Last weekend (was that just three days ago?) I had a free book giveaway on Amazon for my time travel thriller, TimeSplash (that’s it in the left-hand column if you want to pick up a copy). As my previous post says, it was an exciting moment. A book that had spent almost two years in relative obscurity, was being grabbed up by thousands of people. In fact, in the course of two days, over 19,000 people downloaded the book. In the “Free in the Kindle Store” listings, it shot to #1 in Science Fiction, #1 in Techno-thrillers and #13 overall.

It was a wild and dizzying ride. If you’re not a struggling writer, you may not be able to imagine what it means to have so many people wanting your book all at once. Remember that moment when you first realised that the girl or guy you had fallen in love with actually loved you back? It was sort of like that but without the hope of a happy ever after. That’s because, after the free offer period, my book was going back into the “Paid in the Kindle Store” listings and all those nice high rankings would evaporate in an instant. So I steeled myself for the come down, the plunge back down to the dark and obscure depths to which it had slowing been sinking. (I don’t know how far down the Amazon Kindle ranks go. I’ve noticed books with ranks as low as 800, 000. It must be very cold and still at those depths, with soul crushing pressures.)

And then something peculiar happened. TimeSplash fell alright, but it didn’t fall very far (down to about #1000 overall) and then it started drifting back to the surface. Within a day, it had regained its #1 spot in Techno-thrillers – but this time in the “paid” ranks, of course, and was at #60-something in Science Fiction. The next day, I woke to find it at #11 in Science fiction and went to bed last night with it at #5, where it seems to have come to rest. It was still there when I woke up this morning, only now my overall rank has drifted up above #200 – the highest it has ever been.

Since the upward movement seems to have slowed, I imagine it won’t be long before the downward drift starts in earnest. Which is sad, but it was fun while it lasted – and I sold a truckload of books and actually made some real money out of writing for a change. I also managed to loan a few books through the Kindle library – which will translate to further earnings, although I have no way of calculating how much. And I got a handful of very good Amazon reviews out of it. (Well, three excellent ones, one that compared TimeSplash very favourably to Stephen King’s 11.22.63 and scared me to death,  and one in which the reader said she liked it but then went on about all the many ways she had been confused by it all. With which one can only sympathise.)

Also, I think I’ve learned a few things about how this all works.

1. Because Amazon lists the Paid and Free books side-by-side in its “Top 100″ pages, anyone looking at the best-selling books in, say, Sci-Fi, will see the most downloaded free books too. I can only assume that this is the mechanism by which the giveaway led to my book being noticed and then bought by so many people.

2. Equivalent ranks in the free and paid lists are by no means equivalent in terms of the numbers of books you have to shift to achieve them. To get a particular rank in the free lists, it seems you need to give away as many as 30 times more books than you need to sell for the same rank in the paid lists.

3. There is a vast difference between the UK and the USA when it comes to free book grabs. The Americans seem very keen on free books. They are well organised too. There are blogs and websites that track when free books appear on Amazon and spread the word to their subscribers. My guess is that there must be tens of thousands of such subscribers at the very least, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Thus, of the 19,000 I gave away last weekend, fewer than 2% of them went to the UK and Europe. As a consequence of this (and point 1) almost all the subsequent sales have been to the USA. The book just never made it onto Europe’s radar. All I can say to this is, God bless America!

4. Whatever the drawbacks of Amazon’s KDP Select programme (and their insistence on exclusivity is the biggest) it definitely worked with this particular book. As it happens, another book of mine went into the scheme and had a free book period last week with a very different outcome. The uptake was in hundreds not thousands and the after-sale bounce did not happen. Since the gaveaway, I have sold 2 copies of that book. Which just means there are all kinds of variables at play – timing, type of book, pricing, cover, blurb, etc. – and I’d need a lot more data before I could tell you definitely to go for KDP Select. All I can say is that it worked for me once, and didn’t work for me once.

5. Having scaled these dizzying heights for the first time ever, it has given me a new insight into the volume of sales being achieved by the big names in my genre. Wile I expect to climb up and fall back down fairly quickly, there are some who are up there selling hundreds of books every single day for months, years, even decades. It is a very humbling thought and puts one’s success into perspective.

And, as a footnote to all that, I add that in the time it took to write this post, the book climbed a little farther in the ranks. It just moved to #4 in Science Fiction, bumping Orson Scott Card’s brilliant Ender’s Game into fifth position. (Sorry, Orson. I didn’t mean it. I’m not worthy.)

As you may know, I live out in the Boondocks, the sticks, Woop Woop (or pick your own quaint phrase meaning “the middle of nowhere”). The main industries here are fruit growing and wine making.  They play country and western musak in the local supermarket and the churches outnumber the pubs about twenty to one. In this week’s local free rag – which is actually a half-way decent local paper if you can stand the unrelenting right-wing political bias – the front page story (and when I say front page, I mean it fills the whole front page, including a half-page photo) is about a local writer who has had a book published. The story wasn’t just that, of course, although the very existence of a local writer would have been newsworthy enough, it focused on the scale of the bloke’s success. His book has been published internationally, you see. Not only that but he has never had a rejection letter. The first publisher he approached snapped it up.

Of course, I was amazed, not to say a little miffed, that my own publishing success has gone completely unremarked in the local press. I read the article again, thinking I might find out who the bloke is and maybe look him up some time. It would be nice to have another writer to talk to whom I could meet in the flesh from time to time. It was then that a comment near the end of the piece caught my eye. The journo referred not to the man’s publisher but to his “investor”. In a trice I was onto the Web. The publisher of the book turned out to be a vanity press. Judging from what was said in the article, the author had bought their deluxe package at about $2,000 – no doubt this also included a carefully-worded press release to send to the local paper. And that, of course, explained why this writer had not received any rejection letters. (How would a rejection letter from a vanity press look? “Dear Mr. X, Thank you for letting us see your manuscript. We receive thousands of excellent manuscripts each year and, unfortunately, we are not able to take your $2,000 at this time. We wish you more success with giving your money to another publisher.”)

Still, I do know a few people who have used vanity publishing services over the years and in at least one case, their books are as good as any you might find from a major publisher. In fact, better than the bulk of them. And the article had said how amazingly well this particular book was doing. So I went to Amazon, to see what the fuss was about. There was no opportunity to read a sample, unfortunately, but I did notice that it had been out for six months but had only one customer review (albeit five stars) and its sales rank was around three million. (In case you’re new to the mysteries of Amazon, a sales rank of 1 is good. A sales rank of 3,000,000 means nobody is buying. I have no idea what any other number means.) So not really the success the article was making it out to be. In fact (and I have no idea whether the work deserves it, but) it seems to be languishing in obscurity. Perhaps the article in the local paper will improve its fortunes.

A number of thoughts occur to me about all this.

The first is that the journalist and editor who put this on the front page didn’t do even some minimal fact checking. This seems to be par for the course with journalists these days – even on newspapers you have to pay for. If they had checked the facts, they might not have printed such a breathless accolade, or described anything as surprising as a first time author who hasn’t had a rejection letter. On the other hand, the bloke might just be a relative of the paper’s owners or editor. Nearly everybody around here is related to everybody else.

The second is that the journalist, the editor, and perhaps even the author himself, simply do not understand the difference between a publisher and a vanity press. Maybe it is only people in the business who have learned to make this distinction. Maybe the rest of the world hasn’t cottoned on yet. The thing is, paying someone to publish your book is not the same as someone paying you to publish your book. Honestly, I don’t mean to be snobbish about this. I have self-published a few books (although I have not used a vanity press). Self-publishing and even vanity publishing are not bad things – as long as it is clear to the reader what they are getting. Like it or not, being published by a “traditional” commercial publisher (large or small) is the reader’s implied guarantee of a minimum level of quality. Self-publishing and vanity publishing mean there is no implied promise of a minimum quality level and the reader must take pot luck (or insist on reading a free sample before purchase).

The third is that I really ought to be more aggressive and mendacious about marketing my stuff.

Just a quick note to mention that there are still seven days left to win one of 3 copies of the TimeSplash audiobook that are being given away at Martha’s Bookshelf. And it’s not just the book. A short story prequel I wrote and recorded myself will also be given away with each of the three audiobooks.

TimeSplash is a time travel thriller, a fast-paced story about two young people who devote their lives to hunting down the time-travelling terrorist, Sniper. Sandra, his former girlfriend, is driven by fear for her life after a time trip turns into a nightmare of destruction and murder. With no resources and no friends, she doggedly tracks the dangerous and powerful killer. But it is only when she teams up with Jay, an MI5 agent whose best friend was killed in the aftermath of Sniper’s worst and most deadly timesplash, that either of them stand any chance of bringing Sniper down. But time is their enemy. They must stop Sniper before his team pulls off its biggest timesplash ever and destroys a major European city in the process.

The audiobook is published by Iambik Audiobooks and read by the amazing Emma Newman.

The prequel is called Party Time and features the moment when time travel is first demonstrated by two unemployed physicists in a slum in the north of England, and their friend who realises the true potential of what is being demonstrated. I read it myself and Iambik Audiobooks have kindly hosted the recording for this giveaway.

Treat yourself to an extra Christmas present this year.

A profound change has come upon me. No, it’s not the male menopause, although I’m long overdue for a red sports car and a dab of Rogaine. No, this change is based on the realisation that from this week onward, whatever I’m doing, wherever I am, I will never be without a book to read.

What happened to me is this: I bought a smartphone.

I got the phone about a week ago. It took me a few days to footle around with it, setting settings and playing with its various bells and whistles. Then, while I was in a vet’s waiting room, waiting, I downloaded the Kindle app and fired it up. If you don’t know how the Kindle works, let me explain. There is a central repository “in the cloud” where books that you buy from Amazon are held – they call it the Archive. You can download books from your archive into your device and then read them. You can also download books from other sources into your device, but they don’t end up in the archive. So, when I looked at my new Kindle app, there was every book I had ever bought from Amazon, just waiting for me. I picked “Welcome to the Monkey House” by Kurt Vonnegut – something my wife had bought recently, meaning to re-read, and I started re-reading it myself.

The display on my new phone is small (about 10 cm – that’s 4 inches in old money) but the text is clear and steady and I was quite pleased with the readability. The touch screen makes turning the page simple – a single touch with the finger (or thumb) to left or right turns the page that way (you can “swipe” to turn pages too if you’re feeling flamboyant). After ten minutes or so, the vet called us in and I popped the phone in my pocket and thought nothing more about it.

Until today.

I was in a coffee shop. I ordered my usual large cappuccino to go and settled in for the usual fifteen minute wait. To while away the time, I took out my new phone – and remembered I had a book I was reading. So I clicked through to the app and carried on with it. The coffee came. I put the phone away. A couple of hours later, I was waiting again – this time while my wife went to the library (oh, irony). So I whipped out my phone and started reading again.

And that’s when it struck me. I carry my phone with me whenever I go out. Even as I write, it is within hand’s reach of me. And now my phone is an ereader, connected to the largest online bookshop in the world. I will never, ever, have to spend another idle moment without a book to read. Old favourites, new adventures, are just a couple of clicks away. A collection far larger than my local library’s is there in my pocket whenever I want to dip into it.

I find this idea profoundly moving. It is a quantum leap improvement in my quality of life. I still can’t get my head around how significant this is.

I’ve been reading ebooks for years. I have a Kindle which is in constant use around the house, or in hotels on overnight trips. I’ve had a smartphone for years too – just not one with a large enough screen to make reading feasible. But, somehow, the combination of big screen phone and Kindle app has given me access to a capability far more significant than the sum of its parts.

Just for the record, I still prefer reading on the Kindle to on the phone (a Samsung Galaxy S, by the way, running Android). The Kindle was literally made for reading books. When I have them side by side, I will always pick up the Kindle. However, the awesomeness of having a not-quite-Kindle there in my pocket, wherever I go, has changed everything. I no longer go to where the books are, or where my ereader is; now the books come to me.

I’ve been looking forward to this launch, partly because the book contains some of my favourite Australian SFF writers, partly because the whole point of the book is to raise awareness of suicide, and partly because it contains the first story of mine ever to be published that features one of my favourite creations, Broome.

Broome is a robot that will be assembled some three hundred years from now. It will appear in two space opera trilogies of mine (only two and a half volumes of which have been written so far). At the time of the story in Hope (called The God on the Mountain), Broome is 11,000 years old and many light years from Earth. It’s had various names during that long time, but it chose the current one because of the old joke about the broom that’s lasted for years, and has only had three new heads and two new handles.

You can join in the launch on Facebook, if you’re quick, and you can find details of the book on the Kayelle Press website. Whatever you do, please buy the book. It’s got terrific stories and useful information about suicide but, more than that, it’s in a good cause and the people who put this together have all given their time and energy to try to help. And pass on the message to everyone you know. Someone in your circle of family and friends may be glad that you did.

Here is a summary and something about the stories:

Courtesy of the very kind Marilee Brothers, I had the chance to blather about the three-ring circus we call publishing on her most excellent blog. If you’re interested in what I think about small publishers, self-publishing, and the Big Six, you should hop over there. If not, you should go there anyway as there is a wealth of fascinating posts by far more knowledgeable and interesting people, all on your favourite subject*.

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*Books and publishing, of course. What did you think I meant?