And guess which ebook I hope everyone is reading

With between 200 and 300 per cent growth year-on-year in the ebook market (different surveys call it different ways) you wouldn’t think there was much need for such an event, but there is.

It isn’t just that there is entrenched, almost paranoid resistance to ebooks among many readers (you know the type – people who rhapsodise about the smell and the texture of blocks of printed paper, and who feel besieged and beleaguered by those who promote ebooks, swearing to defend their right to own lumps of pulped tree to the bitter end)  it’s that the vast majority of readers have not even heard of ebooks and ebook readers.

For those of us who have, there are many free ebooks on offer during this week. So shoot across to E-Reads, or Smashwords, the Read an eBook Week site, or any participating outlet, and see what’s on offer. (You can avoid all the big e-book stores like Amazon and Fictionwise if you’re looking for read an e-book week special offers, none of them appear to be participating. I bet they will be next year.)

But it’s not just about the free stuff. Books are starting to be published in digital-only editions (like mine, for instance) and digital-first editions. This means that, even now, the only way to see some new books is to get the ebook. If you’re not reading ebooks, your choice of books is already starting to narrow.  A few years from now, this trickle of digital-only books will be a torrent.

And when you have a hard drive stuffed with great books, maybe you’ll want to pick up an ebook reader to go with them.

The other day, someone in my online writers group wondered if a particular publisher was still in business. They had submitted a manuscript to them four months ago and had heard nothing. So they’d checked the website and found it hadn’t been updated since some time in 2008. Of course, old hands at the submissions game will be shaking their heads and smiling wryly. Four months is no time at all to wait! they’re thinking. Small press publishers are far too busy to worry about updating their websites. This guy is obviously a newbie and will have to learn to control his patience and live with his frustration. Worse still, these old hands will tell you that you mustn’t express your frustration, you mustn’t let your impatience show. It doesn’t matter how the publishing houses treat you, if you kick up a fuss about it, they will put a black mark against you. Commissioning editors, they say, have long memories – as do agents.

Frankly, I don’t understand this attitude. I’ve been in business for three decades. I have managed business units for some of the world’s largest corporations, and I have run my own small consultancy. I know how businesses run. I know how buying works. I know how to manage a supply chain. It’s painfully obvious to me that the world’s publishing houses are making some basic and very stupid mistakes.

At the front end of the publishing business, the companies seem to be doing better than at the back end. Their attitude to book shops – their primary market – seems to be businesslike enough.  It’s a mess, of course, horribly inefficient and the book retailers seem to have beaten the publishers up pretty well over the years, but the publishers are doing as well as they can in a market that has become overly complex and difficult for them. Marketing beyond the book retailers seems to be a rout for the publishers but they are trying hard to redefine the business so that this is considered outside their responsibility.

On the supply side, the picture is patchy. On the one hand you have editing, design, printing and related services, which are going OK. On the other, you have content acquisition and management which appears to be a disaster. Most sizeable publishers only receive submissions from agents these days, having thrown their hands up and given up trying to do it themselves. Despite having been at it for a century or two, the publishers never learned how to do this efficiently. I don’t suppose they think that agents can do it any better, but at least now they have passed a large part of the cost on to someone else.

Since agents and publishers do not know which books will succeed and which will not, they have no way of telling writers what they want (apart from saying “This, this, and this genre – oh, and anything that’s really good.”) This means writers must produce work on spec and hope it fits the requirements/hunches/moods of the moment when they submit it. Agents are not in a much better position, they have to read through heaps of queries and mountains of slush, then take a gamble on their gut feeling, imprecise knowledge of publishers’ tastes and needs, and their (often quite limited) experience. This amounts to a major inefficiency in the system. If you include authors as part of the publishing industry, this process alone pushes the overall productivity of the industry very close to zero.

The gross inefficiencies of the acquisition process, and the lack of effective process management tools, are directly responsible for much of the rough treatment of authors that ensues. If you call your local utility company, a voice recognition or menu system will channel you into appropriate queues. There you may be given an estimate of how  long you will have to wait to have your call dealt with. You may be told how many are ahead of you in the queue and this will count down for you as you wait. At the very least, the musak will be interrupted every couple of minutes so they can apologise for the delay and assure you that they are still working on getting to you.

With an agent or publisher, it is very different. You may (or most likely won’t) get an acknowledgement that your submission has arrived. After that you will hear nothing. Sometimes you will hear nothing for three, four, six, or even twelve months, before you get a one or two line pro forma rejection. Very often these days, you will wait forever. Many agents and publishers say their policy is that if you don’t hear from them, you can take that as a ‘no’!

It’s not because they’re rushed off their feet (although that is often true.) It’s not because they’re rude and selfish people (some are, some aren’t.) It’s because their business processes are ridiculous, designed for another age, and propped up by free labour and outrageous demands on salaried staff. It’s because their acquisitions business model depends on luck, rather than on knowing what they want to acquire, leading to huge amounts of additional, wasted work. It’s because their suppliers – the authors – are so desperate for success, so cowed by the system, so petrified by the old hands and the long memories of faceless decision makers, that they will put up with this shoddy treatment.

Do you think the suppliers of paper and transport and warehousing do their work on spec, hoping that the publisher will approve and pay them? Do you suppose the printers submit a quote for services and wait six months without hearing a word from the publisher, afraid that if they complain they might uspset them? Of course not. So why do writers?

Honestly, we get the publishers and agents we deserve.

Right now, the publishers stand with respect to writers as the big supermarket chains stand with respect to farmers. But, in a time when publishers and agents are teetering on the edge of complete disintermediation, this is not the time to be upsetting potential suppliers. This is the time to be raising your game. Writers have long memories too!

Reading the Entrails

I’m developing a relationship with Amazon.

It used to be a simple relationship. I bought books from them. Well, not quite simple. I occasionally bought books when their low price plus the exorbitant cost of shipping to Australia worked out better than a local bookshop, or it was a book you just couldn’t get here. So I’d get into some pretty silly calculations involving Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, prices, shipping, and exchange rates.

Then I bought a Kindle. The relationship deepened. I stopped buying printed books from Amazon. In fact, I stopped buying printed books altogether. Now I only get ebooks from the Kindle Store. Unless they’re cheaper elsewhere, of course – which they easily can be, because Amazon charges a US$2 ‘foreigner tax’ on every book bought by people who have the temerity to live outside the USA. (Don’t ask me why. Something to do with Amazon wanting all the money in the world, I think.) This means there is no such thing as a free book on Amazon. All Amazon books start at US$2. So I tend to look around. If I can get a PDF of the book somewhere else and cheaper, or a Mobipocket version, I will. As for free books, on sites like Project Gutenberg, they’re rather better value than the US$2 Amazon equivalents. (What’s worse than the ‘foreigner tax’, I’ve discovered that many Kindle editions of English classics have been ‘Americanized’. God knows why but someone has gone to the trouble of changing the spelling in old Wilkie Collins and Jane Austen novels! Are American readers really that dumb that they need a ‘translation’ from English spelling before they can read a classic English novel?)

When my novel, TimeSplash, went on sale in the Kindle Store, my relationship with Amazon plumbed new depths. At first my biggest concern was with the huge slice of the sale price Amazon charges for the privilege of selling my book. They take a 65% cut of what you pay! Then, not only do they arbitrarily discount it from US$5.50 – the publisher’s sale price – to US$4.40, they also add a US$2 ‘foreigner tax’, making it US$6.40 for foreign buyers, making the book more expensive for the 95% of us who do not live in the USA. (And you only get a DRMed, .PRC file for that – which is why I recommend to anybody wanting to buy my book, for the Kindle or any other eReader, that they buy it from the publisher’s own bookstore. Even for American buyers, I think the bundle of non-DRM formats you get from the publisher is a far more attractive deal than the slightly lower Kindle Store price.)

But that’s not the worst of it. I’ve started noticing all the twiddly bits on te book page in the Kindle Store. Things like the star rating and the tags. As a buyer of the book, you get to rate it and to tag it (either just ticking tags you agree with, or adding your own). It turns out the ratings and, especially the tags are crucial for sales. They determine whether the book turns up in Amazon searches (if it’s not tagged, it probably doesn’t show) and how high up the results list it appears. (So, for God’s sake, if you love me and you bought TimeSplash, rate it and tag it, or you might be my last customer on this site!) Then there’s the customer review. I don’t know how many people have bought the book so far – from the kind things people are saying on Twitter, there are a few of you – but, so far, only one person has written a review. Just one!

But the most insidious and terrible piece of data on the Kindle Store page for TimeSplash is the Kindle Store ranking. It’s something to do with how many books are being sold, but I don’t know what. It’s never the same from one minute to the next and it fluctuates wildly – and I mean wildly, within a range of 70,000 so far. And it means nothing, or, perhaps it means everything! Since it is a rank, and I know Amazon has about 400,000 books in the Kindle Store, it’s easy to see that, if the book is ranked better than 80,000, it is in the top 20% of sales. If it is ranked 20,000 or less, it’s in the top 5% of sales. But what does that mean? Does Amazon sell a thousand ebooks books a day, or a dozen? Who knows? And since 90% of the “best-sellers” in the Kindle Store are free books anyway, what on Earth does that do to the sales distribution? If they’re giving away books by the shovelful (in the US presumably, since they’re not free anywhere else) at one end of the ’sales’ scale, are there 200,000 titles at the other end that are not selling at all?

I’ve had to stop looking at my book page on Amazon because this kind of thing is driving me nuts. I only make about 60¢ on an Amazon sale anyway so it’s hardly worth worrying about. I’d need to sell tens of thousands before I saw any serious money, and that’s not going to happen. So why torture myself?

Well, because, regardless of the money, I’d like to see people buying the book – and reading it!

The TimeSplash Non-Stop 24-hour Round-the-World Twitter Tour starts soon. The process is complicated but all you need to know is that I’ll be in your timezone between 7pm and 8pm during the next 24 hours. To shout out to me as I go by, send me a tweet on Twitter.

This is my Twitter ID:  @graywave  ( http://twitter.com/graywave )

I’ll be using the hashtag  #timesplash if you’d like to follow the whole thing (and have lots of stamina and a very high tolerance for me saying “Hello New York”, “Hola Argentina” “Gruetzi Switzerland” and such for the next 24 hours.)

Don’t forget to shout. And if you know people in odd places, tell them to shout out too. I’ve a feeling some parts of this are going to be very lonely :-}

At last, it’s February 15 New York time, and Once Upon a Bookstore, my publisher’s own online bookshop, is now selling copies of TimeSplash.

Get your copy here

Please, everybody, pass on this message. Retweet it, Digg it, Stumble it, and tell all your friends on Facebook. You can even mention it to people in real life, if you like.

And, if you do me the great honour of buying it and reading it, I’m dying to hear what you think of it.

(If you haven’t heard me talking about TimeSplash before and don’t know what I’m talking about, here is the website of the book that tells you everything you will ever need to know. And if you find you need to know more than that, there is also a blog of the book. Enjoy!)

Vlentine’s Day is always overshadowed at our place by my wife’s birthday, which falls on the 13th. (She was actually born on Friday 13th – which is how she ended up with me, I suppose.) If I haven’t demonstrated sufficient love and caring by the end of the 13th, there’s no hope of recovering my position on the 14th. So I like to put in a bit of effort, and, as a writer, that means, at the very least, that the message inside the card is properly spelled.

For her birday/Valentine’s Day 2000, I pulled out all the writerly stops and wrote her a love sonnet. It was the featured poem in The Blender of Love’s Valentine’s Day issue that year and I reproduce it here today just because I still feel the same way about her ten years on.

SONNET for Christine

Had you a dozen children, we both know
That not a one would but resemble you.
The essence of the woman I love so
Could not be conjured into someone new.
And if you were a genius of note
And penned your life for all to read and share,
The words, no mater with what skill you wrote,
Could not but hint at everything you were.
Your visage may outlive you even so,
Preserved as data, safe in cyberspace,
With all that made you wonderful to know,
Reduced to just the image of your face.
You will not live forever, nor will I,
But we will live in love until we die.

Happy Valentine’s Day everybody!

A survey of book promotion tactics was conducted by The Savvy Book Marketer in December, 2009, and is reported today. It asked a number of authors what their book promotion strategy would involve in 2010. You can check the method and the outcome there. I just want to look at the list of tactics they came up with and try to get a feel for how appropriate they might be for marketing an ebook. The list, most popular at the top, is this:

1. Social networking and social media
2. Blogging
3. Seeking book reviews
4. Seeking testimonials and endorsements
5. Press releases
6. E-zines or email marketing
7. Radio and television talk shows
8. Speaking or teleseminars
9. Article marketing
10. Book signings

There are some obvious things to say about this, so let’s say them first. The people surveyed clearly included a lot of non-fiction authors. So I can eliminate items 8 and 9 as not really relevant for a novel. I can also eliminate 10. With an ebook, there is nothing to sign, and, for that matter, no reason why a bookshop (the traditional venue for such things) would let you in the door. So that leaves:

1. Social networking and social media
2. Blogging
3. Seeking book reviews
4. Seeking testimonials and endorsements
5. Press releases
6. E-zines or email marketing
7. Radio and television talk shows

1 and 2 are no-brainers. Anybody with a book to promote in any format and little or no money to spend, will be all over the social networks and blogsphere.

Seeking book reviews (3) might also seem obvious but it isn’t an avenue that is open to ebook writers in most genres. Where ebooks have been popular for years – in erotica and romance – there are dozens of popular and authoritative review sites on the Web. In all other genres, book reviewers will almost never review an ebook. Only rare exceptions exist among the popular review websites and online magazines. I am unaware of any exceptions among the major offline reviewers. So we can scratch that one. Over the next decade, as it becomes normal to release ebook-only novels (and as more reviewers buy ebook readers!) this will change. But in 2010, ebooks just don’t get reviewed.

4 is an interesting one. I have read a number of advice blogs saying you should do it and telling you how to go about it, but it is an amazingly difficult thing to bring oneself to do. You have to approach famous writers you admire and respect in your own genre – complete strangers, of course unless your damned lucky – and ask them to read your book and say something quotably nice about it. Given that many such writers have already come out and said, on their own blogs, that they hate being pestered this way, and some have said flat out that they won’t do it, I just can’t bring myself to ask it. I screwed up my courage in one single instance and asked a very well-known writer I’d had some slight dealings with, if he would look at my book. I then waited, cringing in embarrassment, for a reply that never did come.

5 is also interesting. I could put out press releases but who, really, would be interested? Not the national press, certainly not the international press. Which leaves the local press. Since I live out in the boondocks, my local press is full of reports on farming and country shows, and letters to the editor complaining about the global conspiracy to fool us into thinking there’s such a thing as climate change, or explaining, with Bible quotes, why God dislikes liberal politicians. I’m pretty sure I could get into a local paper but who in my area has even heard of ebooks? Who, in a town where they play country and western music in the supermarket, is interested in sci-fi?

Many e-marketers advise you to convert your social networking successes into cash by creating mailing lists. You get everyone to sign up for your regular magazine or newsletter and then, cunningly, blast them all with spam emails when the book is released. This is the strategy I assume is meant in 6. Well, I think such practices are evil. Sadly for me, I think most marketing practices are evil. Like a lot of writers, I just don’t have the personality type it takes to sell things.

And as for radio and television talk shows (7), the idea seems to suffer the same drawbacks as sending out press releases.

So, for an author with an ebook to promote, who is squeamish about marketing, and doesn’t live in a major metropolis, 1 and 2, and to a very limited extent 3, seem to be the only options available. Of course, ’social networking’, ‘blogging’ and ‘reviews’ can mean a lot more than is obvious. Blog tours, viral promo videos, Twitter parties, online competitions, and so on, are all in the potential mix. The online activity around a new book can be quite vibrant and exciting. And, as for reviews, even if the big-name sci-fi magazines won’t review ebooks, ten kindly bloggers with readerships of a thousand or so, might easily reach more actual readers than a major print review magazine could ever hope for.

Please say hello to the newest member of The New York Journal of Books‘ reviews team. And, while you’re at it, why not nip across and have a look at my first review for this new, online book review journal. (Actually, if you read my recent review here of Dawkins’ Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, you could skip that step, since it is almost the same. Almost, I say, but not quite. When you write a review for a review mag, you can’t adopt the same chatty, personalised, approach that I do in my blog reviews. And if that difference intrigues you, you might like to go and take a look anyway, to compare them.)

Why favour the New York Journal of Books with my erudition, you may ask. Well, I’ve been looking for some non-fiction projects to become involved in, lately, the kind of project that is both writerly and related to my interests, that will involve me more in the writing world, and which will raise my profile in literary circles. I’ve come to being a published writer from a long, long time of wandering in the wilderness. My name is much better known in other, completely unrelated spheres of life. Now I need to change that.

And by great good fortune, I came upon the NYJB. It’s a new venture (it started last month!) and, I think, an exciting one. As Editor-in-Chief and founder, Ted Sturtz says:

In light of the shift from print to online content, there is an opportunity to establish a purely online book review positioned to capture the ongoing growth of the online audience. Moreover, by gradually assembling a broad panel of highly-credentialed reviewers the journal is positioning to offer far more comprehensive coverage of new books than any other book review. While it will be critical to review major new titles as they are released, the Journal aims to review more books in niche or non-mainstream genres than are covered by the current major review publications. The NYJB aims to also review more books written by first-time authors and books published by smaller independent houses, providing respected reviews for authors and independent publishers that are generally spurned by the major review publications. The review also intends to review books in niches that are generally ignored by mainstream publishers. In short, the aim is to establish NYJB as a review widely recognized to be on par with the most respected traditional reviews, while reviewing a far larger number of books.

With so many highly respected review sources either folding or being drastically cut back, I’m very pleased to get behind the NYJB and to help create a top-class online review site in the tradition of (the struggling) Kirkus and the great New York Times Book Review. Authors and publicists, you should seriously consider adding the New York Journal of Books to your list of review sites for your next release.

The Queensland Writers Centre is touring blogs again. This time the tour has a theme: Writers’ Desks. For some reason writers’ desks are fascinating and pictures of same are hugely popular. So QWC is probably onto a winner here. However, when they asked me to put up a picture of my own desk as part of the tour, I was painfully aware that I’ve only recently done that.

Fascinating as my desk is, I can’t keep posting pictures of it. It’s not as if it has seasonal changes or anything. So I’ve taken the opportunity to correct a glaring omission from my last picture and show you my computer ‘desktop’. This should be just as interesting as the wooden one since, for me at least, the computer is where 95% of the work gets done.

The desktop that really matters

For those without broadband (or using Telstra NextG, which is almost as bad) I apologise for the size of this picture. Even so, it isn’t big enough for you to recognise all the icons. That’s why the animation provides labels for the following groups.

• Group A: Various mobile device managers (phone, camera, MP3 player and so on.)
• Group B: Internet stuff (browser, email, Skype, Twitter, and FTP client)
• Group C: Office software (mostly Open Office but also PowerPoint)
• Group D: Music score editing software. (Yes, I write music. It’s a little hobby of mine.)
• Group E: Image editing software (Paint Shop Pro, IrfanView and IconEasel)
• Group F: Media players (Windows Media Player and WinAmp)
• Group G: HTML editors (HTML Kit and Komodo Edit)
• Group H: Sundry utilities (antivirus, encryption, DVD writers, backup, 3G wireless client, and Celestia, which lets me view the universe from various perspectives)
• Group I: Various ebook readers and ebook creators.
• Group J: Stuff to do with my current writing project (the Open Office file itself, my multifunction tracking sheet, and a program called StoryBook that I’ve been trying out as a way of organising the background info – I’m not getting along well with it.)
• Group K: Games (basically, the only computer game I ever play is Freecell – a patience-style card game.)

I should also mention the background picture. I change my background quite often and it is usually an astronomical theme. This one is a long-exposure shot of the space shuttle taking off in Florida last year. I love pictures of astronauts on EVAs, Hubble deep field shots, and the ISS. Images like these help keep me inspired.

This post is part of the Queensland Writers Centre blog tour, happening February to April 2010. To follow the tour, visit Queensland Writers Centre’s blog.

If I wanted an ebook reader, would I buy an Apple iPad? I don’t think so. Would I accept one as a gift? I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t.

The only ebook reader I know well is my 6″ Kindle 2 (foreigner’s edition). It cost me $256, and there are no ongoing costs. It’s a great reading device. I love the e-ink screen (especially because it means I can read in the garden) I love the physical size, weight, and ergonomics, the battery life (it goes for weeks!)  the 3G wireless connection, and the dead easy Amazon shopping experience.

With the iPad, 3G is an ‘optional’ extra, so the base model starts at $629 (2.5 times the Kindle price!) plus, you have to pay a monthly fee for it, which (currently, in the US) starts at $15/mo – so another $180 per year (about 3/4 of a new Kindle each year!) That the Kindle bundles the price of a 3G ISP connection into the price of its books is, in my view, one of the best things about it. Say you buy 20 books a year from the Kindle Store or on the iPad’s new iBook store. The Kindle’s books will cost you just the cover price. The iPad books will cost you the cover rice plus a twentieth of $180 (i.e. $9 !!) each. For identical $10 books, that means you’re paying $10 on the Kindle and $19 on the iPad! Where is the sense in that?

The iPad is very pretty, it has colour and a touch screen and so on, but try taking it outside to read a book during your lunch break and you’ll soon see the benefits of e-ink, and the Kindle’s small size and light weight. What’s more, because the Kindle is designed for ebook reading, you can easily hold it in one hand and turn the page with the same hand – the buttons are just where they should be – so you can eat a sandwich with the other hand. Try doing that with an iPad.

You may argue that it’s not a fair comparison, the Kindle is a dedicated ebook reader, the iPad is, essentially, a PDA on which you can also read books. I say, so what? I don’t want a PDA. (And, if I did, I’d buy one with a proper, non-modal operating system, not a souped-up iPhone OS.) I’ve already got a smartphone that does useful things that the iPad doesn’t (like taking pictures and making phone calls) along with useful things that the iPad does, like displaying maps, managing a diary, and so on. If I had an iPad, I would still need a phone (with a camera). I would also still need a good ebook reader – because a bulky, LCD-screened, expensive, heavy iPad just doesn’t cut it.

I’ve got to say, Apple, I feel pretty disappointed.