Except she has carers, and she needs them, so we can’t isolate her. They have to be out and about collecting supplies and looking after a pool of people. People, who are handicapped, or vulnerable and who will, to put it rather baldly, die in a pool of their own excrement if they isolate themselves the way they have been instructed. Mum’s carers go in every day to help cook her meals, so after a brief discussion with the Wednesday lady, and Mum, we’ve decided that the benefits of my visiting probably outweigh the drawbacks. What’s one more, to be honest, so long as I’m sensible, like them. And because Mum is pretty unfazed by the whole thing.

That said, we had ‘the talk’ the other night on the phone. Mum said,

‘Darling, you know I may well die in this thing don’t you?’

‘I hope you won’t,’ I told her.

‘Well, I’ve got to die sometime and I’m eighty six, it’s going to be sooner rather than later.’

‘I know Mum, but I’d prefer it not to be now if at all possible. I want it to be gentle and I don’t want you to be on your own in some hospital, with nobody you love near you.’

She laughed, ‘We have to be realistic though, darling and we all die alone.’

‘Yeh, I know. Everyone dies alone, even if there are people with them, but … I would like to be there with you, you know, dropping you off at the gate so to speak. Holding your hand the way you held Dad’s.’

‘You are a dear,’ said Mum.

Then we ended up having ‘the talk’. I told Mum the things I would tell her if she was on her death bed, that I love her, that she has been the most wonderful mother to me that anyone could have had, that she and Dad were fabulous parents. That she was ace because … well … how many people can say their mother dragged them into a cupboard to hide from a particularly talkative member of staff so they wouldn’t be late? How many parents are genuinely more open, and unshockable than their children’s friends, pretty much until they hit their seventies? So I thanked her for that, too. And she told me she loved me and that she was very blessed to have kids like my brother and I. And it was all rather poignant. And a little sad. And then we had a giggle about how melodramatic we were both being.

And thinking about all that, I know I have to write more, not the shorts, which are lovely to write but leave less room for complexity. No, I need to write another sweeping epic, with a cast of hundreds, a plot with more twists and turns than a DNA profile. Another massive tome about belief and truth and the grey between the black and white.

The whole situation is a bit unreal though. It also feels as if life as we know it is a bit fragile. I learned, a long time ago, that the only thing we control in life is how we react to what happens. In fact I learned that in about 2012 or possibly before because The Pan of Hamgee says it to Ruth in K’Barthan two so I must have cottoned by then. Sometime, when Dad was beginning to be ill I guess – still well enough to refuse my help, but at the same time, ill enough to have carers to come and sit with him in the afternoons so Mum could go and garden.

I’m pretty firmly convinced that we have no control, but maintaining the illusion that we have, that something we do will change things, and proceeding on the understanding that we do, is helpful, if only so we can control ourselves. On the other hand, I do believe that we can change our thinking and spread a bit of kindness. Also if Mum does get Corona, I want to be sure that a) I did everything I could and b) we all agree on our courses of action first so there’s no looking back and regretting that I’d not done x, y or z. And yet, despite the surreal nature of existence right now, the nitty gritty of life, the minutiae, is as pleasantly barking as ever.

First up, a week ago on Thursday, after swimming, my ear hurt a bit. I had been wearing my new underwater MP3 player so I suspected I might have pushed the headphones in too far and pushed a lump of wax against the ear drum. As I had some olive oil drops, I started to put them in to soften it. I also had a doctor’s appointment booked for the Monday so I was confident that if I stuck olive oil in morning and night, the doctor could have a look and I’d know if I needed to book in to have it syringed. But then my doctor’s appointment was changed to a call. After speaking to him, he was pretty confident it was just wax and told me to keep up with the olive oil. He said it would come out on its own.

A brief whinge on Facebook and my niece – hellooo Jamie – told me that she has the same trouble and that she does the olive oil and then syringes her own ears.

‘You can do that at home?’ I type incredulously.

‘Sure,’ she replies.

Hmm … I googled home syringe kits and sure enough, I discovered I can. I decided to nip to boots to buy one on Thursday.

By the Thursday morning I was as deaf as a post. Worse I had sinus and a twitchy face. Oh no, hang on, that might be hayfever. I took a piraton, which helped but didn’t totally fix things sinus wise and I was still deaf, of course. Hmm … Was I infected or was the earwax just pressing on something? Not sure. Only one thing to do. I had to go buy a home syringe kit and before I used it – because that’s not advisable on an infected ear – I had to find someone who would look into my ear and tell me.

The doctor’s was not open to that sort of thing and I was certainly NOT going to casualty about it. Then I remembered hearing aid stores. Genius! I knew Boots had one, I’d start there. Off I went to town. Unfortunately, I drew a blank, their person was away that day and they recommended I ask at spec savers. But I splashed out the princely sum of £6.99 on a home syringe kit on my way back out through the store.

On to Specsavers. The lovely man there was available and he looked in both ears, without charging me, confirmed that they were both full of wax and recommended I use bicarb drops to clear it. He warned me to wait until one was done before starting the other. He recommended bicarb because he explained, it would dissolve the ear wax whereas olive oil merely softens it, ideal for syringing but I’d be lucky to get my ears syringed before hell froze over, although hell probably will freeze over sometime next week. I mentioned I’d bought a home syringing kit, ‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,’ he said.

The kit contained a rubber bulb … mmm … and yes I have the rubber face to go with it.

That afternoon it was clear that I was going to have to do something about the deaf ear so taking my courage in both hands I got out the kit. It contained a rubber bulb and its own bottle of drops, which I decided to put aside, unopened for future emergencies. I didn’t know how long this was going to go on for. I boiled water, for hygiene purposes, and then let it cool until it was warm. Finally it was ready and I plunged the bulb into the tepid water, filled it and with my head over the sink, I squirted it into my ear. It felt warm and rather nice and a lump of wax fell out.

Oooo.

I put it carefully onto a piece of kitchen roll to have a better look. Because I’m gross like that.

It was about the size of a small pea, maybe half a pea. Excellent. That was the wax gone, or was it though? Because I was still deaf. I had another go. Another lump of wax fell out. I could hear a lot better! Hurrah! Nearly there. One final effort and … oh my gawd! Something fell out of my ear. It was just over a centimetre long, about seven millimetres wide and dark brown.

Holy fuck! What is that thing? I thought. More to the point, how did it ever fit in my ear?

McOther and McMini asked the same question when I proudly showed them my er … excretions. They were also completely, utterly and comprehensively repulsed. I may have traumatised both of them! Although they still brought me a Mothering Sunday breakfast in bed, bless ’em.

Buoyed by my experience I set about my left ear with the bicarbonate drops. The guy had explained that earwax is acid and bicarbonate is alkaline. Yes, I know this. I sprinkle it over rhubarb and pour boiling water on it to make it a bit less acid. It’s rather cool because it fizzes, but it also takes the acidic extreme off the rhubarb. I did not expect the bicarb drops to fizz when they hit the ear wax but … they did. Gulp.

Two days in and things were getting ridiculous. Not only was I completely deaf in my left ear but there was gloop dripping out of it at night: vile factor ten and definitely a bridge too far. Sure, the bicarbonate drops were dissolving the earwax, and I can confirm it is more effective than olive oil, but this was completely disgusting. Saturday morning, with friends coming for a final pre-lock down supper, I decided it couldn’t face my friends with orange goo dripping out of my ear and I syringed it. No beef jerky this time, thank heavens but a lot of really, really weird debris, including many things that looked like the little tiny bones you get in a herring.

Then I walked around wondering what that strange whooshing noise was, and realised it was my clothes rubbing against my body. It was the bizarrest thing, to suddenly hear in glorious Sensurround again. It’s made proofing the audiobook a lot easier too, I can tell you. But having done this, myself, I have that same smug feeling I had the first time I changed an alternator in my car, something my uncle, who I was living with at the time, had just paid £500 for. Then again, he had a merc and I had a Triumph so for me it was undo three bolts, bung on the £20 replacement I’d found at the scrap yard, do up three bolts. That slightly smug feeling of self sufficiency. Always a good thing to feel in times like these.

Other news, it was McMini’s last day of school on Friday, ‘until further notice’. Unfortunately, he threw up in the night so he missed it. He has been slightly under par for a week, feeling sick in the mornings etc and I wasn’t sure if it was just apocalypse nerves or if he was genuinely feeling bad. Genuinely feeling bad, it seems.

Since I am sleeping like the dead right now I didn’t hear. I’m not sure McOther heard either and McMini told us that, once he’d been sick, he retired to bed feeling much better and went to sleep. In the morning, his father flushed the loo. As the strong stomached parent, I cleaned up and disinfected the loo, picked up the bucket, which had been rinsed but had remnants of sick in the bottom, and took it downstairs to wash.

Since I limp like Herr Flick, and it takes me for fucking ever to descend our stairs unless I have an arm free to lean heavily on the bannister, I will carry absolutely everything I can downstairs in one hit. On this occasion, I decided I would take the bucket, McMini’s hot water bottle, my iPad, tablet, phone and empty coffee cup downstairs at once. Thereby negating the need to make a second painfully slow and irritating trip. Stuck in a little sleeve, on the side of my iPad case, is an iPencil. It’s an old style one, with a lid on the end. How many times do you think the lid has fallen off this iPencil, ever, in my entire life?

That’s right. Never. Until this morning. Half way down the stairs there was a watery splat as something fell into the sick in the bottom of the bucket. Joy oh fucking joy! So when McOther came down, I was washing the bucket and the iPencil lid was sitting in a small jam jar full of spray bleach.

‘What’s this?’ he asked.

I told him and then of course, the git laughed, and I laughed and McMini came along to see what the fuss was about and he laughed. Well … at least we’re happy.

 

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29 Feb 2020 · 4:28 pm

This, that and audio marketing …

In a delightful departure from what was rapidly becoming the norm, I have no rodent-related shenannagins to report this week. Well … unless you count having a tetanus jab, which I did … you know … just in case.

To be honest, I haven’t done much. Partly because it’s been very windy here, I’m not sure what we’re onto now, we’ve had Brian and Chiara who segued seamlessly into Dennis and now we have Jorge who is Spanish and has pipped Ellen to the post. Snortle. But the weather is chuffing bogging a lot of the time.

Ellen. I had so hoped they were going to call it Windy Ethel. Never mind, can’t win ’em all. Whatever it’s called, it makes sitting in the conservatory like being underwater in a submarine. It’s about as dark and about as wet. I have not ventured out today and I don’t intend to any more than is necessary. Needless to say I have a packed social programme with school parents’ evening and some corporate wifing to do tonight. Bastard Ellorg or should that be Jorgllen?

Apart from an ambivalent effort at metal detecting on Sunday – right metals, wrong objects, clay pipe fragments but a nice medieval pottery shard, I seem to have been running around like a blue arsed fly all week but can’t really remember what for. It was mostly crises of my own making, delivering the iPad to the Apple shop to be fixed, picking it up and then setting it up. I was lucky enough to have a lovely visit to Mum’s on Wednesday. The gardening team was there as well as the career and Mum was very switched on. We chatted and watched telly.

While we were there, I played her a couple more of the audio voices. There is one character, Big Psycho Dave, he’s called, who I just can’t listen to without giggling. As you know, because heaven knows I’ve banged on about it enough, The K’Barthan Series is currently in production for audio, along with Unlucky Dip, which kind of acts as a prequel to everything.

At some point, I need to talk about the process, or at least, do a kind of dummies’ guide for Morons Who Are Unable to Grasp the Blindingly Obvious (as I call myself in these situations). Blimey but it’s taken me a while to cotton on. I’m still not sure I have.

One of the problems is that many of the people doing and talking about audiobooks are big hitters. I’m guessing some have little people to do the being an idiot bit for them and spit out the things they need to know at the end. But when it comes to what they do, they don’t want to talk about it. This may well be because they’re still experimenting and have no clearer idea of a successful strategy than I do. Alternatively, it may be as a result of legal advice in case someone says, ‘I did what you said and it hasn’t worked’ and sues them. Terry Pratchett had to stop visiting his own forums because people were starting to suggest things and, worse, say, ‘so, you used my idea then?’ And he’d be thinking, ‘What?’ And his lawyers advised him to make a sharp exit before the ‘so, you’ve used my idea’ bit got to the point where they started adding, ‘how much are you going to pay me?’

Actually, that’s not my approach, demanding compensation if it goes wrong. I’d just love to riff with people about what they’re doing and pick up some pointers. That’s what I’ve always done with the ebooks but there’s not much riffing going on as far as I can see, apart from on two Facebook groups where I’ve picked up a lot of interesting information. But, ideally, I need more points of view.

You may begin …

Some of the muted nature of the debate may be founded in that, if you go exclusive with ACX you have no control over the price of your books, so there’s not much you can do to market them, really, other than tell people they’re there. Obviously with Findaway, you do have some control over the price, you can set it at zero and folks are able to download the book for free in some places, but other sites will set the price at 99c. It’s a different model, I suspect, in that the data transfer costs must be very high, so free is probably not great for business, even if it leads to more sales in the long run. The royalties are smaller too, no 70%, anywhere.

Whatever the reason, I’ve failed to uncover much of the information I’m looking for out there or at least, not in as much detail as I’d like. Although there is a wealth of technical stuff about making your own sound booth, recording your own books, how to set the levels etc etc. If that’s the way you want to go, you’re laughing. As for what I have discovered about marketing audiobooks … well … here are my thoughts.

Thing One: the conundrum …

It’s becoming blindingly apparent that there is no obvious ‘right way’ to sell the ruddy things. Or at least, not that I can see. There’s what works for a particular author and what doesn’t. The only way to find out what works is to experiment. Gulp. And even then it may only work for you. My issue is this:

If you are an unknown tiny fish in the authorial sea – I am – you want social proof on your books, also known as reviews. With ebooks you just approach reviewers, grovel a bit and give them free copies. After a while they read them, tell their followers what they think and bob’s your uncle, five star joy to convince buyers your stuff is magic. (Ideally, but the right kind of one star, I-fucking-hated-that can be just as effective to sell your books.)

The difficulty with audiobooks is that they are massive so you can’t just send them to someone. Except you can with tokens. Both the major players I am looking at; Findaway and ACX, will provide tokens so reviewers can download your books for free and review them. But Findaway won’t provide them to British readers, which may not be helpful to me. Although other authors report their efforts to give away British codes often meet with complete failure, anyway. ACX will only give tokens out if you sign up to them exclusively. ACX exclusivity is for seven years but … if you have uploaded a finished book, rather than used their royalty share scheme (where they find an author for you) they will let you out after one year if you write and ask them nicely.

On the other hand, with Findaway comes Chirp, their own platform, and access to a BookBub style promotion system, and BookBub is extremely powerful. Although I’ve never scored one for more than ‘international’ – that is, promoting a price drop on a book to Canada, India, Australasia and the UK but not America. I’ve never scored a free promo there either. And yes these are the audio versions, but they are still the same less-than-attractive-to-BookBub’s-selection-panel books. On the other hand, you can advertise on BookBub and I suspect that if I can get my advertising shit together, that is where I could get some love for the audiobooks.

Also, there was a massive influx of audiobooks uploaded to ACX just before Christmas, and they are still wading through them. I could still be waiting for my books to go live in six months’ time, I know of authors who have waited five months, already, for their books to go live and are still waiting … At least if I am going direct to both, I have 60% of the market covered from the off … and it matters because it’s not just me, here, half the earnings are Gareth’s. It’d be nice if there were some after he’s put in all that effort.

Thing two: the options …

I think …. Yeh.

I have two cunning plans … although, whether or not you could, strictly, call either one cunning, remains to be seen. Basically, I reckon I need a few reviews for people to buy anything so I may need tokens. The books might get reviews from my lovely fans and friends, they might get reviews from Gareth’s. On the other hand, they might not. The choice is simple:

1. Get my advertising shit together and go wide. Run promotions, submit the books to Chirp, take advantage of being able to control the price, mostly. Give away Unlucky dip for 99c or even free to get them hooked. Use the tokens and try and attract reviews from Canadian, Australasian and American readers. After all, a review is a review, right?

Disadvantages … well … advertising might take more money than I’ve got. Also I might not find many British readers, and Americans might not be able to understand the British regional accents in my books. But, on the other hand, there’s a lot of British slang, and American readers have done OK with that in the ebook version. Also, while the audiobook market isn’t quite Audible-and-the-others yet, or at least, Audible is only about 40%, I believe, rather than the gargantuan slice of the pie Amazon enjoys for regular books, it’s still a big hitter and stymying my books there may cost us at the start.

or

2. Go exclusively with ACX for the first year to get the tokens and bribe people to review the books on the UK site as well as the US one. Get more sales organically because … more punters. Then ask them to release my books and go wide. Because ultimately, I want people to be able to be able to download my audiobooks at the library and in the long run, there is a lot more earning potential there for us. I also want to take advantage of Chirp and advertising and if I’m exclusive with ACX chirp is a non-starter.

The Advantage, ready social proof and the biggest UK market share (at the moment … I think). Also better chance of organic sales. Better royalty rates at Audible – like 40% rather than 25% – which is important if that turns out to be the only place where I sell any books.

The disadvantage of this strategy is that in a year’s time, when ACX release me, there may be a lot more competition for a Chirp promotion and more people advertising audiobooks meaning that traction wide is harder to achieve. In addition, while Unlucky Dip was approved relatively quickly, I have author colleagues who submitted books in December last year who are still waiting for them to go on sale. The upshot being that it may take six months to a year for my book to go live and it may be more like two years before I can go wide. In a market moving as fast as this one, a year feels like a very long time, but if it’s more like eighteen month or two years? Yikes.

And not forgetting that I loathe and detest the subscription model myself – it’s amazing how fast all those £7 a month for different things add up to something big, and cataclysmic, so it goes against the grain because I’d like to have my books available to people like me from the off; people who’d rather buy them outright.

Thing two: different books sell on different platforms.

There’s a suggestion that short books sell better on Findaway Voices than on ACX. The commonly held view is that this is because Findaway supplies more sites where people buy books out right and so those readers will want to try shorter, less expensive books before shelling out for the gargantuan ones. Conversely, readers on subscription sites usually are eligible for a set number of books per month, so they will go for the biggest possible books to get more bang for their buck. ACX supplies more of those, hence you would put your novellas and shorts on Findaway, but not necessarily on ACX (unless legions of your fans are asking) and then the box set – a nice big book for subscription site listeners – goes on both. But again, this would suggest that, if, like me, you’re an author of a novella series and a massive door stop sized books series, ideally, you want to be on both platforms. Or maybe some and some, I dunno. But yeh, I’ve had a brief chat with Gareth about him doing the rest …

Thing Three: there is No thing three.

Every fucking time Mary? Yep. I know. I’m sorry. I can’t help myself.

Thing Four: testing the market.

This is, kind of, where I am now. It’s taken me a very long time to work out how to upload a book successfully. Jeez ACX some coherent error messages would be grand. That said, I have now uploaded Unlucky Dip, the short series prequel to the K’Barthan Series, to all the sites I’m looking at; Kobo, Findaway Voices and ACX. I am also toying with the idea of uploading some snippets, or the odd chapter, up to Soundcloud for you to listen to. That does depend on what Gareth thinks about it. I can’t do it until the audio files are all finalised, anyway.

So we’re nearly set …

Gulp. Here begins stage one of our dummy run.

Unlucky Dip, is on sale. I think it’s about $2.99 and whatever that is in GBP pretty much everywhere, or as part of your sub on a subscription site.

Even more exciting, despite having zero sales reported on either ACX, Findaway or Kobo, I discovered, this morning, that it has an also bought on Audible, which would suggest that somebody, somewhere, has bought it. It’s a decent also bought, too; Jasper Fforde, whose readers sit squarely in my target demographic.

If you’d like to find out more, I have a lovely page, with links to look at it in store for a bunch of places so you are welcome to go and have a listen to the excerpt, or even download it if you like, here.

Unlucky Dip Audio Book

 

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25 Jan 2020 · 11:58 am

Quality can’t be rushed …

This week my son invented something called the White Wee Crew. Mwahahahrgh!

NO! You filthy ones at the back. This is about drinking vast quantities of water!

Yep. If you drink enough you end up doing what he used to call a ‘silver wee’ or one that the normals would call ‘clear’. He then changed it to the White Wee Club but has decided that the White Wee Crew is better. He’s read somewhere that being hydrated keeps your brain switched on. I believe that is A THING. So, he’s been proudly coming home and telling me he’s still a member of the White Wee Crew. I love the way his entire view of life is so completely non standard. And aimed to amuse; himself and others, but he seems unfazed if it’s just himself.

Weird square eye thing … eeeek!

Scary!

One of the delights about having a kid is what a complete giggle we have. Normally we’re talking bottom gags here but sometimes other stuff. The comedy of tiny noises, odd squeaks, floorboards that can be reliably walked on to sound like a fart, well yes, more bottom gags there, I suppose. But if anything makes a strange or surreal noise, no matter how quiet or insignificant, I’ll hear it and one look at McMini and I know he will have heard and think it’s funny too. From a squeaky hinge to McCat going mad for cheese. Any sound is fair game. McOther is able to be equally arcane but seems to derive more enjoyment out of watching us do it than indulging in arcanity (is that even a word) arcaneness, himself. Then there was the night at McOther’s parents house where McMini and I spent about half an hour in their en-suite positioning ourselves so we could take a selfie with the reflections from the bright strip light surrounding the mirror reflected in our eyes. We thought we looked like robots, or perhaps, I thought, that thing that happens to your eyes in Dune when you ride the worms. He hasn’t seen or read Dune yet and my memory is very sketchy but I tried to explain.

It does look weird. CF photos.

McMini is naturally funny, one of those people who is going to be funny whatever he tries to do  so has decided to ham it up. I’ve always felt that the trick was to make it look deliberate but I suspect I ham it up, myself. He’s definitely a chip off the old block. Or perhaps he’s just watched my coping mechanism and decided it’ll do for now. The other evening having implored him, with increasing desperation, to remove his socks I finally succeeded.

‘If you throw those at me, I warn you, I’ll get really cross,’ I told him, anticipating his thoughts, mainly because it was exactly what my brother or I’d have done at his age.

Needless to say, the little so and so threw them at my face. So having told him I’d go into orbit, I did. Except that I was doing it because I needed him to Learn A Lesson rather than because I was actually that cross – although it is completely fucking vile and I wish he wouldn’t do it. McMini looked momentarily crushed and protested at my turning into Ogre Mummy without due warning. I told him he’d jolly well had due warning and that he should have taken heed. But then he picked up on the faux nature of my rage and smiled. I desperately tried to maintain a Stern Exterior but failed and found myself laughing.

It took me straight back to being a kid and doing the exact same thing to diffuse my father’s rage. There were incidences, when he’d gone beyond a certain point, when you didn’t do this, but it did work most of the time. If he can see what we’re up to my Dad must be laughing his head off. I hear him in so many of the things I say to McMini. It’s not that I mean to copy his parenting style, although I reckon he was a pretty good Dad so I probably wouldn’t go far wrong if I did. It’s just because I’m like him. And as I tell McMini, of an evening, with increasing frustration, ‘Will you go to BED!’ As he cavorts about the place like a lunatic clown and I desperately try not to laugh so he stops and does as I ask, I hear my father saying the exact same thing to my brother and I, all those years ago. And I can’t help but smile.

Though I have always thought of myself as a bit of a Daddy’s girl, I’ve always felt that I was very much more like Mum, I have Dad’s soft heart, I think, but I am definitely able to override it more easily than him, or at least I was. One of the things about his illness and death is that, coming out the other side of them, I no longer can.

Then again, as far as taking after one or another parent goes, I guess the point is moot. They were both as maverick and non-standard as each other. My father revelled in the eccentric and in pricking the bubble of the pompous, but it was my mother who dragged me into a cupboard to hide from the over-chatty house matron, who popped in as we were about to go out. Yeh … there probably isn’t much in it, between the two of them.

Trying to parent my wayward, but good natured son, I guess I’m beginning to understand what my poor parents, especially, were up against. What makes me laugh is that there is so much of my father in McMini, too, that it’s hilarious. He has a great deal of McOther in him too, jeez you don’t discipline McMini, you open negotiations. It’s really terrible, but I would bet his father was exactly the same. He always drives a hard bargain, too. It’s interesting, he’s kind of cheeky but at the same time, he’s treating me as his equal, which is really rather lovely.

He’s also a kind little lad. The other day I took him metal detecting. McOther was away on business and there was a dig and I really wanted to go. I was aware he might not want to come so we agreed he could bring along his lap top and sit in the car playing games if he wanted to. We had a great morning out. He enjoyed it and he found some things. Worked out the exact spot and got them out. At the end, he told me that he’d had a lovely day and that even if we’d remembered the lap top, he didn’t think he’d have used it. He told me it was all the better because he’d been dreading it.

‘Oh dear, not totally dreading it were you?’ I asked.

‘Yes Mum, completely, but I couldn’t not come. I knew you hadn’t been for ages and you so wanted to go. I couldn’t stand in your way. How mean would that be?’

I thought that was pretty impressive for an eleven year old. So much like his father, and also so much like his grandfather.

Another area I feel a lot of the Dad influence is in cheesy stuff. Dad derived a great deal of hilarity from bad poetry, especially hymns. There were times in church when I could just lean forward and look along the row at Dad with a bit of a twinkle and he’d turn to me with a pained expression and we’d start giggling. We both tended to be a bit vague and sing the wrong verses in the wrong order, if they have them lined up so you go across you can guarantee we’d end up reading down, and vice versa. But McMini gets my hilarity at some of the terribly bad, sentimental Victorian poetry you find in hymns as well. He doesn’t come to church so often now, I don’t want to force it because he has a faith and nothing is more likely to switch that off than forcing him. And the church I go to is pretty good at picking the fabulous poetry rather than the crap stuff, anyway, but McMini, he does, sort of, get it; good and bad. I have come to poetry rather late in life, partly from school, but also, greatly, from my Dad pointing out the rousing stuff, in hymns and … well … anywhere. And then from noticing it in hymns, myself.

McMini can act, too. Really act, unlike my brother and I who are merely funny – not the same thing at all. He doesn’t, of course, he regards learning lines and attending rehearsals is far too much like hard work. Then again, as far as I can gather, so did Dad. Indeed, the old man’s louche approach to knowing lines or giving cues was legendary. Apparently you would often cover the plot points you were meant to in a scene with Dad but not necessarily in the order in which they were written or the time allocated. Sometimes he’d guess. If you were lucky, you might get enough indication, from the general gist of what he’d said, which line you were supposed to deliver in reply. There was also a lovely story a friend told about how he and Dad on stage. They were both very short sighted, but each was trying to help the other across the stage without falling off the edge, into the orchestra pit. The whole exercise was fraught with difficulty and an extra frisson of danger, because neither of them was very sure where it was.

Strangely, later in life, when Dad had Alzheimer’s, he could recite vast tracts of Shakespeare, apparently word perfectly. I’m thinking that he was probably in plays at school as a kid.

If McMini wanted to act in things, I suspect he’d be extremely good … if he could be arsed. Yes, he is so like his parents, but I see so much of my father in him, too. Dad may have died, but whether or not you believe in life after death, he lives on in us. Mwahahahaargh!

Talking about fine acting skills, the audio project is trundling along. Gareth is still coughing a bit and suffering a sore throat but he seems to be happily getting stuck into the second book. He has been surprised to discover the books are much longer than he thought, ‘another learning moment’ as he put it wryly. It sounds as if he’s been thinking, ‘bloody hell! What the fuck is going on! I should have finished this by now!’ Except I think Gareth is a bit less foul mouthed than me so he probably thought it more politely … possibly. I’ll have to get his address and send him some signed books. I suspect we may not get the whole thing done before he’s off on tour but I’m OK with that if he is. After all, quality can’t be rushed.

Meanwhile, if you’re interested, Nothing to See Here is available for preorder. If you want to know more, click here, or click on the picture.

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18 Jan 2020 · 12:18 pm

Why is life so fucking annoying?

Yeh, I know. There’s an eternal question if ever there was one. Not a great week so far. The chaos fairies are afflicting me with a vengeance. I literally cannot remember my own name, or the names of, for example, any of the ladies I go swimming with.

Everything seems to be a bit up and down. Good things happen but the frustration levels of every day existence are at an all time high. Why, I can’t fathom. I’m not sure if I’m feeling it extra specially at the moment. Maybe I am. I got the power of attorney over Mum’s finances back this week. I’ve been managing them for nearly four years, but this does make her vulnerability that bit more official. Maybe I’ve passed through the eye of the storm with the relative calm after Dad’s death, and it’s the prospect of going through something similar with Mum that’s hurting. I suppose that could be it. Or am just going through one of those phases when every single fucking thing that can go wrong does, at a point where I’m not quite as emotionally robust as usual? Hmm … could be that too.

Whatever is causing it, I’m afraid the irritation needs to be exorcised the only way I know how. Yeh, this is going to be a rant, although I’ll try to walk the line between a Basil Fawlty style funniness and poor little me. Apologies in advance if I fail on that one. And of course, as usual, there’s a certain amount of melodrama.

But seriously. Why does life have to be so fucking annoying? And why won’t the Chaos Fairies piss off?

First up, Mum’s electricity. She pays by direct debit but she’s over paid this year so they have told me they’re carrying more than £200 over to her next bill. So I have to ring them and ask for it back. At the time I phoned them, I had to do this with Mum so she could tell them it was OK for me to speak on her behalf. So yesterday, we duly rang and after pressing various buttons to navigate our way through the menu reached a message which said.

‘Our offices are currently closed for staff training. We apologise for any inconvenience this will cause. Goodbye,’ click, dialling tone.

NO, SSE. This is how it’s done,

‘We apologise that our offices are closed for training today but we will reopen on X date at X time.’

And you don’t leave customers navigating through all the bloody menus first either, wasting minutes of their precious chuffing time. Even a government department, like the Office of the Public Guardian, knows to tell you about that sort of stuff up front.

Second, I’ve been referred for a gym membership on the NHS, three months at a reduced rate to try and get my knees a bit better. Unfortunately, I sat on this for a while, I got it in the last week of November, just after Dad’s memorial. Two weeks before Christmas I rang to book an evaluation. I got an out of office reply message explaining that the lady was now away until after Christmas. I tried ringing, anyway. The answerphone message said that we would be contacted about appointments in the order we’d rung.

When the lady returned to work in January, I discovered that no, the appointments were not being allocated the way the message said, it was the usual free-for-all, post-Christmas gannet fest where the Normal Organised people ring and bag the appointments for the next four months within about three minutes of the lines opening and the rest of us are left with their pecked over, spittle-flecked remains. Bastards.

So now they’re taking bookings for February but the lady only works three days a week and of course one of them’s Wednesday. Sigh.

Double foiled then, in my efforts to get the booking in before Christmas and then in believing the message. I found this out when she sent an email saying she’d a few appointments left in January to everyone on the waiting list. I emailed back about the one I could do, which was gone, and she suggested I call and gave me the number.

I called the next day, and was told that they only had January’s appointments, that she’d already gone home and to ring the following day, which was Wednesday, of course. So I rang from Mum’s at two and discovered that she’d already gone home. The staff informed me that they’d lost the appointment sheet so I was best emailing her, I explained I had and she’d told me to ring them. They suggested I try a different email address, which bounced.

So I sent her an email saying, politely, and I hope humorously, ‘throw me a frigging bone here.’ I’ll try again on Monday. Who knows, some time in the next month, I might manage to swing things so that I remember to ring at a point when she’s actually there.

Third … sort of … Wednesday’s visit to Mum’s was good and bad. Mum was on form, but very tired after an extremely windy night – wind blowing round the house and garden banging things about, I mean, not Mum’s bum. I could go off on a tangent here about how much Mum and I laugh about farts, but luckily for you, I’ll leave that for another day.

Anyway, Mum was knackered so not as switched on as sometimes. And she kept falling asleep, which made it hard to have a conversation, but at the same time, instead of just relaxing and having a snooze, she was trying to stay awake, bless her, so she’d just drift off and I’d keep talking until I reckoned she’d gone off, get out my book and bing, she’d wake up again. So the conversation was quite weird because it happened in instalments and I had to keep reminding her what she was saying before she dozed off. At which point, on a couple of occasions, she dozed off again.

We had lunch, and it was pork chops. It was one of those days when the rinds hadn’t caught. I looked at the uncrackled rind on my plate and then at the fire, which Mum laid first thing, and which had lit itself, and was now burning merrily in the grate. It would be nice to have crackled pork skin, but we didn’t want to go obviously into the kitchen and put it in the microwave (brilliant way to crackle crackling is 1.5 minutes on high, however many times it takes). We didn’t want to do it because it might look like an oblique criticism of the lovely lady who’d cooked lunch. (Not overthinking this in a ludicrously British way at all, there, were we?)

We decided we’d try toasting the un-crackled crackling on the fire and after some reminiscences about Dad toasting crumpets that way, when my brother and I were small, I toasted both our rinds. The two of us giggled like naughty children as the rinds bubbled and spat in the flames. If I’m honest, I could have done with another foot on the toasting fork, but never mind, our skins crackled up beautifully and no matter how it might have felt, I was relieved to discover that my knuckles hadn’t.

So it was light and shade, but sad – especially as, of course, Mum still gets 28 out of 30 in the pathetic NHS memory test which seems to be constructed as a method of delaying any meaningful treatment for as long as possible. I’m guessing Alzheimer’s drugs are expensive. But whatever they say, she’s not alright. There is something wrong. And it may be vascular dementia but it may also be Alzheimer’s and if is Alzheimer’s and we knew, we could hold it back for a little while with treatment. The Doctor said he’d put her through, but she’d have to have blood tests first, and that he thought, personally, that she was OK. She’s said she’ll go with what he advises, sigh.

Meanwhile, fourth my car. One of its dipped headlights has been randomly turning on and off for some time. Serendipitously, I discovered, this week, that Kinky Winky, as I’ve been calling it, is probably the same trouble as last time. The £1,120 plus VAT part trouble. How did I discover this? Incidentally actually, during …

Fifth, my car ate my son’s sports bag.

Six, because of five I missed parents’ swim.

Bastard thing. It may look the dog’s – it may be the dog’s, it can proceed, axle deep, across a muddy farm yard and it ploughed through at least six inches of standing water at 60mph without so much as a twitch on Wednesday (driving in the dark with one headlight anyone?) – but aspects of it are ridiculous. And why does Kinky Winky have to afflict dipped beam? I probably used full beam for about five milliseconds last year, in 25,000 miles of driving. And driving with one light, well, when the person in front of you who’s overtaking suddenly slows up and pulls in … because he’s seen a massive puddle that you haven’t … that’s when two working dipped lights are a lot better than one.

Because I hit the massive puddle with McMini on board and two cars next to me. And the bow wave came over the windscreen. Tight lipped I hung grimly onto the wheel and kept accelerating, in the hope that I could keep the pressure of the exhaust coming out of the pipe higher than that of the water wanting to come in, and the balance of the car where it was. The ABS light came on to tell me that it was giving up on this one, but the car stayed straight and true. Which was good because with the two cars next to me on McMini’s side, any fishtailing would have ended badly.

We did get steam in the ventilation system though and the entire car fugged up, instantly. I had no meaningful clue as to the location of the traffic round me, although I knew it was clear ahead and that I was approaching a roundabout. Once there I was supposed to be turning left. Rather than try and pull in where I knew there were two cars … somewhere … I wiped a quick hole in the fugged up windscreen, opened my window so I could see, indicated right and turned left by going all the way round.

That was when I thought maybe I should get the Kinky Winky syndrome investigated. I should have known. I mean this is Britain, and if there’s one thing we do know about Britain, it’s that it’s fucking heaving with people. And they all drive. You know when you lift up a stone and there are loads of ants under there, rushing around with white eggs? Yeh, that’s Britain’s roads, except there aren’t enough bastard ants for this analogy to ring totally true. Our roads are a lot busier than that.

The only thing you can guarantee about driving in the dark here in Britain is that no matter how obscure or empty the road appears to be THERE WILL ALWAYS BE SOMETHING COMING THE OTHER WAY. If you are living in an obscure part of the Outher Hebrides and there’s only one other car on the entire fucking island, IT WILL BE COMING THE OTHER WAY should you decide to drive anywhere at night.

Yes. You’d better get used to driving with dipped headlights people, because if you think you’re going to be able to use full beam for more than a fucking millisecond per nine billion hours of night driving, you’ve another think coming. So yeh, completely missed the existence of a massive eff off puddle. Won’t be doing that again.

Where was I?

Oh yes. Thing five.

My car ate my son’s sports bag.

No shit. It has a ridiculous boot which opens by pulling a string in the cab. Every now and again the string breaks, or becomes detached. When it does that, the boot can sometimes be opened with a bit of jiggling the lid but mostly it’s only going to be opened by experts. The latch on the boot is adjustable, so it can be aligned, precisely, to go through the hole in the bodywork where the rest of the lock is.

Mmm sports bag. Om-nom-nom. Look at its smug fucking face. The git. 😡

Trouble is, roads are bumpy and so this beautifully aligned latch, which is held in place with a bolt, can move if the bolt loosens. And it does.

Muggins here, with her arthritic thumbs, was aware this was happening and tried to put it back. This worked but only sporadically as the Stupid Hands won’t do it tight enough, even on the rare occasions when I can find The Right Sized Spanner. So it was that on Thursday morning, I put McMini’s bag in the boot, plus the clubs he takes to after school golf lessons, and closed the lid. Then I remembered I’d forgotten his sports shoes. That was OK, I would just open the boot and … add … them …

Could I open the boot? Could I bollocks?

No of course I could. I tried all the usual things that work.

Nothing.

Shit! Shit! Shit!

I stalked back to the kitchen, because if I stayed in the garage with that bloody car I was going to take a hatchet to it. And then … which is the slightly worrying bit here … I had a full on melt down. At my husband. Well, not at him, but to him, about … everything. I cried and railed and told him that he and McMini were the only good things in my life (which is not entirely true but they are the only consistently wonderful things, everything else does tend to be a bit off and on … rather like the Noisy Cricket’s stupid bloody headlight).

And McOther listened in silence. And then he said.

‘I’ll take McMini to school, you get onto the mechanic and get this sorted.’

And he did.

And I hot footed it to Newmarket to get the lovely and extremely competent mechanic who works on my car to open the fucking thing. He has constructed a special tool out of wire to do this.

It turned out the latch was so loosely attached to the lid it had, basically, enmeshed itself in the lock and got stuck. While I was there I asked him about the headlight, which is how I know. As he was pretty sure it’s the same deal. So we’re starting to look into that, because it’s only the dipped light at the moment and it’s not off all the time so if I can limp through to summer, it should be OK until next October.

So … I’ve a car that ate my son’s bag and doesn’t work properly in the dark.

Footnote, or possibly seven and eight, my metal detector turned itself off the other day and wouldn’t turn on again for five seconds. I’ve a dig on Saturday, and I bet I’m going to discover that’s not a one-off anomaly. Nine, I’ve just put the washing out and some Important Piece of Metal pinged off the washing line. It pinged off easily enough but would it go back? Would it fuck? I had to go and slip it over the side of a saucepan and pull the long end about so it’d widen and go back on. Now it’s too wide and it’ll ping off every time. Grrr. And having phaffed about with all that and put the washing out in bright sunlight, here we are ten minutes later and it’s sodding raining. Biblically. So that was another twenty minutes of my precious fucking time pissed up the wall to nowhere!

See that? That’s the road of life … cold, dark, uphill the whole fucking way and all the shops are shut!* It’s doing my head in.

I also finally reached the stage where, instead of laughing at the fact every single fucking thing I do goes tits up, or odd, or according to someone else’s bastard plan, I lost it. Totally. When I am looking at one to five years of walking beside Mum and with the very real prospect that we will be following the same journey as Dad I know it’s going to cost me. Keeping my shit together is quite important. So that’s not a great sign. Protective measures will be taken. I’ll let you know what they are when I do.

Oh yeh, ten, The Stupid Hands … knees, shoulders back and ankles. And eleven. I still have my tax return to do. I suspect I’ll feel a lot better when I’ve done that.

Ho hum. I swear this would be a lot funnier if I wasn’t fucking living it.

* Yes. I do completely, and utterly know that’s not true. I’m actually ludicrously blessed and I understand that. I’m just having a rough time right now so it’s harder to appreciate.

Never mind, on the upside, thanks to the HRT, my hair’s looking quite good at the moment. Suddenly it has body again. It’s all long and curly and everywhere. There aren’t many people who could rock a periwig without one! Mwahahahargh! And it’s keeping my head nice and warm.

Eeee look at my chuffing periwig! Phnark.

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12 Jan 2019 · 4:02 pm

Trust me, I’m an expert … mwahahahaahrgh!

As you are all aware, because heaven knows I bang on about it enough, I lead a very busy life and because the tolerances for error are quite small, I sometimes make a comprehensive fuck up of things. Quite a lot of the time, to be honest. One of my specialities on this front is turning up at the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s the latest instance of this which I’d like to share with you now. It happened like this …

McMini and I are sitting at home relaxing after he’s come home from school when I open an email from the school. It is a new layout, and it starts like this.

Thursday 8th January,

SATS evening for parents.

Dear Parents/Carers

On Thursday 17th January at 6pm, we will be holding an information event …

PFC – pretty fucking clear – right? Er, no. Not to muggins here. I have seen the date at the top, Thursday which is tonight, and the title, SATS evening for parents, and so I ignore the body of the letter, because I’m far too fucking busy to read that, and merely scan for the start time, ah yes, 6.00pm.

I look at my watch.

‘Shit it’s five o’clock!’

‘What’s up Mum?’ says a cheery voice from the other room.

‘The school is doing a thing about your SATS and it’s tonight, at six pm.’

‘Oh what? Do we have to go?’

‘Afraid so, it’s really important.’

McMini appears in the hall all rolling eyes and sighs, ‘Won’t Dad be back in time for me to stay here?’

‘Not at six, no, sorry.’

‘Oh well, I have some charge on my iPad, can I bring that?’

‘Yes, and your reading homework, you can write your book report while your’re there.’

He’s leaning over my arm, reading the email on my phone.

‘Hang on Mum, it says kids aren’t allowed.’

‘No it says it’s not for you, I can still bring you along if I’ve nowhere else to put you, they just mean that I don’t have to bring you if there’s someone you can stay with at home.’

So we get ready but we take too long so we have to go in the car because there isn’t time to walk. When I get up there, we are, parking, and of course it’s one of those ones where it goes wrong. You know how, when you’re in a hurry, you always get the angle wrong and have to come back out and start again. Off we go, second time, reverse, turn, turn, turn, ‘MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!’

‘Shit.’

The arrow is actually pointing to the place where I’d put the firing button for the machine guns I will be placing behind the lights at some stage. Except now I’m thinking that if I’ll be inadvertently spraying the streets with fire every time I parallel park it might not be such a good idea. You can see the little trumpet where the hooter button is to the right of the arrow. There’s one of those each side so I have double the opportunities to beep in error like a fucktard.

I used to have a car with a hooter in the centre of the steering wheel and I beeped it with my elbow every time I reversed. This car has two hooter switches, one each side. Someone does something stupid on the motorway, nearly killing us all and can I find the hooter? Can I buffalo? But I still manage to beep the fucking thing by mistake every. Sodding. Time. I. Park! Maybe when I’m next in a dangerous situation, I should try not to hoot, then I might chuffing manage it.

McMini puts on an expression of mock shock at me for swearing and in his best Walter from Dennis the Menace voice he says,

‘Mother I’ve told you about swearing in front of me, you’re setting a very bad example.’

‘I know, I’m a terrible mother,’ I reply, giggling because I know he’s only taking the piss.

‘There’s an old man in that house staring out of the window at us, he’s looking very disapproving.’

‘I expect he is. I’m making a right pig’s ear of this parking.’

‘It’s not the parking, I don’t think he liked you hooting.’

‘I don’t blame him. I didn’t either. Right,’ I haul the handbrake on. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

Immediately a stream of cars comes up the street so we have to wait for them to pass before McMini can get out.

‘It’s the Truman Show!’ he says cheerfully. ‘They’ve been waiting ages to drive up here at the moment it would be most annoying for you.’

I heartily agree. My whole life’s the fucking Truman Show in that respect,

We arrive at the school as the clock on the church two streets over strikes six. Woot. Not exactly timely but we won’t have to do the walk of shame to the only seats left (at the front). Well, no, that’s not true. We will have to do the walk of shame but at least we won’t be doing it after the talk has started. I push the button to open the door but there’s no-one to buzz us through the air-lock or whatever they call the next bit.

‘Strange.’

Just then, two teachers appear and they come out and ask us if they can help. We say why we are there and they buzz us in.

‘Are you sure it’s tonight?’ asks one.

I’m not as it happens. I meant to check the email before leaving. ‘I thought it was,’ I say weakly.

‘The light’s aren’t on and there’s no-one else in the hall,’ says the other.

‘Uh … right,’ I say.

‘I’ll go and ask Mr Hammond,’ (the headmaster) ‘he’s still in his office,’ says the first one and she runs off up the stairs.

I have an Ely. That is, according to The Meaning of Liff, the first tiniest inkling that something has gone horribly wrong.

‘Hmm … I’m a bit of a spanner with dates, I may have stuffed up,’ I tell the other teacher as we wait. ‘Hang on, I’ll check the email.’

I get the email open and see that I have, indeed, misread it.

‘Shit,’ I say before I can stop myself. ‘Sorry,’ I start laughing, because cheery apology seems the best way to play it, ‘Will you look at that? I’m such a bell-end, I’ve got the wrong day.’ I remember that the other teacher has gone to get the headmaster. ‘Oh no I’m so sorry, and now I’ve woken the Kraken and everything!’ I say as I turn and realise Mr Hammond and the other teacher have just arrived and heard everything, including the bit where I refer to the act of fetching him from his office as ‘waking the Kraken’.

He looks knackered and I apologise for dragging him away from his work. The three of them are all extremely good natured and up beat about it, I’d have told me to fuck off! and we laugh and apologise cheerily and McMini and I go away marvelling, in a slightly giggly way, at my complete ineptitude. As I get into the car. McMini says,

‘Mother you swore in front of the teachers, you said ‘shit’ and you called yourself a bell-end in front of Mr Hammond.’

‘Oh dear, did I?’

‘Yes you did! You know in early years, when I said bollocks and I got told off and they asked me where I got it from and I said ‘my mum’ and they didn’t’ believe me?’ he says, reminding me of yet another example of exemplary parenting from my past.

‘Yes I do,’ I reply.

‘Well they know I wasn’t lying now! Because they’ve heard you swearing, so they know it was you and they know you’re a foul-mouthed shrek-lady. They’ve got … what is it when you have loads of evidence?’

‘Hard evidence?’

‘No.’

‘Cast iron proof?’

‘No.’

‘They’ve got me bang to rights?’

‘That’s the one! They now have you bang to rights because they have concrete evidence that you swear in front of me and not just in front of me but in front of the headmaster! They know you are a very bad mother.’

We start laughing about this but I do manage to leave the parking space without beeping the chuffing hooter again and the Disapproving Man has gone from the window so I thank the lord for small mercies.

‘I am a bad mother, but, at the same time, I must be doing something right if I have such a good, well mannered little boy.’ Obviously, I say this in a really syrupy voice, like the Walter the Softee one he does when he calls me ‘mother’.

‘True mother, despite your somewhat idiosyncratic parenting you really have produced a most charming and well behaved child.’

‘Exactly, you hear and see me behaving extremely badly but you don’t, that has to count for something,’ I say. ‘Although, they’ll be wondering back there, won’t they?’

‘Yes, they’ll be saying to each other, “how could such an evil crone produce such a perfect little boy?”’

‘Indeed. Why is he not affected by that potty-mouthed harridan he calls his mother? Mr Hammond has probably had to go and have a lie down.’

‘I bet he does an assembly about it tomorrow, he’ll say McMini is a lovely charming little boy despite the fact his mother is a horrific, sweary, shrek-like crone!’

‘That’s right, he’ll say I’m dirty! A dirty, filthy, vile, morally-dissolute, harridan!’

‘And a shrek!’

‘And a shrek.’

We spend the journey home coming up with more and more colourful adjectives for fictional Mr Hammond to use in assembly while describing my dreadfulness, and shouting them at a higher and higher volume, as if his fictional disapproval is moving from strongly-voiced, through angry to apoplectic.  The incongruity of this, when placed against the actual, real Mr Hammond, who is is the most calm, measured and even-tempered person you could care to meet, is a source of childish amusement to both of us.

We continue randomly shouting pejorative adjectives at one another for several days.

I really should be setting an example.

Yeh but …

Oh well, you can’t win ’em all.

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24 Nov 2018 · 2:13 pm

The sky is falling apparently … again.

Today, let’s talk about publishing! Yes, I’m going to talk author shop. That said, I’m supposed to talk author shop really, aren’t I? That’s why I mark all the McMini and dementia posts ‘off topic’ although to be honest I go off topic so often that the book-related stuff is the off topic theme here nowadays. But hey ho, onwards and upwards.

 

So this week I was listening to Joanna Penn’s podcast, at least, I think it was this week’s, it might have been last week [MT disappears to check]. Ah, yes. Last week, number 402. The point is, she was talking at one point about the apparent disappearance of the also-boughts on Amazon. Now, I’ve never actually got much out of the also-boughts, myself, because the folks who read my books seem to have very enquiring minds and read all kinds of weird shizz so they were always stuffed to perdition from the start. People who bought my books have also bought thrillers, horror books, text books and mostly, my other books leaving the Amazon recommendation engine going, ‘Uh?’

However, if your readers are a bit more genre-centric, I’m reliably informed that you can glean readers from the fans of authors similar to your via the also-boughts, readers who are likely to enjoy your stuff. Amazon notices their buying habits so if readers of Terry Pratchett books start buying mine, for example, the recommendation engine goes, ‘Oy-oy!’* and starts automatically recommending my books to people who have bought Sir Terry’s books (oh how I wish). If that happens Bob’s your uncle, your work is introduced to a new and interested audience.

* you didn’t know it was Jewish, did you?

Word is that for some time, Amazon has been trialing the removal of these also-boughts from its current, prime position, or removing them altogether, and introducing more strips of paid advertising instead. They’ve been doing this mostly on their US site so I haven’t seen it but obviously, if they make the switch permanent, it has some serious ramifications.

If the also-boughts disappear, then, in theory, the ads should provide a similar premise, since most authors who advertise chose similar authors’ names as advertising keywords, so that when readers look at books by them, they see adverts for your similar book. However, as usual, there are some unscrupulous spammers advertising everywhere, without a nod to relevance at all like those people who keep offering me products to enlarge my penis … when I’m a WOMAN (money down the drain boys). Or thinking about it, maybe they just have the SEO equivalent of also-boughts like mine.

Anyway, a lot of authors head the advert something like, ‘If you like Douglas Adams you’ll love M T McGuire’ except I don’t because it’s like telling everyone you’re actually God, down to visit the planet incognito, and will unleash a string of one star reviews from Douglas Adams fans who are incensed at your presumption. Indeed, advertising anything funny that’s not Douglas Adams to Adams’ fans is a bona fide recipe to send them into conniptions about your sheer brass neck and bring down a tidal wave of snark upon yourself – believe me, I’ve tried it. Luckily Terry Pratchett fans are more benign so I say things like, ‘The K’Barthan Series. A bit like the discworld series but not as funny.’ But I digress.

So will also-bot-ageddon make any difference if it sticks? Yes, in that it will mean authors and publishers will have to pay for their place on the also-boughts. For readers, there will be no also-boughts to trawl for similar authors to the ones you like. For authors, there’ll be no easy way of finding alternative yet similar authors to yourself to use as advertising keywords. But as David Gaughran, points out, the infrastructure will still be there and Amazon will still use the also boughts algorithm to make recommendations to customers by email. Also, since what an author thinks her audience is may not be correct, Amazon will always go on the buying habits of target readers rather than an author’s guestimate, because that will make them more cash, so presumably they are unlikely to bin the also bots long term.

As a reader, I only use the also boughts or buy on personal recommendation, I never use search because it never returns interesting books, only commercial ones and I’m British so I’m far too cynical to click many ads. That, alone, is enough to suggest Amazon probably won’t bin the also-boughts entirely. I can’t be their only customer who works like that. Maybe it will appear in some other form or maybe they will fix the shambolic awfulness that is AMS ads so they present a more accurate alternative. We can but hope.

What this whole panic does flag up to me, though, is that now, even more than ever, it’s important to avoid being beholden to one big business for anything, be it a retailer for all your income, a particular form of social media for all your communication, or even one product. We have to get our books out to as many retailers as possible, in as many formats as possible and while social media is best done in earnest on one site alone, there’s no harm in having your blog posts go to all the others if the software you use allows.  And yes, that means I really should make some audio books. I’m not sure it has to involve remortgaging the house or tying myself in an exclusive deal to one retailer for however million years* for a crappy 40% royalties, anymore.

* actually, I think it’s seven, or maybe fourteen years, but that’s a sod of a long time. I may be dead by the end of that.

For a number of reasons, mostly Real Life’s continual and annoying interference with my plans for literary world domination, I write slowly. That means that, ideally, I need to engage the kinds of readers who are prepared to pay for my books because there’s a longer gap between each one. But, as digital content becomes further and further devalued we probably will reach a point where it’s all free on subscription and we authors get paid for page reads of our electronic content, if at all. If the review site I used to write on was anything to go on, payment starts at a good rate, the site in question paid 50p a read at the start. By the end, it paid a fraction of a penny for each read and you needed to get hundreds of reads on any piece you submitted to net 10p. I see the subscription model going the same way; 1p per read of each of my 100k+ books. Ouch.

Yet, one of the things Joanna Penn raised this week, was that while recent trends point to electronic content decreasing in value to nothing, there is an increase in people buying other things, instead; their favourite albums on vinyl, hard backs of their favourite books or box sets and other deluxe or collector’s versions. There’s also the idea of the author as a brand, the value of a personal appearance, visiting conventions, schools etc. Not something Real Life gives me room for at the moment but there’s no harm building the MTM brand.

As for product diversity, as well as forms of output for my books, there is merchandise. Many readers do and will buy merchandise, possibly more for comedy books, but, for my own part, the stuff I made on Zazzle with the art work from my books netted me rather more than the books, themselves the first year they were out. Again, I stick that stuff everywhere; redbubble, zazzle, cafepress, and any I go on to find. More importantly, I should to put them on my own site – don’t forget to do that, kids, I’m working on mine. It’s an easier decision for me, since my books aren’t mainstream and committing to one retailer makes little business sense if you write the kinds of books I do. My fans are eclectic and far flung and I usually only sell a couple of copies of each book a month on each site (it’s particularly low at the moment because I’ve run out of cash for ads). The way I see it, on pretty much every site where my book is on sale, I’m likely to sell a handful. The more sites my book is on, the more people will be buying those couple of copies and suddenly, £5 a piece from twenty or thirty obscure book retail sites adds up fast.

Finally, it’s all about control. I think, possibly, the smartest thing you can do is retain control of as much of your work, rights and reader contact as you can. I’ve spent enough time in marketing to be wary of relying on any one big business. Remember when Facebook showed your posts to, like, everyone? Remember when they stopped and authors with followings of thousands found they were only reaching a handful of their fans? Yeh. That. So to me the most important thing, above everything else, is to get a mailing list going, achieve a rapport with the readers there, sell your stuff on your own site and keep all those small sites going. Because that way if one of the big boys does something funny and stuffs up your earnings, it won’t be the end of the world.

To sum it up then, nothing is constant, the only thing we can guarantee about the ebook business is that it will keep changing. And people who are reliant on Amazon will run round complaining that the sky is falling on their heads. So you have to keep as much of the process where you can control it as possible while, at the same time, giving yourself as many options as possible. That’s why, if you write slowly, the way I do, there are probably only three golden rules:

  1. Have as many sources of income as possible, by having your products available in as many different places as you can.
  2. Aim to generate as many different income streams as possible around your books.
  3. Aim to get a good rapport with your readers and sort out as much of that as is humanely possible, through channels where you have control, on your own cyber turf.

______________________________

Happy news. If anyone wants to try reading the weird shit I produce without having to join my mailing list to get some free, and then be subjected to even more weird shit in the form of newsletters, you can buy Book 1 in the K’Barthan Series at a reduced price on Kobo from today until 27th November. There are a lot of other books reduced like this on Kobo, too, not just mine!

Few Are Chosen

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2 Jun 2018 · 1:48 pm

What I know now, that I wish I knew then …

The advice kettle is sage and wise and also keeps the water hot, like an urn, only not.

Back on topic this week, I was asked for some advice by a writer who is just starting work on her first book. Even though she appears to be of sound mind, she was dead chuffed with what I wrote and asked if I’d share it on my blog so she could send people to the post. As a result, by special request, here is my rambling view on er … some of the aspects of writing that popped up.

BEFORE YOU START ….

1. What do you want to do?
a) have fun writing a book.
b) have fun writing a book and maybe make a bit of side cash – or at least get the cover artwork and editing costs back.
c) Rule the world: Yeh, move over JK, I am on your tail.

2. Decide on a target genre, who your reader is and what genre/store category your book fits into. Are there other books for the kind of reader you are aiming at. What are they like? What do their covers look like? Hint, you do NOT want your cover to stand out, you want it to be slick, well designed and exactly the same as all the others so readers know what they are getting (I so didn’t do this). Are you going to mash genres? Say you’re writing Sci-fi, is it something else too? Is it funny? Is it also fantasy. Are there other books like yours? Who writes them?

Your answer to question 1 will affect this as if you’re looking to make a living you need to totally conform to the standard tropes. Unless you are going to be an outlier. I thought I was going to be an outlier. It didn’t work too well for me. I write because … actually, I write because I can’t walk away from it and to be honest, walking away would be the sensible option right now.

Pantser or Plotter?

I was firmly in the pantser camp to start with – as in I’d just write and see where it went. It went to lots of good places but my first book took 13 years. Pantsing may well slow your rate of production so if a fast output is your aim plotting is good. Likewise, if your daily existence is the equivalent of having someone opening the top of your head and stir your brains about, constantly, with a wooden spoon, some kind of plot outline is going to be a huge help. Especially if you have menopausal brain fog on top (yes apparently that really is a thing and yes, of course I have it).

I find that even though I now write an outline, there is plenty of wiggle room. The key thing is to experiment and find what works best for you. I find that if I get too confined by an outline I stop enjoying it as much, I quite like the whole wondering around and seeing where it will go aspect, but when I relied solely on that I got frustrated with having to keep stopping while my brain sorted itself out. I really enjoyed the learning process – even though it was trying at times.

However, these days I am very light on time so if I want to produce a book every five years, I do need to plot a little bit so I don’t waste time. On the last two books of the K’Barthan Series I wrote 60k words I didn’t need. Right now my year’s output stands at about 40k so I can’t afford to waste a year and a half’s writing time on plot bunnies. Hence I now plot, but with enough wriggle room for the characters to act on their own initiative. This works for me – and that’s the important take away from this one: that what works for me may not work for you.

Write in whatever way suits you best.

Try to avoid being too rigid in your approach

My brain and my life.

To put this in perspective, basically, I pantsed my first novel and I wrote three versions that I sincerely wish I hadn’t written and one half cock novel (which I managed to tidy up and turn into something decent: my fifth published novel) before I managed to produce a book that measured up to my Quality Standards.

In that time, the male lead had appeared out of nowhere, one character had changed from a mechanic to a ganglord, the first book had ended up being the third and fourth ones and the other two were the backstory that popped up out of nowhere at the same time as my getaway-driving male lead. By the time I’d got to the last book, the plot was so complicated my brain was just about melting out through my nose – oh no wait that was hayfever.

What I mean is, you don’t have to stick too rigidly to the plan but you may have to shake things up originally and see what falls out to know if your book is going to work, or if it’s two books, or a series of short stories, or if the character who has just turned up in prison really is the male lead. Sometimes you get too many characters. Eric, from Escape From B-Movie Hell was actually in the K’Barthan Series to start with. Obviously he was human in that, but he was also telepathic. I just made him into an alien for his new world, his character didn’t changed much.

Likewise, at the second short in a series of five, I discovered that what I was writing was a novel. We’re 60k in and yes, I’ve already binned 40k. I’m not learning from my mistakes am I? But at the same time, the short was not a short so there was no point in forcing the issue. Now it’s a long. So what? It will be what it will be. Just try different approaches and you will find a number of different things that work.

Grammar and Punctuation

Bollocks to it. It’s the editor’s job. As you write you learn more, as you work with a decent editor you will learn loads. The point is, you will need an editor unless you are a very and I mean very rare breed. Most of us are too close in to self edit. Additionally, the only thing I really know about grammar and punctuation for sure, is that there are no right answers.

It doesn’t matter what you do, someone, somewhere will always complain so a lot of it is about having faith in your editor. I do edit my work but that’s more word choices, and tweaking stuff so it makes sense; structural things. It also helps me to do this if I need a bit of re-orientation with my giant sprawling novel. Also I have regular read throughs of what I’ve done so far so I can zoom out to the overall big picture. Otherwise I can get kind of lost. Am I a grammar nazi? No, that’s the job of my editor.

Also there will be points where you really dislike your book or think, ‘blimey this is a bit meh.’ That’s all natural. Everyone does it. Sometimes, a good way of getting round that is to work on several projects at the same time. I do that because my life is hectic and I can’t afford to not write something when the stars align and the grey matter is fired up because it happens so rarely. But working on multiple projects also helps you to ensure you’re always working on something you’re up for and enjoy.

Learning Your Craft

I never bought any how to write books – actually, I tell a lie, I have a Chuck Wendig Book on writing which is epic.

However, mostly I’ve learned to write by reading a lot of work by authors who write the way I want to; Pratchett, Adams, Woodehouse and Bryson, notably, along with Tom Holt, Robert Rankin, Nick Hornby, Spike Milligan and Tom Sharp but also non comic writers like H E Bates, Graham Greene, Neville Shute and Asimov. There’s the odd dash of historical fiction, Moonfleet when I was a kid, the Children of the New Forest and The Three Musketeers, Jane Austen. In addition my work has gained a lot of influences from TV; Dr Who – check my non violent hero who never thumps anyone – the original StarTrek, StarWars are the three big ones but also a lot of the 1960s TV shows like Get Smart, the Man from UNCLE, the Avengers, Thunderbirds etc.

This is where I confess that I am the only living person in existence who is not going to bang on about To Kill a Mockingbird or Moby Dick in this section. I have never read a word of either.

The point is, I’m guessing there is a similar list of relevant books to mine for each genre.  A list of must reads which any author would look to for inspiration if they wanted to write in it. If you don’t have one, make one.

The most important thing is patience. Nailing the whole write a book thing usually takes a long time. You are probably a faster learner than me, most people are, but it took me ages to write a book that measured up to my QS. On the upside, when I did, I knew at once that I’d cracked it.

Setting Deadlines

I don’t do this. It would kill me because if they were realistic I’d be in tears about how long each project was going to take and if they are unrealistic I’ll be beating myself up over failing to meet deadlines. I just set a long term goal and short term, realistic, targets and then creep slowly along. One of my friends got stuck a while back when we were at the same stages in our first book. I was stuck, too, but by telling myself it was temporary, or writing other scenes from other parts of the book, or, indeed other books entirely, I managed to keep on creeping slowly forward, I now have 5 books out, she’s just completing her third novel. Other writer friends have twice as many books out as me after two years in the game. So much of writing is a case of having a firm word with yourself and just getting on with it in whatever way you can. You may find deadlines work for you. I find they don’t but a handful of defined and doable goals, with no done by time, they do help. Like all this, you probably need to experiment to get your own happy medium.

In a nutshell, then, bollocks to deadlines; set targets.

Building an Audience

It’s well worth doing this as you go along rather than waiting until you’re ready to launch your first book. If you can manage a free short story you can give to folks in return for mailing list sign up that will help you to start growing a following. Open an account at instafreebie and bookfunnel to deliver the free book to folks. Join promos with other authors. Find websites and Facebook groups where you can chat to other writers in your genre and exchange marketing tips and ideas. For mailing, it’s up to you but I use Mailerlite – they’re cheap and do all the things I need them to do as an author.

This might sound a bit premature but if you can start getting people invested in you even if it’s only to share your journey, you are more likely to start off with some decent book sales.

Big caveat on your give away short though, it has to be your best stuff because it’s your shop window.

Working Out Who Your Audience Is

This is going to affect what you do considerably. For example it is really, and I mean really hard to reach young people or children online. I’d call my book Young Adult. When I wrote it, as well as me, I was thinking of my nephew, who was 12 years old at the time. When I do events, my books sell exclusively to 10-14 year olds, with the odd adult Pratchett fan thrown in. The buyers are usually parents who want to encourage their children to read books. Online, no matter how well your ads or your site piques their interest, kids will not be able to buy your books without their parents’ say so and you run into a whole heap of legal headaches if minors start signing up to your email list. The folks who buy my books online are 45 and over, more women between 45 and 50, more men over 50.

So, if you are going to sell your books, think long and hard about who you are selling to. You may need to concentrate on libraries or making a print version – Ingram Spark are good for this if you are looking for world wide sales and will get your book distributed far more widely then Createspace or Amazon Print and for far less per copy than LuLu.

Here are resources which might help focus your thoughts on production and marketing, anyway …

The first is a series of books about how to format paperbacks using word and publishing indie books. They are by this guy here:

Aaron Shepard

Mr Shepard’s books, From Word to Kindle and POD for Profit might be useful. The amount of information he is dealing with has increased so where I bought one book: Aiming at Amazon, which dealt with the process of making print books. I would have never got my paperback stuff sorted without them. If you are looking at children’s books it might be worth looking at Adventures in Writing for Children and The Business of Writing for Children and the ones he has written about making a useable kindle file using word!

The three other essential ones that will give you an idea of how you can go about building an audience, indie musician style, and sell your books are a three book set by Patty Jansen. I heartily recommend these as they also propose a way of working that is not reliant on any one bookseller and with a work rate that is realistically attainable. They are:

  • Self Publishing Unboxed
  • Mailing Lists Unboxed
  • Going Wide Unboxed

Links to buy them from all retailers can be found here – scroll down to the bottom of the page.
Or you can buy them, direct, from Patty’s Website here

I realise I’ve probably given you way more information than you might want and about stuff way further down the line than the point at which you are now. It might look daunting but the thing is, if you enjoy writing and work at it, you will get there, and when you do it won’t feel nearly as daunting, putting your work out there. It is like putting your soul on the table and inviting snide comments but somehow it works out OK and the more you do it the more your confidence builds and the more you begin to believe in your work. Not everyone will like your stuff but that’s OK. I have one star reviews and that’s fine, and if it isn’t fine, avoid reading the reviews! 😉

Finally, the most important things

IMPORTANT THING ONE: enjoy it. Enjoy writing and the love for it will shine through in what you say. If you write with conviction and enthusiasm, pretty much any plot will work, I mean, look at my stuff! The rest is gravy.

IMPORTANT THING TWO: never, EVER look at other people’s progress and compare it to yours. They are not you. Their life, their personality, and probably their books are different. Keep your eye on your own writing goals, make them realistic goals and work steadily towards them. Enjoy the process of learning and enjoy writing.

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14 Apr 2018 · 6:30 pm

Gumbification is the name of the game: the capriciousness of science, things and me.

Yes, I have been on holiday! Woot.

Apologies for my absence last week. Though on holiday I was writing and meant to sort out a blog post while the others were skiing but I got too into what I was doing and dismally failed to leave enough time. Which reminds me the final score for that week’s writing was 7,570. Dead chuffed with this as I had to integrate enough exercise into my day to be able to eat as much as everyone else and there were usually things I had to pop down to town and get as well. Walking was very enjoyable but fuck me it hurts. I was so delighted to get home and tackle the hill up to town on a bike instead of my creaky knees. Pain aside though, walking was lovely as not only was the countryside stunningly beautiful but for some reason, I find there is something intrinsically humorous about snow.

Mmm … cheescake anyone?

Interestingly, when you go up a mountain, science tells you that the air pressure around you will not be as high but apart from seeing a slightly elevated heart rate, perhaps, your imagination doesn’t really furnish you with the full implications of what this might mean. Not until you open a bottle of shampoo. Then a practical demonstration will soon put you right.

The thing is, obviously, it’s logical that something which has the same amount of air per cubic inch inside as outside down in the valley is suddenly something with a far higher amount of air per cubic inch inside, than outside, when you go up to an area where there’s lower air pressure. And that only means one thing. The air inside is going to leave very quickly when you open the lid and if there is something between the air and the lid, that’s going to be pushed out with the air, and it will also be leaving the bottle very fast.

Thus it was that our packet of almond biscuits – newly purchased in the valley – ended up looking like a mini zepplin by the time we’d got it up to our apartment nearer the top of the mountain. I also forget to shake down my half full tube of hand cream, which exploded out of the tube when I popped the lid, depositing a neat white worm on the wall near me, my shampoo, suncream and toothpaste all reinforced this lesson (I’m a slow learner it seems) and yes, I was also foolish enough to open a brand new tube of echzema cream for my son which went off like one of those indoor fireworks that ends up looking like a huge silver poo.

Luckily, there is not photographic evidence of this. You’ll just have to take my word for it that I’m as stupid as I say, but I do have a picture of how the empty water bottle I’d closed up at the top of the mountain looked when we got back into the valley. Just shows you how rarefied the air was up there. Not as much inside as outside, you see.

Mmm … pressure inside and outside no longer equal.

Even the ever-efficient McOther didn’t escape gumbification of his own making. We always play scrabble while we’re on holiday. It’s great fun and we all get the giggles most of the time. Imagine McOther’s consternation when he opened our splendid car boot sale travel scrabble – probably circa about 1967 – only to find that somewhere on its way from his desk to his suitcase the bag with all the tiles in had dropped out. Our first game, then, was called ‘making the tiles’ which we did with paper, snortle. Then there was an added frisson of what would happen if anyone sighed too heavily towards the board or, heaven forfend, sneezed! We did have to remake an R after I laughed too hard, sending the ’tiles’ scattering like confetti, and we were unable to find it afterwards.

Paper travel scrabble. Mmm ritzy.

Our fantastic paper tiles, demonstrated is the characteristically excellent hand I drew in one game although for once this was not the norm.

Having taken the piss out of McOther, now, clearly I have to do so about myself ‘for balance’. Here, then, is something that happened the week before we left.

In my town, everyone’s as skint as the rest of the country, ten years ago, when we moved here, there were lots of houses for sale on our street. Then the economy went down the lavatory and most things over two bedrooms and pretty much everything over three bedrooms went off the market over night. It seemed that everyone who was going to move tightened their belts and decided not to. Instead they started converting lofts, cellars, out door sculleries, they started building on, building sheds … you name it they’re doing it. The net result is that there is never a shortage of skips.

As a keen skip shopper I find this rather splendid. OK so I missed three bicycles the other week – not good bikes but I could still have ‘downloaded them’ checked them over and flogged them for £20. However, they were gone by the time I’d returned from the school run. On the up side, at least I know somebody else took them and is either cycling happily or made a few quid.

Then there’s the useful things like boxes and drawers, c.f. my sad tale the other week about locking myself out and having to use a discarded kitchen drawer to gain the height required to lean over the back gate and open it so I could get in and retrieve my keys from where I’d left them in the garden.

There has been one particularly useful skip near us, literally at the end of our road, 20 metres or less from our house. It’s been useful for the plethora of lovely stuff within – cf the bikes but also some new skirting board for our bathroom – and of course it’s also very handy for putting things in. It is intriguing watching a skip, seeing what appears and what disappears especially a long term one. There is definitely a thriving up and down-cycling economy here.

Anyway, the other day, I saw the skip had been emptied and a new one had arrived. I had a peek in the bottom and there I saw a wine rack. A 25 bottle wine rack no less. McOther has a large cellar and wine racks are always greeted with enthusiasm. So I picked the wine rack out of the skip and took it round to our back gate. When I’d unlocked, I picked up the wine rack and realised there was a lot of dust under it.

Hmmm, I thought.

I checked it more closely and … yes … it had woodworm. Then again, I had some treatment for woodworm so I could treat the wood, I reasoned and then give it to McOther. After all we’d discussed, only a few days previously, how sad it was that one of his racks had woodworm and decided that it wasn’t worth treating. If I fixed up this new one, it might be a nice surprise.

But realistically, could I be arsed to treat it?

No.

Accepting this, I picked it up, took it back to the skip and put it in again.

However, it did prompt me to remove a wickerwork chest of drawers from our utility room which has been sitting in a pile of tell-tale dust for some time and treat that for woodworm.

When McOther came home, the skip was full and I told him about the wine rack.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you know that one we were talking about the other day?’

‘The one of yours?’

‘Yes. That one. Well, I threw it in the skip.’

‘So … you mean I nearly rescued our wine rack?’

‘Yes dear.’

I was quite glad that I hadn’t brought him his own wine rack back. I’d have looked a bit of a chump. As for the chest of drawers, on reflection we decided that despite being treated it had reached the stage where there was more air than wood and we decided to bin it. I forgot to put it out in the skip at night so whizzed round and dumped it in on the way to school with McMini. By the time I returned from the school run the skip had gone. It hasn’t been back since.

That’s the logic of MTM then, bin something I find in a skip because I can’t be arsed to treat it for wood worm – something which is ours, anyway and which I put back because I can’t be arsed to treat it for woodworm twice – then spend hours treating something else for woodworm only to throw it in a skip.

That is illogical, Captain.

Ho hum.

My best eyebomb ever … probably

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17 Feb 2018 · 1:25 pm

Round up!

Eerie speaking to you from the past picture because I don’t have one of my face in the dark with a torch shining up at it.

Today through the magic of science I am speaking to you from the past. Yes, once again, as it’s half term, I’m actually typing this up about a week before it will be published. You remember a while back in this post, I was glossing over the miserable hash I’d made of achieving … well, anything much career-wise in 2017, and talking about what I intended to do in order to organise my time and projects. Half a term in, I thought it would be good time to take stock on how much of my shit I’ve actually got together.

Amazingly my plans for doing the pinger routine have worked extremely well. I feel in control and I have managed a bit of writing, or some work on my writing, most days. Yes, it took three weeks to get rid of Christmas properly and I haven’t done the thank you letters yet – although I’m working on those and I did do the parish magazine – but a routine does appear not only to be emerging but also to be actually sticking. I got rid of enough Christmas to start doing some writing by the last week of January but forgot to log the word counts until 5th Feb because I’m really smart like that. I am optimistic about the small slices thing though, so here is a quick update about each project and how it’s going.

The Unknown Work provisionally entitled: Traffic.

There’s an outside chance I might finish this in 2018. I am currently on the third iteration. I wrote 19,933 words at the start of last year which were really just a load of getting-to-know-the-characters-rubbish but I might be able to turn some of them into a short. That was followed by a 48,982 second version. That was the point I decided to give the Joe Nassis plotting thing a try so I stopped, plotted it as best I could and had a go at writing it by numbers for Nano. I wrote about 32k of the new version for Nano (can’t remember the exact number but it was 25k in the first week) then this kicked off and I had to stop.

It reached 42,300 on Monday but it’s dropped to 41 something by today; I’ve been whipping it into shape a bit this week before moving onto the next bit. Bonus, I have managed to crack a difficult linking scene that was really frying my synapses in an interesting way. Touch and go if I finish this year but it is possible.

Setting Tripwires for Granny and other Tall Family Tales

This one had reached about 17,000 words by the end of 2017 and after a bit of a pause where the fiction took over I have taken it up again this week. There is a new and interesting twist in that I am beginning to think that I would be better splitting it to the family history stories in one volume and the ones about growing up in a school, and my dad, in another. So tripwires is up to 20571. Woot but some of that may end up in.

Hello Jonny Bell

As opposed to Goodbye Mr Chips … another working title, obviously.

Talking to Mum and Dad recently, I realised they have made a lot of visits to the school where Dad taught and so I thought that some stories about Dad’s time working at the school would be a brilliant talking point and memory aide After contacting the school, bless them, they have emailed all the people they have on record who were in my dad’s house asking for stories or reminiscences about him. I have had some fantastic responses with wonderful tales about Dad and the school. He has had an absolute gas listening to Mum and the carers reading them to him. He has also enjoyed reminiscing about those times as it has brought back lots of memories. Even better, the exercise has also focused Mum, my brother and I on who he really is. It’s been amazing and I reckon that those, with the stories I remember added on, would make a cracking book on their own. After all, it’s basically characterisation with knobs on!

Space Dustmen

This one needs the same planning efforts done on it as I did on Traffic. After that I’ll be able to write that along with the others. As well as giving me more options to suit more moods, having more than one project on the go means I can chop and change if I get stuck, giving me time to let stuff settle and let the subconscious find ways to sort problems in a more interesting manner. Hoping to do that before We go skiing during the Spring Holidays, at which point I will have lots of time to write while the others ski.

Jump

This one is finished and waiting for a decent cover. I am taking a while because if I do it right, I can probably come up with an idea that ticks the boxes for a cover that looks interesting and has a person on it but which is also the type of generic scene that I can use more widely to promote the whole K’Barthan range of books; Series, Extras and Shorts, when I get my ads up and running again.

Short stories

As Jump took just under a month to write I can’t help thinking that I should be able to do a couple of shorter books next year – things weighing in at about 20k or so – if I plan them first.

Top of the agenda for the next few weeks then, planning Space Dustmen and some shorts.

Eyebombing book

The book is still going nowhere but at the same time, I’m collecting more material every day, and I’ve set up a blog for them – . Also there has been some progress on other fronts. The Zazzle shop is finally tidied up – I think I mentioned that the other week. So there’s the mother shop for my art and then there’s one for eyebombing and one for K’Barthan/Hamgee University Press stuff. The main shop has ‘collections’ of the good in all the other shop. In addition, I’ve produced a set of 10 eyebombing cards and an eyebombing 2018 calendar. Next year I’ll be a bit more organised about that and might actually manage to do a 2019 calendar in advance. If you’re interested in any of that, you can find the link here:

My main Zazzle Shop with all the ‘collections’:  http://bit.ly/dbhonazzle

Sorry, I have to do a horrible bit.ly link because the affiliate code is a massive number, possibly 32 digits … well … OK … it’s about 16 but it’s not exactly snappy and easy for folks to remember.

 

Meanwhile, the nascent blog, which, irritatingly, doesn’t tie into my instgram feed, is here: https://eyebomber.wordpress.com

Now I need to come up with a consistent name for my eyebombing exploits, work out which days of the week to post eyebombs and then remember to post them. Right now I’m doing that on Sundays and Wednesdays at UK lunch time; i.e. Australasian evening (mostly) and American morning (mostly).

There is also a domain name: http://www.eyebomber.co.uk – although at the moment it doesn’t point to anything.

The truth is, I’m having a real quandary trying to decide on a proper name. I really like, eyebombtheschoolrun because it’s quirky and fun but it’s also long and it only has two more years’ shelf life, after which point it will become a lie because McMini will walk to senior school or go on a bus.

There is also the option of eyebombthereforeIam (Eyebomb: therefore I am). That is more of an evergreen name and I love that, too, but it is still horribly long. I suspect, in the end, I will have to go for eyebombthereforeIam.com and change everything to that.

If I was actually Scottish it would be a no-brainer. I would call it http://www.ayebomb.co.uk – but I feel a bit of a charlatan claiming Scottish heritage if it’s only by association and marriage, rather than lineage. So … quiz time, what do you think I should call my eyebombing exploits?

 

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