Marc Nobbs's Blog, page 18

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On Writing, Publishing and Blogging

Writing, for me, has never been about profit. When I started writing back at the turn of the millennium, the only way to get what you’d written read by other people was to give it away for free on the old Usenet (remember that?). The Usenet was replaced by story websites like Literotica or StoriesOnline, but the stories were still given away for free. Or try and get published with, you know, a ‘real’ publisher. Go through that whole process of sending your work away to be rejected, I mean evaluated and if you were very, very lucky, they’d buy your rights from you, take control of your soul and pay you a tiny royalty percentage.

Then Amazon changed the market for ‘amateur’ writing. Their Kindle put e-books into the hands of many, many more people – people for who it was not unusual to pay for the content. And Amazon then made it easy for “amateurs” to get their content onto those Kindles and make a bit of money from it. Of course, there was a slice of the pie for Amazon too, obviously – that’s why they did it.

So now we have an interesting situation for us “amateur” writers. Because we don’t need to sell our rights to any given book (or our soul) to a publisher, and instead retain those rights ourselves, we can pretty much do things how we like. We can still give away our stories on sites like StoriesOnline but we can also sell them through KDP and Smashwords at the same time. Why? The audiences are different, that’s why.

What do I mean by that? Well, most of the people who would read your work on StoriesOnline, wouldn’t pay for the story if they didn’t have access to it as part of their membership. That’s the same sort of principle as the newer book subscription services that are popping up like Scribd and OysterBooks. But at the same time, the people who have easy access to your books on their Kindle, iPad or Nook, would never go looking somewhere like StoriesOnline just because they could get it for free. It’s just as easy to pay a couple of quid and get it delivered right to their device in “One Click”.

See what I mean? Two different audiences, each as valid as the other.

The interesting thing is, if I did use both these channels to get my writing ‘out there’ chances are I’d get more readers on StoriesOnline, but make no money from them, whereas I’d earn some nice pocket money from Amazon & Smashwords but from far fewer readers.

And so far, that’s all it’s been. Pocket money. A few extra quid to buy some cool toys for me or a present for the wife or kids. No, if I wanted to, say, give up the day job and write full time, I’d have to sell a lot more copies than I currently do. Let’s do some maths shall we?

Royalty payments from KDP for a 99c short story are 35c. That’s about 20p in real money. So I’d need to shift somewhere in the region of ten thousand a month to be able to pay the mortgage and feed the kids etc.

Those slightly longer stories at $1.99? They net me about 70c or about 40p. So I’d only need to sell 5000 of them. Every month.

The novels are a bit better. From the $4.99 they sell for, I get £3.45 – or about £2. So that’ll just be a thousand copies a month then. Easy, right?

Well, let’s just say I’m some distance off those numbers.

But, like I said at the start, I’m not in this for the money. Never have been. I do it because I love to write and it helps me relax at the end of a hard day. I love to create characters and I love to tell stories.

But I also love to rant and to vent. I love to write about all the frustrations of daily life. I love to get this stuff out of my system. And that is something I haven’t done for a while. Look back through some of the posts of my old Blogger blog and you’ll find a lot of entries that are just about everyday life. When I imported those to this website, I dumped a lot of them. Not all, but a lot. Instead, I decided to make marcnobbs.co.uk more of writing focused website. More ‘professional’ if you like.

And to some extent that has been a bit frustrating in itself. I do enjoy letting off steam. It’s one of the reasons I write. But I didn’t want to alienate any potential readers (or should that be customers these days?). So all the potentially controversial stuff got pushed aside.

That’s about to change though. Here’s what I’ve decided to do.

marcnobbs.co.uk will remain a website focused on my writing. I’m going to clear out any posts that are not writing related from the blog.
marcnobbs.blogspot.com will remain an archive of my ‘old’ blog and not be updated. I will however, update the style to look more like marcnobbs.co.uk and remove “From Across the Pond” from the title.
“From Across the Pond” will return. Most likely at Blogspot, but maybe at WordPress – I haven’t decided yet. There are advantages and disadvantages to both. This will be a more personal blog – focused on the goings on in my life – albeit as anonymously as I can do it. That is to say that all names will be omitted or changes to protect the guilty.
A new blog called “Middle-aged and Grumpy” will come into being. This is be my ‘moaning’ blog. My chance to vent and get everything off my chest that annoys me about modern life, the media, world events and the media. Yes, I said the media twice – they annoy me twice as much as anything else.

Will this work, splitting off my blogging efforts like this? We shall have to see. But there’s no harm in giving it a go if it gives me a chance to vent. And we all need that, don’t we?

Two new 5-star reviews have been added to a couple of my ...

Two new 5-star reviews have been added to a couple of my shorts on Amazon. Juanita Souza (Amazon) has review Heaven in Leather & Extended Family. Just click to read the reviews. 

Many thanks to Juanita. I really do appreciate every review I get, but those 5-starers are something special.

Excellent Review for “A Good Man”

Patricia Maia (Facebook, Goodreads, Amazon) has written a really, really good review of A Good Man. You can read it for yourself here. But I’d like to quote some of it if I may.

Very well written, very concise, full of various details that makes you live the story as if you were one of the characters.

It’s heartbreaking and beautiful.

… and oh boy… I need book nr 2!!!!

Fortuntatley for Pat, Book 2 is already available. I having (virtually) chatted with her, I know she’s already started it. Let’s hope she enjoys A Tortured Soul just as much.

Why “A Tortured Soul” Makes Me So Nervous

I have to admit to having been, and continuing to be, very nervous about how A Tortured Soul will be received by you, my readers, and the reading public at large. Why? Simple. It’s not like anything I’ve written before. Let me explain.

I’ve always seen myself as a writer of “Erotic Romance”, that is to say that the books I’ve written have all been erotic and about a romance, or a love story if you prefer, between two people.

I’m talking about my novels and novellas here, not my short stories. My shorts tend to just be erotic and that’s it. But the longer works, well, they are all about the way two people feel about each other, the journey this takes them on and the fun (and heartache) they have together along the way.

Take, as an example, the earliest two of books currently on sale. Lost & Found and Reunion, could both be described as ‘typical’ erotic romances. In Lost & Found, a man flies across the Atlantic Ocean to be with the woman he loves and when he gets there he fights for her (and they have lots of hot sex). In Reunion a pair of high school sweethearts come together again after many years apart and fall in love all over again (and have lots of hot sex).

The first two Westmouthshire novels, Kissed by a Rose and Eternally & Evermore, could also easily be categorised as Erotic Romance, even if the plots are a bit different and the characters much stronger and well formed than the earlier two books.

All four follow the ‘typical romance’ format. A man and a woman who fall in love, overcome obstacales in thier relationship, and have lots of sex. All the kind of stuff that readers expect and look for. The kind of things they read and like.

Then I wrote A Good Man. And it started out, and for most of the book, was just like all the others. A man. A woman. They fall in love. They have to overcome obstacles. They have lots of hot sex (including some pretty good ‘angry make-up sex’). All well and good. Until I threw in that twist at the end. The twist that turned one book into a triology. A twist that some readers loved and some hated. A twist that some readers wrote to me about and said “Wow, wasn’t expecting that, can’t wait to see what happens next” and some wrote to me and said “You’re a bastard! I hate you!”

And a twist that makes A Tortured Soul the least ‘erotic romance’ book I’ve ever written.

As the second book in a trilogy, A Tortured Soul is pretty dark. What is it they say about trilogys? Introduce the characters in the first part, put them in the worse situation you can imagine in the second part and resolve everything happily in the third part. So A Tortured Soul, as you can infer from the title, take our hero, Paul, to a pretty dark place.

Paul is dealing with the consequenses of the twist in A Good Man. For pretty much the whole book. He struggles to work out what his purpose in life is. He battles his inner demons. And he has no time for romance. Time for hot sex, yes, but no time for romance.

And that’s what makes this book so difference. There is no clearly defined ‘heroine’ for Paul to fall in love with and fight for. He doens’t have to ‘win someone’s heart’ or fight to keep hold of that heart. He has to take himself from a place where he’s not ready for any kind of romantic relationship, to a place where one might be a possiblity.

And I don’t know how readers will react to that. I don’t know if they will be upset that Paul’s “Happily Ever After” doesn’t occur in this book. And I don’t know who they will react to some of the less-than-savory things that Paul does in this book, given he was such a Good Man in the first book.

I just guess I’ll have to wait until all you lovely people have read it and tell me what you thought of it. I’ll be waiting with baited breath.

A Tortured Soul is Now Available

My latest novel, “A Tortured Soul”, is now available across the usual range of e-book retailers.

Paul Robertson’s epic “Coming of Age” story continues in this follow-up to the novel, A Good Man.

After almost a year of running from his grief on a road trip around The United States, Paul returns to Westmouthsire for a fresh start at university.

But he knows he can no longer run from his problems. He knows he has to turn and face them if he is ever to get on with his life. But that’s not as easy as it sounds.

New friends. An old enemy. And a voice that haunts his days and fills his dreams. Will Paul ever find a cure for his tortured soul?

You can get the book from :

Amazon US – http://bit.ly/ATSTV2
Amazon UK – http://bit.ly/ATSTV2UK
Smashwords – http://bit.ly/ATSsmash
iBooks – http://bit.ly/ATSiBooks
Nook – http://bit.ly/ATSnook
Google Play – http://bit.ly/ATSgplay

I should point put that this book is a continuation of the story in “A Good Man“. If you haven’t read that book, you might get a little lost.

Westmouthshire – What is it and is there a Reading Order?

I had an interesting conversation on Facebook the other day, the gist of which was, “Do I need to read your books in any order? They are all part of the same series, aren’t they?”

The short answer to that is Yes and No. Or rather, No and Yes but no, sort of.

My four most recent books and my most recent short, have all been set in the “Westmouthshire” universe and I’ve retconned the four “Ladz Local Lovelies” stories into the universe too. But that doesn’t mean to say that you have to read them in order.

Apart from A Good Man and A Tortured Soul the second of which carries on the story from the first and in you don’t read AGM before ATS, you’ll likely get lost along the way. That’s why I call these two books together Tutelam Venit. They are smaller parts of the same story.

But, aside from that, you can read Kissed by a Rose, Eternally & Evermore, Tutelam Venit and The Big Four Ohhh! in any order you like. They do have a chronological order in which the plots happen, but you don’t have to read them that way if you don’t want to.

So, what do I mean by the “Westmouthshire Universe” if they are not a series. Good question, and one I’ve been meaning to add a page or two to this website dedicated to answering for quite a while now. For now though, this post will have to do.

Essentially, all the stories take place in the same fictional county, which is situated on the South Coast of England. If it were real, it would be squeezed between Kent and Sussex. Westmouth is the Shire Town (or County Seat, if you prefer), although it’s not the largest town in the county – Walminister is.

I created Westmouth for the book Kissed by a Rose. I wanted a seaside town with a ‘hip’ vibe, kind of like Brighton, that would be attractive to a young movie star. So Westmouth and Westmouth University were born.

I’ll be honest, much of the town and university campus are an embellishment of my memories of Aberystwtyh, where I studied in my youth. (Twenty years ago now. Damn!)

At the time, I thought I was just making up a town for the book. Then as I wrote the book, I made reference to “Ladz” magazine, which is the focus of four short stories I originally wrote for Ruthie’s Club. That’s when I thought I might be able to create something bigger. A whole group of stories which are separate stories but have similar elements – the setting, some of the characters and events.

Kissed by a Rose introduced a couple of characters who have gone on to either appear or be mentioned in subsequent books. England’s Rose, the movie star Chloe Goodman, is mentioned in Eternally & Evermore as is the movie she made in Kissed by a Rose. She also appears in both Tutelam Venit books – a very brief cameo in A Good Man then a longer appearance in A Tortured Soul.

Chloe’s good friend, Pop starlet Tina Thomson, is also mentioned in all three books written after Kissed and her song have significant meaning to many of the characters.

Eternally & Evermore introduced Will Brown, who is an important secondary character in Tutelam Venit. Although most of his book takes place in Westmouth, it also introduced the town of Walminister.

A Good Man led to the creation of the small town of Micester and some of its surrounding villages, but some of the story also takes place in Westmouth.

A Tortured Soul takes us back to Westmouth University and introduces yet another new town in the county – you’ll have to read it to find out why.

So, as you can see, although the stories are interwoven, which characters and settings in common, they are separate stories and you can read them in any order. What I would like to do, when I can find the time to sit down and do it, is produce a timeline that easily illustrates when each of the stories take place in a chronological order. And perhaps put together some sort of table that shows who appears in which story and in what capacity.

But in the meantime, if you are looking forward to the 5th May when you can get your hands on A Tortured Soul, rest assured that the only book you absolutely NEED to have read before it is A Good Man. Everything else, can wait until after.

A Tortured Soul Pre-Orders Live on iTunes

The pre-order page for A Tortured Soul is now live on iTunes. That brings the total of outlets you can pre-order the book up to four.

The link for the iTunes page is http://bit.ly/ATSiBooks

Pre-orders are also live at Smashwords, Barnes & Nobel and Google Play.

There will not be a pre-order page at Amazon, because Amazon doesn’t let us little guys do pre-orders, that’s reserved for the big guns with power, money and influence.

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Pre-Orders now available on Nook & Google Play

In addition to the pre-order page at Smashwords which went live at the weekend, the pre-order pages for A Tortured Soul have gone live at Barnes & Nobel and Google Play. So, if those are your e-book stores of choice, what are you waiting for, go guarantee release day delivery of your copy of the second part of Paul Robertson’s Coming of Age story right now.