I'm on Kindle and I have a new book

As many of you will know, I'm currently on a break from the internet. After 18 months on the go with Year Zero and eight cuts gallery, I finally burned myself out pretty much completely, as well as losing all sense of my own worth as a writer. Add to that mix not one but two particularly nasty bugs (no doubt caused by an immune system dramatically lowered by stress). I hope to be back and in the swing of things mid March.



But I haven't been totally inactive, and as I claw my way back into things I wanted to share two pieces about my own writing, because as I've had a chance to look through it away from the relentless melting pot of the internet I've realised there is some merit to it. In fact, Songs from the Other Side of the Wall is a book I'm rather proud of.


I just wanted to let people know that it's now available for Kindle at just 70p
the link to Songs on Kindle is here!
and of course I would dearly dearly love it if people who thought they would like it bought it. I'd also really really love it if those of you who have enjoyed it were to leave a review - I've had some lovely reviews over the past 18 months, but all of them before it has been available for Kindle. I've decided it's time to relaunch my own writing career as well as the other things I do, so this is sort of an official relaunch for Songs. So if anyone has any space on their blogs for a gentle literary read...


For those of you who don't know anything about it, here's a little something blurbwise:


After her mother walks out and returns to England when she’s just a week old, Szandi grows up on the vineyard in Hungary that has been in her family for 300 years. Now 18, Szandi is part of Budapest’s cosmopolitan art scene, sharing a flat and a bohemian lifestyle with her lover and fellow sculptress, Yang. She has finally found her place in the world. When she discovers that her father has only weeks to live, Szandi must choose once and for all: between the past and the present; between East and West; between her family and her lover.
Songs from the Other Side of the Wall is a coming of age story for all who love Murakami's Norwegian Wood that inhabits anti-capitalist chatrooms and ancient wine cellars, seedy bars and dreaming spires; and takes us on a remarkable journey across Europe and cyberspace in the company of rock stars and dropouts, diaries that appear from nowhere, a telepathic fashion mogul, and the talking statue of a bull.


And here are some reviews:
“captures the rhythms and nuances of how we live now in a way that has rarely been done better” LA Books Examiner (read full review)
“Holloway’s accomplishment is in rendering a world in exquisite detail and still conveying the universal via the personal.” Emprise Review (read full review)
“a lovely book written in that rare thing: beautiful, lyrical prose.” Jane Smith, The Self-Publishing Review (read full review)
“Songs From the Other Side of the Wall is a *very* good book” Erica Friedman, Yurikon publishing (read full review)
“genuine promise”, Scott Pack, Harper Collins Fifth Estate/The Friday Project (read full review)
“In threads that shimmer like the novel’s central image of petrol-colored silk, what could have been weaves itself into every situation.” Pank (read full review)



Which brings me to the other news. The reason my blog has the name it does has to do with a book I began writing 2 years ago. And now, finally, The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes is complete. It will be available on Kindle from March 10th. For those who don't already know, here is the blurb:


When mysterious Polish woman Agnieszka Iwanowa's tragi-comic death in a gym accident is uploaded to YouTube, the film's final image of her upturned trainers is rehashed by everyone from right wing extremists to a reclusive installation artist who only speaks through his dominatrix PA.


Now Dan Griffiths has to make the image fresh.Dan's search for the reasons behind the picture's magnetic pull suck him into the worlds of political extremism; BDSM; a haiku-composing graffiti artist; an online community devoted to the dead girl, and its reclusive Japanese schoolboy moderator who has just paid half a million dollars for the diary of a scientist whose work he believes will enable him to bring Agnieszka back from the dead.


And as the search for Agnieszka's secret slowly overtakes the search for his own daughter, missing for ten years, ignored by the media, and now sending him - and the reader - glimpses of messages from what seems like another world, he is confronted by the question - why are some images impossible to look away from, whilst others fade without ever being seen?

A story about a world gone numb, in which pain is the only thing that's real

A Matter of Taste

This year I decided to enter my novel, Songs from the Other Side of the Wall, for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards, which is one of the biggest prizes there is for unpublished and self-published authors. I made it to the second round but no further. Progress form the second round was dependent on reviews from Amazon's "Expert Reviewers". These reviewers were given the first 3-5,000 words of each book - the first two chapters in my case (you can read the whole book for free here to give you an idea what they were judging). It should be noted that they were not given the book's "pitch" (what you'd see on the back cover, or its genre. That may be evident.

A few months ago my wife receioved a hilarious circular e-mail telling the same story from two different sides and showing what a difference perspective plays in how we see things.

I decided to post the reviews here because they show a very similar thing about books.

I will not comment here on the reviews themselves. You are free to, and I will certainly join in once conversation has begun.

ABNA Expert Reviewer 1

What is the strongest aspect of this excerpt?

I was very intrigued by the title of this excerpt, which may also interest other potential readers as well (though I was unable to determine what relation the title had to the story).

What aspect needs the most work?

Without seeing more of the work than this excerpt, I am not sure that the date at the start of the first chapter (December 12, 2007) has much relation to the story. The second chapter does not start with a different date. There is quite a bit of vulgar language that seems to have no other purpose than to shock the reader. This language could be eliminated or replaced with something not as vulgar without detracting from the story.

What is your overall opinion of this excerpt?

After reading this excerpt, I cannot identify the central conflict. I am not sure who the target audience is (age and gender) or what other authors' works this target audience may enjoy. It seems as though the author may not have clearly identified this either.

ABNA Expert Reviewer 2

What is the strongest aspect of this excerpt?

The quality of writing is very consistently very good and the work is finished and polished. The characters we meet are interesting and even in this short excerpt are fleshed out enough to seem like real (if atypical) people. Choice of words and phrases are original without seeming contrived or awkward as is so often the case. The story promises to be a little edgy without being at all crass. It is fresh and contemporary. There are some truly brilliant parts, for example, when Szandi describes the route to Yang's studio or Yang's handwriting or is entranced by her eyes, the description of their lovemaking or her flashback about her Mum.

What aspect needs the most work?

I am unable to identify any major flaws in this excerpt. One minor issue is that as far as I can tell, Ilke never tells Szandi her name when they meet yet Szandi knows it.

These certainly aren't flaws, just some thoughts while I was reading:

It took me a heck of a long time to figure out that Szandi was female on the first reading.
There are some Briticisms that may or may not be intended.
What's up with Claire?
Szandi is quite mature for a 17 year old.
There are a lot of little threads started in the beginning of the novel, such as the letter about Szandi's father.

What is your overall opinion of this excerpt?

Judging from this excerpt, there is no doubt that the manuscript should advance in judging so that it can be evaluated in its entirety. It is difficult to say exactly where the plot is going from the short excerpt but there is more than enough enough interest and originality in the characters and opening action to hook the reader. It is likely that the main character doesn't really know where her life is going, either. I certainly hope that I have the opportunity to read the entire novel in the future.

Newsflashes

Gosh, what a busy time it's been, hence teh humungous apologies for the lack of posting. I hope to make up for it now, with some meaty posts coming up on subjects like censorship and confessional literature. But first some updates!

BUYING MY BOOKS!
Has never been easier! I've compiledd a handy guide to where you can buy the physical copies of my two books - either online or from bookshops

SONGS FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WALL
bookstores:
The Albion Beatnik, Walton St,Oxford, UK
Rough Trade East, 91 Brick Lane, London, E1 UK
Camden Lock Books, Old Street Station, London, UK
Jaffe & Neale, Chipping Norton, UK

online:
Lulu
Rough Trade

SKIN BOOK
bookstores:
Rough Trade East, 91 Brick Lane, London, E1 UK

online:
Rough Trade

Not forgetting FREE DOWNLOADS
Songs From the Other Side of the Wall
SKIN BOOK

And from next week To Hell With Books at 10 Woburn Walk in Bloomsbury will be added to that list.

GIGS!
On Feb 4th Year Zero had an amazing gig at Rough Trade East on Brick Lane, with music from the fab InLight, Jessie Grace and To The Moon

And on 23rd Feb YEAR ZERO UNPLUGGED AT TO HELL WITH BOOKS will be our most daring gig yet

To Hell With Books is the bookstore part of To Hell With Publishing, one of the most exciting outfits in literature. Specialising in special editions, poetry, art, zines, and the uber-literary, they are a publishing press we actually love – and that’s like being a beloved carpaccio at a vegan dinner.I even blogged about them.

It’s an intimate setting, and a timetable without constraints, so to do our hosts justice, we’ve put together the following feast of unplugged delights for you. Come, listen, buy:

Dan and Daisy dueting Daisy Anne Gree’s Conversation in a Basement on 17th and Mission, in 1998
Penny Goring reading Bone Dust Disco
Daisy Anne Gree
Dan Holloway performing a world premiere of FREAKSHOW
Marc Nash performing “Non-Smoker” & “Meathook Carousel” from “A,B&E” plus “Mother-Daughter Coagulate”
Larry Harrison
Readings from Ali Cooper’s forthcoming The Girl on the Swing
PLUS: An acoustic set from the brilliant blues singer-songwriter Jessie Grace

MAILING LIST!
Year Zero has a mailing list!

We have no desire to spam you. On the other hand, we realise things can get lost in the blog, and we do like to give you freebies. So, from April 2nd, we will be sending out a monthly newsletter that will contain:

- what we’re up to in the following month – readings, publications, all sorts
- what was posted the previous month, with excerpts
- what we’ve been up to – reviews, write-ups of events, links to videos etc. - where to get hold of our books – in the real world, online, and as free downloads
highlights from our personal blogs

We will probably run a full e-newsletter every other month, with a digest one in the intervening months, depending upon our time – and yours. We may even run some writing comps.
To subscribe, simply e-mail yearzeromaillist@googlemail.com and put “subscribe” in the subject line

We will ONLY send you the monthly newsletter unless you initiate correspondence. We will NEVER divulge or shgare your e-mail address (even with ourselves, as it were – so if you sign up for newsletters from Year Zero you won’t suddenly find yourself on Marc or Dan’s private mailing list). All information will be handled in accordance with the 1998 UK Data Protection Act. You may unsubscribe at any time simply by e-mailing the above address with “unsubscribe” in the subject line.

Some writing by Year Zero Writers may be unsuitable for minors – by subscribing to our newsletter you are affirming that you are of a suitable age to access such material. Year Zero Writers will not be responsible, jointly or severally, if this is not the case.

Book Launch!

(all photos courtesy and copyright of Janelle McCarty)

I’m always saying that being a writer is about engaging with readers, about getting out and talking to them directly. Which si very easy to do from the safety of one’s keyboard. But last Thursday, it was finally time to put my money where my mouth was, and find out if I felt the same way when I actually had to do some direct conversing with readers. It was time for my book launch.

I’d chosen to hold the launch for Songs from the Other Side of the Wall at The Albion Beatnik bookstore in Oxford for several reasons. First, the owner, Dennis, had agreed to stock my book. Second, it’s the coolest bookstore I’ve ever been in, with its specialities of books on jazz music and the Beat Poets. And third, it’s a perfect venue for hosting not just reading but music.

Because, finding it oh so easy from cyber-safety to say how I didn’t want this to be like any other book launch; I didn’t want a table and some chapters read aloud to polite listeners who’d applaud and maybe buy a signed copy afterwards; I had decided I wanted a gig. A proper gig with live music. Because that’s what my book is about (well, literally, it IS about musicJ); and because that’s what Year Zero is about – giving our readers a great time.

I was very lucky that local singer-songwriter sensation Jessie Grace, whom I’d first heard at Radiohead’s old haunt The Jericho Tavern, said yes, she would play a set from her new album, Asleep on the Good Foot. Throw in some free Tokaji wine (the book is set on a Tokaji vineyard) and I was genuinely excited. When I went into the shop the day before the gig only to find a young guy chopping up Shirley Bassey records to make art, I knew I was in the right place!

Add to all that the fact that Jessie’s producer, Kevin from Selecta Sound, had swung us a 9-strong film crew from Worcester University, and I was in hopping up and down with excitement media tart heaven with anticipation.

It’s hard to figure out what to say about the event itself. It’s not really good form to talk endlessly about yourself, so I’m not going to do a review of the gig. Although I WILL say that Jessie Grace, with her clean, pure voice and dirty guitar, elevated the music part of the evening way beyond anything I could have hoped for.

So what will I talk about? I don’t know. Whether it lived up to my expectations, or whether I decided to shut up and stick behind the keyboard for one. What it was like meeting up with some fellow Year Zero Writers and the lovely Bee Drunken for two. How it felt seeing my boss walk through the door just as I was getting to the juicy bit of a sex scene? Maybe not.

The day itself felt like I’d set up an Authorworld theme park ride. I went from buzz to despair to being physically ill to control-freakery to having, ultimately, the time of my life. I decided went I chose the venue and asked Jessie to play that I didn’t want to play safe. And that had always seemed like the right thing. At Year Zero, after all, we don’t do safe. We do different and exciting and out there for the audience. Come the morning, however, the decision to augment my readings from the book with an impromptu talk about French cinema (I still haven’t quite figured that one out), and a reading of the first three parts of SKIN BOOK, seemed like a Very Bad Idea. Not just because, frankly, saying “Is it wrong to want your snot-piss-shit-come-vomit on my skin?” in front of work colleagues is embarrassing/apt to get you fired. But because SKIN BOOK is my attempt to reach into the darkest parts of the psyche, and to do it justice I was going to have to lay myself absolutely bare. It took several twitter-buddies more effort than I had any right to expect to tweet me up from the depths.

By the time I arrived, though, a can or two of Relentless later (because everyone knows caffeine’s great for anxiety), all I was thinking about was making sure the performance was as good as I could get it. That meant laying the venue out perfectly, sorting out glasses and wine, and laying out the souvenir programmes. Best of all, though (for me, not for them), having three cameras, with an editing suite in the basement meant I had enough to focus on getting my positioning and delivery right that I didn’t have time for nerves. And all the while Dennis, whose shop had been utterly overrun all day by swarms of camera crew and sound people, was an utter saint, if a very bewildered and despairing-looking one.

One of the great things about the evening was I got to meet some of my favourite people from the web. I’d already met Anne Lyken-Garner (pictured, left, in the purple) but it was a delight to meet her again. I got to meet another Year Zero Writer, Penny Goring, who was lovely, ferociously intelligent, and an utterly electric personality – one of those people who has the kind of presence that can make a whole room go quiet. And the author of the Bee Drunken blog, whom I interviewed a few weeks ago for The View From the Shoe, came along and added her wit and charm to proceedings.

And the performance? Jessie was incredible. Me? I’d better let others answer that, but I CAN say that I am very glad not to have been found out in a lie – reading live to an audience is the most exciting thing an author can do – it’s what storytelling is all about. I loved every second of it, and can’t wait for the next one (December 1st, Café Tarifa, Oxford, as part of Free-e-day, before a big gig in London). I would advise every writer out there to get out and read!

Eastern European Blockbuster Auction

Herta Muller has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Eastern Europe is now HOT. Especially quality literary fiction about Eastern Europe.





So for one week only I am officially selling out and offering publishers the chance to bid for the hottest literary novel set in Eastern Europe that's currently unsigned, Songs from the Other Side of the Wall.

If you wish to check the quality of the novel, you may download it in full from here.

TO PUBLISHERS: e-mail me BY 12 NOON GMT THURSDAY OCTOBER 15 2009 at songsfromtheothersideofthewall@googlemail.com with the subject title "interest in Songs", and state your interest or your offer. I will open all e-mails with that title only when the auction has closed.

TO EVERYONE: If you would like to see Songs from the Other Side of the Wall cash in on the new craze for all literature anout Eastern Europe, leave a comment here; tweet this page to publishers; stumble this page; digg this page, and otherwise bring this opportunity to publishers' attention.



ABOUT THE BOOK:

The day the Berlin Wall came down, Jennifer returned to England, abandoning her week-old daughter, Szandi, to grow up on a Hungarian vineyard with 300 years of history. Now 18, Szandi is part of Budapest’s cosmopolitan art scene, sharing a flat and a bohemian lifestyle with her lover and fellow sculptress, Yang. She has finally found her place in the world. Then a letter arrives that threatens everything, and forces her to choose once and for all: between the past and the present; between East and West; between her family and her lover.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:
Songs from the Other Side of the Wall was a number 1 book in 2008 on both Authonomy and Youwriteon.

Scott Pack of The Friday Project said last weekend "Some moments of genuine promise in this debut novel suggest that Holloway could have a future outside of the world of peer review sites and print on demand"

US blogger DJ Young said two days ago: "Like Sputnik Sweetheart, Holloway’s prose gives shape to his characters and delivers us to a time and place, from the end of the Cold War in east Europe to the dead-end enclosures of modern Oxford, the world inside and out, the interior mechanisms and escapements that tick and tock, leading to the next hour or the next half-empty station. Songs, in a sense, reads like the inner life of 21st century bloggers and artists piecing together whatever has been left behind by the last generation.

"Like K in Sputnik, Sandrine is searching for something frustratingly vague and all the clues left behind only bring her to a kind of self-knowledge, though not the kind she was seeking. Interconnectedness is another theme of Songs, so, unlike Sputnik, we are given a narrative resolve to Sandrine’s journey, one that takes up the loose ends of these relationships – parent and child, lover and other and the wanting nature of love – and sets them adrift, free."

Random House, critiquing the book for Youwriteon, said: “Your voice is very fresh and original…Sandrine is an engaging, intriguing narrator…Your writing is extremely good, very lyrical but always with the aim of moving the story on.”

Harper Collins, critiquing the book for Authonomy, said: “An artful style, with some very striking moments…The parallelism of a person and a country coming of age; the past’s haunting of the present in both; the hopes and fears of different generations: all these are rich veins that you exploit well, and provide a fascinating core to the book”

SO WHAT NEXT?
I am a self-publisher. I am a happy self-publisher. But for one week I will, with respect to my own work, but whilst carrying on blowing the trumpet for my fellow Year Zero Writers, forget that. FOR ONE WEEK. And then it will be too late. Any cashing in to be done on Mueller's success will be done by me, and by Year Zero, and us alone.

THE AUCTION STARTS NOW

Hold me to account: Month one accounts of a self-publisher

OK, time for the first month’s report. This was always going to be the most exciting one, because the first always is. So let’s see first what it says; second what happened this month; and third what that means.

So,

1. The stats

Downloads

Smashwords:
(I’m going to break these down day by day because they tell a tale:
3,9,5,17,14,11,8,14,10,10,11,6,15,12,64,25,19,64,14,12,50,25,20,18,22,8,13,9, 14

My website: 2

Year Zero Website: 1

e-mail requests:

Scribd: 9

Total 544

Books:

Direct from Lulu: 3

My orders from Lulu: 25

Sold through bookshops: 1

Direct sold by me: 5

Ordered online from me: 1

2. The calendar (what I’ve done, where I got a mention)

Sep 1 – Farm Lane Books gave me a mention and announced she’d bought a copy from Lulu
Both Jaffe and Neale in Chipping Norton and Albion Beatnik in Oxford agree to stock the book
Sep 2 – One in Four magazine are going to run an ad for Year Zero
Emprise magazine offer to do an interview about Year Zero
Sep 4 Barnes & Noble deal announced by Smashwords
Sep 9 into stock at Albion Beatnik, and a date (29 October) fixed for a reading
Sep 10 3 copies sold to conference participants
Sep 14 invited to guest blog on the Aspiring Mangaka and Writers Club website (and the book will be featured there on 6 October)
Sep 16 listing on Finding Free e-fiction
Sep 21 e-mails form two media figures interested in review copies (names omitted until reviews published, if published)
Camden Lock Books, in Old St Station, stocks the book
Sep 22 ebooks Just Published lists the book
I take part in Operation ebook drop
Benny Platonov is offered free, meaning all 3 Year Zero titles are free ebooks, and we can begin presenting a unified platform
Sep 27 My college alumni office offer me a promotional opportunity (more if/when it happens)
Sep 28 Smashwords is down for about 12 hours
Sep 29 I receive requests to guest blog on 2 writing sites about Year Zero
Smashwords announces a deal with Sony.


3. Analysis

Downloads: The smashwords stats tell some interesting stories. I didn’t think there would be such apparently obvious correlations between downloads and events, but there are. Viz:
- The figures jumped from single figures (before Sep they were also 3-10 in general) to regular double figures ON THE DAY the deal to list with Barnes & Noble went live
- Listings on the web fiction guide and novels online did not meaningfully affect figures (it seems). The listings on Finding Free Efiction and Ebooks Just Published most definitely did – AND had a residual effect.
- When smashwords went down for most of the day, there was – unsurprisingly – a big effect on downloads

Books: These are lower than predicted. I can offer the following analysis.
- I predicted a spike from friends and family sales – largely because this is what “established wisdom” tells us happens with self-published books. This hasn’t happened. With family the reason has been “we’re waiting till we do our Christmas shopping”. Friends – well, I try not to “sell” to friends because it’s distasteful, and most of them haven’t gone and ordered the book anyway.
- Things move slowly. I have had progress in terms of getting agreements to do reviews, but they take a long time coming. The first will be out this weekend.
- I’ve managed to arrange some great book readings. I’ll be at the Book Club Boutique on October 5th, and will have a music and wine and reading night in Oxford on 29th. In other words – these are all in the future.
- I haven’t mentioned above because it has been ongoing, but there have been serious issues with my ISBN and subsequent Amazon listing (several people citing “I’m waiting till it’s on Amazon”). I purchased a “Published by You” package with Lulu, which comes with 10 ISBNs. This was in July. Then, at the start of August, Lulu changed their offer without informing people who’d already bought it that it was no longer available. Customer service refused to answer e-mails. There was no help on the forums. FINALLY this month I found a post on the Lulu blog. I had an e-mail and a refund within 48 hours. Impressive, and worth remembering for people – go to the blog not the usual help channels, BUT leaving me still without an ISBN

Next Month:
Predictions:
Downloads: I will struggle to match this month’s because I’ve had the initial spike from listing on the main efiction sites, and I don’t think enough time has elapsed for people to have read what they’ve downloaded and start spreading word of mouth. I’m saying 300
Books: I am hopeful of 25, based on bookshop sales.

OK, SO NOW GRILL ME WITH QUESTIONS!

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.

Ash: The book that changed my thinking

I don't often recommend a book on my blog. In fact, Year Zero books aside, I don't think I've ever done so. So it's time I did. Just the once.

And that book is Ash, by Malinda Lo.

Of course, in order to justify a change of policy, there has to be a story behind the story, as it were. So why this book?

Well, I came across Malinda when I was looking for places I could send Songs from the Other Side of the Wall for review. D J Young very kindly recommended I try After Ellen, one of the leading lesbian lifestyle magazines. There I discovered a great article by Malinda on lesbian fiction beyond coming out stories, exactly the kind of thing I'm interested in, as Songs has a lesbian protagonist and is nothing to do with coming out.

Hmm, yes, well what has all this got to do with Ash and how it changed my thinking (and what did I change my thinking about?)

Well, Ash is a lesbian retelling of Cinderella, and rather well done at that. I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone interested in young adult fiction. And that's the reason I'm recommending it today. I read a great interview with Malinda about Ash, and the writing of the book, and one thing stood out for me.

Ash began as a work of literary fiction, but over time Malinda came to look at it differently, and began seeing it as young adult fiction, and it's that market into which the book has just been launched.

Now, Songs has a protagonist who's 17/18. And, as soon as I realised the parallels to Muraklami's Norwegian Wood, I started using the phrase "coming of age". But I used it sparingly, fearful lest my use of it mislead people into thinking it was a young adult book. Which it wasn't! It's literary fiction! Just like Murakami, and Coupland, and Brett Easton Ellis.

Only. Well, I know there are lots of people who like the book who aren't young adults (largely, from the response I've had, these are women in their 40s and 50s). But when we started publicising Year Zero, one of the places we went was Suicide Girls, a site frequented by a lot of teenage girls drawn to an alternative/emo lifestyle. And I got some e-mails about Songs. Which made me wonder a little. Sowed some seeds.

And then I read Malinda's interview and I finally realised that the target audience for Songs may just be young adult after all. And what the devil's wrong with that?

So there we have it. Ash, by Malinda Lo, the book that made me see Songs as a young adult book aimed at the alt/emo market. Thank you, Malinda.

You won't find this in ths shops; or, why authors should stop pretending to be Indie when they stuff their books in Borders

Remember those adverts for 100 greatest b-sides of 1950s records by people you'd never heard of? You always had to send a cheque to Admail 54 (they were in Plymouth, I think) because "this offer's so good you won't find it in the shops".

That's what being Indie in the book world's all about, isn't it? Doing it all online, getting people to order from Amazon, sticking two fingers up to the whole bicks and mortar and paper establishment.

Well no, it's not. It's about valuing quality over consumerism; about cherishing specialist knowledge; about appreciating a great job, beautifully done. As long as I've been arguing about he future of the literary world, I've been pointing out the business reasons as well as the cultural ones why independent bookshops will increasingly thrive as Borders and B&N flail.

By independent bookshops, I don't mean "a shop just like Borders only smaller and owned by a strange man in cords with a ginger cat for his sales assistant". I mean shops that have a passion for books, a deep knowledge of the literary world, who can act as trusted reading companions for their customers, and probably have at least one area of specialism you just won't find in the mainstream sheds.

I mean shops like The Albion Beatnik in Oxford, buried in Jericho, a part of town so cool you need to take mittens just to walk down the street in summer. The Albion Beatnik sells hyper-hip fiction. But it also devotes half its floor space to books about music and the Beat Poets. And its online arm, Jazzscript, just sells books (including a whole library's worth of novels) about jazz.

It's become really trendy to "support your local bookshop". Authors are always plugging the cause. Great! Well, yes and no. First, I'm not a sentimentalist. I don't really see that "local bookshop" is the right thing to support. Not unless it gives readers that extra something. I'd rather see people supporting independent bookstores, in the sense outlined above. That really is a good cause. It's campaigning to give readers quality.

So it's great that authors support independent bookstores. But come on, guys, you can do a bit better than you are!

If Ian McEwan, for example, insisted that his next book was ONLY stocked in indie bookstores, THAT would be a serious statement. Sure, his sales might be a bit lower. But it would drive money to the Indies. Why not? Because his publisher wouldn't countenance it, of course. You see where I'm going with that.

All of which is by way of announcing that Songs from the Other Side of the Wall, unlike those Admail Classics, IS available in the shops. But you'll only find it in the Indie shops. Easy for a nobody like me to say - that's like a bloke down the pub saying "I'm not going to sell out and play for Manchester United". Well I HOPE if (heaven forfend) I ever get as big as Ian McEwan, I will still only sell my books in Indie stores. There may be a time in between when I sell out - I want toe arn a living. But I don't want to be stinking rich. I'd rather throw all my support behind the Indies and earn a little bit less for me and the mainstreams, thank you.

So far the book's in stock at - you guessed it - The Albion Beatnik (where thers's going to be a big party to celebrate at the end of October). It's also at Jaffe and Neale in Chipping Norton later in the week (Independent Bookstore of the Year in 2008). And next week I'll be checking out Indie stores in London - suggestions welcome.

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)

The View From the Shoe: Sarah E Melville

I didn't meet Sarah E Melville through twitter, but in the guise of @carlottafantino she is an active part of the twitter community. I actually met her as a writer, before discovering her talent for art. I liked her art so much I asked her to design the cover for my novel, Songs From the Other Side of the Wall, which you can see on the previous post.

So, what does Sarah do? (Sarah has asked em not to quote her verbatim because seh thinks what she says is too rambly. Personally, I like it, so it stays :-))


I am a writer of tragic, depressing, atmospheric literary novels set in the past or the post-apocalyptic future. Ninety percent of this work deals with the dark corners of human relationship, especially sexual relationships Also, I write weird stream-of-consciousness vignettes and poetry from the point of view of my alter ego, Paulie, a young man who is very much in love, but also very sad. His is the work in one of my current literary and artistic projects, Beautiful Things that happen to Ugly People.

I also make all kinds of art. I paint and draw and have an odd obsession with illuminated manuscripts and mediaeval and Byzantine art, as well as altered books. While portraiture is my favourite style of art, the art I actually do is quite different. Some of it's photo-realism, some of it I do with my left hand without any forethought, kind of like stream-of-consciousness painting, some of it's illustrations of things no one else knows about.

Mostly, though, I just draw naked people.

As a way to spread my love of vintage, I recently opened a vintage store on Etsy called Charlotte Fantino (another alter ego, though she makes films). I sell a little bit of my hand-embroidery there as well, though you're not likely to see much of it up at once as it takes hours upon hours to just embroider something, nevermind sewing it!

You can find me all over the place online,
www.s-melville.blogspot.com
www.smelville.deviantart.com
www.sarahemelville.daportfolio.com
www.charlottefantino.etsy.com
AND I have a new writing blog, which is going to be insanely great. I have a bunch of stuff already written for it and I'm psyched. It's called S Melville Writes.www.smelvillewrites.wordpress.com

So, without further ado:

Louboutin or Converse?

I'm taking this question literally, and my answer is Louboutin. I've never really been into the Converse. They're sexy on indie guys, but not me. For not liking them much I do have two pair, though one is for work and the man makes me wear his kind of shoes. I've not worn them in over a year, which is really great because that means I'm free from the machine, but also sad because that means I'm poor.

Why is there no one in the world that does it quite like you?

Well, that's easy. Because there's no one else like me. Trite, but true! There are so many strange influences that make all of my work what it is -- from my love of dead languages to stormtroopers, platform heels to the Tudor dynasty -- it all amalgamates into this very odd world that has notes and tints from everywhere. I think that's why it's so different, and so hard for me to explain.

What do you really, really love about it?

I love the freedom of having so many different outlets, and the freedom I give myself to be contradictory and go in opposite directions. For instance, my favourite art form is classic portraiture (think Gainsborough), and my goal is to someday be able to paint like that. But I'm not afraid to I let myself embrace whatever it is I feel like doing, whether it's making paintings and drawings with my left hand (my natural's my right) that look like they were drawn by monkeys, or spending my creative coins on historical embroidery.

If I stayed within the parameters set on me by any title -- painter or literary fiction writer or college student, even -- I'd do nothing but freeze up when these glittering impulses from outside the supported realm pop up. I wouldn't get anything done. For instance, I've been a prose writer and poetry hater all my life, but in this past month I've started seriously writing poetry. I could've held on to my disdain for poetry and self-imposed label of Fiction Writer, but why would I deny myself the experience of poetry? Do you know what I mean?

The most important thing, I find, and this goes beyond the creative world, is allowing yourself to be free and expressive in any way that strikes you.

Remember, you learn the rules only so you know how to best break them!

A bit more time in the day, or a bit more money in the bank?

Oh, I couldn't have any more time in the day. I don't work, and though I do go to college, it's a very laid-back sort of thing. I've had all 24 hours to myself, and I'm less productive than if I have other things going on. The lack of money is just a lack of means -- not in writing, of course, but certainly in art. I've not had certain essential supplies in months, which is why I haven't painted in so long.

Imagine you "make it". You wake up and imagine the day ahead. Tell us about breakfast.

I don't see too many things changing as a result of any sort of success. Yes, I will still eat breakfast and it will still probably be chocolate whipped yoghurt.

What's your Jimmy Choo? and what's just Cobblers?

Literally, my Jimmy Choos are Betsey Johnsons (sorry Jimmy, you're not my favourite flavour) and my cobblers are . . . goodness, what are the lowest of the low-end I own? How about those slippers I inherited from my little brother when he outgrew them? They're too small for me, but I don't care. They're comfortable and, well, I do what I want.

Metaphorically, Jimmy Choo would be Lady Chatterley's Lover; something absolutely adored and dreamt about. Cobblers would be? Well, I could go at this from a lot of angles: cheap, only used around the house, not anything worth looking at, the bottom o' the barrel . . . how about a dish sponge? Then again, if we are looking at cobblers from the 'often used' point of view, it would still be Lady Chatterley's Lover. It's the best piece of fiction ever written. Now there's a man who was free.

Tell us about the last time a fan made you feel 100 feet tall.

Hmm, my fan-base is a little sparse. But everything you do really makes me feel good. I think it was when you asked me to design a book cover for Songs -- that was the best thing that's happened to me so far, fan-wise, art-wise [ed: *blushes deeply*].

For my writing, it was a true highlight when someone started a thread praising my collection Husbands and Portraits of their Wives on a writing site that shall go unnamed. I've copied-pasted all the comments for when I'm down. It really made me feel grand for a few days.

Independent and poor, or under contract and rich?

Uhm, this is hard. I'm going to say . . . goodness, I don't know. Half of me wants to be rich and half of me wants to be free. I'm going to go with independent and poor.

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?

Okay, so I've thought about this one long and hard, and my choice is the Gorillaz (that's Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett &co.) Man, that would be nuts! I was totally obsessed with them in high school. I'd have Damon write a song about me or my art or whatever, and I'd get a small melodica part, all toot-toot-too!, and Passion Pictures would put together this insane music-video thing that'd be playing on a huge screen behind us, and it would be my work and Jamie Hewlett's work mashed together with zombies and thigh high stockings and Murdoc Niccals everywhere. And Damon would be singing in falsetto and then Daft Punk would smash in through the wall with an insane techno bridge, and -- shi-zam!Nuts, man! Read my freaking books!

Frocks or socks?

Frocks, no hesitation. "Thou shalt not eat the fruit of the sock tree"

Bookbuzzr: a writer's essential tool

Dan Holloway
Author
Songs From the Other Side of the Wall
Read Now - http://bit.ly/YT12b




I'm not going to do a long "how to" with this, because that's been done (I wish I hadn't forgotten the link, but it was recommended by the lovely Danny Gillan). I will, though, tell you a little bit about this fantastic device.


The Bookbuzzr is, in essence, a small virtual copy of your book (you can see mine for Songs from the Other Side of the Wall above), that you can embed in your blog, your Facebook page, as your e-mail signature, all over the place in fact. You can use it wherever you'd normally use a picture of your cover. Furthermore, anyone else can do the same, simply by visiting your Bookbuzzr homepage and clicking share.


The widget allows people to turn the pages of your book (my only quibble is that in the quest for authenticity, they've used shading that can make some of the pages a bit tricky to read) and read it (you can choose exactly how many pages they can read - from only a few, to the whole book) without leaving your web page.


It's also a great way to store all kinds of information about your book - where it's available to buy, for example; and people can leave reviews and ratings.


The Bookbuzzr is the brainchild of Vikram Narayan, along with the website Freado, where readers can go and read all the books (or as much as you have allowed to be read) for which Bookbuzzrs have been created. what's so great about Bookbuzzr, Freado, and, indeed, Vikram, is that not only do they care about writers - they listen to writers. They respond swiftly to feedback - they will even try to make changes. They actually want to give writers a tool that works for them. And they've succeeded. Bookbuzzr is the best widget I've ever found on the web. And would go on my essential top 10 web toolkit for writers.


Talking of which, you can follow @bookbuzzr on another essential, twitter. And unlike many, they will gladly @ reply you. They represent, in fact, everythng that's positive about writing on the web. 10/10

Into Print

OK, this post is basically a plug. BUY MY BOOK, Songs From the Other Side of the Wall.

The day the Berlin Wall came down, Jennifer returned to England, leaving her week-old daughter, Szandi, to grow up on a Hungarian vineyard with 300 years of history. Now 18, Szandi is part of Budapest’s cosmopolitan art scene, sharing a flat and a bohemian lifestyle with her lover and fellow sculptress, Yang. She has finally found her place in the world. Then a letter arrives that threatens everything, and forces her to choose once and for all: between the past and the present; between East and West; between her family and her lover.

Songs from the Other Side of the Wall is a coming of age story that inhabits anti-capitalist chatrooms and ancient wine cellars, seedy bars and dreaming spires; and takes us on a remarkable journey across Europe and cyberspace in the company of rock stars and dropouts, diaries that appear from nowhere, a telepathic fashion mogul, and the talking statue of a bull.

There, that's the pluggy bit. Now I'll try and make the rest of the post as helpful as I can for a plug asking you to BUY MY BOOK.

So I’m going to offer a little bit of an insight about what I did to get Songs From the Other Side of the Wall to print (in the widest possible sense. You can also download it to you Kindergarten or Eyeball or any other kind of device you may have). It’s strictly technical stuff as practical advice. I’m always talking about marketing and abstract stuff, so this is a pure hands on of what I did, where I went, and what I thought of it.

First, the electronica. The book has been available as a simple pdf on my website for a little while, and remains so, but this week I made it available for all sorts of e-formats on the Smashwords website . You can download the book as a pdf, as rich text, or in special formats for Kindle, Sony e-reader, and through Stanza, the app used for iPhones. It took me about half an hour to get the Word document ready for this. There’s a Smashwords Style Guide you can download for free that tells you exactly what to do, but it basically involves removing tabs and similar formatting. Then you upload the document, and it takes about an hour for it to become available on the site.

You can set the price at any level. The most commonly downloaded books are, of course, the free ones. I’ve deliberately gone for the “set your own price” option, although I’ll probably experiment with several different variations and see what gets most downloads. The advantage is that if someone wants to pay they can (I want people to read it, and I want price not to be a barrier, but I really WOULD like to be paid :-) so how about downloading it for free, and if you read it and like it, downloading it again and paying?), and you don’t have to give out details of how to get to your Paypal. But no one has to. This disadvantage is that although most people will download your book for free, it doesn’t show up in the free downloads search. Next week I’ll offer it for free for a few days and see how much difference it makes.

The only issue I have with the Smashwords site is the classification of the book. You have to either declare it universally suitable, or over 18 which makes a book like mine (it isn’t young adult, but I imagine a lot of YA books would have the same problem), that deals with adult themes but would suit a teenage readership, awkward to classify.

The paperback is printed through Lulu. If I explained why I chose Lulu I’d be here all day, so I will just outline my experience after I made the choice. Getting your book ready for printing involves two main steps: preparing the inside, and preparing the cover. The inside can be uploaded as a pdf or converted from your own Word document. I could not, whatever I did, get the site to accept my pdf, because of non-embedded fonts (my pdf maker, Primo, doesn’t allow me to embed fonts after production, and seems to unembed those I embed in Word). I had several problems with Word as well, again because of unembedded fonts (the site insisted I’d used Helvetica somewhere, which I know I didn’t – strictly Garamond everywhere except for the name and title headers, which were Verdana. It turned out to be a result of using insert symbol for diacritic marks in Romanian names). But this was eventually remediable by discovering how to embed fonts (through the MS button, and “Word options” at the bottom of the window, clicking “save” and then checking the “embed all fonts” box).

If you do run into problems, there are plenty of onsite forums to help, and Lulu help-bots frequently come along and answer your questions.

The cover was slightly easier because my designer, Sarah E Melville did the hard work. You can either do an all in one cover like mine, or use Lulu’s wizard to do it in three parts, but you need to be very careful that the size of your file (the all-in-one has to be a pdf; the wizard will take jpegs) pic is exactly right (the site does give you very clear instructions on spine size, based on the number of pages in your book). Be warned when using the wizard – the picture you see is NOT what you get – they will crop the file based on its size even though it looks like it’s been shrunk to fit.

Anyway, after one mishap with the cover when I used the wizard, now that I’ve got the all in one, I have to say I’m seriously impressed how accurate the spine printing is, and how good the inside of the book is. I am also very impressed by the speed of service – from uploading the file through two proof copies to being totally happy took two weeks.

You can either leave the book just for sale on Lulu, or buy a package of ISBNs and admin that will get you listed on Amazon et al. I opted for a package called “published by you” which means the book doesn’t come festooned with Lulu logos, which isn’t suitable given that it’s being released through the Year Zero Writers collective. I must say I haven’t been as impressed by this add-on as by the basic service – I was given a maximum time for getting the ISBNs of 14 working days, and it’s now been 16. It will be worth it for the benefits of being on Amazon – the main one of which is getting cross-linked to similar but more famous books.

Finally, the pricing. I was always told self-published books were too expensive for the public. Songs From the Other Side of the Wall is £7.98, a whole penny cheaper than a standard paperback, and I make the same as I would had I been published in the mainstream.

I realise I’ve rambled too much, but I will happily answer any questions in the comments section. Oh, and BUY MY BOOK :-)

All in the Past: Why I'm Getting Tense about my New Project

“You’ve gotta come see it, Szandi,” says Yang. I slam the phone down but it misses the base. I hit the clock instead, which flashes 03.00.

I put the handset on the pillow and turn over so I’m looking at it. The white plastic appears faintly red in the clock’s LCD glow. “Szandi?” I hear. The black dots of the speaker seem to wink in the dark as she talks.

Those are the opening words of my last novel, Songs From the Other Side of the Wall. So what? They’re OK – apparently it’s unfashionable to mention time in the opening paragraph, but as it’s a reference to the KLF’s 3 a.m. Eternal, I figured why not. So, perfectly passable and uneventful, right?

Well no. These two brief paragraphs turned my writing world upside down. You see, they just came out like that, natural as anything, and it was only much later – pages later, in fact that I noticed: THEY’RE IN THE PRESENT TENSE.

Half of you are probably still saying so what? But the other half probably winced the moment you read “says”. And when I wrote the words, I was one of them. I hated present tense. With a vengeance. So much so that I stopped reading Patricia Cornwell’s The Last precinct after 5 pages, and haven’t picked up a Scarpetta novel since. It feels contrived, showy (exactly the reasons outlined when I held a straw poll on twitter yesterday) – as though it’s there to keep the reader guessing what’s going to happen. We’re always aware of the author, and never quite lose ourselves in the story.

Furthermore, my favourite agent’s reader, Jodi Meadows, made the very good point that it is very hard to maintain the present tense without letting the POV slip. And as Miss Pitch pointed out, the incessant battering of first person present tense can actually get rather dull (and, I would add, a little bit shouty).


So imagine my horror when I found I was writing in the present tense. Only then the horror started to subside. I found myself reading a whole slew of books where the present tense seemed not to get in the way of the narrative but to enhance it. After Dark by Murakami and Less Than Zero by Brett Easton Ellis are the two that stick most in the mind. They just couldn’t be written any other way.

So why does it work so well for these authors, and so badly for Cornwell? It might seem at first glance that it’s a question of first person against third person, which would in itself be strange because the objections I encountered (single POV, maintenance of a sustained character, claustrophobia) all seemed to apply to the first person. But I have a feeling it may be more to do with genre. I think in a thriller (I have the same issue with Simon Kernick) it feels as though you’re using it as a trick – a “will the character pull through?” or “keep the reader in the moment” kind of thing.

What Ellis does – and this sounds arty nonsense, the very opposite of everything I mean to convey – is perfectly reflect the throwaway lives and casual violence of teenage rich kids in The Valley. The tense is part of that “yeah, so what” voice he has, and that makes it work.

With Murakami, it’s something different, something specific to that kind of literary fiction that I can only describe as poetry. The other day I tried to analyse it, just why the present tense used well sounds so exquisite, and all I could come up with is that the sound “d” is ugly and “s” is elegant. Which is rubbish. Only it isn’t because we so often forget as prose-writers the absolute importance of the way words sound – and poets so often remember.

So I became happier in my present tense. It suits the loose, liquid style I like to write in, where sound matters more than strict meaning – no, where sound often IS the meaning (I write magical realism so I can get away with saying nonsense like that!). AND I write about teenagers.
Now I can’t imagine writing in anything BUT the present tense. It just seems so natural, so flowing, so loose and easy (not, I hope, floppy, stream of consciousness, but it’s not my place to say). Indeed my current novel, The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes, is written in the present tense from three separate POVs, one third person, and two first person (one of them plural).

NOW imagine my horror as I sit at the keyboard, tingling with excitement to begin tapping out the opening of my new novel, “Life Drawn Freehand”:

I remember the phone was cold in my hand when they called to tell me Simon was dead. I thought, it’s summer and I’m holding slick, plastic ice, and it’s talking.

The voice was Andrew’s. He said “Mrs Hart?” and I said yes, once, and his voice kept saying “Mrs Hart?” and I thought isn’t it strange this cold thing in my hand keeps repeating my name. Then there was another voice, not Andrew’s, not anyone’s I knew, and it said “Mrs Hart I’m afraid there’s been a terrible accident” and I said “Oh” and for a few seconds I thought the frozen thing in my fingers was Simon’s skin.

Then I put it down while it was still repeating “Mrs Hart” in the other voice, the one I didn’t know, and it was just a hot summer day, and I was staring at the telephone, and my son was dead.

My deepest thanks to @jodimeadows @pitchparlour @pattyjansen @brennig @triplecherry @tommyjaybooks @George9writer @remittancegirl and @vpynchon for their helpful input on twitter

Not Writing

This week I am too busy to write. I even sent a message round to the wonderful members of The Man Who Painted Agineszka's Shoes to explain. This is, after all, the week that I have to get Songs From the OtherSide of the Wall finally ready so I can start selling physical books on September 1st. And I need to help my fellow Year Zeros, Larry and Oli do the same so they can also get their books on sale for then. Oh, and my wife's textbook has a final deadline of Jly 31st, so I really should help her proof it.

In other words, for a week, the fiction needs to go on hold. So I set up what I believe to be an important debate over at Aggie's Shoes, on the question of whether culture should be free, as part of giving participators an all around experience.

but then - rather like what happens in Marie Darrieussecq's biting Pig Tales that I've just finished, something started happening.

I went out in the pouring rain yesterday to deliver a form to the finance office (yes I DO lead an interesting life), and came back to find a fully developed pitch for my next novel written out longhand in my head. And no matter how much I thought about gutters and margins and formatting page numbers, all that was going round my head was the scene of Dan (my protagnist, not me), sitting in a chair in Gdansk with Agnieszka's parents, as it slowly dawns on him there is soemthing very very wrong and they may, after all, be totally mad.

I was almost feeling feverish (perhaps Pig Tales had put the H1N1 in me?). My fingers were twitching. My skin started aching and itching. I sat down at my computer and, lo and behold, come this morning an 1100 word chapter had appeared on the Aggie wall. My skin went calm, my temperature subsided, and all was calm.

Now, though, I feel that itch that urge all over again. I have some notes and before very long I have a terrible feeling the opening of my new novel will have emerged, squirming and squeezing itself through my pores until it hits the screen.

A simple message, then. If you're considering it might be better not to write: don't. The words will find their own way out. Far better to let them do it on your terms.

Oh, and I believe those of you who wish may be able to purchase a copy of Songs From the Other Side of the Wall now by clicking here. But I'm not 100% sure. I do know it will be on Amazon in plenty of time for September 1st, though. Which, if I hadn't given in and written, may well not have been the case.