Lexi Revellian's Blog, page 24

THE AFRIKA REICH rolls off the presses

The very first copies of Guy Saville's soon-to-be-released hardback, The Africa Reich emerge from their production line. I think this is one of the most exciting clips I've ever seen, and it's not even my book!
It will be available to buy on February 17th 2011 - or you could get your order in now ahead of the crowd.

10,000 e sales of Remix

Forgive my boasting - it's just such a landmark.
When I published Remix on Amazon in August 2010, I had no idea that my sales for the Kindle would take off the way they did. In the first six weeks, I didn't sell many; eleven on Amazon, and seven on Smashwords (never have equalled those first Smashwords sales!)
Then I lowered the price to 86p hoping to persuade readers to try an author they'd never heard of, and the book started selling - 81 in the last ten days of September. In October I sold 669 copies, in November 1,559, and in December 4,281. So far this month, I've sold 3,398. Remix has spent 97 days in the UK Kindle top 100.
One of the best things has been connecting with readers, and knowing that people were willingly spending hours reading a novel I wrote - and enjoying it. Some have emailed me, asking about my next book, which gives me a real kick. Without the Kindle, I wouldn't have been able to prove there was a market for Remix. (The paperback has had modest sales, because it's not possible to compete on price with POD, or get into the bookshops.)
After a year of fruitlessly submitting Remix to literary agents, it's great to feel vindicated; to suspect that had an agent and a publisher taken the book on, they'd have made a tidy profit.
N.B. 1) Alan, you were right.N.B. 2) Victoria Strauss, if you don't believe these figures, email me for proof :o)

Why wouldn't you epublish?

So you've finished writing your novel; you've gone over it dozens, if not hundreds of times, till it is as polished as you can make it; you've sent it out to beta readers, and used some of their suggestions. If you need it (and it's a myth that every author does) you've paid a professional proofreader.
Now what?
If you buy lottery tickets each week in the hope you will win - after all, someone has to - and enjoy banging your head against a brick wall, your course is clear: submit your novel to literary agents. The publishing industry moves at the speed of a sloth with a hangover, so while you are waiting, as well as writing the next novel, why not publish for the Kindle on Amazon? Because:You will get some experience of marketing, always useful.You will find out what the paying public thinks about your book; on Amazon, you can expect slightly less than one review per hundred books sold.You will start to make money immediately.If your book sells well, this fact may impress the literary agent of your dreams; in fact, at some point agents are going to wake up to where the good non-contracted authors hang out these days, near the top of the Kindle chart, and start prospecting there.Is there a downside? I think not. Some say you should not give away your first publishing rights, as publishers will not touch your book if you have. Frankly, if a publisher believes he can make money from your book, he won't give a damn about that. Suppose your ebook doesn't sell? If you've made every effort to promote it, and your price is right, you may have to face the fact that it's not as good as you'd hoped; or that it's a minority taste.
And you still have the agent lottery to try.

How to publish for Kindle on Amazon

To anyone who hasn't done it, publishing for the Kindle on Amazon can seem a formidable task, so this post is to share my tips on how I published Remix. There are other ways - and you can always pay someone else to do it. JA Konrath recommends the person he uses. Allow about a day to do it my way.Prepare your book as a Word document. Remove page numbers and headers. Make a title page; I'd advise condensing the usual front matter to one page. Put the indents to three characters, and start each chapter on a new page using Ctl and Enter. I used a tilde (~) between scenes, as the conversion process can remove line spaces, even though they show on the Preview. Consider if you should put a bit about another of your books, or a link to your website, at the end.Download Mobipocket Creator (free) and from the home page, import your Word document.Click on Metadata to the left of the page you are now on, and fill in your book's details and cover. You will need to use Ctl and V to paste.Click File and Save As, and the document will be saved in HTML form where you choose on your computer.Go to Amazon's Digital Text Platform. Register, go to your Bookshelf and click Add a New Title. Follow the instructions carefully.Once your HTML file is loaded, you get to the most important part of the process, Preview. Preview gives you an approximation of what your text will look like on a Kindle. At this stage, go through every single page looking for formatting flaws which have popped up, such as passages in bold or italic or incorrect indents. Put these right on the HTML document as you find them. You don't need any knowledge of HTML to do this; it's easy to work out which bit of code is wrong, and replace it with a sound bit of code from a correct passage. Remember to change the code at the end as well as the beginning of a paragraph. Warning: this painstaking process may take hours, depending how much extraneous concealed formatting your original Word document had. But it's essential. Reload the improved text, and check again.Repeat until your book looks the way you intended.Fill in the rest of the details.Publish! If you have a Kindle, download a copy to check; if you don't, download Kindle for PC and check on that.Sell lots of copies.

REMIX in today's Times newspaper!

Paul J told me Remix was on page 31 of today's Times; I rushed out and bought a copy, and here it is. The article is about sales of romance titles booming, because if you read on a Kindle, no one can tell whether your taste runs to Tolstoy or Katie Price.
Mark you, their definition of a romantic novel is pretty loose, as is Amazon's. I wouldn't call Remix a romance as such, and it's been near the top of the Romance chart for months. Jane Austen's collected novels are there, and she said,
"I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter."
I'm dubious about one or two others; Erotic Tales? Surely not. But it still gives me a buzz to see the cover of my novel in the Times.

REMIX stats on UK Amazon

At some time today, Kindle sales of Remix went over the 5,000 mark, and are currently ticking up like a taxi meter in a traffic jam.

On Christmas eve, I received my very first cheque from Amazon, for £194.22 (buns for tea!)

My royalties in the UK for the seven days up to Christmas were £256.62.

Remix has spent 74 days in the UK Kindle top 100 so far.

It has 50 reviews on UK Amazon, 41 five star, 8 four star and 1 three star.

I am amazed and delighted.

HAPPY NEW YEAR to all my bloggie friends

Future Me

There is a website called FutureMe, where you can write an email to be sent to yourself at a date chosen by you in the future.

I've got one in their system awaiting its moment, though I can't now remember what my concerns were at the time of writing or when it will arrive. It's interesting, because it gives you a way to juggle time.

On FutureMe's site, you can read a selection of anonymous emails, and they make poignant reading, like this one:

stop it Lyss, Stop thinking about him. -Lysswritten Apr 11th, 2005, sent 1 year into the future, to Apr 13th, 2006

Did she manage to stop thinking about him? Or perhaps they got back together...

Writers are no more bound by chronology than God; we can nip back in the novel's time and change things just like a Time Lord (how handy that would be in real life). So much power confuses me, particularly with the current book, where alternating chapters deal with each heroine. It's hard to ensure one of them doesn't get to Thursday while her alter ego hasn't moved beyond Wednesday morning.

Amazon

Amazon is my new best friend.
We haven't always seen eye to eye - I remember getting a bit huffy with it a couple of years ago, though I don't suppose it noticed and I've now forgotten why. And ABNA (Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award) is in my opinion a waste of time, a view coloured by my entry, Trav Zander, being kicked out in the very first cull.
But Amazon has done for me what YouWriteOn, Authonomy and two years of submissions to literary agents didn't succeed in doing; it's allowed me to offer my writing via Kindle to the paying public and see whether readers like it.
And the good news is that a lot of them do. As I write, I've sold 3,166 e-copies of Remix since publishing in August, mostly in the last two months. Virtually all those are Kindle sales. I couldn't have done this with the paperback, even if I'd spent every waking hour selling it, because publishers have a monopoly on the paper book trade it's impossible to crack. Even Eragon , often quoted as an indie success story, was a flop when it was self-published; this is a quote from Wikipedia:
Paolini and his family toured across the United States to promote the book. Over 135 talks were given at bookshops, libraries, and schools, many with Paolini dressed up in a medieval costume; but the book did not receive much attention. Paolini said he "would stand behind a table in my costume talking all day without a break – and would sell maybe forty books in eight hours if I did really well. It was a very stressful experience. I couldn't have gone on for very much longer."
I feel incredibly lucky that the launch of the Kindle in the UK coincided with the decision to self-publish my third novel.
Amazon, I couldn't have done it without you. Thank you.

Novels need readers

A novel only half exists until someone reads it. The reader completes the process the author began, which is why it's so very unsatisfactory to be an unpublished writer.
I hadn't fully realized this until I self-published Remix . I'd got intimations from members of YouWriteOn and Authonomy who read and reviewed the first few thousand words, but until members of the public choose to pay for your book and spend hours of their time reading it right the way through, you don't know how important this is. These people have a different approach to fiction from writers, agents and publishers. They don't care if you have POV switches, or if your novel doesn't neatly fit into a genre; and no one has told them that books about rock stars never sell. All they care about is whether it's a good read; whether it holds their attention and entertains them for a few hours. Their priorities are so different, I've concluded it's only the stranglehold the publishing industry has on the bookshops that has kept them in business this long.
When I was writing my first novel, Torbrek...and the Dragon Variation , I had the naive idea that if you wrote a reasonably coherent book, you could get it published, and once in the bookshops, the Public Would Decide. How wrong I was. But with the rise of independent authors, who self-publish after rejection by the mainstream, and the advent of the Kindle, we are heading for the situation I imagined, where readers get to choose.
Which is no bad thing.

Revision and editing

I came across the manuscript of the first page of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and it's awesome. This is not just because of the changes he made, all of which add to the powerful effect of the novel's opening - any competent writer knows from his own experience how different the final draft is from the first. You think of a better way of getting the information across, or a neater way of putting it; you add dialogue, or as Orwell did in his first page, take it out. (For the two versions, go here.)
No, it made me realize just how fortunate writers are today to have the magic of Word at their fingertips. I'd hate anyone to watch me writing on a bad day, or a tricky part of the book. I type in a rough version that's all wrong; add bits, change it, move it around, generally tweak it till it's better. Later I have further goes at it. At some time I read it aloud, and run it through Autocrit to pick up word echoes. If I'm considering larger changes, I copy the passage into a new Word document and let myself loose without inhibitions, knowing it's only a copy. I almost invariably keep this new version and splice it back into the text. Whatever I do, Word keeps the typescript neat and legible.
All George Orwell had to compose his masterpiece was a manual typewriter and a fountain pen. How on earth did he manage?