Revenge of the Rejected

Anyone who has tried to get a publishing deal knows it's currently harder than ever. If you succeed, the advance is likely to be small and the contract all-inclusive ( just in case something unforeseen like holograms or brain implants become the dominant format some time in the future.) I've speculated before that all this rejected talent may come back to bite the publishing industry on the bottom, and with so many indie books in the Kindle charts, I think there is now evidence this is happening.

It's easy to say when JK Rowling chose to e-publish Harry Potter herself via Pottermore that with her money and clout, she can do what the rest of us can't. But there's more. Mostly in America, publishers have picked up the best-selling indies - at a price. (If they'd had the wit to sign Amanda Hocking when she was submitting the year before, they'd have got her for much less than the two million dollars they paid.) Barry Eisler turned down half a million dollars from St Martins to stay indie. John Locke, a prolific and successful indie writer, has just signed a deal with Simon & Schuster. But it's a pretty unusual deal - it's just for print books. He retains ebook rights.

No eager publisher has contacted me. But in the unlikely event of this happening, would I be interested? I'd love a print-only deal that would get my novels into the bookshops, and handle foreign and film rights for me. This is improbable, though; I imagine they'd want full control, with a modest advance of five or ten thousand - and I've earned more than that on my own in one year of self-publishing. Add the loss of control, a delay of eighteen months before publication, and paper book sales dropping all the time as digital rise, and I'd feel a distinct lack of enthusiasm.

Bob Mayer, a New York Times best selling author, has been approached three times in the past month by trad authors asking him how ebooks work. He says, "Frankly, I don’t think anyone in NY Publishing really understands the big picture of ebook publishing from writer to reader." I'm not sure they get the small picture, either. Inexcusably, some formatting is  carelessly done. I often notice blurbs on Amazon for mainstream published ebooks with duplications, stray bits of HTML, or missing punctuation. Sometimes the author's page is left blank. When I told an author friend I'd noticed mistakes in his blurb, he said that was the responsibility of the marketing department, and it was difficult to get them to change things.

So: we have good books the public wants to read being rejected by publishers. Midlist authors are treated badly by their publishers. Bookshops are struggling, closing or changing hands. A growing indie movement has proved astonishingly successful over the last year. Writers and readers have more choice and opportunity.

Vive la révolution! 

Decoding a novel

It's easy to forget just how remarkable books are; black symbols on white paper or screen create images and concepts in our mind which can make us laugh or weep. The strange process of reading, once it has been acquired in childhood, is forgotten and taken for granted. This is a miracle that enables a truly good book to transport us to another world and consciousness in a totally absorbing way.

A reader reviewing Remix said, "... as I was reading it, it played through like a film in my mind. Very rarely a novel appears like a film to me and it's a sure fire sign that I'm enjoying it."

When I write a scene, I observe it as if it were a film; so the film playing in my mind was transcribed, published, sent to her Kindle, then replayed as a film for her. Interesting to speculate on the differences between our respective films; Caz's workshop imagined by her will not be the same as my image of it, as it's based on places she has never been to - but if I've done my job well it'll be none the worse for that. (I wonder what her Ric Kealey looks like? Drop dead gorgeous, of course...)

Thinking about this, it occurs to me that books are written in code, and only the right reader is able to correctly decode them.  It is a joy for a writer when a reader totally 'gets' her novel, and of course, not everyone will, even with the most popular authors. Myself, I reckon my decoding of Jane Austen or Mary Renault is in the high nineties, percentage-wise, but for Dan Brown, DH Lawrence or Dostoevsky it's down in the low thirties.

Doomed, we're all doomed!

It's been a week for prognostications of doom about the future of publishing, with Ewan Morrison writing at inordinate length about how grim everything is in The Guardian, and Graham Swift maintaining the rise of digital books could even mean authors would stop writing (yeah, right). I wondered whether the invention of the printing press had met with similar reactions, and pootled round Google to find out.

I got a bit waylaid...

Apparently, the Black Death was the catalyst that speeded transition from hand-copied manuscripts on vellum to printed books on paper. Many monks closeted in crowded monasteries fell victim to the plague, leaving fewer scribes; the price of manuscripts, already hugely expensive, went up. A vastly reduced population became better-off as they inherited from those who had died. They bought new clothes the way you would, thus making lots of rags available for the production of paper; the cost of paper books went down.

Printers now decided what to print, rather than the Church. It made sense to print the books readers wanted. They realized that the real market was not for big heavy volumes of the Bible and religious tracts, but for smaller and cheaper books on a wide range of subjects. The Church was no longer in charge of the dissemination of knowledge, because it could no longer control what people read. It got rather cross about this, but there was nothing it could do to halt the rise of the new technology beyond issuing dire warnings to an unheeding public.

Does any of this sound vaguely familiar?

Writing the next novel...

Jonathan Morris said about writing a screenplay, There are three stages of writing a script: being unable to start it, being stuck in the middle, and being unable to finish it. Just like novels, then. It's a wonder so many get written.

One of my favourite quotes is Lynne Truss's, concerning well-meaning friends who enquire how you are getting on with your book. "It was peculiar," they say to one another, when I pop out of the room. "All I said was, 'How's the novel?' and look, she bit my hand." I know from personal experience this also applies to silversmithing, and no doubt all other fields of creative endeavour. Stick to asking where your friend is going on holiday is my advice.

How terrible life must have been for Harper Lee after she had written her one and only hugely successful novel. To Kill a Mockingbird is a hard act to follow. She worked on another book, called The Long Goodbye, but eventually put it away unfinished. During her long life, how many kindly people have asked her what she is writing now? Ditto Margaret Mitchell, after Gone With the Wind won a Pulitzer Prize.

And I bet JK Rowling, in spite of all her riches and success, is currently fretting about her next novel, or lack of such. Just don't ask her when it'll be out.

My first year of Kindle self-publishing

Exactly a year ago today I published Remix on Amazon for the Kindle. I didn't blog about it, because I wasn't expecting much. If I could magically whisk back in time and tell my younger self she would sell over 40,000 e-copies of her books by the same time next year, she'd be astonished. And so is the older me, except I've had time to get used to it.

August 2010 I sold 3 copies of Remix on Amazon. Near the end of September, I lowered the price, and sold 78 that month. In October, it was 700, and Remix went into the UK Kindle top 100. That Christmas, the Kindle turned up in lots of UK Christmas stockings. Sales exploded. In January I sold 5,939.

Many factors affect sales, and most of them you can't control. As you sell more, Amazon makes your book more visible - but the opposite happens if your sales falter. As Remix sales dipped towards the end of March for a variety of reasons, Replica was out with beta readers and I was designing its cover. Replica was published 9th April 2011, and Remix fans sent it straight into the top 100. In May my sales were 7,196. Remix has spent over eight months in the top 100.

Like many writers, I dreamed of mainstream publication, and spent a year submitting Remix. But as someone who has always been self-employed, and as a single mother, I'm used to doing everything myself. I've enjoyed learning how to do covers and formatting, and writing a blurb is much easier than writing a synopsis.

Publishing is changing so fast, who knows what is round the corner? Is this a brief golden age for indies, an opportunity that will vanish as the industry gets its act together? Maybe. But it's really nice while we've got it.

Grateful thanks to Amazon, and especially to all my readers.

Book promotion or nagging?

Anyone who's brought up a child knows that nagging doesn't work (not sure what does work with a teenager, but that's a subject for another blog).

So there is simply NO POINT adding a sombre, "Please enjoy responsibly," to a radio advert for alcohol. That is so not going to make the listener think, "Dear me, in that case I'd better not go out with my mates and get ratted tonight as planned." Similarly I doubt all the messages on cigarette packets persuade smokers to desist. The thing about nagging is that it's irritating, so people tune it out.

Indie authors, who have to market their own books, sometimes forget this. Every now and then, you come across a post like this:

Hi everyone, my thriller The Tattooist is on special offer for 99p!

What starts as just another murder investigation for DI Beverly Richards gradually turns into a nightmare, as a ruthless serial killer known as The Tattooist slays and mutilates lots of attractive young women and a few children and pets too, then tattoos clues on to their skins to taunt the police.

In a unique twist, the killer begins to hunt the cop hunting him! Beverley must find him and stop the slayings before he slaughters her, her twins, and her pet lop-eared rabbit, while simultaneously dealing with a hard-drinking boss who wants her taken off the case. Not to mention unfinished business with a man from her past who may not be what he seems.

Time is running out for Beverley – can she beat her demons and survive a final show-down with The Tattooist?

Happy reading!

Perhaps they worked, in the early days of the Kindle; but now, I think there have been so many of these posts, often inappropriately posted on half a dozen threads simultaneously, that potential readers mostly screen them out. On the US Amazon forums, such was the proliferation of Buy my book! posts that Amazon has declared zero tolerance, banning even discreet book links in signatures.

Writers need readers, and won't get them by badgering.

Writing and self-discovery, by John Harding

Today I'm pleased to have a guest post by John Harding, a mainstream author with four published books.

His first novel, What We Did On Our Holiday, was short-listed for the W H Smith New Talent award and became a bestseller. It was made into a two-hour TV film by Granada in 2006. His latest is Florence and Giles (only 99p for Kindle) which I thoroughly enjoyed, though as a gothic literary thriller, it's a bit outside my comfort zone. The story is gripping, but what made it for me is the twelve year old narrator Florence's idiosyncratic use of language. I was very taken with Florence.

I suggested John write something about the writing process, and this is what he wrote:

I DIDN’T KNOW I KNEW THAT
by John Harding

The American novelist Wally Lamb once wrote: ‘I write to discover what I didn’t know I knew.’ I find it’s a phrase that resonates and by way of illustration, let me tell you a story about me.

In my novel Florence and Giles, for reasons I won’t go into here, Florence, the 12-year-old narrator, has never been allowed to learn to read. But one day she discovers the neglected library of the decaying old mansion where she lives, an immense dusty, disregarded room crammed with books. Visiting it in secret, she teaches herself to read, and then proceeds to work her way through the books there. It’s a forbidden, clandestine act, and Florence has to take many precautions to avoid being caught. If she is, she’ll be banned from the room and have no more books again. So she’s always extremely careful to leave the books exactly as she found them.

Now, when I’d finished it, one of the things I liked about Florence and Giles was that my previous three novels had all contained clear elements of autobiography. For the first time I’d written a book that had nothing to do with my life. Everything in it was completely made up. Or so I thought.

After the book came out I was giving a talk about it one day and someone asked a question – I can’t even recall what it was now – and suddenly I found myself replaying an episode from my childhood. It wasn’t just something I hadn’t thought about for nearly years; it was something I’d completely forgotten.

I grew up in a house with only four books in it on a council estate in a bleak and remote Fenland village where culture simply didn’t exist. It’s likely I’d never have become a prolific reader, let alone a writer, but for one thing. I had my early education in the village primary school (roll call 90 kids) and my mother was the school caretaker. Or, take away the fancy title, the cleaner. Every day when school finished at three o’clock and the teachers and the other kids all left, I stayed behind and my mother arrived and got to work. Last thing every day, before they went home, every pupil had to put his chair on his desk. First thing my mother did was to sweep the floors and when she’d done that (it didn’t take long; she was a fast worker and she had a lot to do) it was my job to stand all the chairs down again so she could clean the desks. Once I’d done that I was free.

The school had three classrooms, for kids aged 5 to 7, 7 to 9, and 9 to 11. Each classroom had its own teacher who taught two different year groups within that class. Now, at first, when I started school at five years old, there wasn’t a whole lot to do after school once I’d finished with the chairs, but pretty soon I learned to read and once I did, I was off. It didn’t take me long to work my way through all the books in my own classroom, the infants. They mainly concerned two kids called Janet and John whose idea of a good time was to point at every day objects or animals and say something like ‘See a dog’ or ‘See a chair’. Once I’d mastered all of these in my after school sessions, I started on those in the next classroom up. There was a frisson of excitement about this, because I never entered it during school time. In most ways it wasn’t any different from the infants except it didn’t have the Wendy house or the portable sandpit on wheels. The principal difference was, the books. Suddenly I was transported into a magical place. I remember clearly a whole series of little books with horizontally red-and-white striped covers and large print. Each one contained an ancient Greek or Norse myth. I especially loved the ones about Loki the Norse god of mischief who caused havoc in Valhalla just for the hell of it. My most spectacular find was Tintin. There were two of them: King Ottaker’s Sceptre and The Crab With the Golden Claws. Of course, I knew comics, no child of the fifties didn’t, but this was something else. A proper hardback book consisting of just one story, in the most beautiful colours. I would have given anything to own one of them. It was another ten years before I did.

Anyway, I read my way through everything in 7-9 long before I was officially allowed to enter that room, and after that I went at the ones in 9-11 and by the time I was nine I was relying on new books arriving or rereading stuff I’d already read, because I’d already read every book in the school. Right from the start my mother had told me, ‘Mr Teale (he was the head teacher) might not like you touching those books, so don’t say anything to anyone about it. And make sure you put them back exactly where you find them.’ Looking back on it, my mother’s attitude seems tantamount to paranoia. Surely the headmaster would have been delighted to find a child so keen to read? But I never thought to question it. I supposed she was worried about stepping out of line in any way in case she lost her job. Of course, as I imagined Florence doing so many years later, I always left the neighbour book slightly poking out when I took a book from a shelf so I’d know its place, though actually I’m pretty sure now none of the teachers would have noticed. It doesn’t matter, because my mother’s insecurity gave me a great gift. It made reading an exciting, forbidden thing; books have never lost that lustre for me.

Now this whole business was lost to me for many years until I wrote Florence and Giles when it surprised me by surfacing again. I’d filed it away some place and not only forgotten where but that the file existed at all. This is what writing does, which brings us back to Wally Lamb. Of course what he was talking about, wasn’t just recovered memories, like mine here. He meant the emotions we don’t know we feel, the attitudes we don’t know we have, the connections we never make until they surface from our unconscious onto the page in that gloriously surprising process that writing is. The connection between my childhood experience and Florence’s fictional one was an emotional one; I was reconnecting with the fear, the excitement, the sheer guilty pleasure I’d felt nearly half a century before.

John Harding: Website
Twitter: @JohnRHarding
Florence and Giles: Amazon UK
Florence and Giles: Amazon US

Dashes: em, en...and tildes

In my occasional series on punctuation, I have reached the dash. Dashes used to be very popular back in the days when a book might begin, "I took a handsome to --- Street, in the small market town of ---, with a view to calling on Lord ---", a sentence that makes me want to hit the author with a rolled-up newspaper until he stops being so annoying. And in more devout times, when the third commandment was taken seriously, characters were wont to exclaim, "By G-d, sir!", another handy use for the dash.

These days many writers have an irrational dislike of brackets, and tend to use dashes instead (I like both of them). But what kind of dash do you use? If you are traditionally published, you won't get a choice; the publisher's house style will decide. As an indie, you make up your own mind.

It's the mark of an amateur to use a hyphen where a dash is intended. A hyphen with no spaces either side is even worse, and plain confusing. In typography you have the choice of an em-dash, so called as it is the width of a capital M with no spaces, or an en-dash, the width of a capital N with a space either side. I prefer the en-dash (as used by Penguin) because the spaces allow the text to flow better in digital format, where em-dashes can result in ugly gaps in the text.

And the tilde? For this post I looked it up on Wikipedia, and rather wished I hadn't. I almost certainly don't need to know all that, and neither do you. But it's one of the prettier punctuation marks.

On starting a new book

I don't really talk much about my novels until they have reached a tipping point and know I'm going to finish them. Especially in the very early stages, when delicate tendrils of ideas are emerging, vulnerable to tramping feet, icy blasts or harsh words. I make an exception of the offspring, but remind her not to be squashing. So I'm not going to talk about my next book, just the process of switching from one to another.

I've completed four novels now, and found each one of them hard to leave. The final words have been written, all corrections made, it's finished; but the characters are still kicking around in my head. Not until I've found at least one new character equally absorbing can I begin to transfer my allegiance; I have to peg away doggedly until there's an almost audible click, the thing is done and the book begins to fly.

I can see the allure of writing a series. Not just the opportunity to garner a faithful readership, but the switch to the next book must be so much easier when your characters come with you.

Do any of my readers find the same thing? Or are you like Trollope, able to finish one book in the morning and start another in the afternoon?

You don't need permission...

American literary agent Rachelle Gardner wrote a blog post a couple of days ago, Will Self-Pubbing Hurt My Chances? And the answer she gives is,

NO. Self-publishing probably will not hurt your chances of traditional publishing. This is a 180 degree switch from just a few years ago! There was a stigma attached to self publishing, and authors who went that route risked alienating those in traditional publishing. The self-pub author was perceived as someone who was impatient; they [sic] were someone who was unable to pass muster with agents and editors; they put out cheap-looking books that were poorly written and badly edited. But today it’s different.

This is good news for authors unable to attract an agent, who feel they need 'permission' to self-publish. The industry is beginning to give its blessing to those pesky indies it was once so scathing about. Perhaps more... one commenter wrote, "I’m worried that publishers will start to expect an author coming to them to already have readership and sales numbers in hand."

What I want to say in big letters is, YOU DON'T NEED PERMISSION. Just a good book, because validation can only be given by readers: not agents, editors or marketing departments.

Konrad Lorenz tells a story about the geese he kept. Each morning he would open the gate to the small compound where they spent the night to allow them to roam freely during the day. One morning, he saw from his window he'd forgotten to close the gate the night before, so he didn't need to open it. A while later, he noticed the geese were still in their compound, making dissatisfied noises. The gate was open, but they would not go through it until he went over, shut it, and opened it again with a flourish. This ceremony over, they went off to forage.

Don't be like those geese. Agents and publishers are losing some of their power. They are becoming aware of this, and so should we be.

On numbers and what they mean

Any indie with a book doing reasonably well on Amazon is obsessed by numbers, and Amazon makes it easy to indulge one's obsession.

Once an hour, rankings change. On Author Central, you have a sales graph going back to December last year. You can watch sales tick up on your KDP page (Kindle Direct Publishing) as they happen - last night I waited before turning out the light for the last few UK sales that would take Replica to a total of 7,000. Childish, I know.

What I don't forget, though, is that each time the number goes up, a human being has decided he/she likes the look of my book, and is prepared to spend several hours reading it, and I am very grateful. Now and then readers write a review, or email me to say they enjoyed the books, which makes my day.

David Gaughran has blogged about some other very interesting numbers, under the title Print Continues Its Death Spiral; the American Association of Publishers have released their sales figures for April 2011. The figures make it clear where books are heading - away from print and towards digital. The implications of this are enormous for writers, readers, and anyone in the publishing industry.

Winners and losers in the revolution? My guess:

Winners

Authors and readers - it's often forgotten, but they're the only essential components of the business. And Amazon, whose business nous is awesome.

Losers

Bookshops (we'll all be sad about this), publishers, agents.

You will identify with one of these...

...and so do I, but I'm not going to admit which one. I have my pride.

E-book piracy:Yo ho ho and what happens next?

Google Alerts alerted me last week to a site where Remix can be downloaded for free. I checked with a knowledgeable friend, and yes, the book is indeed available for download, not just there as an inducement to buy membership to their site. I’m surprised, as a) I’m not a famous author, and b) Amazon charges £0.49 or $0.99 for Remix – hardly prices worth evading. But then, the book has been in the UK top 100 for 209 days…

This got me thinking about ebook piracy, so I did some research, and these are my conclusions:

• Ebook piracy is happening now. DRM offers little or no protection.
  
  
• Many of the early adopters of the Kindle are middle-aged; they can afford it, adjustable font sizes are good for ageing eyes, and it’s an easy gadget to use even if you haven’t been brought up with computers and mobile phones from earliest youth. This age group is less likely to use pirate sites.
  
  
• Younger readers aren't buying Kindles at the moment, thinking them overpriced and that the technology will only improve. This doesn't mean they don’t download pirated books and read them on their computers. Or smart phones, a recent development.
  
  
• As e-readers get cheaper and more common, people used to downloading their music for nothing from torrents will expect to do the same with e-books. A quick search shows you can download the BBC list of top 100 books. It's in pdf format, but it's easy enough to convert to epub or other formats.
  
  
• Publishers are encouraging piracy by their determination to maintain high ebook prices, causing resentment among e-reader owners. One reason they give for high prices (and low digital royalties for authors) is they need to spend money to prevent copyright infringement; but it’s not clear quite what they are doing, beyond giving more money to their legal departments, and hoping e-books are a passing fad.

If the experience of the music industry is anything to go by, publishers will not be able to stop piracy even if they try wholeheartedly to do so, and they have no Plan B. Witness the whole huge amount of effort put into trying to shut down The Pirate Bay - legal proceedings have been going on for years, and yet the site is still up. Maybe I'm being naïve, but I can't see any way that they will be able to stop people illegally downloading without heavily censoring the internet. I don't believe people would stand for that.

This is a big problem for authors that will only get bigger. I've no idea what the answer is.

EDIT: I sent the site a Cease & Desist notice, and the page has been taken down.

Mainstream versus indie authors

...or, the farmer and the cowboy should be friends.

Last week Robin Sullivan, who successfully runs the indie small press Ridan, was banned from AbsoluteWrite with this message from the administrator:

"You have been banned for the following reason: Just get the hell off my site. You're relentlessly snotty, rude, and you're a fucking bald-faced liar. I'm done with you.

Date the ban will be lifted: Never."

Nice. Robin's offence? To politely argue the case for indie publishing on AbsoluteWrite's forums on this thread. On AbsoluteWrite, they don't like self-publishers. Mention that some indies have done rather well, and you are likely to be ignored or disbelieved. The majority of members are wedded to the way things are currently run in the publishing industry, however much evidence accrues that it is broken.

Why are they quite so vitriolic? I have a theory. It can be pretty discouraging, being a writer. You toil away on your own for years, learning how to write, then you reach stage one: submit to agents. Suppose you get an agent (and only a handful of writers I know have achieved this) she will submit your book to publishers. They take their time to reply, and you may find after a year or so your agent has used all her contacts and failed to place your book.

If you are lucky enough to find a publisher, you will wait eighteen months or more to see your novel in print. As a new author you are unlikely to get much of an advance (I know of two exceptions to this, Guy Saville and Elspeth Cooper). With little of the publisher's money invested in it, your book will not get much hype or a favourable spot in the bookshops. 90% of new authors sell fewer than 1,000 copies and don't earn out their advance. Unless you sell surprisingly well, after some months your unsold books will be returned and pulped.

Anyone committed to this dismal system, accepting repeated rejection with gritted teeth and the mantra I'll write another book, is likely to be touchy with those she sees leaping over the gatekeepers and making their books available to readers within weeks of finishing them. It makes it even worse that some of these writers are doing rather well out of it. Stockholm Syndrome kicks in.

The most clued-up authors think that a mixture of indie and traditional publishing is the best way to go. Being hostile to writers who have chosen a different route is pointless - and anyone who subsequently switches sides is going to feel really foolish.

Not the bigots at AbsoluteWrite, though. They know what they think, and you'd better agree with them if you go on their site.

(I choose not to, myself.)

The author, the agent and the cover artist

The publishing industry is in a strange but interesting state, with everyone trying out each other's jobs. This story caught my eye.

Catherine Cookson's books were published long before ebooks were thought of, so her publishers, Transworld and Simon & Schuster don't hold the rights. Catherine Cookson's estate has authorized her agent Sonia Land to release a hundred of her books for Kindle in an exclusive deal with Amazon. Priced at £3.99, I'm sure Cookson's many fans will be delighted.

What struck me as odd is how Sonia Land has published the novels. She's started her own company, and called it Peach Publishing, in spite of the fact that there is already a Peach Publishing in existence in the UK with a website here. Sonia Land's website is still under construction. Did she not think to google the name?

And then there's the covers... I move in indie circles, and have seen a few amateur book covers in my time, but these take the biscuit. How any professional in the publishing industry could think these acceptable beats me. They aren't just ugly and cheap-looking, they're inept.

Perhaps Ms Land has the visual equivalent of a tin ear, or maybe she reflected that Catherine Cookson's books would sell however dire the covers. Maybe the designs were done by a relative, and she found it hard to be objective. I do hope she didn't do them herself...

Whatever the explanation, I wouldn't want her choosing a cover artist for my books.

Sales, publishing and salads

Yesterday sales of Replica went over 5,000 - not bad in seven weeks. And most commenters who have read both books think it's a worthy follow-up to Remix. I'm sure all authors worry over this; you spend a year writing a novel and really don't want readers saying, It was okay, but not as good as her last.

If anyone had told me a year ago I'd sell over 27,000 books in ten months I'd have been astonished, which makes me think about that stratospherically successful indie hero, Amanda Hocking. I've just watched her amusing first vlog, and one of the things she talks about is her decision to self-publish. She says, "I had to do something other than just sit here and wait." And doesn't the publishing industry know how to make us wait, whether it's for a response to submissions or publication after the contract's been signed. (Can anyone tell me why it takes eighteen months to get a book into print?)

And what, I hear you cry, is the significance of the photo? Not a lot, admittedly, but every now and then I like to post something random just because I can. A month ago I bought a matchstick garden; like a book of matches, but stick them in the earth and they grow into a salad. So I did that, and sure enough, leaves sprouted. Not many, and growing rather slowly; in fact, it looked like the sort of salad that would make an ideal accompaniment to Baldrick's very small casserole made from five beans. Then one day it seemed to be growing backwards. Two caterpillars had moved in. As they get bigger they eat more, and I'm beginning to wonder whether I'll have to buy in salad leaves to stop them dying of starvation. I've marked one with a ring on the photo. The other one is there, but you can't see him.

Who chooses what you read?

The answer to this question is not as obvious as it may seem.

For starters, people only get to choose a book from what is available, that they get to hear about. Impossible not to know that Kate McCann recently published a book about her missing daughter, for instance, given the huge publicity and controversy it attracted.

If you go to a bookshop, what catches your eye, the piles of books in the window or on a table near the entrance, or books spine out on the bottom shelf at the back of the shop? Most members of the public are unaware that the prominent books are not those the manager has selected on merit; publishers have paid a lot of money for particular books to be well displayed.

As a self-published writer, I love Amazon because it has given me the chance to prove there is a market for my novels. At the moment, the playing field is nearly level for indies and mainstream; but is that going to last? Amazon has its own version of the table at the front of the shop; its various recommendation pages, Kindle Bargains, Editors' Picks, New to Kindle etc., all of which have a dramatic effect on sales. And publishers are turning their attention (somewhat late) to the rich pickings to be made from ebooks - which, although they will never admit it, cost them nothing at point of sale.

I subscribe to emails from The Bookseller's FUTUReBOOK. In the last one, Philip Jones said:

"At a time when agents and Amazon are moving into publishing, the ability of traditional publishers to demonstrate digital success along with physical dominance will be important. One sign of progress will clearly be when the digital book charts begin to resemble the physical book charts–since it will show that publishers can still make and break bestsellers and that price is not the only determining factor in what sells in e."

Kick out all those presumptuous indies cluttering up the top 100 just because their books are cheap and popular, then. Publishers will decide what sells.

"...crucially publishers have learned and perfected many other strategies [besides price cuts] to push books into the bestseller charts (window displays, handselling/bookseller recommendation, reviews, serialisation, POS, dumpbins, the list goes on . . .), they simply have to also now learn the skills for the digital arena."

So, who is going to be choosing what you read on your Kindle in the future? You, or the Big Six Publishers?

Pinch of salt, meet writing rules

There is only one writing rule you should never, ever, break: Don't Bore The Reader.

Everything else is negotiable.

I was going to make that two unbreakable rules, the other being Get Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar Right, but then it occurred to me that the most successful indie writer ever, Amanda Hocking, admits her books are far from flawless in that regard.

So, on to rules you can break as necessary:

• Show, Don't Tell. This is usually a good rule, but not invariably. Some less riveting bits of a novel are best summed up in a brief paragraph rather than shown happening. And I'm not a fan of describing the minutiae of facial expressions in order to avoid 'telling' when we are all so good at reading people's faces. I favour, 'The Professor came in, looking furtive and agitated' over, 'The Professor came in, his brow furrowed, his colour high, glancing over his shoulder as if checking he could not be overheard.'
  
  
• Avoid Adverbs. Well, okay, it's certainly possible to overdo them, but I've been on writing sites where you got criticized if you used any at all. I don't see why they should be pariahs - adverbs are just one tool in the writer's toolbox.
  
  
• Stick To Single POV. There are occasions when this is a good idea. Mary Renault in Fire From Heaven has an excellent scene entirely in Demosthenes' POV, where he mistakes a young Alexander the Great for a slave boy. The reader enjoys seeing through his eyes while knowing his mistake. In other parts of the book she uses multiple POVs, and why not? It works.
  
  
• Don't Start A Book With Dialogue. Why ever not? Two out of my four books start with dialogue; my favourite being the line suggested as a good opener for Trav Zander by Alan Hutcheson, "I wish to acquire a dragon."
  
  
• Kill Your Darlings. Weird, this one; we are advised to delete any passages of our writing we think particularly good. Um...why? If I truly trusted my own judgment so little, then how would I know I'd got anything right at all?

Have I missed any others?

Desperate writers with cunning plans...

Unpublished authors are a pretty desperate lot. This became clear to me in the later stages of Authonomy, Harper Collins' site for writers, where some members would do anything, it seemed, to scrabble their way to the Desk and win a review by an HC editor. Swap backing, creating sock puppets, grovelling flattery, backing hundreds of books a day, and spamming the entire site all became common. It was a refreshing change to move on to Amazon, where the stakes are real and paying customers don't have an axe to grind; if they like the look of your book they will buy it, simple as that.

So I do a bit of eye-rolling when I see people attempting to game the system. It makes them look sad, and it doesn't work except in the very short term. Today on Kindleboards, a writer started a thread offering to buy the books of the first twenty posters, as long as they bought her book in return. She's had plenty of takers, all, in Mark Twain's phrase, trying to make a precarious living by taking in each other's washing.

Another author a couple of months ago offered to repay the cost of her ebook, if buyers emailed her with proof of purchase, thus effectively buying her own book in an attempt to get it high in the charts (it's now around the 33,000 mark).

And among the tags on my books I've found other writers' names or book titles, presumably put there in the hope of gaining exposure. Hey ho. Have these people no shame?*

*Er, no, they don't, in case you are in any doubt about the answer to my rhetorical question.

DailyCheapReads UK Indie Spotlight and other good news

This is going to be a cheerful post - lots of good stuff happening.

But first I want to mention DailyCheapReads UK, a great site for Kindle owners that features bargain ebooks including mine, nothing more than £6 and many for much less. It's hugely successful in America, and I'm sure the UK version will do equally well, as it's brilliant for finding good, affordable books. The two sparky women whose brainchild it is explain their policy here. Do check it out.

In the last week I've had several nice things happen. Remix's Kindle sales went over the 20,000 mark, and Replica sold its first 1,000. Replica has been chosen by the lovely kuffers at KUF (Kindle Users' Forum) as their May book of the month (or is it June? Anyway, they are reading it in May). I've signed a contract with Könyvmolyképző Kiadó for Hungarian editions of Remix, hardback, paperback and ebooks in 2012. I can't wait to see what the cover looks like.

And Replica has just popped into the UK Kindle top 100...

Woot!