Peter Labrow's Blog, page 4

The other side of the pond

I recently had an interesting exchange with American writer Belinda Frisch about catering for readers outside of your own country.

I'd just finished reading her book and she'd done the same with mine; she asked whether any of the words or references used caused a problem for the UK English reader. Of course, the first thing I did was to throw the same question back at her and we batted things around for a while.

My response was that while writing I was, of course, aware that my book would circulate outside the UK. I wasn't really thinking of non-English countries but I certainly did think a fair bit about the USA. Well, it's a sizable market.

I would say that I thought about it but didn't fret about it.

There are some clear and obvious differences in some of the words used in the UK and the USA. Some examples (some of which occur in The Well) would include:

UK
USA


Torch
Flashlight


Pavement
Sidewalk


Mobile
Cell phone


Boot
Trunk


Petrol
Gas

You get the picture. When Belinda and I discussed this, we reached the conclusion that for the UK and USA, we're each exposed to each other's cultures enough to at least understand the reference, even if it requires a little thinking about.

There's another factor too. The Well is set in small-town Lancashire. To be direct and authentic, it needs to use the vocabulary of that location, regardless of the readership. Using an American expression would grate on both sides of the pond. So, yes, when I used the word 'torch' I did wonder if Americans would readily understand it, but creating a USA-centric substitute would have raised eyebrows.

Of course, there are definitely words or phrases to avoid. An example might be 'fanny' which is quite an acceptable thing to sit on in the USA but isn't in the UK. Or phrases such as 'blowing someone off' which in the USA innocently means to let someone down, or not turn up – in the UK… well, it's a clear reference to oral sex.

There are bigger differences – an example might be how police forces are organised and named. The USA and UK police do the same job, but with a different structure and with different titles. In the UK, we don't have sheriffs in law enforcement, for example – it's a term that's fallen by the wayside in policing and now refers to an officer of a court, such as a bailiff.

The same arguments apply: it needs to use the terminology from where the book is set, not where it will be read. A couple of examples spring to mind. The first is Shakespeare – Shakespeare's English can be radically different from ours, yet even when we don't grasp the specifics the meaning is seldom obscure. Another is Somme Mud, an excellent book about fighting in the First World War, written by an Australian. Here we have the issues of both dated English and colloquialisms – neither really presents a problem to the reader and removing them damages the authenticity of the words.

Then there are cultural references. I think when it came to these, I didn't have to try too hard to make them transatlantic. Most consumer culture is global – so an iPod is the same thing wherever you are.

Some differences are interesting and worth researching. When choosing whether to use 'knickers' or 'panties' I wanted the least sexual term and the most local. Of course, the writer's own knowledge helps and also that of friends. But Google has a useful tool, Google Trends, which can help you too – by showing you which words are most searched for.

In this case, we can see that in the UK, usage of both isn't that far off equal, but in the USA, 'panties' is by far and away the most used term.

Google Trends chart: red: 'panties', blue: 'knickers'

Yet the word is clearly understood in the USA, even if it appears that it's not the most dominant used variation by a long margin. Local vocabulary and context (non-sexual reference) trump worldwide usage in this case.

Of course, when a UK reader picks up Stephen King (as an example) it's littered with pop-culture references, which are everyday to Americans but obscure to us Brits. We don't even eat Twinkies over here – but we do know what they are. When someone lights up a Lucky Strike we know what's happening, though we may have to think twice to get what's happening if the cigarette is a Merit.

I've had a lot of feedback from American readers but none (to date) had been around something that baffled them. Let's hope that's because they managed to understand (or at least guess) everything and not because they're still scouring the Internet for translations.

Filed under: Writing

Blog tagged!

I was blog tagged by @b_frisch a.k.a. Belinda Frisch, via Twitter. As part of the blog-tagging experience, I need to answer some questions; then blog tag some other bloggers. So here we go:

If you could go back in time and relive one moment, what would it be?

When my sons were born. Except that's two days. So, I'd go back in time to when my first was born but then refuse to come back to the future, so I could be around again when the second was born. Sure, I'd have to go through all that crying and nappy nightmare again, but if it was worth it the first time around, it's got to be worth it the second, right?

If you could go back in time and change one thing, what would it be?

I would have started to write fiction much earlier in life. And I'd create a character called Neil Patrick Harris before he was born so that he'd track me down once he was an adult so we could be friends. Who wouldn't want to be friends with NPH?

What movie/TV character do you most resemble in personality?

This is such a difficult question that I couldn't answer it, so I phoned my friend Emma (@emmabclarke). We had a ten-minute discussion that ranged from The Doctor (because I can be excitable one minute and serious the next and love new things in the way a child does, plus apparently I've 'got that vulnerability'), Indiana Jones (because I love quests, although I like mental challenges really), Hitler (don't go there) but in the end she settled on Willy Wonka. I said I wasn't too happy with that but Emma says I have to live with it. So there you have it, childlike, bonkers, old at the same time. But quite honestly, kids, I can't sing.

If you could push one person off a cliff and get away with it, who would it be?

This would be such a long list! Seriously, I'm so anti-killing that I'd really struggle to push anyone unless there was a trampoline or some big cushions underneath. If there were big cushions, I'd push anyone who was up for the thrill. If there weren't, I'd probably make it law that any politician who breaks three election promises has to be pushed. If it's law, I'd have to do it.

Name one habit you want to change in yourself.

The need to sleep. I'd like to sleep the least amount of time possible, so I could do more. Sadly, I'm rubbish without sleep.

Describe yourself in one word.

Surprising.

Describe the person who named you in this meme in one word.

Engaging.

Why do you blog? (In one sentence):

To communicate, converse and share views.

And the people I'm blog-tagging are:

@emmabclarke a.k.a. Emma

@KnightTrilogy a.k.a. Katie

@MarissaFarrar a.k.a. Marissa

@LianneMarieB a.k.a. Lianne

Guys, you're up.

Filed under: Writing

Vote for The Well trailer

I've entered the trailer for The Well in the International Movie Trailer Festival. This is an annual contest for independent creatives, especially movie makers – and, usefully enough, they have a section for book trailers.

Here's the trailer:

If you would like to vote for the trailer, please visit the 2011 Trailer Contest page and register your vote. It would be just fantastic to get a horror book trailer to be highly placed – or even win!

Voting is simple, but it's easy to miss the link which enables you to do so.

First, visit this page: http://www.internationalmovietrailerfestival.com/imtf/index.php/trailer-2011/

Then, search for 'The Well'.

When the trailer comes up, click on the link 'watch this trailer' to view it.

Once you have watched it, click on the white X to close the trailer window, then a link appears for you to vote (it appears next to the link which says 'watch this trailer').

Click on the link and register your vote!

Thanks very much for taking the time to vote. I really do appreciate it.

Filed under: Writing

The film of the book

Quite a few people have asked me how the trailer for The Well was made, so I thought that it would be useful to run through the creative process.

First, here's the finished trailer…

It's not that unusual for an author (especially an independent author) to use a trailer to promote a book. So, as writing on The Well drew to a close, I decided that creating a trailer would be a great idea.

I mentioned this to my eldest son, Dave, and a friend of his, James Darlington, who happened to be working towards his degree in media studies. James kindly offered to create the trailer, since it would be good for his course, portfolio and CV. Dave (who had just finished his degree in music composition and production) offered to record the soundtrack.

I guess that's the point at which I felt really lucky – to create what we eventually did takes a lot of time and, if you're not doing it yourself, can cost a lot of money.

We kicked around some ideas and decided that we were going to take a really bold approach to hopefully end up with something a little different from the typical book trailer: we'd film it not as if The Well was a book, but as if it was a film.

All we needed was a remote cottage, an ancient well, a couple of young actresses and an amenable crow. We'll get on to those in a moment.

Although I'm known to be thorough, I don't like to micro-manage other creatives; it's not fair. They need to bring to the table everything they can and not be simply told what to do. So, I gave James as much of a free hand as I could. I'm so glad that I did.

We chatted through the overall approach over a beer, as I recall. We decided that we wanted it to be short, dramatic and feel 'indie' in itself – of high quality, but perhaps something like Blair Witch though not quite as frenetic. We also didn't want to give too much away: The Well starts as if it's just about a girl who's fallen into a well, but the story expands rapidly. We didn't want to create any reveals that blew the lid off too many surprises in the book – therefore, much of the trailer focuses on the book's initial premise.

James' first step was to create a storyboard. This sketched out the narrative of the trailer – essentially having the camera moving towards a well, hand-held to give the appearance of being a point-of-view shot, before zooming into the well itself. We'd see inset shots of the trapped girl clawing at the wall, plus, when the camera is at the top of the well, the crow would land on it.

The original storyboard for the trailer

Brilliant: a green light and James got to work. The biggest questions were around those things which would be difficult to source or control: the well and the bird. The answer was to create these entirely within the computer as CGI models. This is ambitious – it can easily look rubbish or fake, especially if you're compositing it into hand-held moving footage. Stone is pretty hard to create in CGI – and a bird is much harder. I didn't have the budget of James Cameron and there was only so much time we could spend on something that would be on screen for less than a second.

James set to work and came back with some 'clay renders' of the well itself. I was totally blown away. Although these are neither lit nor textured, I thought that they already looked pretty good. Next, he worked on the broken grating at the top of the well, with equally excellent results. Finally, he laboured long and hard over the crow. In the end, it's not perfect, but it's pretty good. I make this seem as if James disappeared for just a couple of days to do this – it literally took weeks and weeks of hard work.

CGI clay renders of the well

Next, we had to film the live footage. The cottage used as reference for the book's cover is in the Lake District and is pretty remote. What's worse, we don't know exactly where it is – a friend, Martin Mackenzie, originally photographed it when he was out walking, several years ago. We decided to film closer to home as another friend of mine, Rob Clarke, thought there was a very similar cottage reasonably nearby, in Macclesfield Forest.

When we arrived to shoot the cottage, it turned out that the Forestry Commission had taken a new road right up to it, which meant that it was almost unfilmable. It just didn't look remote. But the forest wardens told us of a different cottage, so we made our way to that – it was much better.

We then spent a couple of hours arranging a green cloth on the ground, which would be where the CGI well would be added later. This is the same green-screen technique which is used so often on television shows such as Doctor Who. On the green cloth, we added white markers to give the computer software something to 'get hold of' when it's combining to two bits of footage. James filmed the approach to the non-existent well several times, then got some more shots of the cottage and some establishing shots from around the forest.

James filming the live footage in Macclesfield Forest

Although the cottage is notably different from the one on the book cover, I really didn't mind. We had to be pragmatic – it wasn't practical to trek for a day or more to find the original cottage. But also I firmly believe that the trailer needed to be the best possible trailer – it doesn't need to be slavishly accurate to the cover. (Indeed, I took the same approach with the cover, which differs from the book's description in a few respects.) This thinking wasn't just applied to the cottage – the well is smaller than how it's described in the book and, when you look at the shot from inside looking up, it isn't as deep. But changing the size and shape of the well made the trailer better, much better. For example, if the well's grating really was twenty-five feet above the grasping hands, the shot would be far less dramatic.

Next, we needed to add live actors. The daughters of two friends were asked and were both enthusiastic about taking part. Elizabeth Swindells played Becca, the girl in the well. It's almost a shame we see so little of her – she's perfectly cast, though prettier than how Becca is described. Samantha Clarke played Hannah – while her father, Rob, held the knife to her. She can report him to Social Services later. They both did a great, great job. Elizabeth was filmed against a green screen: James added her to CGI footage of the inside of the well later. Yep, when she's slapping the well wall, she was originally slapping me, holding a cardboard box for her to hit. When her hands reach upwards, she was filmed reaching forwards against a green screen, again the well was added later. Samantha was filmed in Rob's garden.

Then the really, really hard part. James combined all of that footage together to make a seamless narrative. There is a lot of CGI and post-production work that isn't evident. Elements were removed from the landscape, or added – I won't go into detail, but you'd be amazed at how much James changed.

The rendering of the final piece at 1080p (full HD) takes around a day. Once it was rendered out, we made quite a few small changes, tweaks to this, that and the other – I think we ended up going through perhaps a dozen iterations towards the end, until we had something with which we were totally happy. (The final video isn't at full HD, it's at 720 HD, more than enough for use on the Web.)

Next: the sound. Although James' work is by far the biggest and hardest, the sound is what sells the video. Dave set to work by adding first the ambient noise of the forest, the water, the thunder, the crow and so on. He wanted to get this to work from end to end before even thinking about the music.

We brought Elizabeth back to cry, whimper and scream for us while we recorded her misery. Good grief, she was good (once we'd stopped her giggling) – when Dave recorded it, we played it back and I have to say it was very unsettling. And she can scream for England – I'm amazed the neighbours didn't call the police. It's my voice you can hear saying "do you want to live?"

Effects were then added to all of the sounds – so that the screams echo around the well wall, for instance.

Once done with the sound effects, Dave set to work on the music. We discussed approaches – not wanting 'tunes' as such, more mood tones to create a brooding atmosphere. I was also conscious that The Well is a fast-paced read – I didn't want the music to be too dreamy or ethereal. Yet, the trailer isn't much more than thirty seconds, so Dave didn't have scope to compose something with too much structure.

Dave has such a natural talent for music composition (listen to some of the songs he's writing for his band, Coroner for the Police).

Dave's music for the trailer is perfect – ominous, but not operatic.

A key balancing-act is mixing the sound effects (such as the crow squawking, the river running and the girl screaming) with the music. Getting these at the right level in the mix took a fair bit of discussion between James, Dave and myself. It's easy for one to drown out the other, we needed to get this just right – also, the Web isn't a medium where you can convey a vast amount of subtlety in the audio. Many people would watch the trailer on a laptop, where the audio will be heard through relatively low quality, built-in speakers.

The combination of the video, acting and sound is better than I could have imagined. As I said, I feel lucky to know such talented, giving people. Everyone worked really hard to make everything as good as it could be. End to end, the whole thing took perhaps six months – I don't think any of us could have predicted that, but the work was harder than expected at pretty much every turn. (For example, the crow is only on screen for a fraction of a second, but it took days and days of non-stop work to create.) In fact, the finished result looked so much as if it's advertising a film that we had to make sure the captions said very clearly that it's advertising a book!

I can't thank everyone who helped me too many times. I can only hope that, perhaps in twenty years, a successful James Darlington name-checks the trailer for The Well as one of his lifting-off points – and perhaps Dave and Coroner for the Police will be household names. Who knows? I'm grateful for their talent.

Filed under: Publishing, Writing

10 ways Amazon could improve Kindle

There are so many things that I really love about Kindle and about being a Kindle author. I don't want to get into Kindle-bashing because Amazon's system is easy to use for readers and writers – but it does have some shortcomings.

Book-gifting across Amazon websites

Currently, only US Amazon users can enjoy book-gifting, but only amongst themselves. This is frustrating, since you can't gift a book to someone in another country. If you have Amazon accounts in the US and UK (as I do) and a Kindle that's registered to the UK (you can only register your Kindle to one country) then you can't even log into your secondary country to gift someone a Kindle book – because your Kindle (which has nothing to do with the transaction) is registered in another country. The only workaround at the moment is to send the person a generic gift certificate, for which you need an Amazon account in that country. Or, I guess, have a second Kindle, which is registered to the secondary account. Hardly global thinking – indeed, many of my gripes would be resolved if Amazon actually traded as a global company and joined the dots on its many offerings.

Gifting or loaning review copies

As a writer, one thing I need to do fairly frequently is to let legitimate reviewers have a free review copy of my novel. At the moment, I either have to mail a printed copy or send someone a gift certificate. Verified authors should be able to either loan or gift as many review copies as they like, direct from their Kindle Direct Publishing account. This would make the process easy and be good for both parties – every book depends on getting reviews.

Book-lending globally

As with book-gifting, book-lending can only be done within the US. It's a simple and great system – you loan your book to a friend for a fixed period, during which time you can't read it. It works pretty much as if you had a printed copy so writers aren't really disadvantaged. Again, this should work globally – not all of my friends are in the UK.

Review linking across Amazon websites

Book reviews clearly help to sell a book. Currently I have over twenty 4/5-star reviews on Amazon in the UK but less than a handful in the US – for the same book. It would help readers, authors and Amazon if book reviews were linked across other Amazon websites.

Campaign to get VAT removed from e-books

It frustrates people when e-books cost as much as physical ones – after all, there's no physical or transportation costs. But some publishers do reduce pricing – only to have 20% VAT added back on, because for some reason I can't fathom, e-books are seen as a 'service' and not as a book. The law needs to catch up with reality – and it's companies such as Amazon who can help make it happen, by putting pressure on the Government.

Fix the review system

As I said before, reviews are really important to a book's sales. But the Amazon review system is flawed – anyone can leave a review, whether they've bought the book or not. This means that authors can persuade friends to post glowing reviews and those of a vindictive nature can leave poor reviews for no reason. Would it be such a problem if only those who have bought a book were able to leave a review? (Or, perhaps, since a book can be loaned, only those who have loaded it legitimately onto their Kindle.) Authors are now able to easily see their reviews and can respond to each one with a comment – I really like that nice touch that enables an author to build a rapport with readers. However, an author can't easily flag a review as inappropriate. These two simple changes would help to police the review system.

ePub support

The Kindle infrastructure provides a seamless purchasing system – but it's tied largely to Kindle's own file format. I can understand this – but even iTunes supports MP3. ePub is pretty much the equivalent of MP3 and it would make people's lives easier if they could install books that aren't available on Kindle.

Social networking integration

There's a lot of buzz about books on Facebook, Twitter and the excellent Goodreads (a massive and wonderful community of readers). It would be great if some of this buzz could be seen, as it happens, on an author's page or on the book's page. I'd like to see this integration taken further, too – so I can see what my Facebook friends, Twitter followers and Goodreads friends think of a book while I'm reading it, from within Kindle.

Recommendations

A lot of Amazon's success has been based on its recommendation engine: you know, you look at something on Amazon's website and you can instantly see how many people have bought it, if they bought something else instead and so on. It would be great to have recommendations on the Kindle itself – see what people thought of an author, related authors and so on. (The Kindle screen saver could be used to display information about your current read.)

More promotional tools for authors

I've personally found Amazon to be great for authors – they're responsive to queries, fix issues fast and let you build your own author page to promote your work. But I think there's more that can be done. Goodreads lets you host a giveaway draw for a new book, for instance, which really does raise awareness. So, I'd like to see Amazon giveaways along with the ability to post books at a special price for a fixed period – a 'sale'. (With some restrictions, clearly. And yes, I know I can just drop the price for a month, but that doesn't have the marketing pull of '20% off for two weeks'.)

As I said at the start, I don't want to bitch about Amazon, Kindle Direct Publishing or the Kindle itself – because I love it. Kindle's a great product that's hooked into a thoughtfully created ecosystem – but I think it could be better.

Filed under: Publishing, Reading, Writing

A self-publishing journey

I was inspired to write this post after fellow writer Katie M John chronicled her voyage into indie publishing on her website.

Like Katie, I'm an indie author, which is a trendy way of saying that I'm independent. I self-publish. I don't have the backing of an agent or publisher – it's all down to me, for better or worse.

The decision to work in this way isn't ideological. I don't have anything against either publishers or agents. Quite the opposite, I'd love to have the backing of a publisher who believes in my work. I'm indie because I'm pragmatic: it gets the job done. Rather than spend potentially years seeking a publisher, I'm out there, selling my work, generating a readership.

Of course, this means that it isn't just the writing that's down to me. Everything a publisher would do, I have to either do or organise.

Like Katie, I didn't want the fact that I'm indie to be an excuse in any way whatsoever. I want every aspect of my work to stand up alongside traditionally published works: not just the writing, but the cover design, printing, layout – everything.

I was fascinated to read Katie's account of her experiences and she encouraged me to share mine – so here they are. Like Katie's post, this is a long one.

I write using Scrivener. I've blogged about this before, but quite honestly I can't stop banging on about how good it is. If you write long-form, this is quite simply the best tool for the job – Word is a jack-of-all-trades, Scrivener is designed for authors, by authors. Check it out.

What this means in practical terms – or did, for my first novel The Well, is that at some point it has to come out of Scrivener into your final publishing tool. That's usually Word. In my case, I exported after the first draft was complete for two key reasons:

I was sending the manuscript to test readers, so it made sense if we all had a common reference point when discussing revisions – in other words, page numbers.
It had to go into Word at some point anyway, so that my editor/proofreader could work on it. She works on Windows; I work on a Mac – and at the time Scrivener was only available on the Mac.

I deeply regret this now. Word is so inefficient and slow at handling large documents that it severely hampered my revision process (at least, versus using Scrivener). I should have held on until the final draft. Well, it's all about learning, isn't it?

(As it happens, the new version of Scrivener directly exports to Kindle format and there's now a Windows version of Scrivener too.)

Ten revisions later and I was ready to call The Well complete. Time to publish.

For me, publish meant both print and paper. It's worth knowing that my strategy really is to produce e-books. But not everyone has a Kindle or other e-reader – I decided that a print version was essential for marketing purposes, if nothing else. This meant two publishing processes.

I'm fortunate that I already possess the publishing skills required. I've been a graphic designer for over twenty-five years and developed websites since the Web sprang up. So, I guess I wrestled less with this aspect than many writers would – although it still proved to be both problematic and time-consuming.

Getting my manuscript out of Word and into HTML was my first nightmare. Word's claim that it can 'save as HTML' is about as accurate as me claiming I can fly (the best I can manage is to fall with grace). The resulting HTML is a garbage mishmash of unnecessary code. Those with an awareness of HTML can be shocked to learn that Word doesn't even feel compelled to close tags such as paragraph tags, it just opens them, then opens another. It also adds in a massive amount of code which does nothing except increase the file size by around 35%.

I experimented with various tools to clean up the code, but I wasn't really happy with any of the results. They improved the code, but it was still far from perfect. Since I can read HTML perfectly well, I decided to swallow hard and code it by hand. That sounds extreme, but actually it's not that big a job – the manuscript may be big but it requires very little formatting. Most of the work was in stripping out the rubbish code. The next large chunk of work was replacing UTF-8 smart quotes and the like with XHTML entities. You could argue that I didn't need to do this, but it does make the HTML more transportable. So, every instance of an open double-quote for instance would need to be changed to “ – this was really a matter of search and replace. I did the same for accented characters – in The Well one of the characters slips into Romanian, so these had to be in there. I've read a lot of Kindle books where 'real' publishers don't bother with this, so all the reader gets is a word with an incomprehensible ? or ! in the middle of it. Poor show and lazy work.

Eventually, I had a clean HTML document. The Kindle file format is really a zip file with a different extension, with HTML and XML files inside it. The Kindle format also uses its own specific tags where there's no HTML equivalent – such as to create page breaks. To create this file, I used a PC tool called Mobipocket creator (the Kindle format was originally .mobi – purchased by Amazon). Some aspects of this were a little fiddly and it did require a basic knowledge of XML to get the job right, but it wasn't too bad. I was pretty astonished to find that while there are a few tools which claim to do this kind of thing, many are really not fit for purpose. Again, next time, this won't be an issue – I can export directly from Scrivener to Kindle format. Although I work on a Mac, since I test websites I also run Windows and Linux, so using this PC-only tool wasn't an issue.

A friend of mine who's a professional illustrator, Daryl Joyce, painted the cover. I've blogged about this previously, so I won't cover that again, other than to say that while it's true you can't tell a book by its cover, people certainly buy a book partly based on its cover – so it was important that this was as good as a commercial book cover. The cover is embedded in the Kindle file as a relatively low resolution JPEG, but on the print version it looks superb.

That done, it's a relatively straightforward process to load the file onto Amazon and make it available for sale in the UK and USA (well done, Amazon).

The print version had its own challenges. I'd originally intended to use CreateSpace, since it's part of Amazon – but CreateSpace can only make titles available to Amazon in the USA and not the UK, amazingly. So, I opted for Lulu. Unlike Katie, I didn't want to invest in inventory – the print version for me is mainly a marketing tool. In fact, I literally make pennies from print copies sold on Amazon after Lulu and Amazon have taken their cut. I'm OK with that – I wanted to make it as affordable as I could. Print on demand means higher unit costs, so I was trying to offset that.

Because I'd originally intended to use both Lulu and CreateSpace, I'd opted for the smallest common book size, which was A5. As it happens, this is also quite economical – costing not much different than a pocket book size, but able to have more words per page. As I was about to learn, the number of words per page has a drastic impact on the cost of the final book.

I created a layout in Adobe InDesign, and flowed into it my 116,500 words. The resulting book would have retailed at a commercially unrealistic £16.50. Clearly, I needed to be more brutal with the book layout. I pulled down a bunch of paperbacks from my shelves and measured the font sizes and margins. I reworked the book to something more realistic – allowing for a £7.99 retail. My first printed proof showed me that I was still a little off – the gutter was too tight, so the book would have to be forced open too much to read it. I adjusted the gutter by removing space from the outer margins. (It's worth noting that quite a few novels are 60,000-80,000 words, which would have really brought the costs down. Perhaps I'll consider that in the future but The Well is a pretty tight fast-paced read, I couldn't have lost 20,000 words easily.)

I chose a typeface which had professional ligatures, so that I would have nice-looking fl and fi characters for instance. I had looked at typefaces which were used in traditional publishing such as Bembo, but quickly realised that these had been designed in the days of letterpress printing where there is ink gain on impression. When printing litho, there is usually a little loss. I opted for Warnock Pro, which is nicely economical in terms of width and had a decent x-height so it is very readable.

My comparisons with commercially published books showed that many would reduce the typeface further than I had and also have tighter margins. If I'd followed the same route I could possibly have saved a little more in terms of pages and costs, but these looked too tight to me. If I was working with a publisher, this wouldn't have been my call, of course.

It took a few proof copies before I was totally happy. Since Lulu gives you a free ISBN and can push from their systems onto Amazon, that gave me everything I needed. Click – publish. It was available on Lulu pretty much right away and then appeared on Amazon several weeks later.

There was a bit of faffing around with Amazon to get them to combine my print and Kindle editions – and the reviews – but they were very responsive, actually, and always helpful. The same is true of Lulu, though they can't combine reviews of both my print and ePub editions. I created an ePub edition of The Well so that it would feed onto the iBookstore, but it's yet to appear. (I'm hoping this isn't because I sent a shirty e-mail to Steve Jobs criticising iBooks, and the smooth experience of being a Kindle author versus getting a book on the iBookstore.)

So, even for an old publishing hand, there were quite a few bumps in the road and a lot to learn. I've yet to get The Well onto the Sony Reader and Nook, which I guess I could really do with doing. (Any indie authors who've done this – I'd welcome hearing your stories.)

The next time around should be a lot smoother, partly because of what I've learned, partly because Scrivener now supports Kindle export, partly because I can hopefully keep the next book in Scrivener for more drafts and hopefully because Amazon will further improve their processes.

I'm not one to say 'you don't need a publisher'. Publishers offer a lot of value and take from your hands some time-consuming tasks. But it can be done without them – you've just got to be prepared to roll up your sleeves and expend some sweat!

Filed under: Writing

Working with a feedback group

In my last blog, I talked about the process of revision. A key part of this process, for me at least, is getting feedback from a group of test readers.

A good friend of mine recently gave me a copy of A Writer's Tale by Russell T Davies. One of the things which Davies says early on in the book is that writing isn't a democracy. When something's out there, people will like it, love it or hate it – but they can't change it. It's not their job. Their role is to consume it.

I couldn't agree more, I've long been a fan of autocracy as a means for getting things done, but there are dangers of working in a vacuum. When you're an indie author, then you – by definition – don't have the safety nets provided by an agent, publisher and editor. It is all down to you. Except it doesn't have to be.

An essential part of my revision process is to get reviews from a group of trusted readers. In my case, I chose a diverse range of people from within my group of friends – people with different reading preferences, social sensibilities, interpretation skills and so on.

In addition, I had one friend with whom I batted around ideas – or, at the least, reran my thoughts out loud and then solicited feedback. She was the only person who knew anything of the characters and plot before I'd finished the first draft – and her picture of those was far from complete.

I released the first draft to a small part of the group and, once they had read it, gathered feedback. After reading the feedback, I discussed any points which I felt required deeper exploration. Once I started on my first revision, I had the collated feedback noted on a reference copy of the manuscript; I referred to this, along with my own notes, as I worked through the revisions.

As I progressed through my ten revisions, I widened the feedback group. Some people read the manuscript once, some twice.

The type of feedback varied enormously. Some people simply said they enjoyed The Well and pointed out a couple of typos. Some people went into depth about character motivation, or issues regarding logic and continuity.

It was a challenge. I guess there is a part of every writer which wants his or her work to be wholly their own – that somehow, asking for help, advice and comments dilutes the process and the finished work.

Well, I guess it could – if I felt I needed to please everyone or respond to all of the comments. As Russell T Davies said, it's not a democracy. The feedback was always valuable. I'd guess that I acted, in some way, on 85% of it (although my changes might not have been exactly as the reader had proposed). Some of the feedback was harsh and it can hurt – but it's good. Better to have that feedback during the writing and review process than when the book's on the shelf.

I typically dealt with feedback in four ways:

It's a good point, incorporate.
It's an interesting point, discuss.
I disagree, but there might be another underlying issue which I should investigate and resolve.
I disagree: I'm the writer; this is my call.

At this point I want to say that I'm not a fan of focus groups. I honestly think the more opinions you ask for, the less clear the answer becomes. It seems to me that if the Beatles had been put in front of a focus group they would never have been signed. Work that's bold and new doesn't always appear saleable.

This seems at odds with my reader-group process, but it isn't. At all times I made sure I wasn't trying to 'please' the reader group but kept my sights firmly on my goals. But I am very, very certain that The Well is a far richer, far better book because of my readers' feedback.

There is a trap – an agent, publisher and editor has far better knowledge of 'what sells'. Hopefully it's a more objective, expert view – but it's definitely one that's different from a group of readers, no matter how large.

My resolution to this is that there can be a downside to the publishers' approach, too. Marketing people hold a lot of sway within publishers and there can be pressure to rework something so it fits in with the current best sellers. I'm not saying that's across the board, but it can happen – lots of industries are risk-averse. If what you do is a little different, that means by definition a publisher is less sure of the outcome.

But hey, I'm writing my books for readers. So it made sense for me to work with readers while I was writing, at the very least.

Filed under: Writing

Revision – the agony and the ecstasy

It's a common enough question and I'm asked it frequently: "how long did it take you to write The Well?"

The answer I give is accurate: a year. I started on January 1 2010 and published December 27 as I recall, at least on Kindle.

But the real answer is that I wrote it in about six months – the rest of the time I was revising it. Yep, you read that right. I spent at least as much time revising it as I did writing it. 10 full revisions. And that doesn't count the final revision, working with my editor/proofreader/researcher.

Why so long? Why so many iterations?

I think many writers don't enjoy the revision process. Perhaps some object to it and feel that their work is already done and just needs a bit of a polish. (Goodness, I remember clearly posting on Facebook that I'd "Just written the final two words: The End" just before I naively cracked open the champagne. My work had just begun.)

Perhaps part of this is that I'm new to writing fiction. I've written for over twenty years, but always non-fiction (though, since most of my writing was copy for brochures, websites and so on you could argue that the 'marketing spin' is in itself fiction).

Also, I could have been conscious that, as a copywriter, the client is not the consumer of your work – as a novelist, the client is the consumer. Great feedback from clients about my copywriting doesn't mean that consumers felt the same way. My novel would be just that – any praise, or criticism, would be mine to bear. I was passionate about getting it right. I wouldn't have subtracted one minute from the process – it was all worthwhile.

It was in the revision process that the characters gained real depth. Their motivations moved from singular to complex. The plot was tightened. The pace quickened. The stakes raised.

If anything, the language became simpler: I don't especially want to be a showy writer. I want people to be immersed in my stories as if they were watching a TV programme; when a reader stops to admire clever prose, he or she has fallen off the rollercoaster. It's not that I don't admire smart writing (or not want to write it myself) but my current priority is to engage the reader – making the language almost transparent.

There were some major changes, sure – but really, not that many. Perhaps half a dozen that required some extensive work. The rest was all relentless polish.

Sometimes, it hurt. When you're reading something for the tenth time, it's hard to know if your judgement is accurate when you hope the reader will be shocked, scared or upset.

But actually, I enjoy the process of revision at least as much as I enjoy the process of writing. It's like cutting a diamond. There are lots of ways to do it, it takes care – but the results can be so worthwhile.

It does require the learning of a particular skill, what some writers refer to as 'killing your own babies'. You can imagine, you've written something that you believe is excellent – but the problem is, you'd decided to change something else and this otherwise worthwhile sentence, paragraph, page or chapter now no longer has a purpose. All of that work and passion was for nothing. It's tempting to reject the notion of change to keep that excellent prose – but dragging it to the bin can open up even greater possibilities.

That's the agony and the ecstasy of revision – it cuts deep inside you when you trash something you've laboured over, but when the change shines even brighter than the original the feeling of elation is unbeatable.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Goodreads – Facebook for readers

I stumbled across a really wonderful website recently, Goodreads. Now clearly I'm behind the curve on this one, as Goodreads already has thousands of members.

The first joy was that Goodreads has been created by people who really understand both readers and authors. It's wonderfully structured, allowing you to build up a list of books you've read, are reading and intend to read very quickly. You can then review and rate books – all of which makes it easy for you then to connect with others who have similar tastes.

The second joy was finding that my novel The Well was already listed as having been read by someone, who had given it four stars.

The third joy was being able to easily set up an author dashboard so that I could promote my own work. One of the things I really do like about being an author today is that technology makes it easy for readers and authors to connect, via Facebook, Twitter – and dedicated websites such as Goodreads. I like the notion that an author is accessible to readers should they wish to comment on a novel.

My Goodreads giveaway

I also found that, since The Well is only recently published, I can promote it on Goodreads with a Goodreads Giveaway. Essentially, I've promised five copies of The Well, signed, to anyone who wants to be entered into the giveaway draw. At the time of writing this blog, the giveaway has been running for four days and almost three hundred people have signed up for it. What a great way to reach a massive audience of people who love reading. (The giveaway runs until the end of March, if you'd like to enter. ENTER HERE)

Join in with the fun

If you're an avid reader, why not give Goodreads a go? It takes something that is essentially a solitary experience but allows you to make it social, by connecting with other people who love the same kind of books you do.

As well as reviewing and rating books, there are forums to discuss books, authors and genres – and of course lots of book giveaways (at the moment, around 150 books are available).

Maybe see you there?

Filed under: Uncategorized

BookCrossing – social book sharing

I recently came across a wonderful website called BookCrossing. It's a simple idea, well executed.

The notion is that you take a book you've just read, register it on the BookCrossing website – and then leave it somewhere. After that, 'the world takes over'. Someone picks up the book, reads it and then passes it on – after logging where it's been read on the BookCrossing website.

The person who first released the book into the wild can track the book as it travels around. Great fun.

I liked the idea so much that I've decided to release three copies of The Well. The first copy has already been claimed and I'm told will be on its way to Florida in a few weeks. I'm offering a second copy via Twitter and Facebook – if that isn't claimed within a few days, I'll be leaving it at a railway station in London when I visit there at the weekend. The final copy I've made available to users of BookCrossing to claim.

Update: the second copy is now on its way to Italy.

There's an added twist. As well as including BookCrossing's instructional stickers (so that people picking up the book don't think it's been accidentally left), I'm also adding another sticker – asking people to take their picture, with The Well, in front of any kind of landmark. Any pictures I receive will be posted on this website.

I think it will be interesting to watch the book travel around and I really like the way that BookCrossing makes reading fun – and free! In an era where printed books are starting to feel the squeeze, this is a great way of passing around some love for paper.

Filed under: Reading