Burning Time

Despite the purge of a lifetime of accumulated books, I still read as much as I ever did. I have not fallen out of love with it in any way, nor books themselves for that matter. 

The publishing world - alongside of the music business, the movie/TV business and more than likely, every other business you can think of - continues to change. It's confusing out there for writers. Hell, you don't even have to be new to the game to find it the business equivalent of the Grimpen Mire. 

To bring us up to date with the world of me, a couple of years ago, I released a book called The Family Of Noise. I didn't make a huge deal out of it and pushed it out only to a few friends and people who like to follow me here regularly with a plan for a real PR campaign in the following weeks. I thought it was good... but word came back from many of these people that I should put it out through major channels for it to get the audience it deserved. That's just what you need to hear when you've spent two years smashing yourself in the face with a hammer.

I retracted the book from public eye along with any sales channels and set about pitching it to agents and publishers. Although you can apparently find a used copy on amazon for £120... in French! I don't think this item exists because I sure as hell never got it translated and know exactly where every single copy went. Go figure.

The upshot of which is that it's still sitting here a good year later - maybe it really does suck, but oh, how I wanted that book to be picked up by a huge publishing house and for all my dreams to come true but such a thing is not to be - at least not yet.

All that has happened in that year is a year has passed by in which nothing has happened.

Such is the price you will pay (if you want to view it that way) if you want to be a writer... but this is not quite true. 

There are two types of fiction writer and both are very real and proper. For some, validation comes from being picked up for mass publishing and it's a big deal. It means your material was good enough for somebody with something to lose to invest in you - and it is a big deal. It's the traditional way and it makes all of the wheels spin. It's what I've spent my whole life investing in on a weekly basis. I am not pouring scorn on it...

...but I have decided, I don't have that kind of time to squander, hanging around waiting for something to happen with my own work.

This is a really long way around of saying, I am going back to publishing my work through Bad Hare - which is my own imprint. I will likely sell as many copies as I would through any publisher that wasn't one of The Big Four, I like being responsible for my own cover art (which is not something I can bank on anywhere else), I will probably make more money from it but mostly - and this is important, I will be writing and moving forwards instead of waiting for somebody to tell me it's OK to keep writing. 

I do not write because I want to be an award winning writer. It would be nice I guess but I do not want it and I sure as hell am not hankering after such a thing. I don't write for money because I have a great job already and the actual odds on me making enough money to live on in such a niche game are slim. I do not write to be part of a group in which we all slap each other on the back and meet for beer once a month, not for kudos, sex, fame or anything else that might spring to mind. I don't even blog to try to convince anybody passing to sign up to a mailing list so that I can 'harness the audience' - to my eyes, that's cheap, desperate and smells of 'me-me-me-marketing' at its very worst - the internet is littered with them.

I write because I like writing and I want to write.

I write because so far, the people who have read what I write, like what I write - hell, some even love it.

I write because I have no idea what else to do with my life.

My only real fly in the ointment without a publisher is finding an audience... then again, here's the cover of Mary Miller's The Last Days Of California, which I thought was incredible for all the right reasons but have you read it?

No. You have never even heard of it, so I rest my case.

But sometimes, there are those little voices in my head that tell me I am Super Wrong and that I should hold out - but they are lying and I know this because this morning two things happened.

1. The voices began their dawn chorus

2. A few minutes later, I saw this in a thing Mr Gaiman did with The Guardian today:

There’s nothing like studying the bestseller lists of bygone years for teaching an author humility. You’ve heard of the ones that got filmed, normally. Mostly you realise that today’s bestsellers are tomorrow’s forgotten things.

I went to have a look at what was hot at the New York Times this week throughout a few random years. Here:

1995: Beach Music by Pat Conroy

2000: Winter Solstice by Rosamunde Pilcher

2005: Lifeguard by James Patterson and Paul Kemprecos

2010: The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson

2015: Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee 

The first two I have never heard of - author or book, Lifeguard is unsurprising because J.P. knows how to sell a book no matter what you think of him. Nobody cared about Larsson until Dragon became a film, so that too is understandable and Watchman is a blip on the radar - and also, compared to Mockingbird, garbage - that's nothing but a lawyer, a publisher or an estate cashing in on a legend. For point of reference with that, the week after Friction by Sandra Brown was sitting at the top.

No. Me neither.

What can you deduce from this? I'll tell you... people bought what they were sold. As always, Mr Gaiman is bang on the nose. Some made some money with their books, some still are... and at least two of them are dead.

I just want to write, so I am signing out of using my limited time on the planet firing shots at the publishing world. I am going back to flying solo - which also means I don't need to be concerned with ever looking at such lists again and can content myself with doing what I want as best I can and hopefully, finding an audience who like what I do too.

Le Fin.

Sorry it was a long-ass way around the block and if you got to the end, I salute you. If nothing else it made me feel better about the future.

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Footnote: I do think however, that if you are writing a crime/mystery novel or police procedural, a publishing house is unmistakably the way to go. A series - like John Connolly's Charlie Parker series - needs it. I'm not sure I would have discovered it otherwise and that would make me sad. Maybe we should all just know ourselves a little better by being honest. 

Time To Walk The Walk and Talk The Talk...

I pretty much started this blog 12 months ago and announced right up front that much of 2012 was going to be spent getting the right things in the right place - and for the most part, I think I achieved that. There's still some work to be done but most of it is of a personal nature and simple upgrades - figuring that some things might work better if played a different way, but right now that's besides the point. As part of that year of building the site - or 'author house' to give it it's proper name - I thought that 12 months would be more than long enough to make a decision on whether to seek out an agent and therefore a publishing house to call home or to press on alone and publish my own material. In the first of these scenarios, the benefit for me was not actually in the publishing and the 'hey look everybody - xxxx publisher thinks I could be a contender' approval that I carried around with me for a long time, but in the distribution. To put it simply, to get a book published by a decent publisher means that all the hard work (and it is hard work) of getting your product in front of reader's faces, would be done behind the scenes without having to care too much about it. When your books appear on the shelves of Waterstones and all of the high street supermarkets overnight, it's a big deal - I would imagine. That's your product out in the world all over the country, all at the same time. I'm sure that's a great feeling. Maybe we'll come back to that one day.

In the financial stakes in this scenario, here's an extract from the 2006 edition of Self Publishing for Dummies - which whilst a little old now (and I didn't actually buy but instead took a photograph of this page in the bookstore), still has some nuggets of wisdom that are worth a damn:

Major publishers typically pay authors a recoupable advance, plus a pre-determined royalty on book sales as compensation. Writers who self-publish their books, however, must cover all their project's development, printing, distribution, and marketing costs out-of-pocket. The profit potential, however, can be significantly greater. Instead of receiving a 25-cent, 50-cent, or even a dollar royalty for each copy of your book sold, a self-published author can earn 40 to 60 percent of the book's cover price and sometimes even more. So, if your book sells for $15 per copy and you sell just 1,000 copies, the profit is between $6,000 and $9,000.

Conversely, if you're an author whose book is published by a major publishing house, you earn only a 25-cent royalty per book. If that book only sells 1,000 copies, your earnings are a mere $250. As initial sales are generated from your book, you potentially have to repay your outstanding advance to the publisher. (If the book doesn't sell, however, the advance doesn't need to be repaid.) Even if that's been done, your literary agent often takes between 15 and 20 percent of your earnings as his commission. If the major publishing house sells tens of thousands of copies of your book, as the author, you stand to earn a decent income. This, however, doesn't always happen.

Another benefit to self-publishing is that you don't have to wait three to six months to receive royalty checks from the publisher. Authors who have their book published by a major publishing house often have to wait for the money they've earned, but self-published authors tend to be paid a lot faster, especially on copies of the book they sell directly to customers. Self-published authors also aren't subject to a withholding of royalties as a reserve against returns for up to six additional months. As a self-publisher you stand to earn more money per copy of your book sold, but it's also considerably harder, but not impossible, for self-publishers to get distribution in major bookstores.

On this last sentence, at the rate tablets have been selling this year (24.7 million of them were activated on Christmas Day this year - which I look upon as 24.7 million bookshops that have just opened in households across the land) I find that last point somewhat irrelevant now - although make no mistake, it's even harder to get your easily published digital book seen on the pages of amazon and ibooks, but at least you can do something about it instead of sitting at home seething about what a clandestine bunch of motherfuckers WHSmiths are.

Anyway - the point of all this was that I would call myself out on whether to go traditional and seek an agent and a publisher (both of whom are probably more than well aware of how shitty the distribution chain can be already) or do it myself, because not deciding at all meant that I couldn't really say what I thought about either one with 100% conviction. So here goes:

I'm going to do it myself.

There are more than financial reasons behind this - there would have to be. It's sure as hell not a fast track to riches. Assuming I can do the work (the writing) I can feasibly publish a good six books a year about anything I like. Working with a publisher I am likely to release just one and get dropped into a genre I will find it hard to get out of in the future. I don't like that concept. This last year I've spoken to over a dozen authors who, while I might not be able to call them friends yet, are certainly acquaintances, and not one of them has ever said "I am over-the-freaking-moon happy with my publishing deal". Not one. Some are doing OK, some are taking it as it's handed out and rolling with the punches, others are wriggling and wanting out, some are even considering going it alone. In this last example, I think it's a great idea - especially when you've already had some success in the big wide world and don't have to start from absolute zero.

I have to be honest. It's a scary thought - doing it all yourself. I mean, there are probably good reasons why publishers like to pigeonhole their authors. It probably helps a lot in the selling stakes and assists the lazy with where to find you in stores, but looking at it another way, the percentage of authors who make it to the shelves with any promotion worth speaking of are in a teeny tiny percentage. I've read a lot of them. Some are worthy, some are not. Some are still even being pushed off the back of The DaVinci Code - can you believe that? In fact, not even the book itself but more that the cover design is slightly similar to Brown's masterwork. So, in the long term, what the hell huh? How much less of a snowball's chance in hell can I get?

Not very many of these guys ever hit the road to do signings either. Shit, with a reasonable advance, that would be the first thing I'd do with the money. What a great investment in yourself, surely?

So, like I said, time to walk the walk and talk the talk - and there are many things I (or any author) can do for themselves. The 'trick' is to treat yourself how you would want PanMacmillan or Penguin to treat you in an ideal world. Over the next few months, I'm going to post my accumulated knowledge here and be proud to be doing it myself. I'll let the public decide if I fall into the 'holy shit, this is great' or the 'as I suspected, just another self published author of averageness' category. It doesn't really matter - take a look at any product reviews on amazon for the best authors in the world and you'll still find a split in opinion. That's what you buy into when you play the internet game - everyone's a critic.

To wrap up, I'm looking to build a writing career. Period. I don't want to put my trust in bean counters who may one day need to cull or recoup. I don't want to put my trust in a project manager whose idea of a great cover is not the same as mine. I've read constantly for over forty years now - I think I know a good cover when I see one. Neither do I want to believe in a promise that I'll be a priority when I'm not - nobody can promise me that except myself (and sometimes even I just want to kick back and watch cheap TV for five minutes).  The bigger question in the scheme of things for me has always been - if you get dropped from your publishing house (much as a band can get dropped from their record label), what other big publisher is going to look at you twice knowing a competitor couldn't make it work?

So let's see what happens.

Footnote: the only big change I'm going to make here (if you've been following progress so far) is that I don't like my self created 'publisher brand' of Twin Earth that I created. So I'll be changing that soon. Not that it matters to you. Just dotting the i's and crossing the t's...

Footnote 2: It's now 4.22 am. Have laid in bed listening to Bill Bryson touring this Small Island for over an hour, so have decided to not sleep but instead get back up and work on said 'publisher brand'. Is this how it's going to be?