Carry On Writing

Beware of the Bull 

A very long time ago, when I first started out on the long road to publication and production (but not writing. I had been doing that for a long time, writing stories and poems since I could write) somebody said to me 'the only way to learn how to write is to write.' At the time, because I was still in my teens and thought that instant solutions might be possible, it seemed a bit glib. But as time passed, I realised that it was nothing less than the truth. 
I thought about that advice earlier this year when I read Stephen King's excellent memoir On Writing for the first time and realised that he too was advocating intensive writing - and intensive reading, anything and everything, good, bad and indifferent - as the only way to find your own true voice. Practice makes perfect. 
Let's face it, there is a lot of advice out there not just for self publishers, but for all kinds of writers starting out on the same long road. And this blog is probably only adding to the confusion.
But I've felt recently - and uneasily - that some of the advice handed out doesn't just throw the baby out with the bathwater. It forgets to put the baby in the bath altogether. It concentrates on platforms and promotions, but seems curiously reluctant to talk about the need to - well, to do a lot of - you know - writing.
Here's a thing. When I first started to publish my novels on Kindle, backlist and new titles, I read all that 'how to promote your book' stuff myself and I did it a couple of times, posting here, there and everywhere. 
I had some success with Kindle Select which allows you give away your books for up to five days in any three month period in exchange for digital exclusivity for those months. This works well for some writers, hardly at all for others. For me - and I understand that this is perhaps because I have quite a lot of work out there, traditionally published too - it worked pretty well and certainly resulted in sales of other books. But I was also beginning to wonder if intensive promotion might not be counter productive. (It irritated me a bit when I came across it myself even though I fully understood why people were doing it.) 
So I decided to experiment with minimal promotion of a few free titles: putting a link on my Facebook page, doing the odd tweet (but not a steady stream of them!) adding one or two links to one or two groups. And guess what? People still downloaded the books. If anything, they did rather better. Which suggests that letting Amazon do what Amazon does best works at least as well as any other form of promotion. 
Which is not to say that you don't need to do anything. Because whether you go with the odd freebie or not, you do need to do something.
First and foremost, I think you need to concentrate more on the baby than the bathwater. Like my old correspondent said, you need to write. (And rewrite!) A lot. I've said this before, but it's worth repeating. Most writers who achieve any measure of success do an awful lot of writing and they do it because it's what they do.  It's more important than anything else. If you find yourself routinely neglecting your writing in order to do promotion, you've got things the wrong way round. The best way to achieve sales as a 'writer as publisher' or to achieve a publishing 'deal' if that's what you want, is to carry on writing. 
It used to be a sad truth that writers would often find themselves sitting on a body of highly praised but unpublished material - unpublished because it was deemed to be 'unmarketable' for various reasons: too long, too short, too mid-list, too niche. That was the position I found myself in. Now, if you want to, you get get that work out there yourself and still carry on looking for a traditional deal if that's what you want to do. Or not, if you don't. But above all, in order to give yourself options, you have to write. And care about what you write. The more you write, the more material you will have to publish and the more you will sell. 
Promotion is important too.
In fact it's an essential part of treating yourself in a professional manner, treating some aspects of your writing as a business - and engaging with your readers, where and when you can. And whether you're traditionally published, or embarking on the 'independent writer as publisher' route, you had better start thinking like a business person, because either way, those waters are worryingly shark infested and the baby that is your precious work may be gobbled up whole. And don't let anybody fool you into thinking that you won't have to devote a lot of time to promotion if you're traditionally published because you will. 
The trick is in getting your priorities right. Managing the time available to you. 
I'm feeling my way towards something here, as I have been all year, and I think it's this. In my opinion, the best promotions are those which are not so much promotions as 'optional extras' to the sheer pleasure of writing. They add value or interest in some way to the contents of the book. You must be prepared to share something. It could be about the subject matter of the novel, the characters, the setting, the themes. Or it could be about the process of writing. It could be about a particular genre, or none at all.  It could be about some aspect of your research -  or it could go off at a complete tangent. It might well be a recommendation of somebody else's book. What inspired you? Who inspired you? But whatever it is, you're giving your readers something extra, sharing something and - often enough - getting something back in the process. That, too, is one of the joys of social media and blogging. Just make sure that you aren't shouting so loudly about your own work that you miss hearing somebody else's intriguing or moving or inspirational story along the way. 

eBay and the eBook Revolution

About six years ago, when I was working as Royal Literary Fund 'Writing Fellow' at a university in Scotland, (helping students purely with their academic writing) one of my students, studying Commercial Music, remarked, 'You know, you writers should be doing what musicians like me are doing. Forget big publishing. Just find some way of getting the work out there yourselves.'
At that time, eBook Readers were available, but not yet the phenomenon they would soon become. After a writing career so checkered with success and failure that you could have made it into a board and played a game of chess on it, I agreed with her, but I couldn't see how to do it. It wasn't just that musicians could do gigs and get paid - in fact it wasn't even that, since as any musician will tell you, they don't get paid very much and besides, I already did get the occasional 'gig'. My RLF Fellowship was an extended and wonderfully supportive gig.
But although there were all kinds of ways for musicians to get their music 'out there', I didn't yet see how the same might apply to writers. 
Back then, I had just read Chris Anderson's The Long Tail (if you haven't read it, go and get it now!) and it made sense to me. But I had become frustrated at being cast in the role of humble supplicant by my own industry, an industry that seemed to have grown complacent over the years, an industry that increasingly disrespected the talent upon which it was forced to rely.
My 'day job' - the work that bought me time to write - was, and still is, an eBay shop called The Scottish Home, mostly selling antique and vintage textiles. I had always had an interest in such things, and had started out by trying to sell them at antique markets, but it was a thankless task. Then I discovered eBay and realised that here was a technology company providing me with the tools to do the job, worldwide. Soon, I was selling embroidered tablecloths to Australia and vintage linen sheets to fashionable New York addresses. Over time, I built up a nice little business and it's one which I can manage so that it fits in with my writing. When I'm snowed under with writing work - like now, when I'm deep into final edits on a new novel - I can wind it down. When I badly need some extra income, I can work like a Trojan and increase my turnover. I can take advantage of seasonal spikes, such as Christmas. But most of all, I think, my eBay experiences gave me a sense of how to run an online business, how to become friends with my customers, how to add value, package nicely, enclose pretty postcards, and write a blog to give people the extra information they enjoy.
It was only when I tried to apply these same lessons to my writing business that I found myself meeting a brick wall of indifference - not from readers, I hasten to add. When I could interact with them, they were appreciative. But from the layer upon layer of gatekeepers who seemed to have interposed themselves between me and those same readers.
I had an agent, I had a decent publishing and production track record, I had work waiting to go, but in spite of all kinds of praise from editors, my work was generally rejected at the 'sales' stage. I was routinely told that it was 'not linguistically experimental enough to be literary' but 'not quite fitting any genre, so we don't know how to market this.' God help my innocence, I even approached one or two Scottish publishers with the suggestion that a more businesslike relationship should be possible. This met with a disapproving silence. Not the way they worked at all. How dare I?
Until Amazon came along and brought technology to bookselling instead of vice versa.
The parallels with eBay are irresistible. You'll find the shysters and the incompetents on there - of course you will. But you'll also find millions of efficient small-to-medium sized businesses, from sole traders to online incarnations of known names, most of them giving excellent customer service, backed by a superb search facility.
Here's a very ordinary example.
Recently, we realised that the wheels on our shower doors had worn away. A plethora of local bricks- and-mortar businesses shook their heads, with that loud indrawn breath that is peculiar to sales people, and suggested that a new cabinet was the only option.
Five minutes on eBay, one digital picture sent to a seller - and a packet of new wheels arrived by the next post.
Last night, I came across a superb essay by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, characterising the way in which publishing is changing. It's called 'Scarcity and Abundance' and it should be required reading for publishers and writers everywhere. Essentially, it's a piece about mindsets. And the analogy could be extended to include the way in which our High Streets function (or increasingly don't function.) My local 'bathroom supplies' shops,with their beautiful glossy showrooms, were in a 'scarcity' mindset and sliding door wheels did not loom large for them. eBay, on the other hand, with its unlimited shelf space and abundant individual small businesses, could allow me to find the handful of suppliers in the UK who specialised in such things and - moreover- an individual who knew his stock well enough to be able to identify my requirements from a single digital picture. The wheels were not cheap, and I'll bet he's making decent profits - but they were a hell of a lot cheaper than a new cabinet and I was one happy customer.
All of which makes me think that the young literary writers who choose to see the eBook revolution as some kind of capitalist plot to ruin publishing couldn't be more wrong. One is lead to the inescapable conclusion that what they really can't stomach is the democratisation of publishing. They seem to feel that our gain is somehow responsible for their loss. John Carey was right when - brilliantly dissecting literary snobbishness in The Intellectuals and the Masses - he argued that the élite who felt their position threatened by the 19th century increase in literacy, invented new forms which would deliberately exclude the lower orders. A plethora of recent Guardian pieces (and - with a few notable exceptions - their comments) have all taken this remarkably superior stance. For a more balanced picture, you have to go to the technical pages. No doubt the bathroom showrooms feel exactly the same about eBay, even though it is entirely open to them to embrace digital, and set up an online store as well. But that would also mean embracing the mindset of unlimited shelf-space, of abundance, of trusting the abilies of people to search for what they want, coupled with the benefits of good - really good, not just adequate - programming.
A coder friend once told me that when most conventional businesses go digital, they don't understand the difference between an excellent programmer and a merely adequate programmer. All programmers are the same to them. The results are potentially disastrous and you can see them every day in clunky websites that are frustrating to use. Technology companies such as Amazon, eBay, DropBox and so on, always realise this and employ the best.
Above all, embracing the digital revolution means trusting the customer to know what he or she wants. And for most traditional publishers (although not, it seems, for writers) that seems to be a bridge too far.
Of which, more in my next post.

Bird of Passage, on Kindle

The Invisible Woman

The issue of the 'invisibility' of middle aged and older women seems to be everywhere, the word itself cropping up with disturbing regularity. I know the feeling. For a writer it's sometimes an advantage to be able to lurk quietly, watching what goes on, making mental notes, unheeded and unnoticed. At others, it can be deeply frustrating. But here's the thing. We aren't invisible to other women and especially not to middle aged and older women. Often, you'll catch a faintly jaded eye across a crowded room and know that she is feeling exactly the same as you: a mixture of indignation and amusement. That prickly sense of identification will pass between you like electricity.

To some extent, this disregard of the ‘other’ happens all the time and to everyone. It's the cause of many crass political and business decisions: this inability to put yourself in another's shoes, the assumption that just because you feel a certain way everyone else feels that way too. There was a scene during the last series of The Apprentice which neatly illustrated the problem. One of the contestants, an intelligent, determined and talented young woman, was unable to fathom why anyone might want to buy a back pack which would convert into a child's car seat. I can remember a time before motherhood when I might have felt exactly the same. But as it turned out, she was wrong, because it was a mega order for these same back packs that won the opposing team their treat. We all do it, making the assumption that everyone feels and thinks the way we do. But I suspect we do it more relentlessly when we're young through sheer lack of experience. One wrong business decision, based on a mistaken generalisation, needn't be a disaster. But this state of mind can have wider implications and the one that concerns me right now is my own field: writing and publishing.

Earlier this year, a colleague called Linda Gillard published to Amazon’s Kindle Store a beautifully written novel called House of Silence which was proving – as she herself says – ‘impossible’ to sell in the conventional way. ‘We actually ran out of editors to send it to!’ she says. Now this is no beginner we’re talking about. Linda is a talented and experienced writer with a successful, award winning track record and a good agent. The book in question was widely praised, but met with what another fine writer, Maggie Craig, calls the ‘rave rejection’. The problem with these – and I’ve had plenty of them myself – is that there’s nowhere to go with them. More often than not, they will say things like ‘This is a wonderful novel’ or ‘I just love this!’ And believe me, editors don’t lightly admit to loving something. If they don't like your writing, they won't pull their punches out of consideration for your feelings. But the problem invariably lies with the perceptions of those doing the marketing who may not even have read the book. Linda’s novel didn’t slot neatly into any narrow genre. Worse, as far as they were concerned, a significant percentage of her readership (although by no means all) consists of middle aged and older women in search of a thoughtful, well written novel: books that used to be called ‘midlist’ and were deemed to be eminently publishable. Now these same books, their writers and their voracious readers seem to have become largely invisible to conventional book marketing. But these are so often readers with the incentives of time, intelligence and a certain amount of disposable income. Now, in ever increasing numbers, they also have e-readers. And more will be acquiring them for Christmas.

Recent experience would suggest that an older woman in possession of a Kindle or a Nook, wants a more varied choice of reading matter than that generally on offer in your average supermarket. And that’s in spite of the mountains of paper books published every year. Those of us who love reading can identify with the demoralising experience of visiting a big book chain and – in spite of the many exclamatory promotions – finding nothing we really want to read. Inevitably, the marketing departments of publishing houses have become concerned with selling to big stores rather than selling to readers. But the buyers for those chains of stationers and supermarkets with a sideline in books will be focussing on a narrow demographic. Happily for Linda, there is a much bigger market out there. Her novel has become a great success and continues to sell widely and to be received enthusiastically. She sold more than 12,000 downloads of House of Silence, (and counting)  in approximately 4 months and she is already building on that success with another eBook called Untying the Knot.

She is not alone. With the collapse of the mid-list, there are many experienced, professional writers who are struggling to find publication for widely praised and properly edited work, writers, moreover, who already have a significant following among the reading public. My agent is currently sending out a new historical novel for me, in the usual way, and I'd be happy to find a publisher with whom I could work in the long term. But we aren't exactly being knocked down in the rush. Besides that, I have numerous pieces of good work including novels, which don't quite fit the mould of what he is currently sending out. Most of it is, I believe, work of quality, writing that a significant number of people would enjoy reading. And there seems little point in hanging onto it in the hope of some hypothetical jam tomorrow. That's the other thing about reaching a certain age. You become braver and more confident in your own abilities. (Maybe the invisibility helps.)

So I’ve started my own Kindle business with a trio of short stories, one of which rejoices in the title A Quiet Afternoon in the Museum of Torture and a novel called The Curiosity Cabinet which was shortlisted for the Dundee Book Prize, published in the conventional way, sold out within the year, was well reviewed, widely praised, but never reprinted, and which Scottish poet and novelist John Burnside called 'a powerful story about love and obligation... a persuasive novel very well written.’ I'm following it up with three professionally produced but unpublished plays. Some of my plays are in conventional print, and continue to sell well. I know that eBook readers are not the most effective way of dealing with plays, but the three I'm planning to publish in this way are - I think - a 'good read' as much as anything else. After that, there will be more short stories and a new novel called The Summer Visitor in time for Christmas.

There are no easy answers to any of this, but I sense that a great many writers are exhilarated by these new opportunities. As a Canadian friend remarked ‘You have a great inventory there. You should be doing something with it.’ Perhaps most of all, we need to become much more businesslike in our dealings with the industry that surrounds us, becoming proactive partners. Some of us feel that the answer to our perceived invisibility may well lie in what we can do for ourselves and for that seemingly disregarded group of 'people like us'. Because although it's wrong to assume that everyone feels the way we do, it's also true to say that there are lots and lots of people out there who do. And if the needs of that group are not even being acknowledged, still less met by the current business model, it's now open to us to seize the initiative and do something about it ourselves.