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.)

Lately, four of the self-published authors I follow (on their blogs and Twitter) have said that they are giving up. Some are giving up writing altogether, some are giving up their attempts to be successful. Four is quite a rash and I wonder if it is a sign of things to come. The three that gave reasons, said it was because they are tired of putting their books out there and working so hard at marketing their work, only to be ignored by the buying public. They weren’t actually “tired” you understand, they were heartsick, they were miserable, they were defeated and broken.

Those of us who write and submit our manuscripts to the judgement of agents and publishers know the pain of rejection. Some wear the terrible number of rejections they have accumulated as a badge of pride (although that happens mostly after they’ve been published). It is gruelling and it is soul-destroying. Most writers hate it and wish it could stop. Some writers make it stop by taking their hats out of the ring.

In recent times, self-publishing has been seen as a way around the dreadful and often arbitrary judgement of the “gatekeepers”. Why should a writer go on suffering the rejection of publishers and agents, they reason, when they can simply and cheaply publish their own work and “get it out there”? While some see subjecting themselves to the judgement of the gatekeepers as “paying their dues”, others see it as an artificial barrier, erected by an old and crumbling system that no longer has the respect of the people of whom it sits in judgement.

But when you self-publish, you offer yourself to the judgement of a higher court: The Market. And don’t think for a moment that The Market is the court of public opinion. It is not. The Market is a whore, a gigolo. It has favours to offer, but only at a price. And the price is this: you must woo it, thrill it, entertain it, seduce it, plead with it, and subjugate yourself to it. If you don’t catch its fickle eye, its gaze will pass over you and find another, more willing to please it.

There are many panders who will offer the self-published author advice on how to succeed in The Market, but most of them are charlatans or fools. And, besides, so few writers are prepared to make the deals that really work, the ones that are made over buried bones at a crossroads. So the average self-published author sells a book or two a month on Amazon and keeps on writing and hoping – because the panders say you need lots of “inventory”.

But for some the awful truth hits them; The Market is ignoring them. And then they know a pain worse than rejection. A pain that squeezes at their hearts every day of their lives, for every book they publish, twenty-four seven. The Amazon KDP report mocks them. The Smashwords dashboard laughs in their pathetic faces. Self-publishing, for so many, becomes a nightmare of disillusionment and self-torment. The world just isn’t interested. They’re not being rejected because nobody even knows they’re there. They’re being ignored. Their life’s work, their hopes and dreams, they themselves, are beneath notice.

Beneath notice.

How long before this trickle of surrenders becomes a stream? How long before the stream becomes a torrent? I don’t know, but I do know I will continue to face rejection until I can face it no more. The alternative may be far worse.

That's me, near the middle, waving.

Sunshine is inimical to writing. The grass grows and has to be cut. The weeds grow and have to be killed. The fruit grows and has to be coddled like a baby. The dog staggers to the shadows, and drops. That seat among the tress beckons like a favourite vice. You take your laptop but the flashing rosellas and the spiralling eagles, the fidgeting thornbirds and flitting fairy wrens, the tumbling butterflies and swooping dragonflies, all take their toll. The horseflies and mud wasps zip around your head and snatch ideas as they struggle to find their way down to the screen. Like the lizards and the red-bellied blacks, your proper place is lying prone, letting sunlight seep through you. Like the wild orchids and the granite bluebells, your proper job is to nod in appreciation. This is why you came. This is why you found this place in the forest. Writing must wait for the rain.

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.

Well, it was a long and strange journey, but my time travel thriller, TimeSplash, is now available as an audio book – thanks to my newest publisher, Iambik Audiobooks. So, as we speak, TimeSplash is on sale as a self-published ebook and as a commercially published audio book, and it is in production at eMergent Publishing to appear soon in a print edition. Talk about a hybrid publishing model! Iambik has the audiobook rights, eMergent (almost, almost) has the print rights, and I have the ebook rights. (And, if a big-budget film producer would like to make my day, I have not yet disposed of the film or merchandising rights. So drop me a line, OK?)

But let’s talk about that audio book for a minute. I first published TimeSplash as an ebook with a publisher called Lyrical Press. Which is how my friend Emma Newman got to read a copy. She and I had become pals via our blogs. She was agonising over whether to self-publish her novel ‘Twenty Years Later” at the time and I was just agonising. Emma started podcasting her novel, reading it one chapter at a time and putting it up on her blog. She had a surprising reaction. Not only did people like her book (which was not surprising at all) they loved the way she read it. I mean, really loved it. These podcasts changed Emma’s life in all kinds of ways. Firstly, she built a large following, and, when she started Twittering, that grew even larger. Then she signed a three book publishing deal for “Twenty Years Later” and two sequels (so no more agonising – she’d made it!) . Then she started looking for work as a voice artist, recording other people’s books – and has been finding it.

As a side venture, Emma started recording my novel, TimeSplash, suggesting that she jointly self-publish it with me. I was flattered and very keen on the idea, so we worked on it for several months. Which is to say, Emma worked, I simply listened to the chapters as they emerged and said, “Wow! Cool!” and so on. By the time it was over, Emma had made contact with a publisher who wanted her to read some of his books. She let him hear some of TimeSplash and he wanted that too. This was an outfit called Big Bad Media, based in Denmark. Not long after I signed contracts with them for a print and audiobook edition of TimeSplash, they went out of business. It was a bit of a shambles and looking like a complete flop until eMergent Publishing (based just up the road in Brisbane, of all places) said they were interested in the print rights that BBM had forfeited (yay, eMergent!).

And that was an outcome I was reasonably happy with. The downside was that all Emma’s work on TimeSplash might go to waste. And that would have been a terrible thing. Her reading of the book has a strange effect on the story, you see. When I read it – when most people read it from the text – it seems as if there are two protagonists, Jay and Sandra. This young man and woman are caught up in the events of the story and whirled along. They sort of fall in love as they hunt down the timesplashers and fight their personal demons. But, when I wrote it, it was mostly about Sandra and her terrible struggle against fear and her crushed self-esteem. And the miracle was, when you hear it read by a woman, by Emma, suddenly it’s clear as day that this is Sandra’s story above all else. So I really wanted Emma’s telling of this tale to survive.

That’s why, when she made contact with Iambik Audiobooks as part of her ongoing rise to stardom as a voice artist, and she sold them the idea of publishing TimeSplash, I was over the moon. That was almost exactly five months ago and my head is still reeling from the surprise and delight of it all. The path from the first idea for the story (in May 2008) to this day, with the audio book sitting on the shelf at Iambik, has been long and tortuous and filled with kind and talented people like Emma who have pushed and promoted TimeSplash with incredible generosity (and ultimate success!)

What can I say but “Thank you”, to Lyrical Press, to Greg McQueen at BBM, to Jodi Cleghorn and Paul Anderson at eMergent, and to Gesine Kernchen and the team at Iambik, and, especially, to Emma Newman, for keeping this sometimes sputtering flame alive for so long? I could not have done it without you.

And that's my very talented daughter's artwork on the front!

It is a sad and terrible indictment of the society in which we live that a woman like Yasmin McKillop might die because she can’t afford the surgery that could save her life. Yasmin is a young woman, a nurse who cares for old people at my local hospital. She’s one of those lovely people you take to immediately. She is married to my friend James, who is blind, and they have two young boys. And now, Yasmin has a brain tumour. The prognosis from surgeons at the public hospitals here is very poor, but there is a surgeon in Sydney who believes he can save her, if she can find sixty thousand dollars for the operation.

On a nurse’s wage and James’ invalidity benefits, Yasmin has no house to sell, no savings to draw on. Her family are just ordinary, working people. That kind of money is so far beyond the reach of normal people that it must seem completely hopeless to her family and friends.

In desperation, her sister, Mia, has launched an appeal. Mia is not a media-savvy campaigner with far-reaching networks into the circles where money like this is easily found. She’s just a young woman who lives and works in a small, country town who loves her sister and is doing all she can for her. She has put up a Facebook page. She is talking to local people and local businesses – in Stanthorpe, one of the poorest towns in the whole of Australia. That’s why we need to do something to help Mia raise that money and save her sister.

I know most of the people who read my blog are writers and working people too. I doubt we could raise that much money between us, but we can raise some, and there are plenty of other ways we can help. This is what I would like each of you to do.

1. Visit Mia’s Facebook page and donate something to the appeal – even if it is only $5 – the price of a cup of coffee. The link is also at the bottom of this post.

2. Use the +1 and the Retweet buttons at the top of this post to spread the word to your social networks. You can also Digg the post, or use StumbleUpon or any other sharing tools you like. Do whatever you can to help Mia get the message out to the world that Yasmin needs help.

3. Mention the appeal on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, MySpace, Twitter, and anywhere else you have an audience.

4. Write a blog post on your own blog – even if it is just one sentence with a link to Mia’s appeal page, it might just help.

5. If you know a journalist, mention Yasmin’s plight to them. A ‘human interest’ story like this might just be something they, or a colleague, are looking for. If the story made it into a State or national newspaper, or was mentioned on a popular radio or TV show, it would take the appeal to a level where anything is possible. Even if you don’t live in Australia, mention it anyway. Generosity doesn’t stop at national borders.

6. Write a letter and send it to your local newspaper, your local radio station, your local Rotary Club, anywhere you can think of where people might be willing to help.

I’m sorry to ask. I’m sorry to live in a society where I have to ask. Please help Yasmin and her family. Please do whatever you can.

The link to the appeal is http://www.facebook.com/Yasmin.Aid?sk=info

Yes, it’s that time of year again. For the many people who weren’t around on May 4th 2008 when I posted my first “hello world” from my brand new writing blog – that is, all of you – May 4th 2008 is the date from which I reckon my writing career began. So as 3 GWC (Graham’s Writing Career) draws to a close, it’s time to take stock once more and reflect on all that has happened since 2 GWC drew to a close.

Well, maybe not. Oh, alright, but just one paragraph. It was a busy and complicated year – essentially the first year of my first novel – and it ended (near enough) with me having found a wonderful literary agent (Ineke Prochazka) to call my own. There were a few story sales along the way and lots of other writerly stuff. In all, it was a year of good, solid progress. I started writing three novels in 3 GWC too – and finished one of them. I hope to finish the other two in the coming year. It was also the year that Jodi Cleghorn and eMergent Press came into my life and Big Bad Media came and went (literally – it has now wound up). I went to Worldcon. I went to Supanova. A couple of my friends did amazing (publishing-related)  things (that’s you, Emma, Marianne, Joanna and Joanne) and I got two new computers!

And all the other things that I forgot to mention.

On the agenda for next year are another novel sale – or two – (which is now your department, Ineke), more shorts sales, finishing my comedy sci-fi novel “Cargo Cult” and possibly a couple of other books, maybe going to the Brisbane Writers Festival (haven’t quite decided yet), and seeing “TimeSplash” finally appear in print (and maybe audio – how’s that going, Em?) I think it will be another busy and complicated year. At least I hope so.

There are a couple of shorts of mine appearing soon in anthologies for you to look out for (please!)

In Situ – a spec fic anthology from Dagan Books, ed. Carrie Cuinn. It contains my story “Salvage”. Expected publication date is 15th May – pre-order it via Goodreads.

Hope – a spec fic anthology from Kayelle Press, ed. Sasha Beattie, with a great cast of Aussie writers. It contains my story “The God on the Mountain”. Expected publication date is “real soon now”! I am especially stoked that two of the other contributors are friends who shared the QWC/Hachette retreat with me in May 2008 – the event that I believe kicked off my professional writing career.

Nothing but Flowers: Tales of Post Apocalyptic Love from eMergent Press, ed. Jodi Cleghorn. It contains my story “Two Fools in Love” – the first time I ever sat down to write a love story and actually did it. This is already available as an ebook but should hit the streets as a paperback any second now.

You all have a good 4 now. Happy New Year.