Monday 27 February 2012

The new world order...

Anthony Horowitz has an interesting article in the Guardian today.

It's a fairly compelling argument about why publishers are still necessary in this brave new world where literally anybody can publish their own book and make it as easily available as the latest James Patterson (online, at least).

There seems to be a lot of successful self-pubbed authors out there gleefully predicting the death of old-style publishers, agents and even bookshops. As someone newly experimenting with online publishing and hoping to make a success out of it, I can't bring myself to join in.

Sure, there's absolutely room for improvement in the way authors are rewarded. For a start, they should be getting a bigger slice of the pie, particularly on e-books, where the production and distribution costs are virtually zero. But I believe publishers still have an important role to play, and I believe they'll successfully adapt to the new landscape sooner or later.

Because unless you're a genius, it's unlikely your book couldn't be improved by letting a knowledgeable person read it over and offer their comments. I know that Halfway to Hell was improved a lot by my agent's guidance. That's what good publishers and good agents have to offer: careful editing and helpful critiqueing. Readers are always going to be looking for books that have been through some kind of quality control, and that's why there will still be a publishing industry when the dust settles.

Saturday 25 February 2012

The Misfortune Teller

All day today, my short story collection The Misfortune Teller is available free from Amazon.

Get it from Amazon US (up until midnight Pacific Standard Time) or Amazon UK (up until 7am Sunday).

Three short stories of crime and suspense.

In THE ROOM, an incapacitated student gets more than he bargained for when curiosity leads him to join an online self help community. At first the members of The Room welcome him with open arms, but things take a turn for the deadly when one of them confesses to a murder...

In IT'S NOT ME, IT'S YOU, an encounter with a mysterious stranger in an all-night cafe changes a young woman's life forever.

And in THE MISFORTUNE TELLER, Miller is a private detective with an unusual talent. One that just might help him crack his latest case...

Thursday 23 February 2012

Marketing on a non-budget

One of the big disadvantages of self-publishing is you're working on a marketing budget that's pretty close to zero.

The advantage is that your head of publicity knows the product inside out and is 100% committed to it.

I publicised the Halfway to Hell Facebook page to my friends list last week, and it's been a good way to get people talking about the book. Right now, I'm up to 33 likes, which is enough to get the page a custom short URL. There's been a bump in sales (we're not talking in the millions yet, but I've hit double figures), although I'm sure a lot of those are my more supportive friends. It's a good start: one of my primary goals is to get as many people as possible to read the book, ideally enjoy it, and post a positive review on Amazon.

The other marketing thing I'm trying this week is Halfway to Hell business cards.

Vistaprint offers 500 cards for £5 (which actually ends up more like £15 once you factor in extravagant extras like postage, uploading an image, and actually having words on it). I've ordered a set with a cropped cover image on the front focusing on the title, and a bit more info on the back: that it's the first in a new thriller series, that it's available from Amazon, and the Facebook link.

I think cards are a worthwhile investment at that price - they're small, they have a nice graphic, and I can spread them around a bit. I'm planning to leave them in the places where people who read books go: libraries, trains, cafes, bookshops. I can also mail them out to reviewers and anyone else I think might be a good target.

It might be that I'm barking up the wrong tree here, that I need to ignore physical marketing and focus exclusively on e-marketing. After all, even if everyone who picks up one of these cards buys the book, that's still going to do nothing for my US and European sales.

But I don't think it's an either/or proposition. I think it's a worthwhile experiment at that price. I live in Glasgow, one of the biggest cities in the UK, and work part of the week in Edinburgh. My day job takes me around the country a lot. On my travels, I've seen a lot of people reading thrillers, and a fair few reading them on Kindles.

If an eyecatching card intrigues someone enough to download a sample, then maybe buy the book and write a review, and if they tell a couple of friends... well, every little helps, to quote Tesco.

Memo to self: get some cards in the thriller section of Tesco. Maybe the Kindle section too.

Pictures when my order arrives.

Sunday 12 February 2012

Publication day

Halfway to Hell is now available to buy:

Click here to buy (or try a sample) from amazon.com

Click here to buy/sample from amazon.co.uk

I'm very excited that my book is now available to basically anyone in the world with an internet connection.

I'm going to wait until Friday before doing any Facebook announcements. Two reasons: I'm curious to see if I can notch up any sales with zero publicity, and I reckon I can maximise those initial 'likes' from friends (and friends-of-friends) if I tell them at the start of a weekend.

The cover

My good friend John Ferguson has brought his considerable graphic design talents to bear on a cover for Halfway to Hell. I'm impressed:


John's done a really great job here, and given me exactly what I was looking for: something that is immediately identifiable as a thriller, but is striking enough to stand out from the pack. It looks modern, but at the same time the colours and font give it a retro 70s vibe. I think that nicely mirrors the neo-noir sensibility of the book.

The font is exactly what I was looking for: big, chunky and no-nonsense. It's Poplar, for the font geeks.

Saturday 4 February 2012

Judging a book by its cover

One of the fun things about self-publishing is you get to design your own covers.

Most authors, even the really big guns, are never let near the design and packaging of their books. There's probably a good reason for that, in a lot of cases.

The old adage is 'you can't judge a book by its cover'. As an absolute statement, that's bullshit.

In terms of judging quality, it's probably true, but that leaves a whole lot of things you can judge a book on, based on its cover. To wit:
  • If the cover is bright pink with stars and a sparkly embossed cursive font, chances are it's chick-lit.
  • If the cover is a black and white or sepia picture of a wistful-looking child, with a title like Daddy Never Bought Me A Nintendo DS, you're looking at one of those inexplicably-popular misery-lit books.
  • If the cover shows a foreboding and barren landscape (forests and deserts are good), with a guy with his back to us striding purposefully into the scenery, it's a thriller. Extra points for railway tracks.
The last one is the market I'm going for with Halfway to Hell. (The misery-lit one will be my follow-up, when nobody buys my first book.)

Scrupulously, I did some market research, consisting of visiting Asda and the local library and having a look at the contemporary thriller jackets I liked and didn't like.

Good or bad, no-name author or big gun, I was interested to see that pretty much all of them are done the same way: somebody takes a stock landscape photograph from Alamy or Getty or Shutterstock or iStock, takes another element or two (e.g. the purposeful striding man) and puts together a composite image. A lot of them don't even bother with the composite and just use the landscape. Not being a graphic designer, I thought it might be better to try the easy route.

These are the covers I came up with all by myself:






None of them are great, but it gives an idea of the direction I want to go in. Of the three, I think I like the second one best.

The images are royalty-free from Microsoft Clipart, which is a pretty good place to get images to play about with. It doesn't have the range or quality of somewhere like iStock, but then again it's completely free.

My low-tech approach to composing the covers was to use MS Publisher to add the text and try out some different fonts. I then did a screen-grab, pasted that into Paint, saved it as a JPEG and cropped the JPEG in Picture Manager for the final cover. I'm sure any arty or techy people reading this are pissing themselves right now, but hey - I do whatever works.

I showed these (and a few others, all embarassingly bad) to a friend at work who's a graphic designer, and they gave him enough of an idea of what I'm looking for to go away and work up a finished product.

So to cut a long story short, watch this space for an actually-good version of the above.

Thursday 2 February 2012

Sneak Preview

I'm almost ready for publication, but in the meantime, you can read the first 5 chapters of Halfway to Hell here.