Hold a self-publisher to account: Month 5

Stats

Downloads

Smashwords: 336 (forecast: 400)

Sales:

my orders from Lulu: 25

bookshop: 0

direct from Lulu: 11

total: 11 (forecast 5)


Events
(addendum to previous months) - I made two interesting discoveries that may explain previous months' activities. First, I received a positive review from the Oxford information hub "Daily Infornmation" in the middle of November - although there is no obvious correlation to a spike in downloads.

Second, in the last week of December, Songs was listed in ebooksjustpublished's top 10 DRM free ebooks for Christmas - I'm fairly sure that was the reason for the spike at the end of December.

late Dec/early Jan - my old college alumni newsletter went out with a long article on Songs

15 Jan Discounderworld ezine writes a piece on me and on Year Zero Writers

mid Jan - Writers' Forum print magazin carries a follow-up piece on me in Siobhan Curham's self-publishing column


Analysis

It was always going to be a slow month. I spent every spare second building up for the tour that started on Feb 4th. Two things are of particular note:

1. The efictionbookclub closed down the week before it was due to read and review Songs. Obviously this was a big blow. I wish the people behind it all the best in future, though - the jobn they did whilst the site was running was fantastic, and an excellent model.

2. There was an enormous spike in both Songs' downloads, and those for 13 Shadows, on January 13th. I have absolutely no idea why. As it affected both books I then had on smashwords, I am guessing it was related to smashwords, but I don't know how - it's too early for it to be aggregated first quarter downloads from Barnes & Noble - if it happens that date in a month/quarter's time I will be clearer that it is an automated aggregation of something!

Also worth noting that 10 (but not the 11th) of the Lulu sales were from a single family member for use as presents.

Forecast
I DO have hopes for February. I've got some significant local news coverage confirmed, and we are on tour, with two big gigs that I hope will kick start sales, or at least downloads. The first, at Rough Trade East, was on the 4th. Next up is To Hell With Books on the 23rd. I'm also hoping we might get some write-ups and general web coverage out fo the tour, and want to make sure the sales and downloads are mentioned there.

So:

downloads: I'll go with what I hope is a cautious 300, in case the web tie-ins don't run as smoothly as they might

sales: 10 - largely from live readings

I HOPE both of these are cautious

Year Zero Live - Today!

OK, so tonight’s when we kick off our tour of live readings. Seems like only yesterday we were having a casual joke & speculating some live events might be fun – and here we are!!
6pm – 8.30pm, Rough Trade Records (East), Brick Lane, London TONIGHT

To recap, we have the following on offer:

5 writers

Penny Goring reading Bone Dust Disco
Marc Nash reading Twin Topiary Tales
Larry Harrison reading from Glimpses of a Floating World
me reading SKIN BOOK
Daisy Anne Gree reading the Death and Birth of Johnny the Baptist

3 amazing musical acts

To The Moon
Jessie Grace
InLight

And a whole load of super booky, CD, merch stuff, a smattering of which you can see above

Banned Books

Many apologies. This is a pluggy thread. Apologies also for the fact it contains largely the same material as I posted on the Year Zero site yesterday. But I wanted to tell everyone because I'm excited. Actually I'm more than excited. On February 4th, at rough Trade Records, Brick Lane, London, 6-8.30pm, the Year Zero Live tour begins. Full details here on our website. There are so many reasons I'm excited I don't know where to start. So I'll start with the big news: Daisy Anne Gree's "Hearing Voices" event teaser is out, and here it is!

But before you watch it, I should explain the other big news, which is that only a few hours after we'd posted the video, Facebook had had it reported and were banning it from being posted any more. Why we can't quite tell. We think it may be because Daisy's voiceover touches on a suicide attempt. Sure, the first reaction is COOL! WE GOT BANNED! But the second reaction is what the hell kind of sick world do we live in where we get banned for being open about a mental health issue when Facebook allows all kinds of bilious groups to proliferate. Let's just say, it's given us blog material.

Anyway, make your own mind up - but be warned, I guess. If you like it, do tell other people to watch it. I think it's one of the coolest book trailers out there.

Hearing Voices (link to YouTube video)

That's the two of us reading, by the way. So we have a trailer. And we have one of the coolest tour posters on the planet, courtesy Sarah E Melville, based on the cover for Thirteen Shadows Waiting for Sunrise, the anthology we're touring.

We also have a confirmed second date: 23rd February at To Hell With Books in Woburn Place. And the Oxford event will be held during the Oxford Literary Festival - 20-28 March. And we have notice that Jenn is going to be reading in New York in February too!

So what can you expect if you come along to Rough Trade?

Well, the whole gig is FREE, for which you get:

5 writers

Penny Goring reading Bone Dust Disco

Marc Nash readnig Twin Topiary Tales

Larry Harrison reading from Glimpses of a Floating World

me reading SKIN BOOK

Daisy Anne Gree reading the Death and Birth of Johnny the Baptist

3 amazing musical acts

To The Moon

Jessie Grace

InLight

You'll also be able to buy a whole load of books and CDs and Year Zero merch, any and all of which we will sign.

Most of all, I'm excited because we get to perform together, and in a few cases meet each other for the first time!! And I'm hoping we'll get to meet some of you!

Dear Publisher

Thank you for sending me your contract for consideration. I am sure you will appreciate that talented authors receive many unsolicited contracts. Nonetheless, I am aware that a publisher like yourself relies upon discovering new talent in order to keep its lists fresh and win new readers, so I hope that you will not be too disappointed that in this case I am declining your kind offer. I wish you all the best in seeking exciting new talent elsewhere.

I understand that it is frustrating to receive a form rejection from an author, without any elaboration on specific areas to work on in your contract. I hope that the following general points may help you in your future submissions.

1. An author relies for their living upon a day job. They write, edit, and network in the evenings, at weekends, and in lunch hours and teabreaks. A publisher's advance, the largest incentive for an author to sign a contract, is not sufficient for them to give up their day job with any security.

2. Many talented, exciting authors write work that will not appeal to large readerships. Publishers need to sell large amounts of books. The result of this tension is that many of these authors will fail to recoup publishers' outlay within their first two books, and it will not be viable for publishers to keep them on board.

3. Without a publisher, a writer is under no such pressure, and will not be junked if their initial books "fail".

4. Should a writer achieve initial success wit ha publisher, they will be expected to produce similar works, and not explore or develop their talent.

5. Without a publisher there is no pressure to change for a writer the way they write in order to fit market needs.

6. Without a publisher there is the freedom to experiment, change genre at will, try, fail, try again, fail again, and devlop one's talent, voice, and potential to the full.

7. With a publisher a writer must concede control over cover design, the way their work is presented to the world.

8. The long cycle of the publishing industry means that the time from pen to audience inevitably freezes some of the initial energy and excitement of the creative process, leading to a less real and invigorating feedback process between writer and audience, and a less meaningful feedback loop.

9. With a publisher, a new writer loses editorial control. Not just total control of final cut, but control of which editor to use in the first place. An editor must have two qualities - the ability to be utterly ruthless; and absolute sympathy with an author's aims. An author needs to be free to select their own, trusted, editor.

10. Pricing - whilst unsigned, the author is free to set the price for all their books - and other merchandise. This includes setting the price at free should the author wish to do that with, for example, their ebooks. It also means the freedom to create and price specila and limited editions of their work.

In conclusion, I am afraid that an author must consider not just their short-term but their long-term future. And whilst I am sure that your kind offer, were I to accept it, would put me in a financially more advantageous position one year from now, and possibly three years from now, compared to that if I reject it; I am afraid that the models I have run show that in five, ten, and twenty years - that is, over the course of my career - there is no financial advantage, and in many models financial disadvantage, in my accepting.

I wish you every success in your future publishing career.

Countdown: 2 weeks till SKIN BOOK goes on sale

You may have been following my latest project, SKIN BOOK, over at Year Zero. Probably you haven't been :) Anyway, you can read it all for free over there, but if you want a little something in your hands, complete with artwork and design by the amazing Sarah E Melville, there's only two weeks to wait.

The hard copy of SKIN BOOK will not be a standard paperback - that just wouldn't fit the book. It will consist of 8 double-sided high quality cards, of A6 (5.5" x 4.5") size, punched and threaded on a bootlace - like a lanyard programme you'd get at a festival - only bootlaces go with the feel better than lanyards. Price will be under £5 + postage if you order online, or less postage if you buy direct from our live gigs - such as the event at Rough Trade Records, Brick Lane on Feb 4th at 6pm.

SKIN BOOK is a prose poem, first performed in full at Free-e-day live on December 1st. It tells the story of a woman, never touched by another living human, who writes her lonely memories in her SKIN BOOK, her diary made of human skin. And her love for a man who spends his days stalking strangers on the subway, women he can never touch.

Above, you can see Sarah's amazing cover. Which you can have hand tinted in red or not according to taste (but no extra expense). Below you'll see chapter 1. There are also three exclusive, full-page art pieces by Sarah. I hope it's the kind of collectors' edition that you'll consider worth spenidng a fiver on.

The View from the Shoe: Sheena Says

I met Sheena Ignatia on Authonomy, but she is a prolific tweeter, in the guises of @jeannealogy and now @sheenasaysstuff. She is the author of Jeannealogy, a hilarious series of multimedia love-hate letters/journals from her to her mother-in-law. You can find her at www.SheenSays.blog.co.uk and www.jeannealogy.webs.com.

So, in her own words:

· Thank you so much for your time. So, Louboutin or Converse?
I had to google Louboutin. I’ve never heard of it, I thought it might have been cheese. I like cheese. So Converse, or maybe adidas two-stripe, or whatever I find on the floor at the Primark sale. Don’t think I would go for adidas four stripe though.

· What do you do?
I created a new social science called Jeannealogy. It’s the study of Jeanne, my mother in law. She is one big sack of crazy, so I tell people what she does, on the internet. And I am quite rude about her and I post pictures of the awful free gifts that she sends us from the catalogue. I got a real treat for Christmas!

· Why is there no one in the world who does it quite like you?
Lots of people tell me horror stories about their in laws, but I have yet to come across anyone who has an in law who checks the frozen aisle at Tesco’s for eye of newt and toe of frog, like Jeanne does.

· What do you really, really love about it?
I normally start to write when I am angry, I have been furious at times. Then, when I reach the end of a Jeanne blog entry, I am laughing my socks off. Yes I know it’s bad to laugh at your own jokes, but I can’t help it. Besides Banana The Poet says it’s okay to laugh at your own jokes… if you haven’t heard them before!

· A bit more time in the day, or a bit more money in the bank?
More money, lots and lots of money. Enough money to emigrate, far, far away from Jeanne.

· Imagine you “make it”. You wake up, and imagine the day ahead. Tell us about breakfast.
I love Spain, so desayunos would be at the Guinness Bar in Benidorm. Toast and butter and maramalade and a camomile tea. Although last time I had that for breakfast there, the toast tasted a bit like sausages. Weird.

· What’s your Jimmy Choo?
And what’s just cobblers? Nothing in life is more satisfying than spotting a £2 flight on a budget airline site, booking it and getting the email confirmation. I know, I know… carbon footprints- but I can’t help it. I love sunshine! What’s just cobblers? Well, there are rumours our local chippy is trying pass off cobbler as cod. I don’t mind though, if sausage infused toast with marmalade doesn’t bother me, then I am hardly going to be upset about fish.

· Tell us about the last time a fan made you feel 100 feet tall.
My brother’s friend, Ste, who famously reads only bus timetables and football programmes couldn’t wait to get home from work to read the rest of my blog. He was so engrossed, it even prevented him from logging onto his favourite pornography sites. Allegedly.

· Independent and poor, or under contract and rich?
Independent and rich! I’d still book budget flights though!

· Do you remember that bit on Play Away where Brian Cant stood behind people and did the actions whilst they spoke? If you could choose anyone to stand behind you and do the actions to your sales pitch, who would it be and why?
Napoleon Dymamite. Why? Have you seen Napoleon Dynamite? Wouldn’t he be great at that?

· Frocks or socks?
Socks are a bit of a sore point at the moment, I bought 3 pairs of purple socks from the pound shop. Wore them for one day and they kind of disintegrated, all of the cotton seemed to disappear and I was left with the mesh skeleton of the socks. It looked like I had trimmed a bit of net curtain off, and wrapped it around my feet. So, frocks. Definitely frocks.

Thanks ever so much for asking me Dan

Muse, don't look at me like that!

Beatrice, Edie Sedgewick, the Dark Lady. Nine of them who flounced around Mount Helicon. Not to mention a great guitar band. Artists and writers frequently talk about their muses. The person - or, indeed, object, or place (Woody Allen's New York, for example) - who not only stirs something creative insode them, but makes that creativity come gushing out in golden form - transforms it as it touches the page into greatness.

But is there a darker side to the muse? In one sense, there very obvioulsy is, and it goes back to Platonism and the worship and objectifictaion of the spiritual. The muse is placed on a pedestal, worshipped, and, as a result, denied genuine reality - museishness is to blame for a lot of our less beneficial conceptions of women, for example.

But I mean another dark side - for the artist or writer or musician.

For me, the idea of a muse is rather terrifying. I imagine my muse, if I had one, staring at me - taunting or sneering - "You dare to call THAT worthy of me?" she harumphs, turning her back and leaving me staring at a blank page.

The point I want to make is this. there is a very fine line between inspiration and intimidation. Between the object of beauty who touches you and opens a creative spring and an ethereal form that's just "out of your league" - that you could never do justice, so you end up snivelling in self-pity, and struck down by block, like an opera composer waiting a lifetime till they're ready to produce a piece for the voice of their generation.

When you're a teenager you're desperate for a muse. A boy or girl in the class above, possibly a friend of your brother or sister - someone to bring out the Byronic in you. And when you find them, you aften will write a great torrent of, er, romantic twaddle, in your efforst to impress. Later you will look back ashamedly, and every time you write FOR someone or thing you will possibly be struck with fear of doing a similar hatchet job. Add in a mix of idealisation and you have a recipe for paralysis - we can, after all, never give a sacrifice worthy of the gods.

For me it's not people who act as intimidating muses - it's notebooks. I imagine if I have a beautiful hand-boundleather journal I will write something worthy of it. But I can never find a sentence good enough and so I sit and stare, and anything any good I DO write by hand is always in a skanky notebook I bought in bulk from a Polish supermarket.

Yet we feel instinctively that art is about eros, about love, about, in short, muses. So how do we avoid paralysis and create something decent as the result of having a muse?

The answer's simple: forget about doing justice TO your subject; forget about writing something FOR someone. Instead, this is a time when a writer/artist needs to be introspective. What is it your subject/muse inspires in YOU? Look within, and describe the fire, the turmoil and the raging passion you find there. Considerations of worthiness go out of the window - the muse will enter only as a marginal character, a penumbra for the piece, but unmistakably present in the form of those qualities that inspire those particular thoughts. This way you will ACTUALLY do justice to them - not as idealised object but as active subject stirring your passions. And you will connect with your audience, will enable them not just to admire but to feel as you feel.