You get ZERO for FREE

All three of the first Year Zero Writers novels - Benny Platonov, Glimpses of a Floating World, and Songs from the Other Side of the Wall - are now available as ebooks for free.

I want to take a moment to explain why. Inevitably this will mean rehashing some arguments I've made on this blog, and on others. So if you've heard it all before, please bear with me. Because I want to give a list of reasons and starting points for conversation, I won't be going into too much detail. Not because there isn't any, but because that would make the post way too long.

So, why decide to make our work free? (In electronic format - you can, of course, still buy the paperbacks) Of cousre, these reasons don't just apply to us - go forth and make your books free.

Here's my Free Manifesto:


1. People want content to be free. They expect content to be free. As hardware tech advances and people fall in love with it, the hunger for free content grows. I'm going to call this phenomenon FREED. And FREED IS GOOD. It's a wave the new writer can ride.

2. For a new writer, the choice isn't between giving your book away and having people pay for it. It's between giving your book away (and maybe getting some readers), and having no one read your book. Why should someone pay money for a book by someone they don't know? The answer is they won't. Let them get to know you.

3. File-sharing is a fact of life. Embrace it as a way to get your book read. Make it easy for people to do. It's NOT true they'll file share YOUR book anyway if you protect it. More's the pity. They won't. They'll ignore it and file-share Dan Brown/Stephanie Meyer instead.

4. Free does not devalue something. The value of culture isn't in what you pay for it. More importantly, it's not even PERCEIVED to be in what you pay for it. What we value most is what we have a personla and emotional connection to. If you're an author, it's THAT you should be trying to reproduce and not a sense fo "having paid for something". That's what I mean when I encourage writers 1. to engage their readers and 2. to try and recreate the festival spirit. Soem people call it "adding value". Yes, increased money is a result, but that's not the aim - the aim is to "add attachment".

5. Freemium goes with 1,000 true fans like hand in a tight, sheer, silky glove. Jargon apologies. Freemium is the term coined, I believe, by Chris "Long Tail" Anderson to describe the business model by which you give something away for free in one format, with the intention of selling it n another (paperbacks etc).1,000 true fans is Kevin Kelly's idea that to make a living from your creativity you only actually need 1,000 true fans who will pay for your work. Clearly these two ideas marry up nicely. If you give your work away for free, not everyone who takes it will aslo pay. But you don't need them to. If you've got a great product, and back it up with direct engagement with your readers through your blog, book tours, other events, you will build a following of true fans who WILL pay - for the paperback - and more.

6. Free helps us sever the link once and for all between culture and money. At a time when increasing internet access starts to outstrip access to banking, this is, on a global social level, essential. As creatives from all over the world acn put their work out there, and consumers seek to remunerate them, if we rely on the old equation of value and money, the only model available will be to go through third party conversion agents. We will see the developing world's creativity raped for profit in the exact same way as happened to its natural resources centuries ago. We need a new way fo turning the desire to reward into benefit for the producer; and whilst money plays part of that role, it can't be the only part.

7. The big one (and the one most likely to change in coming years) is timing. I won't claim ebooks are THE future. I don't think they are. Not in their current form (the future is intelligent paper). BUT they are about to undergo a mini explosion. As are sites where readers find and promote content they love. The effect of that is simple - if your material's out there now, as the medium grows, the effect of your presence early in the game will be multiplied. I've paid serious attention to the Indie ebook market for about 3 weeks. And I can already tell you who the "players" are, and there aren't many. The chances of great content being discovered and creating a buzz is still high. BUT ONLY IF IT'S THERE and ONLY IF IT'S FREE. And out of that soup, a whole new landscape will emerge. As with satellite TV and internet provision, it's at the start of the tipping point that it's most important to focus solely on market share. And that's where we are now. Now is the time to stake your claim.

Hold Me to Account: The Success or Failure of a self-publishing collective Part 1

Today is official launch day for YEAR ZERO WRITERS. Three of our books are now available to download, and to buy in print. I'm not going to promote them here, but I will explain how I intend to monitor the progress of my book through this blog so that other writers can see what works and what doesn't work for self-publishers.

I have always said that I want to be transparent throughout the self-publishing process. I believe it's possible to succeed as a self-publisher with books like Songs from the Other Side of the Wall, especially as part of a group like Year Zero Writers. As part of this, I want to be up front about what I hope to achieve, when, and whether I am making that progress. So every month I will report on what has happened in the preceding month and what I expect to happen in the month ahead.

I will begin with an outline of my expectations for Year One - September 2009-August 2010.

Paperback sales target: 500 achieved through a mix: 100 sold through personal signings; 100 sold through bookshops; 300 sold online

Free download target: 5000

Anticipated pattern of sales: an initial spike in September largely to family and friends, and through signings at local bookshops. Sales will be driven largely by reviews online and in the mainstream media, so the marketing priority is to get the book read and reviewed. A review slot on the site e-Fiction Book Club in January is expected to spike sales, but efforts will focus on getting reviews on sites where readers of the book congregate such as Suicide Girls, NME, and Indie/emo culture mags. The main sales flow will start when the ISBN comes through and the book is available, and able to be reviewed, through Amazon. I expect this to be sometime in October.

September forecast: downloads: 150 paperback sales: 30

activity: I am hopeful of a report in the local press, which I hope to lead to a review, but this will not come until October. Local bookstores will get author-signed copies. I anticipate slow but steady sales, whcih I hope to convert to a number of full-scale presentations and signings in November, to coincide with the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is the month where sales will be largely friends and family, and the emphasis is on getting people to read the free download and report good word of mouth to their friends.

How I will report

It would be easy to double account my Lulu sales - to show them as online orders when I order copies for direct sale, and then report the direct sales. I will not do this. Instead, I will report on the following headings:

online sales (only those purchased online by other people)

direct sales copies ordered (the number of books I've ordered to distribute myself)

direct sales (sales by me at signings, conferences, festivals & to colleagues/friends/family)

direct distribution sales (copies ordered online from me - I will be offering free posters from October to people ordering in this way)

bookshop sales

Advance figures

The book has been available as a free download for a month. Figures so far are:

downloaded from Smashwords: 68

downloaded from Year Zero Writers: 6

downloaded from my website: 12

direct e-mail requests from strangers: 4

Total downloads: 90

Year Zero is here: So What?

Next Tuesday, the first three books from the Year Zero Writers collective will hit the world with a vengeance. The three of us writers are obviously excited - we finally get to see if anyone's interested in our books. The other 19 members of Year Zero Writers are pretty excited. If we do well, then they're next. And there are a few writers sitting on the periphery thinking about whether to join us or not (and a couple I'm desperately hoping to persuade to join in). They'll be watching with more than passing interest.

But does what we're doing actually matter to anyone else, and why? Well, we're not the first people to self-publish, and we're not the first people to have formed a collective, so I suppose you could say we join the miasma of projects deemed interesting if they poke their noses above the parapets but not until then.

So let me try and explain, in the course of a couple of hundred words, why you should care about whether we succeed or fail.

Writers

The simple reason why our success or failure matters to writers is this: you can learn from what we do right - and what we do wrong. We have set out a clear manifesto, and a clear set of conditions explaining what we are and are not. We are committed to trying a wide range of strategies to promote our work (we are a marketing collective, not a publishing collective). We set out with a clear expectation of what we would like to achieve.

And we intend to report back openly on what works, and what doesn't work. On September 1st, I will issue a projection for my own book, Songs from the Other Side of the Wall, and on the first of every month thereafter I will issue an interim report explaining what's happened over the preceding month, giving figures for sales and downloads, and providing a commentary and analysis.

Perhaps most important of all, if our works gain the commercial and critical success we believe they deserve, we may do something to break down the barriers that exist amongst the gatekeepers of the book world - the reviewers. And tehnext tmie they are approached with a self-published book, they might look before saying no. That matters to all writers, self-published or not (because if we can do it, we will raise the question in many writers' minds: why do we need a publisher?).

Readers

What we're doing matter to readers deeply for a number of reasons - and these are the real reasons we set up the collective.

1. We're new authors, writing quality literary fiction. These are books you will not find through mainstream publishers, because they are simply not a viable commercial proposition. I prposed one way the industry could make them viable last week. E-BOOK ONLY CONTRACTS FOR NEW WRITERS. Whether the industry adopts this model remains to be seen. As it stands, there is no room for books like ours, and no room for talent to be nurtured without pressure for sales. Books like ours would be lost without collectives like this.

2. We are NOT self-publishing because our books aren't good enough for the mainstream. We want our books to look and feel like something you would be proud to pick up in a bookstore. Well-designed, and free of the vast quantities of typos that dog many self-published books. We are self-publishing because that's the only way to get our books into print and into your hands. An agent told me, after reading Songs... that she loved the book, and would love to represent me, but it just wasn't enough of a "big splash" book for a new writer. We don't want to write "big splash" books. we want to write quality, gentle, beautiful, challenging, original books, and we believe readers want to have the option of reading them. If we succeed, then we will have proved to readers they don't have to go to Waterstone's or teh Booker longlist the next time they want a quality read.

3. We fundamentally believe in giving our work away in electronic format for free. We believe it makes business sense, because we will gain fans who will pay for our books. And we believe it gives readers the opportunity to read and decide without having to commit their money to somthing they have no idea about. We took the decision to produce an anthology of writing by 13 of our members, Brief Objects of Beauty and despair, which is, and always will be, free. I am releasing the whole of my novel for free. We've met a lot of resistance to the idea from people who say it devalues culture, and that free means rubbish, but we believe the chance to sample new writers' work for free is fundamental to giving readers choice.

The wider public

There's a bigger reason why our success or failure matters. I've blogged about culture and social exclusion before. Of course we're not going to change the world, and of course our success or failure won't see the perpetuation or the end of vast sectors of our population having their voices silenced by the culture industry. But every time something outside of the mainstream succeeds - in showing that it has a voice worthy of being heard; a product for whihc people are prepared to pay; means of getting the message out there that are not in themselves exclusive - the general assumption that culture is to be found only through recognised channels is undermined a little more. And it becomes a little easier for the next voices who come along to be heard.

So now it's up to you. We launch on Tuesday. I'll put my money where my mouth is with some predictions - and give you a little intro to each book. If you can't wait, you can buy them now:

Songs from the Other Side of the Wall (£7.98)

Glimpses of a Floating World (£8.38)

Benny Platonov (£15.27)

Or if you want to read them over the bank holiday, you can download them in all e-book formats:

Songs from the Other Side of the Wall (FREE)
Glimpses of a Floating World (£3)
Benny Platonov (£4.98)