Where did TikTok go?

 

TikTok’s parent company, the Chinese-owned ByteDance, was directed to sell the app to a non-Chinese owner by January 19 or be banned in the U.S. After ByteDance failed to meet the deadline, TikTok vanished for Americans.

After his inauguration on Monday, Trump gave TikTok 75 days to seek a new solution. The app remains operational in the U.S. for the time being, but if TikTok can disappear so quickly, what’s to stop it from happening again?

No one knows what’s next for any platform. The best advice is Diversify. Start a YouTube channel they say, Invest in Instagram Reels. Launch a Substack newsletter. 

Seems a self-pubbed author needs to be or hire a PR expert these days . Also required is an intuitive knowledge of how to use the new programs. I find it difficult to use the few platforms I do know and wish they were all as simple as Facebook.

That all important Font

 

Whether designing a book or just the book cover, the choice of font is important. Think of it as a design element that will help attract the audience you want. 

Of course, if you find a font you love, you may then find that graphic artists come out of the internet woodwork and say it is overused and passé. To them it probably is, but I doubt it will be to the general reader. But it might be wise to get a feel for how used it is before you decide. Some of the overused fonts might be Times New Roman, Arial, Papyrus, or Algerian, for example. 

There are many fonts out there. I tried Google fonts recently and grew dizzy checking them all but I was glad I looked. Sometimes I found it hard to differentiate between one font and another - they looked so alike to my untrained eye. There are lots of other sites, too. Type  Free fonts in your search box and check them all to get an overall impression of what you could use. 

Some will be suited to a particular genre and to misuse a Sci-fi font on a Romance book would be a disaster. If you are new to this game, then the only way to get a feel for the genre type fonts is to study the market and since we might soon be allowed out into bookshops again, that is a delightful way of working. Until that happy day, online is the way to go. Good hunting! You might find me there, searching for that elusive, just-right font!

PS The moody seascape has nothing to do with fonts!

Is it a bestseller?

How do manuscripts become bestsellers?

Possibly via a referral or through the “slush pile”.

Rumours claim agents don’t read their “slush pile,” but ignoring unsolicited submissions could mean missing out on the next big thing. Agents read new manuscripts from existing clients first. Next those that arrive highly recommended from clients. Interns and assistants comb through the remaining slush pile submissions and identify certain projects as having promise.

Clues in a query letter sometimes indicate that someone is worth closer attention. 

So what will prompt an agent to go for a ms? Good, confident writing. High-concept, ambitious stories. A new voice – something that feels like it simply hasn’t been done before – is a good way to grab attention.

Say the agent comes upon a brilliant ms, and decides to take on the author as a client. What happens next?

The agent and the author will take some time to polish the ms together. Then, the agent chooses the "right " editor at a publishing house. Editors are the people who will acquire the ms for publication. Mainstream editors don’t usually accept queries from authors, only from agents, who have honed their pitching techniques for years.

The pitch - when calling the editor to describe a book is vital. The rapport between agents and editors is vital but little known, built up through regular phone calls, through lunches and coffees over the years so agents know who to call on a specific project.

Picking the right editor and the right way to pitch a book is crucial.

An agent will prepare a proper pitch, clarifying which kind of readers a manuscript is likely to attract, or comparing it to existing titles. A single editor working full-time will take on six to 10 novels a year on average. The volume of offerings has increased drastically over the years. It’s not uncommon for an editor to receive four to eight manuscripts a day.

Fiction is so subjective and may not appeal to an editor who will have to work on it for two years. One editor claims it is all about the voice.

A book should grab the reader immediately. Too often submissions are either beautifully written with no story, or all story but the writing is lacklustre. People underestimate just how hard it is to do both and do both successfully.

See part 2 in the next post.

Social Media: is it any good?

Sometimes I think I waste my time on pointless social media activity when I could be writing more of the next story. But then I think I need Facebook and Twitter 'cos my readers are there. How else will they ever get to know about me? Without paying out good money I don’t know any other way to grow a readership for my blog and books, and paying out goes against the grain. If I were 25 and had a whole career ahead of me, then spending hard-earned money on promotion would be a good idea. But I’m not 25, so it isn’t.

(Note to self: read Chris Syme’s post: “Taming the Social Media Beast.”)

Social media is often useful. How else would I know the single dads and lonely widowers that proliferate on Facebook are scammers doing what is known as “catfishing?”

OTOH, the constant stream of words can get irritating, and that is a good time to take a break from both Fb and Twitter. I know I’ll drift back, but the rest does me good, and I get more writing done. And see more of my other half!

If readers want to friend me, I welcome them, but I don’t beg for “likes.” Authors often send out requests for me to like their page or book or whatever, but if the person and their work is unknown to me, then I don’t respond. If I have read the author and truly like their books, then I do.

“50 people who love your books and tell their friends about them are worth a whole lot more than 500,000 fake followers somebody bought from a click farm in Bangladesh.” (Until I read Anne Allan’s blog, which I dip into every now and then, I never knew about click farms anywhere.)

I often doubt that social media is any good for selling books. Endless “buy my book” Tweets, or repeated quotes from your books do not sell books anymore. I’ve often read that my social media should be 20% marketing and 80% interesting, friendly stuff that’s useful to my readers. So I try sharing funny memes, inspirational author quotes, and pics of my dog Tim; I’ve shared grammar jokes, tales of my hols in rural France, and pics of Aidan Turner and Rafa, but I’ve no way of knowing how much good it does me.

I’m told that if you Tweet that a book is free or on sale, people notice. I once had 19,000 plus downloads on a free book, but that was back in 2012, and I don’t think that sort of rush happens anymore. But maybe I shall try it and see what happens. I must admit it is a while since I tried a "free" week.

Only dimwits forget the market

Every so often I trawl through my documents file and get rid of stuff I don't need any more. Sometimes I find little gems - here's one, written a long time ago by Stephen King. I've shortened it a good deal  but you can find the original if you google it. The comments in italics are mine

Tips for writing from Stephen King

Type. Double-space. Use a nice heavy white paper. (I wonder if he does the equivalent on a computer?)

Be self-critical. (Sometimes I think I'm too self-critical)

Remove every extraneous word. (And by do they creep in....)
You want to write for money? Get to the point. And if you remove all the excess garbage and discover you can’t find the point, tear up what you wrote and start all over again . . . or try something new. 

Never look at a reference book while doing a first draft
When you sit down to write, write. Don’t do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off. 

Know the markets
Only a dimwit would send a tender story about a mother and daughter making up their differences on Christmas Eve to Playboy … but people do it all the time. If you write a good story, why send it out in an ignorant fashion? Would you send your kid out in a snowstorm dressed in Bermuda shorts and a tank top?

Write to entertain
Somewhere along the line pernicious critics have invested the American reading and writing public with the idea that entertaining fiction and serious ideas do not overlap. This would have surprised Charles Dickens, not to mention Jane Austen, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Bernard Malamud, and hundreds of others. But your serious ideas must always serve your story, not the other way around. (I think serious ideas survive in the UK fiction. Not that they are always an entertaining read.)

Ask yourself frequently, “Am I having fun?”
The answer needn’t always be yes. But if it’s always no, it’s time for a new project or a new career.

How to evaluate criticism
It doesn’t matter if you really liked that twist of that character; if a lot of people are telling you something is wrong with your piece, it is. If seven or eight of them are hitting on that same thing, I’d still suggest changing it. But if everyone – or even most everyone – is criticizing something different, you can safely disregard what all of them say.

An agent? Forget it. For now
Flog your stories around yourself. If you’ve done a novel, send around query letters to publishers, one by one, and follow up with sample chapters and/or the manuscript complete. And remember Stephen King’s First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don’t need one until you’re making enough for someone to steal … and if you’re making that much, you’ll be able to take your pick of good agents.

If it’s bad, kill it
When it comes to people, mercy killing is against the law. When it comes to fiction, it is the law.

Self-Editing Your Novel

Since I’m doing so much editing at the moment, it fills my mind. Different writers do different things, but if you choose to do your own editing rather than pay for it, then some thoughts here might help.

I spent a good few years as part of a critique group of a fluctuating number of perhaps 12 to 15 writers, so I got to see a lot of stories of various types, written by all sorts of people. What I saw there helped me to become a better writer. By spotting the good and bad in others, I learned to (hopefully!) spot what is good and bad in my own work.

After plenty of time has passed since you raced the words down and typed The End, take up your printed pages and a marker pen. As you read, mark the words you’d like to remove, the sentences you want to rejig, etc. At this stage, find the problem patches but don’t do anything to your computer copy. Plot inconsistencies should leap out at you. Make a note of them, and later, check your basic plot-line. Did she die in 1542 or 1568? It’s important. The two dates might be mentioned forty or more pages apart and be a slip of the memory as you were writing. 

Holiday this time last year

About now I’d start up the computer and begin to make the changes I’d marked – always double checking that I really agree with the decision as I go. Sometimes I stick with what I had originally!

Then I do a second read through, using a different colour marker pen for the second run through. I'd do the same if I did a third run through. Occasionally I spot a first marker where Word has not saved the change I made.

Consider your plot from a readers’ point of view. Is it believable? More importantly, does it work? If there is confusion, I do chapter summaries, which helps me to spot the detour where the plot went off-line You may prefer a grid or chart of some kind and it really doesn’t matter. If you can follow the logic of the plot, that is good.

Once this is done, it helps to look at the balance of the book. Too much of one character? Too much on one scene? An important character gets little attention? Mark this up for attention later.

As I get closer to the story and the characters, I can see where I need to deepen the character – or omit repetitive stuff. It is easy to say one thing and almost repeat it word for word 100 pages later. Spot these and remove, leaving the one which works best.

My style of writing has changed over ten years. When I re-edit an old story, I find I am removing a lot of when he spoke, she got up, turned and glared, glanced, strode; crossing the carpet was a favourite! Now I omit them or incorporate them more gracefully. It certainly lowers the word count! I think I now have control of point-of-view and showing and telling; psychic distance was a more recent discovery but made complete sense once I knew what it was.

The latest versions of Word offer better help with grammar etc and spelling; there is also a read aloud facility and when I’ve made the changes I shall sit down and let the computer read the whole thing to me. That should encourage me that I’m getting there. There may be odd things to correct like including hyphens, punctuation and the odd spelling error, or a missed word. 

But essentially, this is what I do. How many times I do it depends in the book!

Blurbs - the professional way

Further advice on blurb writing - gleaned from various sources: 

Guessing what will work with your readers might do the trick, but actual data might be better. There are various ways and means of accessing data.

Services like Manybooks allow you to test two different descriptions for your book to see which one gets the most downloads. Or you could send different version of your blurb to reviewers and see which version gets you the most responses. Though why reviewers would be bothered to do this beats me.

 Create a poll on your blog or website and ask people to tell you which version they prefer. That might get better results and might be something I would try.

Run Facebook ads simultaneously with different “pick-up lines” in your ad description  and see which ones get the most clicks - though I have doubts about this. Surely the first option will get the most responses? I wouldn't click on five versions of the same thing, and I don't think many people would.

 Providers like Constant Contact, GetResponse or AWeber will send your proposed blurbs to your subscribers to see which they prefer. Seems to me that I could set up an e-mail people would click without going to a company which no doubt will charge for doing this for you.

Most of this sounds like something I would not do, but I would send a blurb to a group in which I participate and ask for comments. Usually, the comments all seem to cancel each other out initially, but there is often a clear "winner" and that's the one I would go for.

Blurbs

Do you have trouble writing blurbs? I find them almost as difficult as writing a synopsis, so I’m reading around the topic this week. After all, a good blurb should equal good sales and we all want those. Here are some preliminary findings:-

Browsing bestsellers may not be a good idea, as the author’s name already sells the book, so the blurb may not be so terrific; browsing lesser-known but successful authors is a better idea.

A good blurb aims to show the genre (the title and cover should also do this) and entice the reader to look inside.

Highly effective blurbs are CONCISE and arouse the buyer’s CURIOSITY. It is a mistake to think a blurb is a summary, for a summary gives the plot away and answers curiosity. An effective blurb creates questions in the potential readers’ mind.

The Blurb and the Look Inside feature don’t have long to impress anyone, so use some of your best writing in both.

Other vital things to do - Check that your blurb flows well. Spellcheck it. Match your vocabulary to your target audience, because words they don’t understand can scare them away. Research your subject. Ask for opinions on your blurb - this can help you generate buzz before you publish.

We're doomed

I read that there are novels branded as “up lit” by publishers. Upbeat novels of kindness and compassion are making their mark on bestseller lists. I hadn’t heard of them until today, but it seems they have been around for around two years or so.

Novels filled with tenderness, companionship and nostalgia are said by some to be nothing more than wish fulfilment: reading of the society people wish we had rather than the devastation, cruelty and hardship of the world we do have. Comfort reading in other words; possibly a match for comfort eating which may be a cause of so much obesity these days.

“Up lit” is maybe a way of trying to fix what is broken in our fragmenting society. When everything is dark readers have often turned to fiction as an escape. Once escapist fiction was crime, romance and science fiction; now it seems to be novels of kindness that infiltrate the bestseller lists because they offer hope. Maybe the "do-gooders" of the world hope some of the goodness will rub off on society in general, but I doubt it. Society in general doesn't read, it watches film and tv and the internet. What does it get there? Violence, much of it mindless, diversive interviews as channels vie for ratings and often, viciousness in social media.

 "We're doomed, laddie," as the character in Dad's Army used to cry.

KINDLE CREATE

The new software from Amazon that allows publication of an e-book is called Kindle Create. I've been exploring it with a view to publishing my next book, which is due in a few days. I'd love to give an official date of publication, but sod's law says I won't stick to it, so I'll just say it is very close.

 At first glance the software seems beautfully simple, and in many ways, it is.

There is a choice of four themes to suit different genres - Classic, Amour, etc.  They aren't exactly startling, but it means the software will modify the entire text for you to that style. It will seek out paragraphs, breaks, headings etc and deal with them for you, according to the style you've chosen. You can be certain they will all be consistent. 
The software will do the Table of Contents for you, too. 
If you have any links, the software will hold them but once you try to modify them they vanish.

My needs are simple as I have no illustrations, graphics or lists to incorporate. It is a plain novel, and the software seems to suit me well so far. One draw back I've noted is that though you can edit the text in Kindle Create, it - obviously when you think about it - doesn't make the change in your original Word document, so you could end up with no final copy of your ms. 
If I had made all my editing changes on the Word document, I would have been further on by now. I had about three goes at editing on Kindle Create before the penny fnally dropped. Now I'm back to doing a final, final, final edit on Word, so in a sense I've wasted all the time I spent each time making the style changes. Next time I'll know better!

Questions, oh questions

I don't know if I should believe Stat Counter.
Today it tells me that some two hundred  people have viewed my blog yesterday, yet when I look at the behind pages, they record only 65. So what exactly is going on?

I've often wondered if the views each post gets on Facebook are recorded. If they are, that might account for the difference. If anyone knows the answer, please tell me - it would be good to know for sure.

It seems that independent book publishers are still going to the wall. The latest to close its door is Samhain, one of the bigger names in the US. I had two books with a smaller independent and that closed in January after 17 years in business, so I have two books waiting to be given a new lease of life, but I don't think I shall look for another independent publisher. They all seem to be rather precarious. Better to publish my books myself via Amazon Kindle. That way I know I am in control, but a .curious question came into my head the other day.

 A case in point is Banners of Alba, the paperback version. The rights came back to me when the independent publisher closed, but I see the paperback is still up there on Amazon. Amazon say they keep every edition up as a record and it has a silly price on it, but supposing someone wanted to buy it. With the e-publishing process, Amazon could print a paperback copy of Banners whenever they liked and I would never know. I am not in control of that particular item as Write Words, Inc went ahead with the paperback some years back. Is there a way of getting that paperback title removed from Amazon? another question is - what happens when I die? Assuming that my books would still sell, do Amazon get to keep the royalties? Can I will my rights to someone else?

In the search for a good way to promote, I've been doing banners, like the one above. They're fun to do and don't take a lot of time, and hopefully they avoid the readers response of "oh, not that old ad again."

Family trees

Way behind because  of Createspace and my computer. All I can say is that the people who complain about the ease of self-publishing cannot have tried to publish a paperback! Writing the book was the easy part. Editing took time and effort, the cover was fun to do, but getting it all into Createspace is driving me nuts and doing my computer no good at all. (Either that or it still doesn't like Windows 10). Now that I'm almost at the end of the process, I think the book is priced way too high, but either I go with Amazon's  recommendation or I get no royalties. Some choice!

The other problem is that Createspace wants to publish the book as a Kindle e-book for me. There's no way to tell the system that it is already out in e-book Kindle format. Maybe I'll just have to publish and then delete my "original " Kindle - what a waste of effort!

On another front entirely, dh and I have become interested in family trees, both his and mine. I've discovered that a fair few of my maternal grandfather's forebears come from Cotherstone, which I believe is a few yards on the Yorkshire side of the river Tees, but I must check that. I wish the UK Census gave the surname of females who marry, as tracking them back in almost impossible. Birth dates seem flexible, but then  back in 1800 there would be many families who existed without a calendar or a diary to keep track of events and dates. I can well believe that by the time a man had reached 83 he could not recall if he was born in 1799, 1800, 1801 or 1802. (All dates are given!)

It is a fascinating process to track the lines back, though it isn't easy. It seems many didn't bother to report to the authorities when someone died, though most births are recorded. Even after 1837 when registration became law, there seem to have been those who died "unreported."

Fascinating facts for writers and readers

Public Lending Right says five children's authors are among the top ten most borrowed authors in UK libraries in 2014-15.

It also shows James Patterson at the head of the list for the ninth year running - but is that surprising when he published 15 books in that time period and has 300 titles to his credit? Fortunately he doesn't get PLR payments, for which other authors must be grateful! The 202 authors who received the maximum capped £6,600 are all from the UK.

Thrillers are the most popular genre. Nine out of the top ten most borrowed books are in this group.

Among classic authors Shakespeare came in at number ten with Jane Austen at eleven. Roald Dahl was top, with Enid Blyton second and Agatha Christie third.

David Walliams’w popularity continues to grow and he’s now the 41st most borrowed author compared to his 157th position in 2012-13. His book Awful Auntie was also the most borrowed title in libraries in Northern Ireland. “What fantastic taste the children of Northern Ireland have,” said Walliams. “I am beyond delighted. Libraries are vital for children and adults to discover a wide variety of books. Long may they live!” Another big riser was Liz Pichon (64th from 160th last year), who was told off for doodling as a child. But the author of the excellent Tom Gates series, which she writes and illustrates, is one of the most popular in libraries.

David Walliams’s popularity continues to grow and he’s now the 41st most borrowed author compared to his 157th position in 2012-13

In the humour category  Bart Simpson: Big Shot! by Matt Groening came top.

"So many writers benefit from PLR money. In February 2016, PLR will make payments totalling £6 million to 22,347 writers, illustrators, photographers, editors, translators, adaptors, narrators, producers and abridgers. This year’s rate per loan is 7.67 pence."

In the travel and holiday genre, Londoners chose Lonely Planet’s Italy by Cristian Bonetto as their top pick. Other regions disagreed - in Scotland the most borrowed was Edinburgh for Under Fives, edited by Cathy Tingle; in Wales it was Insufficiently Welsh, by Griff Rhys Jones; and in Yorkshire it was North York Moors & Yorkshire Wolds, by Mike Bagshaw.

Mary Berry was the most burrowed non-fiction writer, but MC Beaton, author of the Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth crime fiction books, has held the title of most borrowed British author of books for adults for the last six years. MC Beaton said: “I am thrilled to bits to be the most borrowed British author in UK public libraries. Writing is a very isolating job and, as I am only human, PLR is a sort of lifeline to me from the general borrowing public. I thank them from the bottom of my inky heart.”

Catherine Cookson remains the UK’s most borrowed author over the past 20 years: her books have been borrowed over 32 million times between 1995 and 2015. Jacqueline Wilson is the UK’s most borrowed children’s author over the past 20 years: her books have been borrowed over 24 million times between 1995 and 2015.

Read all the detail here: Martin Chilton, culture editor 5 FEBRUARY 2016 • 6:54AM

A puzzle or not?

"Scientists have settled one of the great puzzles of pre-Gutenberg commercial publishing." 

This is how the article opens in the Guardian, so I sat down to read it. 

"Pocket Bibles, painstakingly inscribed by hand in their tens of thousands in the universities of Paris, Oxford and Padua, were made of vellum taken mostly from the hides of calf, sheep and goats, and then made ultra-thin by a process still unknown."

The article goes on for several paragraphs, but right at the end I discovered that the researchers had "found evidence for the equivalent of a set of 13th-century Europe-wide industry standards, defining the raw material for a labour-intensive copying system that published at least 20,000 Latin pocket Bibles for an eager market. But the technology remains elusive."

So they haven't solved the puzzle at all.  Surely we already knew it was mainly calf skin, with a some sheep and goat skins? The article goes on:

 “It was a craft industry where the skills have been handed down from father to son, and stay within families, and we don’t know how they did it anymore,” Experiments with descriptions found in medieval literature proved unhelpful.

“Clearly the people writing about them weren’t the people doing them: they heard at second hand. As a consequence they write things down which aren’t genuine recipes for parchment production.”

I might be forgiven for thinking the journalist who reported this in the Guardian is guilty of the same thing. The puzzle has not been solved.

Se the article here: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/nov/23/scientists-get-under-skin-13th-century-mystery-vellum-vulgate-bible

Depressing news for authors

There’s a new survey out and it tells depressing news. 

Almost 50% of writers are not happy with their earnings. 

A third make less than $500 (£329) a year. It also shows that “the old way of doing things continues to reap the most financial rewards for writers.” 

Traditionally published authors make an average of $3,000–$4,999 (£1,976- £3,292) a year. 

Independent writers make $500–$999 (£329-£658). 

Those who use both ways – earned $7,500–$9,999 (£4,941- £6,587) a year.

Almost 10% earned $100,000 (£65,874) or more, with 4.1% earning $250,000 (£164,681) plus. At the other end of the scale, 50% of writers earned $1,000– $2,999 (£658- £1,976) or less this year.

(That's converting dollars to sterling at today's exchange rates. It always sounds so much more  in dollars!)

The survey claims Independent authors like doing things on their own terms. “I know that if my book doesn’t sell today, there’s more I can do to promote it tomorrow, or maybe it will see a boost when my next book comes out.”

Traditionally published authors on the other hand are willing to give up their rights for royalties, like the fact that the publisher takes all risks and think a publisher can do more than they could themselves.

If you want to read Alison Flood's article in full, here's the link ~  http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/23/authors-earnings-fall-350pa-survey

Real Books survive

Articles are starting to appear saying that readers are remaining loyal to real books. Bookshops in the UK, US and Australia are claiming rising sales figures. Waterstones in the UK claims a 5% rise in December against the previous year. Foyles reported an 8% rise. Barnes & Noble report a 5% rise in shares.

Physical books sold in the US rose  2.4% in 2014. In the UK real book sales fell by 1.3% but that is better than the 6.5% fall in 2013.

Deloitte are said to estimate 80% of book sales will be real books in 2015.

Ebook sales have slowed and fewer e-readers were bought at Christmas.

 

The growth area is young adult fiction. Teenagers prefer real books, maybe because they can read and share with friends. Also, many don't have credit cards for online buying.

The increase in sales of real books may be small, but at least it is travelling in the right direction. E-books seem to have stalled saleswise, though self-publishing is still increasing and that no doubt accounts for Twitter being filled with adverts for books to the point that I'm thinking of hunting for people not involved in writing just to get some sort of decent content.

Book Clubs

Book groups

 have existed as long as books have been read for pleasure but it seems they have flourished under social media. I've shyed away from joining, mostly because I don't want to read the kind of fiction favoured by book clubs and I'm not a group person. I'm a sit-back and listen person and observing group dynamics is often more entertaining than the topic under discussion. In recent weeks, there have been a few blogs on the topic, notably one from Joanne Harris ~

http://joannechocolat.tumblr.com/post/106244987266/readers-group-or-literary-groupie


"However, I’m getting increasingly concerned by the number of people who think it’s okay to sneer at people for what they read. It’s not okay to do that any more than it’s okay to exclude other people for what they wear, or what they eat, or what kind of accent they happen to have. Books are universal. They are here for everyone. To pretend superiority over someone because (for instance) you like Kate Atkinson and they like TWILIGHT is to be the worst kind of snob, a literary groupie who wants the world of books to be their own, exclusive yacht club. These people do nothing for the world of books. Instead, they create an atmosphere in which people are afraid to talk about the books they enjoy (or not); in which readers of “serious” books are allowed to look down upon those who read purely for pleasure;"


While applauding Ms Harris for her courage in stating this and more on a public blog, I think this kind of thing is also increasing in real life. Electronic interaction makes it easy to give the impression, deliberately or inadvertently, that certain fiction genres are not worth reading, or that certain authors are rubbish. Journalists have made livings for decades out of scathing reviews and these give the average reader ammunition to fire as if the thought were their own. I imagine individuals hastily scan the online reviews in the hope of finding something that gels with their own view before going to a discussion group. I know I would, if I belonged. One needs something to say, after all and Amazon provides reviews in plenty. One could be forgiven for thinking that very few genuine honest views are presented these days. Or am I being much too cynical?

Notable Books

I expect every independent author/publisher received a lengthy explanation about how VAT on e-books will work after the turn of the year. I got mine. So it looks as if it is happening. The consoling thought is that Amazon might be paying more tax too.

The New York Times has published a list of notable books of 2014 - http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/books/review/100-notable-books-of-2014.html?_r=0

As my eyes scanned the list, several thoughts occurred to me. Firstly, I have read none of them. Secondly, they all seem to be on gut-wrenching topics. Thirdly, where have all the happy books gone? Why does everyone want to read about other people's misery and anguish?

When I was much younger and worked in a public library, I ordered/requested many books and read them with a greed for knowledge of the human race. I didn't think of it in those terms then, but it seems to me now that that was what I was doing. I don't do it any more. By my late twenties I had moved away from what I thought of as the agonising stuff, and looked for more escapist fiction, something that would excite me and keep me reading late into the night. Dorothy Dunnett fitted the bill admirably. She had more "bite" than Mary Stewart, wrote so much better than Jean Plaidy, and her mind was so devious I was always surprised by her plotlines.

Now it seems to me that the book world is geared to supplying the stuff that I wanted to read as a young person starting out into adulthood - but there also seems to be a hint that this is what we all ought to be reading. Is this, I wonder, because the editors and reviewers are twenty-somethings themselves?

I read some notable books in the last year, but by the time I get to them, they are likely to be a couple of years old. Burial Rites by Hannah Kent was one title I  would have put on my personal list, and Longbourne by Jo Baker was another. When I read Lamentations by C J Sansom, that will no doubt be added, as I thought highly of his preceding books. Some that missed the mark, like Queen's Gambit (Freemantle) and Bring Up the Bodies, (Mantel) I enjoyed at the time but found they didn't stick in the memory. When I think of more titles, I shall build my own personal list of Notable Books.

PS Tim shows up well in any situation - a flash of white among the dark trees!

Self-publishing and praise

Time to turn my attention to something new - or two things - Promotion and A New Story.

As autumn sets in here in Northumberland, the days are growing shorter and the nights longer. The days are still amazingly warm. Yesterday afternoon was 16.5 C and there are flowers blooming among the berries and fallen leaves. Last night I kept moving to a cool spot on the sheets and we have not had the heating on much at all yet, hence clammy towels in the bathroom, which I hate.

But the weather will change, as it always does, and indoor pursuits will become more important - and the radiators will be hot and towels cuddly and warm when I want them.
Promotion will be a necessity, now that I have a paperback out in public. (I haven't, yet, but it won't be long now, and I'm starting to think about what I should do.)

Some people have said I should have begun already, but there was no time. It seemed silly to put the book aside and work on promoting it! Much better to finish the book and get it published first. This, of course, is where traditional publishing wins out. While someone else worries about editing, covers and proofreading your book, you can be off and away doing other things. What a lovely thought. But I listen to authors saying how wonderful it is to have an editor to discuss things with and decide upon alterations and wonder how much of the story changes in those discussions. How big are the alterations? How much is then down to the author and how much to the editor? At least with my story I can only blame myself if it bombs - but on the other side of the coin,  I can take all the praise - if there should be any!

Amazon and the first 3 chapters

There seems to be a lull in sales on Amazon. Initially I put it down to summer holidays, but now I'm beginning to wonder. We've had terrific weather, and reading tends to go by the board when everyone can get out and about and enjoy some much needed sunshine. And to be fair, here in the UK, we still have the sunshine and ridiculous temperatures for almost October. But I expected sales would have picked up by now, and they have not. If anything, they've declined still further.

Now it could be that I have not been promoting. I'll be the first to admit I haven't promoted anything for weeks. A quick look at my diary shows me that I haven't done more than a few spasmodic posts since June. So maybe it is my own fault. There is that one nasty review that appeared around early July. Could that have anything to do with it? Let's hope not!

There is also this new scheme Amazon has running, and I'm more than a little curious about it. My understanding is that people download anything free of charge and read up to 10% of the work before any payment is made to the author.

So that means  people can read the first three chapters (4,000 word count per chapter) of a 100,000 word count book. A tiny portion, you may think, though it seems much more if the word count is 80,000 or less. I wonder how long it took the author to write those words, and many people read those chapters and then decide they don't want to pay for the rest of it? I imagine many do. It doesn't matter how good the rest of the book is, if those first chapters haven't grabbed the reader by the throat, it is all over. I have downloaded a sample of a Mankell-Wallander book to see how it works as a reader.

It puts a hell of a lot of importance on the first three chapters. Remember how important they were to getting published the traditional way? Well, it seems to me that Amazon have just re-introduced the barrier we independent authors were so pleased to avoid! What do the rest of you think?

This is a link to a long, long article about Amazon I haven't had time to read yet, but looks good enough to go back to in the next day or two:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/17/cheap-words