5 Reasons this Blog Post is Shite

Well, here it is. Our first ever blog post. And it's shite. In our defence, though, there are definite, solid reasons for the shititude.

1) We're a Publisher, without any books. Uh-huh, yes, there it is. The first title, a Matilda Raleigh novella called The Guns of Pleasure and Death, is currently with an out-of-house book editor. When she is finished with it, we'll look at any changes she suggests, and make the novella the best it can be. There is also a draft with a cover artist who is busy thinking of potential covers. When the novella is done, this column will display a link to it so you can buy it, as you wish. <--------- (this column). The blog looks weird with empty columns.

2) It is 2:25 am. Good things rarely happen at this time. It's late, we're all tired, don't expect too much from us.

3) It's not the post we wanted to post. That was a post detailing ways in which traditional publishers could possibly attempt to fix the mess they are in. Good post, great topic, lousy introduction. Yes, okay, this introduction is not much better.

4) The post lacks content. We're not really saying anything here, are we? It's tongue-in-cheek, but as a first post it is our first piece of contact with readers. Readers who have not suffered the whims of our collective senses of humour, and have no way to gauge how serious or sarcastic we are being.

5) The title says 5 Reasons, but we don't even have five. Pathetic or what?

Trust us, the next post will be better. You'll have to come back so we can prove it to you.

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Sometimes I love my government

I have a new website, www.scathach-publishing.co.uk


It isn't a linky because it can take up to 72 hours for it to blah blah blah and I'll linky it when I finish site building.


Thanks to the fantastic fantasticness of GBBO I got my own domain name, 2 years web hosting, and a cool website for the tiny little price of £0.00.


That's right, nothing.


GBBO stands for Get British Business Online. It is part of the government's plan to make Britain world-leaders in IT. It is a partnership between the government, BT and google.


Scathach is born... yeeha!

Scathach is Born

In Celtic mythology the great hero CuChulainn learned love and war from the warrior maiden Scathach. She is always depicted as a Scottish heart-breaker, a martial arts instructor who taught the greatest Irish hero (and many others) how to fight. She would give them Friendship of the Thighs (ie teach those young lads all about sex) shortly before they finished training.


CuChalainn wanted to marry Emer, but was forbidden from doing so until he had finished training. So he went to Dun Scaith (Fortress of Shadows) on the Isle of Skye and seduced Uathach. In the midst of sex her lover discovered them. CuChalainn killed him, and Uathach fell in love with him (I think it was slightly more involved than this. Let's call this the abbreviated version) and taught him how to make Scathach grant him 3 desires.


So he got Scathach to teach him to fight, and to let him agree to marry Uathach, and I cannot remember his third desire. Anyway, Scathach gave him the Freedom of the Thighs (seduced her daughter's lover, fiance, etc) and gave him a magic spear only he could use.


Scathach means shadowy. It is the name I am giving to my Publishing company. The story above will illustrate why Pleasure and Death will be an ace first title. It's pronounced exactly as read (in Scottish, anyway. In Welsh it is Ska ha, but I ain't Welsh. As illustrated by my use of vowels).


Scathach is born.

Ending the Stigma of Self-Publishing

This is a fairly interesting blog post from over on Free Kindle. The author asks the question "What is a book?" He has a valid point. If the book is the physical thing, then an e-book isn't really a book at all. Neither is an audio book, a podcast or anything else.

This is the way I approach it, too. I see myself as a storyteller more than a writer, which is why I'm as happy directing as writing. Films, books, it's all just about a story at heart.

Here's another free kindle post about what readers judge a book by. Publisher isn't in the top 5, interestingly enough. One reader comments that he (or she?) only reads books that are like books by authors he (she?) likes. This reader doesn't know how to search out other books.  I keep getting the feeling that there should be a way Indie Authors can come together, because only collectively can Indie Authors outshine the NY Publishing Houses.

Until there is a way for Indie Authors to work together, there will be limited individual successes (yes, okay, like Zoe. Zoe who?) and a huge amount of people falling into obscurity. Yes, there is crap produced, but there are some real gems out there. I feel there needs to be a way to get readers to more easily find Indie Authors.

I read a lot of Indie Author blogs. You'll find them down the side of my blog, all except Zoe who (lol, again) for some reason I can't link to from down there. I'm always finding more Indie Author blogs without even looking thanks to the gem that is Google Alerts. I have various alerts set up but the important one just now is "Indie Author" including the quotation marks.

A lot of these author blogs I read are geared at other authors. Very few make a conscious effort to blog for readers. I don't either, but I don't have a book out yet so I doubt readers are interested in me.

This isn't an Indie Author thing. Of all the blogs I have read by authors, only 2 have been strictly for readers. Neil Gaiman posts a "this is what I did, this is what I'm doing, this is what I'm going to be doing" style blog here. For a blog that's fun, interesting, and all about the readers, try this one: Patrick Rothfuss. The reason I think this works so well is because he wrote a magazine in college. His blog posts are college-magazine like.

So what can Indie Authors do? I don't really like offering advice because my book isn't out yet. I am kind of side-lined, but it is getting unbearably close to being ready. Like standing at the tip of the diving board, staring into the water below, people behind getting impatient. I did that, once. Was terrifying all the way up the ladders, and just before I jumped I lost all fear. It was about 30 ft above the water and I was doing a life-jacket test.

Indie Authors all seem to see themselves as being alone. But that won't work. When a NY published book comes out it comes out without the stigma attached to self-publishing. It comes out with the backing of literary gatekeepers. Yes, as Zoe Who episode 2 points out, that gatekeeper might be a 19 year old fashion school drop out, but it's still a gatekeeper.

Right now is the best time to be an Indie Author. Right now the publishers are killing themselves, they are literally in their death throes. I really do think they will re-invent themselves, be reincarnated in a new form. But right now they are dying. They are collapsing where they stand. And there are so many reasons for this, way beyond the obvious reasons. You want to know one of the major reasons the publishers are dying? J A Konrath is murdering publishers, or at least he has the potential too.

He is showing that mid-list authors with backlists and fans can do a lot better on their on, without publishers. When this news gets about, as it will, more will follow. When they do, publishers will be left with noobies and big guns. With only debut authors and giants and nothing in between, and every few years the noobies reaching the point where they are better off on their own, the publishers will die.

That's not the only reason. This is another one, and the agency pricing model another, and the obsession with dead tree books another. Now is the best time to be Indie, but to truly get passed the self-publishing stigma, I think that Indie Authors need to work together. There needs to be a grassroots community of Indie authors that readers find easy to navigate. There has to be a way of finding other books readers will like.

It has to be aimed at readers. It has to be directed at the people we are directing our work at. It has to be honest. If we recommend something shit, it damages our reputation. By finding a way to highlight the gold we can widen other indies readerships even as they widen ours. Books are read faster than they are written. By bringing Indie Authors together and sharing fans everyone's readership will grow, and we will lose some of that stigma that self-publishing has.

If a reader picks up an Indie book they might think "Wow, I thought all self-pubbed books were shit. Guess this is the exception." If they Stumbleon the grassroots community of Indie Authors where every book is quality, then their whole opinion must be revised. A self-publishing author isn't news. A grassroots, word-of-mouth community of authors that have turned their backs on Publishing because someone left a wardful of idiots in charge might be news.

For the benefit of all of us, Indie Authors need to come together. I'd love to hear other people's views on this. Leave a comment below.

My Big Mouth

My Big Mouth keeps getting me in trouble.


I do these silly things. Well, no, actually, I agree to silly things. I recently started volunteering on Hospital Radio. Last Thursday I told the manager I could write a radio drama and would happily give them radio copyright but I was keeping all other copyright.


Tomorrow I've to present 3 story ideas.


Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.


I also agreed to appear as Robin Hood when the roadshow goes out in August. Crazy.


There might be pictures.

My boots are huge

I started the first step in my marketing plan, yesterday. It seems crazy, my book isn't even out yet.


On that, I'm 100 pages into my hard copy edit. That's where I mark all the changes on a print out, as in the previous post. My entire m/s currently sits at 127 pages, double-space, 12-point TNR. This edit has some pretty big changes in it. I realised that some scenes which were conversational should really have been confrontational. This is sword and sorcery I'm writing after all it's supposed to be about marching from battle to battle.


After I'm finished, I have to put all my changes into the PC. Then I pop the book to an editor and to my cover artist. I'm confident with my story, I like it, I don't want to change it. Unless there is a gaping plot hole I won't be changing the structure. My artist plans to read my book for inspiration.


And then I do my marketing. Which I started yesterday. It's hard to market fiction, which is why I have decided to do non-fiction to put my name about a bit. So I started working on a non-fiction yesterday, which I aim to have finished by Xmas.


Which is roughly when I'll start the first Guns prequel. I don't have a title yet, but I do know it will be set in 1860, in London. Winter. There will be zombies. And Church knights. And really cool steampunk technology. The plot will involve an old book, somehow.


And Matilda will be evil, which will be fun to write. Embrace the demonic badness.


I have plans for work in other genres too, but I'm just going to keep going for now and see how far I can get. From Sept/Oct next year there's a film I really want to start filming, so I'll need to script it this year, and try and make enough money from the writing to have a float with which to start fundraising for my film.


But this non fiction is one of the hardest things I have ever done. Other companies make these books, and put together teams of 30 staff to pull it off. I have me, and a tea-brewing dwarf, and a quarter of that sentence was a lie.

Hard at Work

Thought I'd offer up some proof I've been hard at work, lol.

These are some heavily edited pages from my manuscript. You can see my scribbled handwriting marking out the detailed changes.










This scene involves the hero Matilda being visited by the Archangel Barachiel, who offers her the Blessing of God.

The Blessing of God ensures that no matter what "evil" a person does in life, they are guaranteed entry into heaven when they die.

Matilda refuses the Blessing of God, saying that if she commits acts evil enough to ensure she is sent to Hell, then she will go to Hell.



Facing the consequences of your actions is a huge theme in this novella. This is the last battle of her life, and she faces once more the first evil she ever fought. It killed her father and her husband.

I really wanted a cyclical aspect to Matilda's life.

She is going to die facing the first evil she ever faced once more. This is the thing that set her down the road to being a hero. This is what it's all about.

A while ago I wrote a query and submitted it to someone who reads queries and tells you if they are any good. This person commented on the fact that it sounded like Matilda was going to die.

She does die.

Unlike most other novels that are about the hero/heroine taking out the evil and finding a way to survive, this book is about Matilda staying alive long enough to get to the Big Bad.

She nearly dies several times before getting to the last fight.

But sometimes it's not about surviving; it's the winning that counts.

I had a lot of fun with this scene because I was using existing Christian mythologies.

In old Christian beliefs Barachiel is an angel who offers the Blessing of God. He often appears holding a white rose.

I went in a very stereotypical way with my angels; white swan-feather wings, handsome bare-chested men, flaming swords. Of course, my demons look very similar, with the exception of Sephyr (she's a demonic mermaid). My demons (being fallen angels) can appear as demonic or angelic as they wish.

This is perhaps my favourite scene in the entire thing. Matilda has given up on God, and when the angel visits her, she argues with it. Its not that she doesn't believe in God, she doesn't have to believe, she knows he exists.

If God has a Plan, if he is all-knowing and infallible, then he must have known about the Fall before the angels rebelled and became demons. If he did know, then God allows evil in the world. If God didn't know, then he isn't all-knowing.

I really like this scene. Once published, I hope some of you like it, too.

Not about strategy

So I said I would do a blog post on marketing strategies. I remember writing that for a very defined purpose. I knew why I was doing it. It made perfect sense. How shit is it that I have completely forgotten what was going into that post?

About the only thing I can say about marketing strategies is... surprise people. Don't do what they expect you to do. Apparently the first company to advertise on the sides of their trucks was the Body Shop. Before that trucks trundled up and down the country with plain white sides. After the Body Shop did it, everyone else copied. But the Body Shop jumped ahead of the game by advertising on the sides of elephants.

I'm not entirely sure why elephants were trundling up and down the country, though.

Surprise people. And I don't mean put Jane in a Box instead of Jack. I mean, actually aim to do different things, things other people haven't done.


Right now, that's all I've got strategy-wise.

Writing wise, I'm about 50% into my newest edit. I'm going to make this the last one. My preious edit changed a lot of things and made the story much stronger. This edit will make sure it all flows and I have no typos or shit lying around. And then, I'm done.

Copies of the book will be sent to my editor and cover artist. At this point I don't see any major changes to my novella, so my artist can read what I have so far and together we can discuss my cover art. She wants to do an original piece of artwork for it.

I've just begin my next big project. It's a non-fiction book, and I'm hoping to have it sort of finished by Christmas. It will then go out to other people, and I'm hoping that stage can be done by April, which would give it a Summer 2011 release date.

Long before which I should be finished my prequel, book one of my series.

I have decided on titles. A while back I asked people what they thought of my titles, The Guns of Pleasure and Death, or Pleasure and Death. The romance writers and readers unanimously picked Pleasure and Death (a romance sounding title) and the spec fic author picked Guns.

For my novella I'm going with Pleasure and Death. For my prequels, the series title will be The Guns of Pleasure and Death. The first book doesn't have a title yet, but it does have a plot. Zombies, grimoires, demonic possession and the militant arm of the Church are all involved.
And that's enough teasers for now. Ba-bye.

I'm baaack!

Got a new charger for my netbook. Finally.


Also got a new job for the summer. Night shift this week.


Next post is marketing strategy, right? Aiming to do that on Friday, then.

My internet died

My netbook charger has died. I write my novel on my PC which has no internet access, so no massive problem there. (I can still write) but in an hour (when this battery goes) I will be cut off from the net.


I will be back as soon as I can get it fixed, but that may be a while. I'm sure you will all miss me.

Do you know what you are selling - marketing part 2.5

In the last post on marketing, I said there were three ways to market your novel. You could market a title, your name, or your company.



These are the three ways you can market. You have to decide on the best approach for you.

There are pros and cons in each of these ways.

If you are writing a series of Paranormal Romances (for example) you may want to promote the name of your series. The pros of this is that each books marketing will build on the marketing of the book before.  When you get quite far into your series, you will be able to do small amounts of marketing for large results. The con is that this works in polar reverse. At the beginning of your series this form of marketing will require a shit-load of work for negligible returns.

You might decide that you are doing one book under a certain name and you won't be doing anything else under that name, and you'll never write anything like that again. If so, promote the book's name. This is perhaps the easiest way to market and will garner you the best results. The downside is that the amount of work you put into it is relative to the amount of work you take out of it. So if you were to do a whole series this way, you would need to put a lot of effort into publicising each book in the series.


You might have a series of loosely connected adventures all focusing on one character (my upcoming books in my steampunk series will all focus on Lady Matilda Raleigh, Duchess of Leicester) and you may decide to market your character.  This is the Harry Potter approach - but the character can outshine you. Any future book by JK Rowling will have "Author of Harry Potter" on the cover. If she decides to suddenly start writing romance this Harry Potter effect will not be good for sales.


You may decide to market your name. This is a good way to do it; it makes you famous, not your books. So each of Stephen King's standalone novels are marketed under Stephen King's name - they will be written in his style, his authorial voice, will probably share themes, but not characters. The downside to this is that readers will build expectations into your name. It makes changing genre a pain the arse.

I will not cover marketing your company. You are indie publishers, and probably not thinking about growing your company to the point where it might be wise to market it. Curiously enough, I am. Marketing my company forms a large part of my strategy.

Ah, strategy. that's important. You have one of them, right? Strategy will be the subject of my next blog on marketing, I think.  Sorry this one was all text, marketing images are hard to find.

Do you know what you are selling - marketing part 2

So in the last marketing post I covered the difference between marketing and sales.  But now I want to know, do you know the point of your marketing campaign?


A lot of authors don't seem to know the point.


There are 3 ways to market your book.  Pick one of the three and use that as the starting point for your marketing strategy. Because (and here is the important bit) the method you use will depend on your goal. It will utilise different techniques, and it will net you different results.

• market your title
• market your name
• market your publishing company* 

*sorry, pet peeve, a publishing imprint is a sub-division of a larger publishing company  wikipedia. You own a publishing company or small press, not an imprint.

Title

  You can market the title of your novel (or, alternatively, the title of your series). I was on about book 4 or 5 before I realised Kelley Armstrong's series was called Women of the Underworld. There was no indication on the books that the series had a title.

On the other hand, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series  has a very distinctive Series name. In fact, the name has been so well presented that it is practically a brand. Every new novel starts with a blowing wind which is not the beginning because the wheel of time turns, it has no beginnings or endings. Additionally each new book is presented as Wheel of Time whatever number whatever title. And throughout the story characters reference the Wheel of Time.

 

You can do this with either your books title or your series title. You can market it to the point where everyone knows it. Sometimes viral marketing (word of mouth) will run with a title, and that's what gets marketed whether you want it to or not. (Which is why Dan Brown's novels released before DaVinci Code were reissued with new covers pointing out he was the author of the DaVinci Code).

Of course, on rare occasions you can market a character. At such times it is a good idea to include the characters name in the title. There are a few examples of this (such as Hannibal the Cannibal or Sherlock Holmes). The most recognised example, of course, is:

Name

You can turn your name into a brand. There are a lot of authors who have done this, and you can spot them because the next book is always introduced as "Author's book."

Examples include John Grisham's The Firm or Michael Crighton's Jurassic Park. The most successful author to use this form of branding is, of course, Stephen King. 

Publishing Company

You can brand your companies name. This is unusual to the point of practically never being heard of. There are only a few occasions when this has been used. It is mostly used when there are a lot of similar books by loads of different authors, and readers want a particular style or genre of book rather than following a certain author's work.


Examples of this would be Harlequin Romance or The Black Library (publishes fiction set in the World of Warhammer).


Okay this feels like its getting long. I have a lot written past this point, I'm going to cut it and use it for a second post which will come online in a few days. It involves the pros and cons of the methods described above.

Killing trees

I just printed off 100 pages of story, started editing and realised it was the wrong damn draft.


Shit.

Book Marketing and Book Sales Part 1

I've always known I wasn't like other people. I know everybody wants to be "special" and nobody wants to be "same-ish."  That's not what this is.

I don't think like other people do, and I never have. I'm not saying it's a good thing.

Here's an example: I have a lovely wife, a lovely young family, etc. I could buckle down and get a shitty full-time job that paid half decent wages, and take my family on holidays and buy our house etc. It's the dreams of every other guy I know in my personal off-line life. Their biggest ambition is to see their team win the world cup.

That's not an ambition I could ever buy into. We have little (ie no) cash because I'm a student, but money has never been important to me.

Seriously, the most I ever earned in a year is about 10k, so if I can earn that as a writer, I'll be able to support myself writing fulltime at the level I'm used to. If I can make £800 a month (which I reckon is doable once I got about 5 or 6 novels out there. We shall see) then I won't need to work.

Maybe other writers are like me. Maybe they look at people around them and think "How can you be content with such a normal life?" I love my wife, but I warned her when we met to never ask me to choose her or writing. I'd do anything for her, anything except that.

I go to college, and we get set tasks. I do them in completely different ways from everyone else, and quite often get better results. But these things just seem obvious to me.

It's the same with book marketing. I look at the ways other authors market their books (book trailers, blog tours) and I just think... why?

I can see the appeal to a blog tour. You get exposed to a lot of other readers (or at least, you hope you do). But do you?  I recently followed Kait Nolan's blog tour. I think she's a great blogger, informative and witty (I haven't read her book yet, but I'm sure I will at some point). I also read Nathan Bransford's blog. Last year (or earlier  this year, maybe) guest bloggers came on for a week. I didn't bother reading any of them. I give up part of my day to go to Nathan's blog to read things he writes, not things someone else wrote.

Is this me being weird? Probably, but I aint the only weirdo in the world.


And book trailers... how do they work exactly? If someone comes on my blog they can watch my trailer? If someone knows my name or my books title they can look me up on youtube? So I'm not actually attracting people that don't know I exist in the first place?

Yeah, I don't see these as being great strategies. I'm sure they work to a point, some people might read a guess blogger, a smaller amount might follow through to your blog. A much smaller amount might buy your book. And any sales a sale, right?

Here's my point... writers without business backgrounds get confused between marketing and sales. Marketing is all about research, and as writers you should have a handle on research. Marketing will help you set your price on your novel. It will help you pinpoint an audience. It will help you find out where your audience lurks likes to hang around, so you can stalk engage them.

Sales is how you engage them.

So Marketing would be the blogs you decide to go to on your blog tour.
Sales would be what you decide  to write in each post.

This is the first of a multi-part look at how writers can market and sell novels, and the steps I intend to take.  I'll be writing this sporadically over the next few months as I put the last touches to my novel and begin my marketing and sales drive.