Look out! It's BP!

G’day mates. It’s a bright and sunny winter’s morning as I write, Independence Day in the US, and just another gorgeous 5th July here in Australia. Since I’ve been neglecting my readers lately, I thought I’d throw in a simple update on my writing life just to keep things moving along.

My head has been buried in my netbook for the past few weeks as I tackle my latest novel, Loner’s Deep. It’s part 1 of a three-part spce opera (and a sequel to another three-part space opera of mine). I’m just about at the half-way mark on my first draft and it is rolling along quite nicely, thank you. The structure of the story is one I haven’t really used before – several groups of characters whose story arcs are leading them inexorably to one point in space and time, where they will all meet and resolve everything. It’s fun but very much complicated by the scale of the piece. It is set in a far-future time when we have colonised stars out to about 50 light years around the Earth, but we don’t have faster-than-light travel. Yet the story visits many different planets and the characters travel huge distances. This makes the timings and the interactions rather complicated. One of the main characters, for example, has a journey of 55 light years, during which she ages about seven years. Another character, whom she will meet, travels just 8 LY and ages about one year. Yet both their stories unfold side-by-side in the book. I’m not sure I can make it clear to the reader that events in their stories are not simultaneous until the very end. Time will tell.

Meanwhile, I’ve been doing some plumbing around the house – the perfect antidote to time dilation calculations – and trying to find an agent for ‘The Credulity Nexus’ – also rather mind-numbing.

Over on Smashwords, they’re having their Summer/Winter sale. I put a children’s story there a few months ago (the picture of the dog on the left is the cover) so if you want to pick up a copy for free, July is the time to do it. Smashwords is a company I have a lot of admiration for. They seem to be doing everything right and I wish them huge success in the future.

So, a happy Nice Winter’s Day to everyone, and, for those still celebrating Independence Day, maybe you should have kicked the Brits out of the Gulf of Mexico while you were at it.

Where do you get your ideas?

Although no-one has ever asked me, I thought I’d answer the question anyway. I’ve just started writing a new book – a new trilogy in fact – and I’ve been watching myself as the process of coming up with the story unfolds. And this is how it happened.

Almost three months ago, I started feeling something. In the back of my head I had a mood, a sense of something big, something grand, and dark, and special. I quickly realised it was a new book coming out. I often get the mood or feel of a book before I write it. This one was very, very large. So I supposed it had to be a space opera.

Space opera has become, to sci-fi, what The Faerie Queen is to poetry, what The Lord of the Rings is to fantasy, what The Grapes of Wrath is to literature. It is the big canvas on which only the grandest of themes are depicted, the highest of high concepts, in an adventure that stretches across the Galaxy, through oceans of time, or beyond. The space opera that had begun stalking me was a big one, so big it was daunting.

I knew what I needed, a place and time for it to unfold in, a cast of characters to carry the story, and stakes so high that loss – huge, apocalyptic loss – confronted everyone at every turn. Yet nothing in my head at the time could possibly match the epic proportions of the sensation I was feeling.

So I started experimenting, sketching out futures, playing with disasters. It took me weeks before I had a place and time  – a future ten thousand years from now, a sphere one hundred light years across containing a thousand inhabited systems – no aliens, just 120 billion humans stranger to one another than they have ever been. I worked on the details, the histories, the technologies, the societies, the economics, the politics… In the end, I had enough to get started.

A story was starting to emerge as I looked at the world it would take place in. It would centre around a catastrophe and it had to be a big one. I sat for hours and pondered the nature of such a beast, why it should happen, how it would unfold, but, while I could describe it in detail, I didn’t know just what it was until, one day, sitting outside in the sunshine, staring into the forest that surrounds my house, I found myself staring at the dark branches of a massive tree, its limbs twisting and dividing against the sky, and I knew I had it.

Now, all I needed were people and a story. Finding the right people is hard, but once you have them, finding their story is easy. For a story that might stretch across three books – or more – the people have to be very special, very interesting, and very sympathetic. I started plucking them from the various cultures and activities of the world I had been inventing. They were OK, not bad, sort of alright – but nothing special. And then I found the one I needed, the catalyst who would bring every one of the others to life, make the story sing, make this huge edifice of invention hang together.

How did I know I’d found such a magical person? Because this was the one with ‘the voice’. The voice of the book, the voice that was there in the mood I’d sensed all those weeks ago. The one that could tell this story and make it sound just the way I could feel it sounding inside me. With this character, with their voice in my head, I could, at last, tell the tale that had been nagging at me.

I’m very excited about it. I’ve written an introductory chapter (so much still to do!) and it feels right, it feels good. I’m ready now to take the plunge into what might be two or three years’ work to bring this to completion.

Wish me luck.

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.

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!

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 wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

(from ‘The Waking‘ by Theodore Roethke.)

Writing is a strange business. Last night I killed my babies.

I woke at about 3 am, drenched in sweat, even though it was cool. My head was full of purpose. I knew what to do. I got up, dressed in the dark and staggered through the house to my office. I thought about coffee, I’m always so slow to wake, but there was no time.

My novel, Time & Tyde, something I wrote two books ago, which got lots of attention but no contract, needed fixing. And I knew, at last, what to do. In a daze, I squinted against the glare of the screen, waiting, waiting for everything to boot and load and settle down so I could write.

It started in the wrong place. Time & Tyde is a psychological thriller. I’d never realised before, but now I understood. It was a psychological thriller but it started like a literary novel, beautiful prose, deft brush-strokes to introduce, describe, all those clever phrases, all that lovely rhythm.

I cut it all out. I cut to the chase. I slashed and burned, ploughed the stubble under, and scraped off the topsoil. My lovely opening was landfill. Now I was down to bare earth, and the real opening was revealed at last.

Various readers had told me, but not in any way that made sense. Various writers had pointed the way. The words of Vonnegut in particular had haunted me, “Start as close to the end as possible.” I must have known, somewhere, that I hadn’t done that. Now I had. Now I could sleep.

By 5:30 am I was finished. I went back to bed and slept until 10.

One of the first things that struck me when I became involved with writers’ groups, was that most aspiring writers can’t write. They may be full of wild imaginings, they may have stories in them, yearning to be told, but, as well as lacking the more esoteric skills of the craft, they can’t form a grammatically correct sentence and they can’t spell.

Most of the grammatical and spelling mistakes you see in people’s manuscripts are old chestnuts. They don’t know how to punctuate (especially when it comes to apostrophes,) they mix up the spellings of homophones (their, there, they’re, for example, or your and you’re,) they misspell uncommon words, they use inappropriate words, they blindly repeat common errors (like using ‘epicentre’ when they mean ‘centre’,) they don’t understand how to form plurals (especially frequently malformed ones like ‘medium’ vs ‘media’,) and they write as they speak (using ‘then’ instead of ‘than’ for example, as in, “He was bigger then his father.”)

What people who can’t spell and who don’t understand grammar fail to appreciate is that, for people who can and do, each little mistake they encounter provokes an almost physical pain. Editors and agents faced with a page full of mistakes like this will save themselves the agony of reading the whole manuscript by rejecting it as swiftly as they can.

To lack such simple skills when you aspire to publication is therefore quite an impediment, and astonishing, too, when the causes and the remedies are staring us in the face. I believe that the root of the problem is that people do not read enough well-written books, that they do not pay enough attention to what they read, and that they do not acquire the habit of speaking well.

You don’t have to read the classics to find good, grammatically-correct writing, you can find it in most published fiction. But if you want to know what it looks like, go and read some Aldous Huxley, William Golding, Margaret Atwood, Gore Vidal, and Ray Bradbury. Then, at least, you’ll have a benchmark. You do have to read carefully though. You have to consider the sentences, the word-choices, the punctuation, the arrangement of words. And you do have to read enough of it that it starts seeping into your unconscious. If you love words, if you love reading, this will hardly be a chore.

And practice speaking too. I have never seen this mentioned as an aspect of good writing, but it seems clear to me that many of the mistakes people make in their writing come directly from the way they speak. I’m not suggesting that everyone who wants to write in English should speak ‘the Queen’s English’ but that they should, at the very least, speak English.

The grammatical mistakes people make in ordinary speech are more easily forgiven – and feel less jarring – than the same mistakes seen in print. We get away with a lot when we speak but we cannot expect to receive the same latitude when we write. If you speak sloppily, if your grammar is atrocious, if you misuse words and can’t form plurals, and you are unaware of it, it is not really surprising that your writing will reflect this. So listen to what you are saying. Think about what your words mean. What’s more, don’t just let other people’s words and sentences wash over you, or into you. Listen to them and analyse them. And don’t take it for granted that a newsreader or a journalist knows how to speak or write good English; a large proportion of them do not.

And as for bloggers… Well, let’s just say that the first draft of this piece contained numerous typos. I’ll also say that the final draft of my novel, TimeSplash, came back from the copy editor buried in such a thick encrustation of markup, it was hard to find the text. You did take that pinch of salt, didn’t you?

I ran the complete set of posts from this blog through the Wordle program. Wordle calculates word frequencies, translates them to physical sizes, and uses this information to lay out the most frequent words in interesting ways. The image below, therefore, shows you just what I talk about most in this blog. If you haven’t played with Wordle yet, it’s definitely worth ten minutes of your time.

Revealing, isn't it? (click for larger version)

No, not a post about the Battle of Thermopylae just a few comments on building up a following on Twitter. Yesterday, you see, I had 300 ‘followers’ for the first time. Unlike King Leonidas, I won’t ask my gallant band to give their lives in a hopeless rearguard action against the armies of the Persian Empire. However, I might ask them to retweet something, one day.

A long time ago (in social media years) I weighed Twitter in the balance and found it wanting. It was time consuming and most of what my followers were saying back then was pretty boring. I felt there were better uses of my time. It seemed that Twitter was only really useful for people with something to sell.

And then I got my book deal for TimeSplash and suddenly there I am, with something to sell.

These days, publishers aren’t expected to do a lot of book publicity for new authors. I expect my own publisher to organise a number of reviews and that’s about it. If you want your book to be noticed, you have to do an awful lot of it yourself.

Frantically, I read all I could find online about marketing your book. There is a massive amount of material out there and one of the things everyone says is to build up your social media followings and then use all those people to spead the word. In particular, they mention Facebook and Twitter.

For me, Facebook is a lost cause. The system is so ridiculous I can barely bring myself to look at it, what with its endless quizzes and games. Great for 12 year olds maybe, but not for grown ups. If I were a Hollywood actress, I’d be Keira Knightly, apparently.

So I looked again at Twitter. A month ago, I had just 28 followers and it struck me that that was pretty pathetic, what with my book coming out in February and all. So I set about finding a few more. Here’s how I did it.

1. I went to each of the blogs I follow and found the twitter address of the blogger. Then I followed them. This ensured that I started with a core of people whose tweets I was almost guaranteed to find interesting.
2. I started tweeting. Just being active on Twitter means people will spot you. People retweet you so that their own followers see you, they mention you, and they recommend you (e.g. with a #followfriday tag.)  This wider exposure means people you don’t know are suddenly following you.
3. I set up an automatic doodad on my blog so it would tweet every time I made a new blog posting. I only did it for my writing blog, having made a decision to keep my twittering firmly focused on writing and writers. I also made it easy (by installing another doodad on my blog) for people who read the blog to retweet it if they want to. If you make it easy for people to do things like that, some of them will. (The button is at the top right of this post. Why not click it?)
4. As I came across people who made interesting tweets, I followed them. Many people you follow will follow you back, I’ve found. I mostly only follow writers or people in the publishing business. Some quite famous writers have followed me back! But sometimes I find others who are doing and saying interesting things and are just too good not to follow.
5. As well as talking about myself (yawn!) I try to join in conversations, make recommendations, and to retweet interesting news items related to writing. Particularly rewarding is to retweet announcements by people who are doing interesting and exciting things. It costs me almost nothing but it feels great to be helping people get their news out, however small my contribution may be.
6. When people I followed recommended other people, I checked them out, had a look at what they’ve been tweeting lately (yes, you can do all that) and, if I liked the look of them, I followed them, too.
7. I installed TweetDeck. This is an application that helps you manage your tweets. It is one of many. I’ve only tried a handful but TweetDeck seems to do what I want. The main thing it does for me is to organise incoming tweets. I’ve only got 300 followers but that means a couple of thousand tweets a day, and I find it hard to keep track of them. God knows what people do who have thousands, or tens of thousands of followers! TweetDaeck gives me a display with tweets organised into columns. I have one for my ‘real’ friends and family, one for the people I’m especially interested in following just now, one for all the rest, one for tweets that mention me, and one or more for various searches. The searches are continuously updated and I usually have one for tweets mentioning Stanthorpe, my local town, and then ones for the hashtags I’m focusing on.
8. I have started making use of hashtags (words preceded by a hash symbol, as in #timesplash). I try to associate particular tags with my tweets (like #scifi, #writer, #Brisbane, etc.) and will be using #timesplash to follow any comments about my book if there ever are any – so far, mine are the only ones Using hashtags potentially exposes you to yet more like-minded people who may themselves be searching on the tag. They also help you find people you might like to follow.

I really only want to follow interesting people so I’m a bit picky about who I follow and I spend a lot of time checking people out before I click that follow button. It is very easy to build up followings of thousands. Many services exist to help you find them. I may be a poor marketer for ignoring this wealth of eyeballs but if I’m going to do this thing, I’d like it to be fun and to mean something, not just be a business venture. I’m also diligent about reporting and blocking spammers. Why Twitter attracts adverts for teeth-whitening schemes I cannot understand but anyone who follows me who so much as mentions teeth is summarily reported and blocked.

300 isn’t a lot in Twitter terms, almost everyone I follow has far more followers than that, but it’s a 1000% increase over last month, ao I’m quite happy with it.

Here’s what I’m twittering now. Why not follow me?