Year Zero Writers has existed as a group since January. Which makes writing a progress column one of those “where on earth do I start?” exercises.
So where I start is this. A twice-weekly column. On Tuesdays I’ll bring things up to date with the “why” and the “what” of the group. And later in the week I’ll take things forward from where we are now.
Rather Like I did with my 10 commandments, I’ll start out with one of those contents-page type columns to give you an idea of what’s coming up over the coming weeks. So, here we are:
1 (this one!) What do Year Zero Writers stand for? What’s our manifesto?
2 How do you go about setting up a collective? What were people’s responses to the project?
3 Why a collective?
4 We are not a small publisher. We are a group of self-publishing writers with common goals and a common theme to our writing.
5 Marketing – how do you get the economy of scale of being a group without losing individuality? How do you decide what to do and what not to do?
6 Quality control. What does it mean? How important is it? How does it work in a collective?
7 Tip-toeing through legal minefields
So, this is our manifesto:
The problem
The Factory: agents, editors, media arbiters of taste, publishers. A chain of filters that takes raw fiction, cuts it, sells it on, cuts it again until the street product peddled to readers is weak, toxic, and addictive.
YEAR ZERØ exists to eliminate the impurities and deliver prose in the pure and raw.
Pushing the boundaries of substance through new technologies, YEAR ZERØ provides prose just as addictive, in many cases just as toxic, but with a powerful, instant high that will stay with you for life.YEAR ZERØ is not an industry. YEAR ZERØ is not a group of writers. YEAR ZERØ is not a set of beliefs. YEAR ZERØ is an approach to culture.
· Culture is the breath we suck from each others’ lips.
· Culture is not alive. Culture is life.
· Readers and writers, like all producers and consumers of culture, cannot exist apart from each other. They exist only insomuch as literature flows between them. Inasmuch as The Factory exists to separate readers from writers it exists only to bring death, to create ghosts and hollow men.
· Culture speculates; culture takes risks; culture hijacks every human artifice and structure in the name of life.
YEAR ZERØ exists as a conduit for this process.
We are not YEAR ZERØ. We are some of its voices. You are its heart.
Why? I hope the thing that’s come through more than anything else in this blog is my belief that culture is a conversation. It’s about readers and writers talking, about the living, breathing, dynamic relation between them. The more I talk about writing, the more I read from my own writing in public, the more I know that something happens when this relationship is direct that just can’t happen in any other way. Which doesn’t mean books aren’t for curling up with in the bath. But that when you curl up and block out everything but the sound of the words on the page, you somehow have to know the only voice you hear is that of the author (that’s sort of rhetorical – I’m not making a statement about POV :-)).
I have a feeling, though, that literature for me will always be about more than words on the page. Having just come back from a conference where I got to take part in a writing workshop with one of the most inspiring writer/teachers I’ve ever met and to give a paper based on my novel – watching the audience’s faces as they listened, I will always want to do it in a way that gets people excited by words and stories in an immediate way.
All kinds of writers can share these goals. Next week I’ll explain how we arrived at our current 20 members.
Showing posts with label marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marketing. Show all posts
Monday, 15 June 2009
Wednesday, 10 June 2009
A Long Tail needn't make a Big Splash
Last week an agent sent me the most lovely rejection letter. What’s strangest about that sentence? That I should consider a rejection letter lovely (hardly – it was, I won’t quote at length out of courtesy to the agent concerned, but it was), or that I should have written to an agent (I am a firm advocate of the benefits of self-publishing, and I am committed to the self-publishing collective, Year Zero Writers, of which I am part, but whilst the agenting system is part of a machine I don’t really like, there are individual agents I’d give my eye teeth to work with – this is one)?
Digression over. The gist of the rejection letter was that my novel had a super, original voice (which is the nicest thing a writer can hear – maybe my voice is something other than simply loud after all!), and a wonderful atmosphere, and that the agent would love to see my future work, but Songs from the Other Side of the Wall was, alas, just not the kind of book capable of making a “big splash”, and as a result not right for the current climate.
Now it’s not news to me that Songs isn’t an “event” book. If I could pick a perfect review phrase for it, I would pick “achingly beautiful.” It’s the dreamlike story of a teenage girl growing up gay in post-communist Hungary, the imminent death of whose father forces her to choose between past and present; East and West; the family-owned vineyard, or art college with her lover. It is, in other words, the kind of book to sit alongside Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, Alessandro Baricci’s Silk, Marie Darieussecq’s Mal de Mer, Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen – it’s a beautiful “translation table” book that students and the odd middle-aged melancholic would love. Because it’s about the fall of the Berlin Wall and that’s topical (I’m speaking about the book at a conference commemorating the anniversary this week) I figure it would happily sell 5,000 copies rather than the 3,000 it would sell in other years.
No publisher in their right mind would sign an author whose books will (consistently, probably – I like writing dreamy, quirky, pop-culture-heavy, character-based books about Eastern Europe [as anyone who’s got further than chapter one of Agnieszka’s shoes will attest] and have no intention [more to the point no capability] of changing) achieve these figures. There’s a chance – an outside one – that one day I might scoop a minor award for one of these books, and increase its sales tenfold (to a very mediocre 30,000).
In other words, no publisher working on the system of advances and big marketing budgets would be able to sign me without being sectioned by their shareholders. And, as a result, any agent of moderate sanity is equally unlikely to want to chance their arm.
It is this kind of book for which self-publishing could have been made. I need to pay for my ISBN – but that’s it on the essential outlay front. I have the most exquisite cover to hook in readers – designed by the super-talented Sarah E Melville. And I know exactly who my 5,000 readers are – they’re students, people interested in Eastern Europe, and fans of Murakami. So marketing consists of finding those people. And because it’s a genre I will stick to, I’m happy to give stuff away to get fans – if people like this book, they’ll like anything else I write. So marketing consists largely of finding these people and giving away pdfs of my novel. It’s slightly more complicated than that, of course (and my marketing series of posts will look at exact details), but not much.
Once I’ve uploaded the pdf to Lulu’s Print on Demand service, it can sit there indefinitely. And I can do the same for Kindle format. It doesn’t matter that I have a very small market. No one’s lost out by having to pay a big advance, and there’s no big marketing budget (the advantage of a small-market book is that we writers tend to know our market fairly exactly, and once we know them, it’s easy to reach them at little or no cost because there are no fishing expeditions).
So my advice would be – have a little self-knowledge. If your book’s not the next Twilight, Harry Potter, Da Vinci Code then admit it to yourself. Having one of those hard to sell hard to place books needn’t be the end of the road for you, just because an agent won’t (rightly) take you on.
Yes, it’s hard going it alone. But over the next few weeks, I’m going to run a column on my experiences of setting up and getting running a writers’ collective – one great way to help you on your way – not just because you’ll have greater marketing support, but because you should never underestimate the importance of company and not being alone. I hope that’ll help you. That will take my regular Tuesday column slot – 10 Commandments will become Year Zero in a rather Pol-Potian manoeuvre – I’ll also be running posts on marketing for self-publishers that I hope will help anyone thinking of that route. Together, let’s see where we can get in 2009.
And if anyone would like the pdf of Songs from the Other Side of the Wall, just send me an e-mail (songsfromtheothersideofthewall@googlemail.com). You won’t find yourself on an e-mail list that bombards you with spam – I’ll send you a note when I launch the paper book, with an invite to the party, but that’s it.
Digression over. The gist of the rejection letter was that my novel had a super, original voice (which is the nicest thing a writer can hear – maybe my voice is something other than simply loud after all!), and a wonderful atmosphere, and that the agent would love to see my future work, but Songs from the Other Side of the Wall was, alas, just not the kind of book capable of making a “big splash”, and as a result not right for the current climate.
Now it’s not news to me that Songs isn’t an “event” book. If I could pick a perfect review phrase for it, I would pick “achingly beautiful.” It’s the dreamlike story of a teenage girl growing up gay in post-communist Hungary, the imminent death of whose father forces her to choose between past and present; East and West; the family-owned vineyard, or art college with her lover. It is, in other words, the kind of book to sit alongside Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, Alessandro Baricci’s Silk, Marie Darieussecq’s Mal de Mer, Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen – it’s a beautiful “translation table” book that students and the odd middle-aged melancholic would love. Because it’s about the fall of the Berlin Wall and that’s topical (I’m speaking about the book at a conference commemorating the anniversary this week) I figure it would happily sell 5,000 copies rather than the 3,000 it would sell in other years.
No publisher in their right mind would sign an author whose books will (consistently, probably – I like writing dreamy, quirky, pop-culture-heavy, character-based books about Eastern Europe [as anyone who’s got further than chapter one of Agnieszka’s shoes will attest] and have no intention [more to the point no capability] of changing) achieve these figures. There’s a chance – an outside one – that one day I might scoop a minor award for one of these books, and increase its sales tenfold (to a very mediocre 30,000).
In other words, no publisher working on the system of advances and big marketing budgets would be able to sign me without being sectioned by their shareholders. And, as a result, any agent of moderate sanity is equally unlikely to want to chance their arm.
It is this kind of book for which self-publishing could have been made. I need to pay for my ISBN – but that’s it on the essential outlay front. I have the most exquisite cover to hook in readers – designed by the super-talented Sarah E Melville. And I know exactly who my 5,000 readers are – they’re students, people interested in Eastern Europe, and fans of Murakami. So marketing consists of finding those people. And because it’s a genre I will stick to, I’m happy to give stuff away to get fans – if people like this book, they’ll like anything else I write. So marketing consists largely of finding these people and giving away pdfs of my novel. It’s slightly more complicated than that, of course (and my marketing series of posts will look at exact details), but not much.
Once I’ve uploaded the pdf to Lulu’s Print on Demand service, it can sit there indefinitely. And I can do the same for Kindle format. It doesn’t matter that I have a very small market. No one’s lost out by having to pay a big advance, and there’s no big marketing budget (the advantage of a small-market book is that we writers tend to know our market fairly exactly, and once we know them, it’s easy to reach them at little or no cost because there are no fishing expeditions).
So my advice would be – have a little self-knowledge. If your book’s not the next Twilight, Harry Potter, Da Vinci Code then admit it to yourself. Having one of those hard to sell hard to place books needn’t be the end of the road for you, just because an agent won’t (rightly) take you on.
Yes, it’s hard going it alone. But over the next few weeks, I’m going to run a column on my experiences of setting up and getting running a writers’ collective – one great way to help you on your way – not just because you’ll have greater marketing support, but because you should never underestimate the importance of company and not being alone. I hope that’ll help you. That will take my regular Tuesday column slot – 10 Commandments will become Year Zero in a rather Pol-Potian manoeuvre – I’ll also be running posts on marketing for self-publishers that I hope will help anyone thinking of that route. Together, let’s see where we can get in 2009.
And if anyone would like the pdf of Songs from the Other Side of the Wall, just send me an e-mail (songsfromtheothersideofthewall@googlemail.com). You won’t find yourself on an e-mail list that bombards you with spam – I’ll send you a note when I launch the paper book, with an invite to the party, but that’s it.
Monday, 8 June 2009
The Golden Commandment
This is the last in my 10 commandments for aspiring writers series. Whcih means I now have to think of a new column theme :-)
Networking is about looking for ways to do something FOR people, not get something FROM them.
This is my favourite commandment of all, and I’m delighted to save it till last in this series. We’re always reading about networking. Anyone who’s part of a writers’ site like Authonomy knows that success has so much to do with spreading your social tentacles, and we’re always being urged to use social media to increase our contacts and improve our chances of success – these days we even have sites like Ning that we can use to create our very own virtual social networks.
So why “network”? To get to know more people so there’s more of a chance of getting things done for us. Isn’t that right? Well, to the extent that’s most people’s motivation, it’s right, yes.
But it’s hardly the best way to go about it.
I’m not quite sure how the structure of this post will proceed. For me the truth of the “commandment” is self-evident, which makes it hard to write about. So apologies for structural vagaries.
I spent the first 30-something years of my life thinking not only was I the world’s worst networker, but that I hated the very idea of networking – it was inimical to me and to everything I, as a sensitive, shy aesthete thought the world should stand for. I associated it with men in suits with slick haircuts and shiny shoes; and I thought it meant the kind of self-aggrandising, pushy arrogance said men in suits seemed to indulge in as they boasted over their lagers about the size and speed of their silver BMWs.
Then I got a job as manager of a carpet shop, and fund myself spending at least half my time drinking coffee with company reps whilst we talked about colourways and product specs and interior design, and I very soon realised that the people who spent most time explaining the trade to me – all about jacquards and chlydema squares, and the acoustic properties of different underlays – were not only the ones I looked forward to seeing, but the ones whose products I sold more of. I’d start calling them up and ask if we could take more of their ranges, maybe put in a window display. They’d start calling me out of the blue and inviting me to go to nice places with them, and they’d start offering me lower prices for the products I was already selling plenty of at the higher price.
When I moved, after a couple of years, to one manage of the swankiest showrooms in the south of England, I was told one of the reasons I’d been headhunted was because I was a good networker, a statement I met totally blankly, until it was explained that was what I’d been doing all this time.
In my next set of columns, I’ll write about marketing and promotion. And one of the golden rules I’ll give you is this: never ask someone to do something for you, or tempt them with your amazing book, if you’re not prepared first to do something for them. So I’m not going to go into detail here about it. It also feels disingenuous as I think about it – because what you get out of helping other writers and people in the trade really is nothing to do with why you help them in the first place.
It’s hard to say much more without sounding either mercenary or a total hippy, so to conclude I’ll go back to anecdotes.
I’m a member of two “competitive” (to the extent that they hold out “prizes” of having your work read by people in the trade) writing sites, www.Authonomy.com and www.youwriteon.com Both these sites attract – from a vociferous, but smaller than their loud voices would lead you to believe minority – criticism for the way some people use the competitive elements of the site to get an advantage. Squabbles erupt about how writers “score” each others’ work, and about the mean-spiritedness of writers who fail to appreciate members’ masterpieces.
It never fails to amaze me what an uncollaborative bunch we writers are (see my previous post). If we go onto these sites to get “discovered” we will almost certainly fail. If we join in order both to learn, and to share what we’ve learned with as many people as possible, to help other writers through our comments, and to add to the educational and emotional value of the site, we will always succeed.
And I’ll close with an ambiguous anecdote. The editors at Harper Collins recently very generously answered a whole swathe of questions about the industry from Authonomy’s site members. Amongst the more illuminating answers was a reinforcement of what I’ve heard said and what I’ve seen done many, many times. When looking at a proposal, one of the things an editor asks themselves before deciding to proceed is what it’s going to be like working with this author.
What would it be like working with you? Does the way you conduct yourself with your fellow writers reflect that reality? Interesting questions. I wonder if we ask ourselves often enough.
Networking is about looking for ways to do something FOR people, not get something FROM them.
This is my favourite commandment of all, and I’m delighted to save it till last in this series. We’re always reading about networking. Anyone who’s part of a writers’ site like Authonomy knows that success has so much to do with spreading your social tentacles, and we’re always being urged to use social media to increase our contacts and improve our chances of success – these days we even have sites like Ning that we can use to create our very own virtual social networks.
So why “network”? To get to know more people so there’s more of a chance of getting things done for us. Isn’t that right? Well, to the extent that’s most people’s motivation, it’s right, yes.
But it’s hardly the best way to go about it.
I’m not quite sure how the structure of this post will proceed. For me the truth of the “commandment” is self-evident, which makes it hard to write about. So apologies for structural vagaries.
I spent the first 30-something years of my life thinking not only was I the world’s worst networker, but that I hated the very idea of networking – it was inimical to me and to everything I, as a sensitive, shy aesthete thought the world should stand for. I associated it with men in suits with slick haircuts and shiny shoes; and I thought it meant the kind of self-aggrandising, pushy arrogance said men in suits seemed to indulge in as they boasted over their lagers about the size and speed of their silver BMWs.
Then I got a job as manager of a carpet shop, and fund myself spending at least half my time drinking coffee with company reps whilst we talked about colourways and product specs and interior design, and I very soon realised that the people who spent most time explaining the trade to me – all about jacquards and chlydema squares, and the acoustic properties of different underlays – were not only the ones I looked forward to seeing, but the ones whose products I sold more of. I’d start calling them up and ask if we could take more of their ranges, maybe put in a window display. They’d start calling me out of the blue and inviting me to go to nice places with them, and they’d start offering me lower prices for the products I was already selling plenty of at the higher price.
When I moved, after a couple of years, to one manage of the swankiest showrooms in the south of England, I was told one of the reasons I’d been headhunted was because I was a good networker, a statement I met totally blankly, until it was explained that was what I’d been doing all this time.
In my next set of columns, I’ll write about marketing and promotion. And one of the golden rules I’ll give you is this: never ask someone to do something for you, or tempt them with your amazing book, if you’re not prepared first to do something for them. So I’m not going to go into detail here about it. It also feels disingenuous as I think about it – because what you get out of helping other writers and people in the trade really is nothing to do with why you help them in the first place.
It’s hard to say much more without sounding either mercenary or a total hippy, so to conclude I’ll go back to anecdotes.
I’m a member of two “competitive” (to the extent that they hold out “prizes” of having your work read by people in the trade) writing sites, www.Authonomy.com and www.youwriteon.com Both these sites attract – from a vociferous, but smaller than their loud voices would lead you to believe minority – criticism for the way some people use the competitive elements of the site to get an advantage. Squabbles erupt about how writers “score” each others’ work, and about the mean-spiritedness of writers who fail to appreciate members’ masterpieces.
It never fails to amaze me what an uncollaborative bunch we writers are (see my previous post). If we go onto these sites to get “discovered” we will almost certainly fail. If we join in order both to learn, and to share what we’ve learned with as many people as possible, to help other writers through our comments, and to add to the educational and emotional value of the site, we will always succeed.
And I’ll close with an ambiguous anecdote. The editors at Harper Collins recently very generously answered a whole swathe of questions about the industry from Authonomy’s site members. Amongst the more illuminating answers was a reinforcement of what I’ve heard said and what I’ve seen done many, many times. When looking at a proposal, one of the things an editor asks themselves before deciding to proceed is what it’s going to be like working with this author.
What would it be like working with you? Does the way you conduct yourself with your fellow writers reflect that reality? Interesting questions. I wonder if we ask ourselves often enough.
Monday, 18 May 2009
Read the book, buy the T-shirt?
OK, I’m taking my 10 commandments out of turn, because I went off piste with my last post to talk about music. So this week we’ll deal with commandment number 10:
Writers need to think like musicians and artists; we need to be showmen and women, to work in the public eye, and to make our money from selling an experience rather than a piece of hardware.
This is the thing that sparks the most intense conversations with my fellow writers, with “we’re just different” being the standard answer, and the reason why my constant references to the music industry are taken as a sign the pressure’s finally got to me. And when I’m at a gig, surrounded on all sides by fans united by the sound and the experience, I can absolutely see the uniquely collective appeal of music. But…
Even during the most intense set I can’t get that “but” out of my head.
The fact is, I would happily pay £10 to sit in a hall and listen to Murakami reading from Kafka on the Shore (I DID fork out a fiver for this year’s Murakami diary even though the paper’s so shiny you can’t write your appointments on it). And look at flashmobbing; and those giant nude crowd photos set in department stores. Art’s clearly not so different from music. That’s the big “but” filling my thought screen – it’s not music that infects the collective consciousness. It’s culture. And culture is writing as much as it’s a rock concert.
I want to aside her, but I’m not going to because I’ll bore you stupid. Just let me know if you’d like me to talk about culture and collectivity in general and I’ll happily do so. For now, I’ll limit myself to the single observation that’s relevant to my argument. For most of the time we’ve had stories, they’ve been public and not private experiences, passed on by storytellers to a live audience.
All of which is jolly interesting but of no help in explaining how to make money from doing something other than selling books.
OK, I’m not writing a textbook, I’m writing a post for my blog and my thousand words are almost gone on my intro, so here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to look at three ways musicians use to make money and see if there’s any transferability.
Take it for read, please, that this post is to be read in conjunction with my earlier post on giving your work away for free. Because for me there’s a real synergy there. Give your story away, and make your money from selling something else. If you can do this you really are on to a winner – and you’re obeying last week’s commandment of putting the fans first. Of course there’s the question of whether writing creates fans like that. But for now I’m going to refer back to my own example. Either I’m unique (in which case I should have figured out a way of getting rich by selling myself to research by now, and my bank account is conclusive evidence to the contrary) or writing can produce real fans.
So here’s our packet of three:
The tour. In the free download age, we’re always hearing that bands rely more and more on making money from live performances. I want to make two points. First, the live tour is something writers can replicate perfectly well. Second, whatever their multitude of benefits, unless you ARE Murakami, or Oasis, they’re not really a way to get rich.
I paid (sorry, my wife paid) £7 to hear The Boxer Rebellion last Friday (as an aside, that’s ridiculous value [we got 3 and a half hours of which 2 hours was live music form 3 great bands, including the hottest property in the UK] – gigs are ridiculous value, even the humungous ones – but the humungous ones aren’t really what we’re looking at as a replicable business model). There can’t have been more than 150 people there. Even allowing for an average price of £8 to include those paying £9 on the door, that’s £1200 from door receipts. Split with the venue. Less the cut for main support (assuming first support are doing it for nothing but the kudos). Less manager’s cut. Less paying the road crew. Less transport, accommodation, food, kit maintenance. Then split four ways. Even my maths is good enough to tell me it pays better to sew the tour T-shirts in a sweatshop.
You don’t make your money on tour from playing. You get a kick from playing; you spread the word by playing; you delight the fans by playing. You make money on tour by selling merchandise. And that can include selling something you’ve already given away. We went to see The Charlatans at The Astoria last November. They got a vast amount of publicity by giving away free downloads of last year’s album You Cross My Path. CDs of the same album were on sale with the other merchandise, and within an hour they were sold out – bought by people who already had the free download. The point is, get a group of fans together and they’re not just PREPARED to pay for something they’ve already got for free. They’ll WANT to. But those who missed out on the night probably won’t all go to HMV the next day – that’s the importance of the gig.
So can writers do this? Well, yes. Book tours, with readings and signings, don’t have to be impossible to arrange. And they don’t have to be dull, dry, reverential affairs (although they can be – what form they actually take probably depends on your genre). Nor do they have to take place in bookstores. Chains will probably baulk because if you’re self-publishing they won’t get a huge slice of the pie. Independent bookstores are more likely but not great venues. I’d take a leaf out of bands’ books. Start in small venues you can get on the cheap – why not ask pubs and coffee shops (these are great because people go there anyway). Give away free downloads to build publicity, put up flyers, then sell the book on the night and split the profits with the venue. Move on to town halls, leisure centres, other public amenities, when you think you can cover any cost (and why not find local bands and ask them where they play/rehearse?).
Merchandise. Yes, merchandise. This is where the money is made by bands on tour – those 50 T-shirts at £15 a pop will earn them as much as the door money. Then add the badges, hats, mugs, and lanyards. But how on earth can a writer sell merchandise? Well, I bought my Murakami diary…
As a writer you may not be able to do the whole traditional gamut straight off – chances are people won’t want a Joe Wannabe mug, for example. This DOES illustrate the importance of branding yourself, though – giving yourself a visual as well as a verbal identity (think about the font and layout of your covers). One of the most important parts of The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes, especially given the subject matter, iconic images and viral phenomena (although I obviously chose the subject matter for a reason) was the creation of a brand image to go with the website and novel. Agnieszka Kitty is an instantly recognisable, simple image that would look fine on anyone’s T-shirt.
Your audience might want different merchandise – I think Agnieszka Kitty eco bags would look rather nice. Then there’s the obvious – bookmarks. The other thing you can do is tie your merchandise in with your book – there’s a big tech element in The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes, so I’m thinking mobile phone or iPod socks (but be careful, and I’d advise steering clear of the legal minefield of using proprietary brands). Does your book have a key theme? An orange chrysanthemum, for example. The masters at this are the Coen brothers – think Miller’s Crossing hats, Big Lebowski bowling balls, O Brother Where Art Thou hair wax (not to mention the Soggy Bottom Boys CD).
The special edition. Musicians and film studios are masters at this. The Smiths even wrote a song (Paint a Vulgar Picture) about it. When I was at university, bands would routinely bring out 5 or 6 versions of a single and fans wanted ALL of them. Needless to say eventually the fans got rather tired of “a slightly different cover” and “bonus tracks,” but the special edition has evolved.
The point of the special edition isn’t really getting fans to pay twice for the same thing. That’s what the bad old days turned it into. It’s about just what it says – giving them something special. Something that’s a badge, that marks them out as a “real fan” as well as satisfying the fans’ desire to know more about anything and everything to do with your work And the advantage to you is you can charge a premium, making more profit per unit. There are whole books to be written on getting the price right – my rule is simple: never take the p*** - it’s as much for them as it is for you. They may grudgingly pay £20 but wouldn’t you rather they willingly paid £15? But always charge more than the standard version (or if you’re giving the standard version away, more than the RRP of similar books) – otherwise it’s not special, it just looks like the different cover double profit trick.
So what goes into a special edition to make it special? In a way that’s up to you and will depend on what you write about. But make it something YOU’D want, and be prepared to pay for. And make it specific to your book (don’t just stick a generic pen on the cover, for example, or give them 20% off a MacDonald’s). Is there more information you could give on some of your characters? If you have a great cameo character you know people will love but can’t really expand for story reasons, why not write a short, or even a novella, and include it (The Man Who Panited Agnieszka’s Shoes is about a man’s search for his missing daughter. There’s nothing about her childhood, but from June 1st I’ll be tweeting her childhood story on the username dadpleasefindme – the collected tweets would be a perfect companion piece to a book)? Does your protagonist keep a journal? Why not give a customised blank journal of the kind you’ve described so readers can keep their own (would work perfectly if you’re writing a Bridget Jones type book)?
Writers need to think like musicians and artists; we need to be showmen and women, to work in the public eye, and to make our money from selling an experience rather than a piece of hardware.
This is the thing that sparks the most intense conversations with my fellow writers, with “we’re just different” being the standard answer, and the reason why my constant references to the music industry are taken as a sign the pressure’s finally got to me. And when I’m at a gig, surrounded on all sides by fans united by the sound and the experience, I can absolutely see the uniquely collective appeal of music. But…
Even during the most intense set I can’t get that “but” out of my head.
The fact is, I would happily pay £10 to sit in a hall and listen to Murakami reading from Kafka on the Shore (I DID fork out a fiver for this year’s Murakami diary even though the paper’s so shiny you can’t write your appointments on it). And look at flashmobbing; and those giant nude crowd photos set in department stores. Art’s clearly not so different from music. That’s the big “but” filling my thought screen – it’s not music that infects the collective consciousness. It’s culture. And culture is writing as much as it’s a rock concert.
I want to aside her, but I’m not going to because I’ll bore you stupid. Just let me know if you’d like me to talk about culture and collectivity in general and I’ll happily do so. For now, I’ll limit myself to the single observation that’s relevant to my argument. For most of the time we’ve had stories, they’ve been public and not private experiences, passed on by storytellers to a live audience.
All of which is jolly interesting but of no help in explaining how to make money from doing something other than selling books.
OK, I’m not writing a textbook, I’m writing a post for my blog and my thousand words are almost gone on my intro, so here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to look at three ways musicians use to make money and see if there’s any transferability.
Take it for read, please, that this post is to be read in conjunction with my earlier post on giving your work away for free. Because for me there’s a real synergy there. Give your story away, and make your money from selling something else. If you can do this you really are on to a winner – and you’re obeying last week’s commandment of putting the fans first. Of course there’s the question of whether writing creates fans like that. But for now I’m going to refer back to my own example. Either I’m unique (in which case I should have figured out a way of getting rich by selling myself to research by now, and my bank account is conclusive evidence to the contrary) or writing can produce real fans.
So here’s our packet of three:
The tour. In the free download age, we’re always hearing that bands rely more and more on making money from live performances. I want to make two points. First, the live tour is something writers can replicate perfectly well. Second, whatever their multitude of benefits, unless you ARE Murakami, or Oasis, they’re not really a way to get rich.
I paid (sorry, my wife paid) £7 to hear The Boxer Rebellion last Friday (as an aside, that’s ridiculous value [we got 3 and a half hours of which 2 hours was live music form 3 great bands, including the hottest property in the UK] – gigs are ridiculous value, even the humungous ones – but the humungous ones aren’t really what we’re looking at as a replicable business model). There can’t have been more than 150 people there. Even allowing for an average price of £8 to include those paying £9 on the door, that’s £1200 from door receipts. Split with the venue. Less the cut for main support (assuming first support are doing it for nothing but the kudos). Less manager’s cut. Less paying the road crew. Less transport, accommodation, food, kit maintenance. Then split four ways. Even my maths is good enough to tell me it pays better to sew the tour T-shirts in a sweatshop.
You don’t make your money on tour from playing. You get a kick from playing; you spread the word by playing; you delight the fans by playing. You make money on tour by selling merchandise. And that can include selling something you’ve already given away. We went to see The Charlatans at The Astoria last November. They got a vast amount of publicity by giving away free downloads of last year’s album You Cross My Path. CDs of the same album were on sale with the other merchandise, and within an hour they were sold out – bought by people who already had the free download. The point is, get a group of fans together and they’re not just PREPARED to pay for something they’ve already got for free. They’ll WANT to. But those who missed out on the night probably won’t all go to HMV the next day – that’s the importance of the gig.
So can writers do this? Well, yes. Book tours, with readings and signings, don’t have to be impossible to arrange. And they don’t have to be dull, dry, reverential affairs (although they can be – what form they actually take probably depends on your genre). Nor do they have to take place in bookstores. Chains will probably baulk because if you’re self-publishing they won’t get a huge slice of the pie. Independent bookstores are more likely but not great venues. I’d take a leaf out of bands’ books. Start in small venues you can get on the cheap – why not ask pubs and coffee shops (these are great because people go there anyway). Give away free downloads to build publicity, put up flyers, then sell the book on the night and split the profits with the venue. Move on to town halls, leisure centres, other public amenities, when you think you can cover any cost (and why not find local bands and ask them where they play/rehearse?).
Merchandise. Yes, merchandise. This is where the money is made by bands on tour – those 50 T-shirts at £15 a pop will earn them as much as the door money. Then add the badges, hats, mugs, and lanyards. But how on earth can a writer sell merchandise? Well, I bought my Murakami diary…
As a writer you may not be able to do the whole traditional gamut straight off – chances are people won’t want a Joe Wannabe mug, for example. This DOES illustrate the importance of branding yourself, though – giving yourself a visual as well as a verbal identity (think about the font and layout of your covers). One of the most important parts of The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes, especially given the subject matter, iconic images and viral phenomena (although I obviously chose the subject matter for a reason) was the creation of a brand image to go with the website and novel. Agnieszka Kitty is an instantly recognisable, simple image that would look fine on anyone’s T-shirt.
Your audience might want different merchandise – I think Agnieszka Kitty eco bags would look rather nice. Then there’s the obvious – bookmarks. The other thing you can do is tie your merchandise in with your book – there’s a big tech element in The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes, so I’m thinking mobile phone or iPod socks (but be careful, and I’d advise steering clear of the legal minefield of using proprietary brands). Does your book have a key theme? An orange chrysanthemum, for example. The masters at this are the Coen brothers – think Miller’s Crossing hats, Big Lebowski bowling balls, O Brother Where Art Thou hair wax (not to mention the Soggy Bottom Boys CD).
The special edition. Musicians and film studios are masters at this. The Smiths even wrote a song (Paint a Vulgar Picture) about it. When I was at university, bands would routinely bring out 5 or 6 versions of a single and fans wanted ALL of them. Needless to say eventually the fans got rather tired of “a slightly different cover” and “bonus tracks,” but the special edition has evolved.
The point of the special edition isn’t really getting fans to pay twice for the same thing. That’s what the bad old days turned it into. It’s about just what it says – giving them something special. Something that’s a badge, that marks them out as a “real fan” as well as satisfying the fans’ desire to know more about anything and everything to do with your work And the advantage to you is you can charge a premium, making more profit per unit. There are whole books to be written on getting the price right – my rule is simple: never take the p*** - it’s as much for them as it is for you. They may grudgingly pay £20 but wouldn’t you rather they willingly paid £15? But always charge more than the standard version (or if you’re giving the standard version away, more than the RRP of similar books) – otherwise it’s not special, it just looks like the different cover double profit trick.
So what goes into a special edition to make it special? In a way that’s up to you and will depend on what you write about. But make it something YOU’D want, and be prepared to pay for. And make it specific to your book (don’t just stick a generic pen on the cover, for example, or give them 20% off a MacDonald’s). Is there more information you could give on some of your characters? If you have a great cameo character you know people will love but can’t really expand for story reasons, why not write a short, or even a novella, and include it (The Man Who Panited Agnieszka’s Shoes is about a man’s search for his missing daughter. There’s nothing about her childhood, but from June 1st I’ll be tweeting her childhood story on the username dadpleasefindme – the collected tweets would be a perfect companion piece to a book)? Does your protagonist keep a journal? Why not give a customised blank journal of the kind you’ve described so readers can keep their own (would work perfectly if you’re writing a Bridget Jones type book)?
Monday, 27 April 2009
Using the Internet to do something NEW
Blogs have turned the internet into some kind of noisy Hobbesian nightmare. Twitter has quietened the noise to a series of feint coughs, but the effect is the same – now everyone has something to say and no one has any time to listen. We are all participants; we are all producers; the consumer is dead.
It sounds scary or exciting depending on your take, but actually it’s rather dully neither. Technology may have changed the number of writers there are, but it hasn’t really changed writing. Writers who talk about the Internet – and even that’s a small percentage of them – see it as a way of publicising their book through a website. A few of them will try exotic marketing techniques like giving away their book, or producing their book as an e-book. The object of their craft, though, remains a book.
Which is a terrible shame when there IS so much creativity out there on the web. Some of it involves stories and characters – the tools, we were led to believe, of the writer. But what creativity there is belongs to the YouTubers and the gamers, groups of people who work together to create stories from the roots up, or to take narrative in surprising new directions.
So what can we, as humble writers, do with the Internet? Tom McCarthy, one of literature’s great innovators, said earlier this year that he couldn’t think of much – the Net did little but make more bad books available than ever. He’s right, but he needn’t be.
The first thing we need to do as writers is stop seeing ourselves as writers, and start seeing ourselves as creators of culture. Stop drawing boundaries and fences and closing off exciting possibilities. So you want to incorporate a video of someone singing into your novel but that’s music and film? So what? It’s a sad indictment of the boxes we put ourselves in that the most innovative novel of the past twenty years remains House of Leaves, a book that only ever existed on paper.
Two things excite me about the web. First, the potential for collaboration; and second, the fact that it exists in so many places and in so many ways that are all only a click away from each other. To make the most of these we have to get rid of two preconceptions – that we as writers sit in our attics dispensing words to the masses; and that what makes something literature is the possession of a story arc that can be contained neatly between the covers of a book.
It’s only since the printing press that writers have been physically able to separate themselves from the communities for whom they wrote. Storytelling always used to be a dialogue between teller and audience. The web allows it to be that again - it allows us to take our writing to people, listen to them listening to us, and change things as we go along. We can produce different versions of a book; we can even write the whole thing as one gigantic, multi-authored mess. Why don’t more of us stop worrying about the fact collaboration means the end of “auteurishness” and see where it leads in its own right – why don’t we allow ourselves, for a moment, to revel in the anarchy of it all, and see what emerges the other side?
I have offended countless writers by calling the centrality of “story” a myth – those writers who know their theoretical onions accuse me of swallowing Denis de Rougemont’s rather torturous conclusion that narrative arcs are an infusion of Platonic death into the pure life of culture. I haven’t swallowed him at all- historically speaking, his Tristanocentrism is rubbish. But he’s right about one thing – there’s nothing “natural” about the mythic status the likes of Dwight Swain accord to “story”.
Story implies unity, direction, that things follow from one another. In order (and I’ll explain if you want to know more): story is a phallocentric invention; story is the obsessive compulsive ritual at the heart of western literature; story is what literature should look like if quantum never happened and relativity still ruled the astrophysical high seas – only it did, and it doesn’t, and story is, therefore, an atavism, a throwback, a genetic anomaly that has interest but shouldn’t, by rights, exist.
What the web gives us as authors is the ability to put bits of stuff here there and everywhere and leave readers to join the dots. The fact that we as writers don’t is, to be honest, rather patronising. Of course most of the time people just want to relax in the bath with a good book. And for that, nothing is better suited than something with a good story. But there are other times when as readers we want to discover, elicit, be part of the uncovering and unravelling – revel in the wide-webbed mess of an entity that’s everywhere – it’s like watching the Usual Suspects with a zillion bells on. And the web gives us the potential to do this.
The Man Who Painted Agneiszka’s Shoes, my Facebook novel, is a vague stab at this. There’s a text. But it exists within a great morass of other “stuff”. Some of that stuff is on the Facebook group in the form of character sketches, back story articles, podcasts and pictures. But there’s also this blog, there’s a YouTube channel, there’s tweets, there’s a whole game the successful completion of which will influence the novel’s end; there’s fake websites; there’s fake blogs and dead end links; there are all sorts of phrases that you can google and find yourself in another part of the novel. You can enjoy the “story” without any of this – but you can also follow it down a hundred different routes, and enjoy it in as many different ways. There is no “one” novel. There are as many novels as there are readers – and then some to spare. As a writer, laying down these paths is like writing a thriller only in four dimensions. It’s the most intense adrenalin rush imaginable. I still haven’t figure out why other writers don’t agree, why they’re all still pounding away to write “a book” rather than exploring this wonderful multi-dimensional virtual notebook we now have. A few of us are – I invite the rest of you to come and join us. It’s fun.
It’s also got serious commercial potential. But that’s for a later post. This one’s all about getting you creatively excited.
It sounds scary or exciting depending on your take, but actually it’s rather dully neither. Technology may have changed the number of writers there are, but it hasn’t really changed writing. Writers who talk about the Internet – and even that’s a small percentage of them – see it as a way of publicising their book through a website. A few of them will try exotic marketing techniques like giving away their book, or producing their book as an e-book. The object of their craft, though, remains a book.
Which is a terrible shame when there IS so much creativity out there on the web. Some of it involves stories and characters – the tools, we were led to believe, of the writer. But what creativity there is belongs to the YouTubers and the gamers, groups of people who work together to create stories from the roots up, or to take narrative in surprising new directions.
So what can we, as humble writers, do with the Internet? Tom McCarthy, one of literature’s great innovators, said earlier this year that he couldn’t think of much – the Net did little but make more bad books available than ever. He’s right, but he needn’t be.
The first thing we need to do as writers is stop seeing ourselves as writers, and start seeing ourselves as creators of culture. Stop drawing boundaries and fences and closing off exciting possibilities. So you want to incorporate a video of someone singing into your novel but that’s music and film? So what? It’s a sad indictment of the boxes we put ourselves in that the most innovative novel of the past twenty years remains House of Leaves, a book that only ever existed on paper.
Two things excite me about the web. First, the potential for collaboration; and second, the fact that it exists in so many places and in so many ways that are all only a click away from each other. To make the most of these we have to get rid of two preconceptions – that we as writers sit in our attics dispensing words to the masses; and that what makes something literature is the possession of a story arc that can be contained neatly between the covers of a book.
It’s only since the printing press that writers have been physically able to separate themselves from the communities for whom they wrote. Storytelling always used to be a dialogue between teller and audience. The web allows it to be that again - it allows us to take our writing to people, listen to them listening to us, and change things as we go along. We can produce different versions of a book; we can even write the whole thing as one gigantic, multi-authored mess. Why don’t more of us stop worrying about the fact collaboration means the end of “auteurishness” and see where it leads in its own right – why don’t we allow ourselves, for a moment, to revel in the anarchy of it all, and see what emerges the other side?
I have offended countless writers by calling the centrality of “story” a myth – those writers who know their theoretical onions accuse me of swallowing Denis de Rougemont’s rather torturous conclusion that narrative arcs are an infusion of Platonic death into the pure life of culture. I haven’t swallowed him at all- historically speaking, his Tristanocentrism is rubbish. But he’s right about one thing – there’s nothing “natural” about the mythic status the likes of Dwight Swain accord to “story”.
Story implies unity, direction, that things follow from one another. In order (and I’ll explain if you want to know more): story is a phallocentric invention; story is the obsessive compulsive ritual at the heart of western literature; story is what literature should look like if quantum never happened and relativity still ruled the astrophysical high seas – only it did, and it doesn’t, and story is, therefore, an atavism, a throwback, a genetic anomaly that has interest but shouldn’t, by rights, exist.
What the web gives us as authors is the ability to put bits of stuff here there and everywhere and leave readers to join the dots. The fact that we as writers don’t is, to be honest, rather patronising. Of course most of the time people just want to relax in the bath with a good book. And for that, nothing is better suited than something with a good story. But there are other times when as readers we want to discover, elicit, be part of the uncovering and unravelling – revel in the wide-webbed mess of an entity that’s everywhere – it’s like watching the Usual Suspects with a zillion bells on. And the web gives us the potential to do this.
The Man Who Painted Agneiszka’s Shoes, my Facebook novel, is a vague stab at this. There’s a text. But it exists within a great morass of other “stuff”. Some of that stuff is on the Facebook group in the form of character sketches, back story articles, podcasts and pictures. But there’s also this blog, there’s a YouTube channel, there’s tweets, there’s a whole game the successful completion of which will influence the novel’s end; there’s fake websites; there’s fake blogs and dead end links; there are all sorts of phrases that you can google and find yourself in another part of the novel. You can enjoy the “story” without any of this – but you can also follow it down a hundred different routes, and enjoy it in as many different ways. There is no “one” novel. There are as many novels as there are readers – and then some to spare. As a writer, laying down these paths is like writing a thriller only in four dimensions. It’s the most intense adrenalin rush imaginable. I still haven’t figure out why other writers don’t agree, why they’re all still pounding away to write “a book” rather than exploring this wonderful multi-dimensional virtual notebook we now have. A few of us are – I invite the rest of you to come and join us. It’s fun.
It’s also got serious commercial potential. But that’s for a later post. This one’s all about getting you creatively excited.
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