Just a quick note to let you know I have been interviewed by the lovely A.M. Harte on her quillsandzebras blog. Anyone who has read my book, TimeSplash, may wonder what is the only thing that my uber-villain, Sniper, and I have in common.  Well, the answer is…  just a click away at quillsandzebras.

I hope my favourite sci-fi newsletter, Ansible, won’t mind if I reproduce the following paragraph verbatim. Not only is this matter one that outrages me, but Ansible’s treatment of it is just brilliant. Anyway, enjoy:

Peter Watts, Canadian sf author beaten up and pepper-sprayed by a US border guard in December (see A270), was convicted on 19 March for ‘failure to comply with a lawful order’. Apparently it’s a felony to be even slightly groggy and hesitant when told to lie down on the ground by someone who has just punched you repeatedly in the face for asking a question. Sentencing should follow in late April. As they phrased it at Making Light: ‘Peter Watts has been found guilty of being assaulted by a border guard.’ Another notable victory in the War Against Tourism.

“The War Against Tourism”! I love it.

Of course, it’s no so funny for Watts. For his part in the incident where he was stopped, bullied, and beaten up by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers – whilst trying to return home to Canada – he now faces up to two years in prison.

What do you do when you’re trying to build a career as a science fiction writer and you suddenly go nuts and write a children’s book? I’m sure we’ve all done it. Right in the middle of writing your latest high-energy space opera, your brain goes on the fritz and out pours a Rgency bodice ripper – or whatever. Well, if you’re like me, you show it to your family and a couple of friends – for their amusement – and then you stick it away in a dark corner of your hard drive and never look at it again.

Except this particular story (for 6- to 8-year-olds) keeps popping back into my head. In fact, I keep thinking of sequels. Some part of my writerly brain says, “You should try to sell that.” The other part (the part that would have to do all the work of understanding the genre, finding agents and finding publishers) says, “No frickin’ way am I going to do all that! I’ve got a career to build here. Just forget about it.”

But I can’t. So I did the next best thing. I self-published it as an ebook. It’s out there, it’s free, it is, as far as I’m concerned, damned lucky to get even that much effort spent on it. It also afforded me the interest of actually going through the self-pubbing process (I used Smashwords) to see how it works. I may blog about the experience too at some point. I think that’s not a bad return for the effort, actually.

If you have wee sprogs who like stories about feisty dogs and their hapless owners, you might even download a copy and read it with them. I can’t guarantee they’ll like it – what do I know about writing for children? – but I’d be interested in their reactions.

It’s called “Hangin’ With the Monkeys” and it’s avaiable from Smashwords for free.

Fresh from my first ever web radio interview, I am now a world expert. (You can see just how expert I am at this by downloading the MP3 recording of the show I did yesterday with the lovely Nanci Arvizu, who does the Page Readers show on BlogTalkRadio.) And, on the basis of this extensive experience, I offer all writers the following advice:

1. Your interviewer will send you a list of questions or topics they hope to cover in the show. Glance at it briefly, saying “Yeah, yeah, no problem,” to yourself, and then put it out of your mind. As each question comes up in the show, you will find you recall seeing it on the list. This will momentarily distract you from the fact that you never did get around to thinking of a good response.
2. There may be questions that are highly relevant to promoting your new book (these sound something like, “Tell us about your book.”) and ones which are somewhat irrelevant (questions like, “Tell us something about your background.”) You will find the less relevant ones are easier to answer. Rambling about your poor working-class background and the benefits of socialist educational policies is a good way to fill up your half hour and will save you from having to say anything that potential readers might want to hear.
3. Don’t worry about burbling at length about your strange and involuted relationships with your characters. If the interviewer is skillful and takes pity on you, she will cut you off eventually with another question. Whatever you do at this point, try not to sob with relief and gratitude, it will prevent your from hearing what the interviewer has asked you.
4. If at any point your head is buzzing and swimming so much that you do not hear the question you were asked, pick on any word you think you might have heard and invent a plausible question that might have been asked. Answer it confidently. If the interviewer seems confused, rest assured, the listeners have probably all gone out to make a cup of tea by then.
5. Remember, you have set yourself the goal of at least mentioning your blog URL. When the interviewer, after what seems like just five minutes, starts thanking you and saying goodbye to the audience, you must stop her at all costs. Interrupt her repeatedly, raise your voice, become abusive, do whatever it takes to stop that flow of pleasantries so you can give out your URL. Even if, halfway through spelling out your 85-character address, you realise the interviewer had just been saying it would be up on the website after the show when you told her to shut her f***ing mouth and listen for chrissake, keep on doggedly to the end. The listeners will appreciate your determination.

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!

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.

I now have the galleys of my novel TimeSplash and they have prompted me to say this to all aspiring novellists.

When you write a novel, make sure it is as rich, deep and subtle as you can possibly make it. Make all the characters complex and interesting, in fact, make them fascinating. Make sure that the book you write has enough wit, wisdom and intricacy that you could read it over and over again and still go on loving it and believing in it’s value. Because, even after you have edited it and polished it for months before delivering your final draft, if the book is accepted by a publisher, what with the copy editing, the line editing, the proof reading, and the marketing (hunting through the text for suitable extracts and so on,) you will find yourself reading it end-to-end another ten times before it is published. If you are not to find yourself hating it, or embarrassed by it, it better be one hell of a good book!

Tara Moss is running a series of posts over on her blog on writers’ desks and what they look like. So I took a snapshot of my own, to see what it might reveal about me. Well, what do you think?

It was the maid's day off.

Looking at it with an outsider’s eye, I suppose it looks rather scruffy. Even looking at it with my own eye, it looks that way. Well, if I’d have known you were coming…

Just out of shot on the left is a filing cabinet so full I can’t get another sheet of paper in it – yet I can’t bear to throw out any of the junk it contains, which I never look at. Over on the right, again out of shot, is a bookcase and some drawers. The drawers are full of rubbish and the bookcase is full of books, CDs (mostly software), souvenirs, and a collection of mugs, each of which has its own story.

Left to right on the desktop are:

• Some unattended admin (receipts, letters, etc.)
• My pens, pencils , post-its and what have you
• My notebook (with the only pencil I actually use lying on top of it – a beautiful, lacquered, Waterman propelling pencil that my wife gave me over 20 years ago)
• A small weather station, ironically placed right in front of the window (shades of Subterranean Homesick Blues) The window, by the way, has a fabulous view across hills and forests.
• My Asus EeePC netbook, with a music CD lying open on top of it (a Christmas-themed collection of rock songs, compiled by a friend in Switzerland.)
• Tissues, spare ink cartridge, printer…
• The round white thing is a Stargate Atlantis coffee warming pad. It is, perhaps, the most useless thing I own (my Airedale excepted), but it lights up in neon blue when you switch it on and looks cool.
• Behind the coffee warmer is a collection of family photos (so I don’t forget who they are), a tray filled with flash memory sticks, acquired here and there, a phone and, out of sight, a bunch of chargers, USB hubs, transformers, and such. I actually have the wiring for 13 electronic devices on this desk. You can see some of it dangling attractively down the back.
• Then there’s my external hard disc drive (for backups)
• My dear old computer (actually, my original dear old computer died a few months ago but I got a new dear old computer with the exact same specification for $300 on eBay)
• To the right of the computer is a hideous but extremely reliable and accurate clock
• Another USB hub and an MP3 player
• A copy of Advice to Writers by Jon Winokur, which I won recently in a competition and which I dip into while my machine is booting, or I’m waiting for software updates, or whatever.
• Just visible at the top right is the corner of my whiteboard. This has the ranges of various instruments and voices written on musical staves, phone numbers, passwords, and Linux shell commands.

Just to complete the picture, the room also contains the gutted remains of my original dear old computer on the floor, a guest chair, a pile of wires of various kinds, pictures around the walls that are mostly from work-related events, a small collection of poker dice, a box full of music CDs I keep meaning to give away, and my guitar.

If you can imagine me slumped in that big, black chair, typing with three fingers at this blog post, you pretty much have my working life in a nutshell. It’s a good room and, I have to say, a good life.

My perception of the Web has changed. I used to think it was full of people like me, ordinary folk, going about their business, finding things that interested them, chatting to friends and acquaintances, but I was wrong. Oh, there may be such people – millions of them – but they don’t really matter. What matters are the eyeballs. The eyeballs float above this solid mass of ordinary people, surging in flocks from one site to another, drawn there by ‘optimised text’, pausing only to graze on the ’5 ways to increase your traffic’, or the ’7 ways to maximise newsletter registrations’. Then they are off again, swarming to another site with tasty ‘keywords’ or juicy ‘anchor text’.

To the Web marketing gurus, the cattlemen (and women) who can herd eyeballs around the Web at will, none of this talk sounds strange. Eyeballs, to these expert manipulators, are like floating voters to the politician, free electrons to the elecctrical engineer, mum and dad investors to the financial advisor. Search engine optimisation (SEO) is their equivalent of election promises, electrical potential, or a glossy prospectus, respectively. Eyeballs are a crop to be harvested.

Why do I care? Because I’m a writer. And that makes be a small businessman. And that makes me a marketer with no budget and only one place to look for customers: the Web. So I’ve been reading lots and lots of Web marketing articles lately. I’ve been learning how to structure my Web presence so as to funnel eyeballs to my main site. I’ve been hearing about how to woo eyeballs with value-added commenting and by taking a ‘genuine interest’ in their lives. All the marketers’ not-so-subtle tricks of language and persuasion, are now mine. I’ve read and absorbed them. My own eyeballs have flitted hither and yon like butterflies, alighting here and there to sip the sweet nectar of marketing wisdom.

“Most of this is just common sense,” the gurus tell you, disarmingly. In fact, most of it is. Most of it, given the uniformity of the message, is probably just what they’ve read on each other’s blogs. The rest is a tiny dollop of personal experience (no-one has been in this game too many years), the ability to drop names (names like ‘Google Blog Search’, ‘Alltop’, and ”TweetMeme’), and a sprinkling of graphs.

Proof that doing nothing clever also produces spikes in site visits

The graphs are an especially nice touch. They don’t actually present real evidence. There is no science behind this. No-one is publishing academic papers on the effect of guest blogging on RSS feed subscriptions. There is no ‘marketing theory’ that generates testable hypotheses that lead to solid facts. What there is is guru A showing a graph of how using a particular search term on one site over a few days last year produced an apparent spike in visits (which, may look impressive, but is statistically meaningless) or guru B showing a graph of how guest blogging on a popular site led to a sudden increase in Twitter followers.

In fact, the graphs reveal something very profound about eyeball herding. The people who do it for a living are the same kind of people who sell soap. Once you’ve absorbed the common sense from the message, you should try to forget the rest. There are some people who can sell soap and there are some people who cannot. If you’re not one of life’s soap salespeople, there is no graph in the universe that will help you become one.

And the point of all this eyeball herding? To get eyeballs to a place, physically and mentally, where the marketer can finally make his sales pitch. If the marketer ‘owns’ enough eyeballs and the pitch will yield a high enough ‘conversion rate’, he or she will, at last, make some money.

So let’s cut to the chase, so I can stop reading all that stuff. What I’m selling is my new novel, TimeSplash, a near-future sci-fi thriller. If you’re an eyeball a lover of great stories, go to the TimeSplash website and sign up so I can tell you when it’s available to buy. No obligation. No pressure. And a free bar of soap with every ten purchases.

Well, thank God that’s over.

I’ve been looking at 2009 to check how I’ve been doing against my writerly ambitions. It’s pretty good, overall. I got eight shorts stories published and placed in two competitions. I also won a write-a-quote competition! I also had my two first print publications (both short stories in anthologies). Although I actually made money by selling stories last year, it didn’t amount to much. The biggest single return for a story was $68 (which amounted to 4c/word). On average, I earned about 1c/word last year. One trip to attend a local writing conference wiped out the whole lot many times over. If you count my time, trips to my writing group (which is 300km away and involves an overnight stay) and consumables, I doubt that a lifetime of selling short stories will ever compensate me for just this year!

Yet, strangely, I feel I’ve had a successful year.

More exciting by far was signing  my first book deal. Unspeakably wonderful as this is, sadly, it isn’t likely to make me much money either. As an unknown writer, trying to sell an e-book in a world where no-one has an e-book reader, with no publicity except what I provide for myself, in a genre that people keep saying is dead, I expect sales to be embarrassing at best. However, I will probably be happy with anything above crushing humiliation. (So please, buy the book and then tell your 5,000 Facebook friends how great it was – even if you have to lie through your teeth. You wouldn’t want my utter failure on your conscience, would you?)

The book, TimeSplash, took hundreds of hours to write and scores of hours to edit. I’ll make about $2/book on sales, so, even if I paid myself minimum wage, I’d need to make many thousands of dollars to cover all that time – and that would involve selling many thousands of books. Unfortunately, because almost nobody has ever published their first book as an e-book with no print edition, especially their first sci-fi novel – there are no good stats to suggest what sales might be. Even my publisher is working in the dark here. I’m a bit of an experiment. It could be zero. It could be a few hundred. If it goes as high as 1500, I’ll be blowing that month’s royalty cheque on a bottle of champagne.

So, it has been a good year. In fact, it’s been a great year. But there is as yet no prospect of making a living from writing. To do that, I’d probably need to be publishing four books a year, or more, and selling really well – and I’m not sure I want to be that guy. Publishing one has been hard enough!

Maybe I need an agent?