T.S. Sharp's Blog, page 4

The Holiday Book

I’m going on holiday in a week or so and need to choose which lucky book I’ll be taking with me.

I often take a couple of books with me when I go away, but I’m only planning to take one this time for a couple of reasons. I’m driving to a cottage in Norfolk, so I won’t be on a train or plane for hours with perfect reading opportunities. Secondly, I’ll be surrounded by extended family, a baby, and a dog, so I probably won’t actually do that much reading in reality. I will take my Kindle, which has a mini-library of electronic books on it awaiting my attention, but I’m not counting those.

I’m currently reading a book that I’m finding pretty average, so I plan to finish that one before we leave, which leaves me with the decision of which one to take. A combination of the slow pace that I read at and the rapid rate that publishers seem to produce books means that I have a whole stack of reading material. The photo above only shows a sample of the books I intend to read in the near-future. Some of them have been in my ‘to-read’ pile for months.

For practical reasons I think I’ll select a paperback novel to take away as it will be easier to pack and carry around. I might also opt for something that I am not too precious about, in case it gets wet or the dog/baby chews it. A few of the unread books I have are from charity shops or bought in deals from supermarkets, so that’s fine. Now, how do I choose one?

Do other people have criteria for holiday reading?

Traditionally, holiday reading means choosing something trashy and nailing through it on the beach, and either leaving it behind when you leave, or dumping it in a charity shop months or years later. Publishers and writers have based entire careers around the less-discerning nature of vacation reading. That’s what ‘airport thrillers’ are for. They’re not books about airports, they’re books bought on a whim in airports just before boarding your flight. And quite often sold to people who never otherwise read books.

“This book could well be a bit lame, but I’ll read it on holiday anyway.”

(James Patterson has made a fortune from this mentality)

My current ‘to-read’ pile has a couple of these types of titles in it.

How do you decide which book(s) to read during the summer trips away? Do you buy them during the year and ear-mark them for your vacation? Or do you grab something semi-random from the bookshop before making the journey?

Have you read anything from my ‘to-read’ pile which you’d recommend or advise against?

Adding It Up – May

Where is the year going? We’re already into June, so it’s time for me to sum up my additional earnings for the past month.

The total for May was £29.96, which was from four items sold on eBay, and one on Amazon. I sold a couple of Nintendo N64 games, a pair of Paul Smith Jeans, and a Ted Baker handbag on eBay, as well as a book about e-Commerce I had listed on Amazon Marketplace. The biggest profit came from the Paul Smith jeans, which is unsurprising given their designer cachet, even if they were used. This would seem like a good revenue stream to pursue, but the danger of unknowingly passing on fakes is a bit worrying, so I’ll probably proceed with caution on that front.

I went to a few car boot sales over the last couple weeks, but bought absolutely nothing at any of them, simply because nothing caught my eye. Unsurprisingly, they were mostly filled with heaps of children’s clothes, boxes of VHS tapes, and the general junk found at the back of people’s garages and sheds. I know that this is also where the best gems can be found, but seeing as I was looking modern or retro video games, these weren’t of any interest to me. Any video games I did see were all in that mid-range of not being new enough to attract a decent resale price, but not old enough to qualify for being retro or vintage. Think PC games and PS2 games – neither old or new enough.

I have a few more things to list at home simply to get out of the way, but like always, it’s a matter of doing the research to find the pricing point, and then photographing and listing them. This doesn’t take up too much time, it’s just a matter of finding the motivation to do so. One thing I’ve found quite useful over the last couple of months is the eBay smartphone app. My approach has been to take photos of the items on my phone (mostly those which don’t need multiple angles and close-ups etc) and then compose the listing at a later date. Depending on how detailed I want the eBay listing to be, I often just list it via the phone when I have time. If it’s an item that is better listed via the laptop or a PC, I can write it up and then simply add the photos I stored up on my phone and listed them there and then.

In theory, I could buy an item at a car boot sale and photograph and list it for sale mere minutes after my purchase. I’ve also noticed that the prevalence of smartphones and tablets has led to a rise in eBay listings launched from these devices, all of which stands to reason, but it’s also led to an overwhelming amount of very poor listings. This can be both good and bad for the buyer. Poor quality ‘eBay Mobile’ listings is one of my bug-bears at the moment, but maybe I’ll post/rant about that another time.

I’m off on holiday in the middle of June, so I might not do much listing this month. I’ll at least have to be careful not to have any listings that end during my trip. I’ll still be keeping my eyes open for re-sale opportunities when I’m away, though.

I’ve already made a couple of sales in June, so even if I don’t get around to making any listings I’ve at least made a few pounds.

Adding It Up – April

It’s time for a monthly update of my Additional Income Challenge where I record any extra cash that crosses my path during the year.

The total for April was £32.01. This was almost 50% from Amazon Marketplace and 50% from eBay. The majority of the money is from the old video games I’ve been selling recently. I went to a car boot sale last Sunday and amongst all the household detritus  that you always see at these places were a stack of Sony PS3 games. I only had enough money to buy a couple, so I did a quick search on the eBay app on my iPhone and found out which titles had the best resale value, and bought two, negotiating a discount in the process. I listed one on eBay as a Buy It Now, and the other on Amazon Marketplace. They both sold for almost three times the price I paid for them within 24hrs of me listing them. Pretty good for an hour’s work on a Sunday morning.

The other eBay video game sales I made during April were both the results of some eBay arbitrage, or flipping. I bought a job lot of 13 Nintendo N64 games, and am now in the process of re-listing them for a profit. So far I’ve sold three games and after deductions I’ve made back almost half of the original cost of all the games. So far so good.

I’ve been spending my lunch hours scouring the charity shops for more bargains this month, and have come up with a few more items to list. I also persuaded my wife to go through the wardrobe and identify anything that could be sold, more in a bid to de-clutter than to raise funds. Now that I’ve got some stuff to sell, I just need to find the time to list it all. The other minor downside of my current efforts is that it’s providing an unneeded distraction from writing, which I really should get back to. Maybe I will after a quick peak on eBay…

Feel Free To Steal My Idea

I have an idea for a horror/thriller novel that I know I will never write, so I’m going to outline all the elements here so another writer with more ambition and motivation than me might be able to use it.

A year or so ago I stumbled across an online article about a partially built amusement park just outside Beijing in China. It was meant to be their equivalent of Disney Land or something, but the project was abandoned due to land disputes with farmers and the government. The developers got relatively far into the construction before it was left to its own devices.

Inside the park. It looks like a video game or something.

Abandoned amusement park outside Beijing. Tell me this isn’t the best setting for a horror novel ever…

The above photos are from this article, which has some great images of ‘Wonderland’ as it was going to be called.

The news story is from December 2011, so I have no idea what has become of the park since then, but it set the cogs turning in my head in terms of using it as a setting for a horror novel. Which brings me back to my original point. I saw the images, read the news story, and then began thinking about what could happen in a theoretical novel.

I wanted to keep the Chinese location. China’s position on a global stage is fascinating for so many reasons, so it made sense to keep the story based in China and not transport the whole setting to the UK or the US. But therein lies the biggest challenge (for me at least). China has a deep and complex cultural and political identity which is pretty alien to the average Westerner. The thought of the research alone needed on Chinese culture and history was enough to stop me putting fingers to keyboard.

However, I did have a few thoughts on a basic scenario. I never got as far as outlining a plot with a narrative conclusion etc, but there should be some ideas to get the ball rolling. So here they are, bullet-pointed out for your consideration;

A group of families originally from rural China leave Beijing (or a fictional large modern city) to head back to the countryside after deciding to leave the city where they had been scraping a living. Imagine a small community of families crammed into mini-vans with all their belongings. Maybe a dozen or so people. Poverty, unemployment, and/or disillusionment drives them out.  They’re landless peasants with not much to go back home to, but they’ve decided to cut their ties to the city.
Maybe they sold their land back home and can’t return, or criminal moneylenders are waiting for them back there.
They take up residence in the amusement park. The empty buildings and facilities afford them a roof over their heads and plenty of space. Maybe there’s still running water or they use one of the ornamental lakes for water. They have chickens or a pig(s) and begin adapting the park to their needs.
‘Something‘ kills a pig (or one of the peasants) in a brutal fashion. Terrified, but unable to go to the authorities, they blame each other. Strange noises and glimpses of something out in the complex haunt the squatters.
The protagonist (take your pick – an old man, a young girl, a mother, a young husband) has to convince the community that nothing is out there and that they should remain where they are until they have saved enough money to return home. But he/she is not convinced themselves.
Chinese folklore is full of stories of creatures and spirits that terrorise the guilty or immoral, so the squatters are torn between fearing mythical beasts or a killer in their midst.
Whilst all this is happening, thugs hired by the local mayor/government/landowner arrive to try and force them off the land. They resist/hide and the thugs withdraw.
When the thugs return in force, the mythical creature(s) makes an appearance, attacking the thugs, hunting them down across the complex, where they are tracked down and then destroyed.
The protagonist and his community come to the conclusion that the complex was built on the creature’s ancestoral land, and the spirits have been angered. They must make peace with it or be destroyed themselves.
I never got as far as working out an ending or conclusion, so you’ll have to contrive one yourself. This could either be an out-and-out horror novel or more of a fantasy styled piece – Chinese folklore would certainly lend itself to the latter.

Ultimately, this idea is little more than a haunted house story. A bunch of people in a spooky location having to deal with crazy people and/or beasts. But I think the Chinese angle makes it more interesting. It certainly gives more scope in terms of monsters. At the same, it probably makes it less commercially viable, but what do I know about that? Plus, the setting actually exists. A Google search will reveal lots of examples of abandoned amusement parks all over the world, but this is probably the only one in China, and is certainly among the biggest.

Like I mentioned earlier, I’m unlikely to ever write something like this, so feel free to take some of the elements and do what you will with them. I just thought I’d lay out some of the thoughts I had to see if it sparks any creative fires out there. I’d also be interested to hear other people’s thoughts on the concept. Hey, I might even make a stab at writing it myself!

Adding It Up – March

It’s time for a monthly update of my Additional Income Challenge where I record any extra cash that crosses my path during the year. I’ve decided to post the new blog for the challenge at the end of each month, giving me the full month to earn the extra cash and work out the totals.

During March I’ve earned £48.29. About 60% of this is from eBay, the rest was from selling a couple of second-hand books on Amazon Marketplace. I went through my bookshelves and CD collection dragging out anything that might have a re-sale value online and that I wasn’t  too attached to and listed it on Amazon.

I had a narrow escape with postage fees for one of the eBay items I sold this month. I had a  load of old Commando Comics, WW2 comic books that were popular in the 70s and 80s,  (the early ones from the 1960′s go for a decent price on eBay!) and have been selling them in bundles of 6. They haven’t been fetching big prices, but since they were given to me a few years back there’s a small profit to be made on each one. One of the lots sold to a buyer in Australia, and I had set the International Postage to £4.50 without considering that someone from the other end of the world might buy them! The only way to post them and still make a profit from the sale price and postage fees combined was to send them surface mail, meaning they’ll take up to 56 days to arrive! After posting them, I emailed the buyer to let him know the rough arrival time and see if it was OK. He emailed straight back and said he was fine with it. In fact he even left me positive feedback despite not even seeing the goods. I suppose good customer relations help after-all! This taught me the importance of correctly listing your International Postage fees…

This month I am patting myself on the back for making money from almost nothing on eBay. Following a tip I found on a blog I read recently, I decided to look at Costco for eBay inventory, given that they regularly discount items. When the monthly offers brochure came through the door I was keen to check out what they had to offer. I noticed that they were discounting 24 packs of Sharpie marker pens, and when I checked eBay for the same product they were selling at double the price. So, without even buying the pens from Costco, I made a listing for eBay and waited. Three days later two packs of the pens sold, netting me over £5 after all fees and costs. The next day I bought the pens from Costco and mailed them to the eBay customers. Not much of a profit margin, I agree, but I effectively earned myself £5+ in my lunch hour as I was able to buy and then ship them while at work. Now I can use that principle over and over again whenever I identify a product at Costco. Shopping will never be the same again!

In other news, I noticed that Amazon’s Kindle publishing have changed their policies regarding fees for overseas authors. Authors in the UK used to have to wait until their US sales had accrued to at least $100 before sending a cheque/check out, with no way of selecting electronic payment. But now they’ve changed it to be in line with UK sales, so the new threshold is $10 – and will be paid by electronic transfer. This means that at some point in the near future I should get the tiny amount of dollars I’ve built up in the US from Unfamiliar Country. Better than a punch in the word-hole!

Word Count – A Moving Target.

Earlier this week, Chuck Wendig wrote to me and told me to write a minimum of 350 words a day in order to finish my novel. Well, he wrote to thousands of people, via a blog post, but you get the idea. Currently I have a work-in-progress crime novel and a ‘completed’ novel undergoing a total re-write, both of which require words. Lots of them.

I’m well aware that basically all I need to do is start writing and eventually the projects will get finished, but I keep finding lame excuses to not do so. Wendig’s post demands that you, as a writer, write at least 350 words, every day, to get that novel written. So for now at least I am motivated to do just that.

Since yesterday I have added approximately 1,500 words to my crime novel, which is 1,150 over the minimum 350. Or 4.2 days worth of writing at 350 words per day. In theory I have earned myself a holiday, but as I’m sure a lot of writers will be aware, once you stop writing, it’s harder to continue. Better to keep writing while you’re in the groove. If I wrote at that rate over a two month period, at 1,500 words per day, I’d have a finished first-draft of a novel. Even at 350 words per day, I would have written an 80k word novel in about seven months. Which sounds impressive. I just need to keep going, keep adding those words.

I currently attend a monthly writing group, where I take excerpts of the crime novel to read out and get critiqued etc. This helps to keep me working on the project because I feel like I have to have something to show each month. If I can keep to between 350 and 1,000 words a day I’ll have plenty to talk about.

How do other people keep themselves writing? Right now I’m relying on a mix of smug self-satisfaction about my recent word-count, and a sense of shame for when I don’t write anything at all. That’s normal, right? Guys?

Chuck Wendig puts it more concisely here;

Chuck Wendig tells you to write, mofo!

Adding It Up – February

It’s time for a monthly update of my Additional Income Challenge where I record any extra cash that crosses my path during the year.

So far during February I’ve made £47.88 in extra income. £18.48 is from Amazon Marketplace sales, and £29.40 is from selling a couple of things on eBay. Unless more of the second hand books I have listed on Amazon sell, that will probably be it for the month. That brings the running total for 2013 to £89.09. Not a bad start.

I worked out that if I take the net pay I receive each month from my salary and divide it by 30, the rough number of days in a month, I get about £54 per day. So for each month that I hit the £50 mark I could in theory take a (unpaid) day off, having made that money elsewhere. Effectively earning myself spare time.

What would I do with that time? Write. Read some of the books in my ‘to read’ pile. Play Xbox. Watch films and TV series. I’m not sure really, but the point is I’d be free to do whatever I wanted. Which is the ideal scenario when it comes to earning money, surely?

Does anyone else do this, earning income on the side to indulge themselves in their passions? How do you do it? What do you do with the money?

Adding It Up – January

January was the first full month of my campaign to record all the extra money I made on top of my monthly salary, and it wasn’t a bad month. I made £41.21, all of which is now sitting in my slush fund. £20 of that came from cash-back earned from my recent Netflix subscription, and the rest was from selling a book, a CD, and a PC game on Amazon Marketplace.

In the latter stages of January I made a few more sales through Amazon Marketplace, but as they pay in two-week intervals, I should get the money some time in February.

February looks just as good as January. I have the above Amazon sales money to come through, and have just sold an unopened Gandalf from Lord of the Rings figure on eBay, as well as a new printer ink cartridge.

So far for February – £29.08 (with an Amazon payment still come through from last month).

I also got an email the other day from a charity shop who I donated some old books and PC games to. They didn’t seem to have any resale value, but I thought they could put them to good use, and it seems they did, making £12 from my donations. I’m not sure if this was from selling all the stuff I gave them or just some of it, but it’s all good news. I’m registered with Gift Aid, which means the charities can claim the tax back from the sales, at 20% – which is pretty good. If you donate goods to charity organisations for sale, I urge you to do the same. Of course, when I’m in charity shops donating things, I often buy things too, so it’s win-win.

One of the features of Gift Aid is that charity organisations are obliged by the Government to write to you tell how much money they made from the donations you provided. I can tell from the semi-sarcastic wording of their emails/letters that they see this as an inconvenient layer of bureaucracy, which is true, but it’s interesting to see how much was raised.

So, while the cash slowly builds in my set-aside account, I’ll have to think about something to do with it, as well as finding other ways to build extra-curricular income.

Adding It Up – Additional Income

What with it being a new year and all (OK, I know almost a month has passed since New Year. What are you, the Time Police? Is that a stun gun? Aaaaggghhhhh) I thought I’d keep track of how much money I make in addition to my salary, to see how much I have by the end of December 2013.

Put simply, I’m going to record any extra income that comes my way that isn’t pay from my full time job or a gift. Anything else, it goes on the spreadsheet. I’m not planning to include coins found in the street unless this turns out to be a larger source of ‘magic money’ than I thought it would.

Sources of extra income are likely to be things such as;

Ebay
Amazon Marketplace
Kindle sales from Unfamiliar Country (yeah right!)
Cashback from online purchases

To keep the maths simple I’m going to ignore the cost deductions involved in Ebay and Amazon Marketplace – ie posting the sold items etc – and just include the money that comes into my account.

The money is being sent to a separate online bank account, dramatically referred to as my ‘slush fund’, to keep it separate from the sinkhole that is both my current and household accounts. What I’ll do with the money is another question. Probably something boring or practical.

So, for January I have made £41.21. This is made up of £21.21 from the proceeds of selling some old junk on Amazon Marketplace – an old PC game, a DVD, and a couple of books. All of which were casualties of my recent anti-clutter sweep.

Another £20 was made from cashback for opening a Netflix account. Technically I made £55 from cashback this month, but £35 of it was for a car insurance policy my wife paid for, so I’m transferred that to her.

Not a bad start to the year. I’ll update the blog each time some funds find their way into my grubby mitts.

and then…. The End

My ‘to read’ pile has grown once again. This time it’s not only a physical pile of books but also a virtual one as my Kindle has acquired new titles clammering for my attention. At least that pile doesn’t create clutter around the house. I tend to read one physical book and one electronic book concurrently, switching between them depending on where I am. More about that here.

I really like my Kindle, but one thing I’ve noticed since using it is that as I approach the climax of a novel, the end doesn’t really feel like the end until, well, The End. When reading a book, you turn the pages as you go, feeling the stack of remaining paper lessen in your hands. This doesn’t happen with an e-reader. All that happens is the percentage goes up every now and again. Those numbers tick by but they don’t imbue a sense of the narrative winding up to a conclusion. In many cases the novel doesn’t end at 99 or 100%, but somewhere around 95% and the remaining pages are acknowledgements, author interviews, or adverts for other books by the publisher. When this happens, I feel like ‘oh right, so that was the end…’. It’s like watching a film where the screen fades to black, you expect it to fade back in and add just a few more details to the story, but it doesn’t. The credits roll instead.

When reading a paperback, I’ll often flick to the last page of the story (being careful not to read any of the text) and make a mental note of the page number. If it’s page 350, I’ll know that I have another 100 pages to go when I get to page 250. This doesn’t really make any rational sense, but I’ll know that the author has roughly 100 pages to develop and wrap up the novel. Then I’m intrigued to know how they do it. When that remaining bunch of paper in your right hand starts to get wafer thin, and the heroine hasn’t wrought terrible vengeance on her childhood tormentor, I’m anxious to know how things will end up. I’ve read books that turn out to be the first of a series, but without me knowing that beforehand. So as the unread portion of the book gets thinner and thinner I’m beginning to think ‘hold on, this novel is about an epic, around-the-world search for mankind’s saviour/some golden hubcaps/magic sex potion, and they haven’t even left Dover yet…’

There’s none of this with an e-reader. I could of course see if the novel ends on or near the 100% mark, but it’s simply not the same. I’d never get the same sense of mini-anxiety as  my Kindle novel hurtles to it’s conclusion and think ‘ooh, I’m on 96% now…’. In fact, I bet a lot of Kindle users don’t even notice the numbers as they swipe the pages whilst reading. That might just be me. Tell me there are other readers with this ‘issue’. Maybe we could meet up and talk about it, in between drinking tea and weeping.

In other news, I sold a copy of Unfamiliar Country on Kindle this month. In your face, bank manager!