The Day After THE ‘Sale’.

The first day and one sale.

Before I could celebrate, I check to make sure no one I knew had bought it without me knowing.

Satisfied that I haven’t breached the ‘contract’, I have glass of wine (I’d have had one anyway, but this one tastes better).

Promising, and this morning, on first check, my wife points out I am 12,000 odd in the rankings. This may well be ten times the number a normal bookshop should stock, but I am quite pleased.

And secretly, I am reminded of a tale an old teacher of mine — Mr Weeks: cheers and nevermind the headmaster telling my mother I was responsible for your heart attack — told me when I was seven.

It concerns a courtier who did some enormous favour for the potentate with whom he played chess.

“What can I pay you?” the potentate asked, “Whatever you want in my kingdom.”

The courtier, a wise man, said: “I shall have a penny, place it on the first square of the chess board.”

“Is that all?” asked the potentate.

“Not quite.” Said the courtier. “Tomorrow, you shall double it. And the day after it shall be doubled again, doubled for each square on the board.”

I shall leave you to do the maths, but by the sixty-fourth square, the potentate was broke and the courtier the richest man in Christendom. I have been looking all my life for someone to put that one over on. No takers so far.

However, one sale today, two tomorrow and who knows?

Except there are no sales tomorrow and as I type my ranking has fallen to 32,000 and it is only my pessimism that is doubling.

The doubts creep in: do Amazon ’buy’ one copy of each book, just to keep their selling customers happy? Note that royalties are not payable until they reach £10, and they could always say it was ‘refunded’.

So, a new strategy? Already, you say. Well, I need to get a review. There are sites, though the only one I have seen so far that will consider ‘self-published’ works requires a’ reading fee’. No thanks.

So, while I research on, I am looking for new ways, some other way of getting it out there.

Please, ideas on a postcard…

….alternatively leave a comment.

Marketing and Why I Am Not Doing Any

The argument that self-publishing is an ‘open gate’, that the guarantee of quality a ‘proper’ publisher (or, more importantly, the editor) offers the reader is not there for self-published works, has been well-made many times and I won’t rehearse it here.

As I have said, I don’t think my book is ‘bad’ – not as good as it could be - but it is not bad, and I wouldn’t be ashamed to have my name on it as it is (it doesn’t have my name – instead some absurdist pseudonym that I blame entirely on those who failed to answer my call).

But more importantly for the self-publisher, there is no marketing department, no advice on hand, no one telling you how to get your books to the reader, giving them a chance to buy.

I will say it again, for the self-publisher happy with the quality of their work, this is the greatest loss that self-publishing incurs. There are a quarter of a million works of fiction published on e-book format on Amazon.com, non-fiction is double that (Amazon.co.uk figures are harder to come by). Regardless of quality, getting the work noticed is the biggest challenge a self-publisher faces.

And here I explain why I am simply not going to do any marketing whatsoever, at least not for a while.

The First:

On looking at the Kindle ‘community’ website, I noticed a thread entitled ‘Marketing’. I thought I’d have a look. There weren’t many responses, but two things I noticed: the first was a link to a 2009 blog by Mr Konrath, self-publishing’s own (self) success story. It was interesting, though he was only reporting sales in the low hundreds then.

The second thing was that two of the participants came to an agreement on the thread to write glowing reviews of each others work. And mightily pleased they seemed to be with themselves and their ‘wheeze’: mutually beneficial co-operation in action.

Except of course that to post a review of a work, a false review, is a lie, intended only to dupe the reader, or at least the potential reader.

We would all be quite appalled if advertisers were allowed to get away with ‘bigging up’ the claims of their products. In Britain, as I imagine in most countries, false advertising is illegal and one tempted to lie to the public could find themselves fined or worse. Yet it happens on a daily basis on the pages of Amazon and I don’t see anyway of stopping it, at least not completely.

But legal or not, duping readers is morally wrong (odd thing to say for someone who believes in no absolutes and as such would consider themselves to be, philosophically at least, an ‘amoralist’) and I want no part of it.

So that is the first reason; the second follows as surely as day follows night:

E-Publishing is not self-publishing. But given the size of e-publishers, many of their authors are expected to self-market. Tweet, they are told, blog, do everything you can to get your name out there, stand out above the crowd. And so they do, and I have nothing but respect for them.

But perhaps it was the way I was bought up, but for me, self-promotion is an anathema.

Even this blog, well, were it not for the anonymity of the internet, I would have saved you the few moments it has taken to read this far.

But I have seen the self-publicists – and in our world that is usually understood as a derogatory term, or has been until now, but it shouldn’t be and here I don’t mean it in that way – I have seen how they have to work, have to promote, encourage and cajole. And, as much as I admire them, I want no part of that either.

So, no ‘duping the reader’ and no self-publicising, so why do it at all?

Well, if this is the way things will go – and I hope it is not –  i.e. if agents are on the way out, publishers going down the sink, then I had better learn what happens if one simply refuses, if one doesn’t ask one’s friends and acquaintances, back-scratchers, even blog-readers to write reviews; no asking anyone to shout one’s name from the rafters, help propel one’s book up the charts.

So that is why no marketing: simply to see what happens. And that is what I shall be telling you here. 0 sales and counting….

And please, tell me what you think.

The Practicalities

One should note that a proper writer would have people to do all this for them, and they wouldn’t take so little time doing what I did. Nevertheless, once decided upon something, I like to get it done and while patience maybe a virtue, sinning is much more fun.

Fun? Maybe I should think again….

First Day – The Cover

A day when I should have been doing other things. Nevermind…

Given that I am not going to be doing any kind of viral marketing, asking friends etc etc (and I will explain why at a later date) I have to rely on someone looking at the book on line and being interested enough to read the blurb.

So the cover is all.

I am lucky in that I have one sister who is an illustrator and another a graphic designer specialising in CD covers. However, I am unlucky in that I don’t feel in a position to ask them to disturb their busy working lives to work, unpaid, for me. But I email for advice.

Can I nick stuff of the internet, change it a bit and claim it is my own? No. You’ll be sued, people aren’t stupid. Oh…

So, for a while I was tempted to dust of my paint pots. But I am the non-artistic one amongst my siblings. So I have a think about what type of image I want, what I want to convey.

And then I dress up: my wife is very forgiving.

A photograph, played with on Photoshop, can easily be made to look like a drawing, and once I have managed to hide the length of my nose with the judicial use of a masking tool, I’m ready to go.

Now for titling.

Font. I found a lovely site, a French chap who has some lovely fonts you can download for free. Here.

I play around, my wife giving guidance, and together we came up with something which was okay.  And if I didn’t have the sisters I have, I’d have left it at that. Instead I send an email: ‘Can you just have a look?’ I ask.

And so it comes back, redesigned, corrected and with an even better font than my researches had uncovered. Cheers, sis.

Next stage, formatting the text…I know you can’t wait.

Second Day – The Text

Gosh, I hate third-party software.

Why can’t I just upload my Word.doc? Why do I have to first learn, then use, then realise I hadn’t learnt properly and go back and use again, some strange program? Computers were meant to make life easier, weren’t they? Somebody should tell programmers…

Anyway, if you want to know how to use ‘Mobipocket Creator’ send me an email and I’ll tell you how not to do it…

But once ‘built’, I have to check everything to make sure it has formatted properly. This turns out to be a good thing – though I thought I had a clean, mistake free copy of the book, I realise I have confused homonyms, left out words, missed punctuation. So I spend a day copy-editing and my eyes and shoulders are knackered.

And after many abortive attempts, I have something to upload.

Of course I should wait: it is eleven o’clock at night, I am tired, and have drunk far too much wine: wait, leave it and look again in the  morning. But do I wait? Of course not. Upload!

And that is it. The Book is now pending acceptance - 24 hours I am told – a bit of a let down now its done. So off I go to bed to dream of selling copies, millions of them, overnight.

Now that would be nice.

Next, Marketing, and how I am not going to do any…

An Introduction

I asked for advice. None came. So I thought I'd do it anyway.

Do what?!

Publish on Kindle of course.

You missed out – I was going to ask you to provide a pseudonym - but at least that saves me a dilemma, namely…

… a word of warning, or rather to put you at your ease – I shall not be telling you the name of the book here, on Twitter, or on any other network social or otherwise.

I am not selling.

This blog is my record and my present to you – you can learn from my mistakes. And while you learn , you can laugh both at my incompetence and my soaring, pathetic hopes matched by my despair as such hopes are dashed, cruelly but inevitably.

Although to be honest, I have no hopes and nothing to lose – 'nah, nah' as they say.

Let me state what I’m risking:

This is my first novel I am ‘publishing’. I don’t think it is badly written and I am not ashamed of it. But it is unpublishable in the sense that like most first novels, it really should be left in the drawer. It simply fell between two stalls and should be treated as a training exercise, something to learn from and move on. So no risk at all. Except…

...except it is an asset. I have invested what – three hours a day, five days a week over six months? Does that sound reasonable? 390 hours. If I was paid cash that would be a reasonable sum. Plus the hours I have spent thinking about it, submitting it, pointlessly, to agents.

And I’m broke. But that is not the main reason. 

The main reason it that my dear friend Pk sent an email around the other day, pointing to a blog which suggested that the age of the agent might be over. I hope it is wrong (and I intend to try the traditional route for the novel I am in the middle of now - if I ever finish it).

But if the blog was correct, then the lesson will be invaluable. For us all.

Follow me on this journey. See me fail.