Beverley Carter's Blog, page 2
October 5, 2012
Where I Work!
Here it is, the chaos that passes for my desk! It might not be very big but it is perfectly formed - compact and bijou! Everything is within easy reach, allowing for maximum energy conservation, although sometimes I do have to stand up to get something off the top shelf! This is actually a corner of my living room, although I harbour dreams of one day having sold enough books to purchase a cliff top house with a cliff top writing retreat in the garden - with a view of the sea, of course! Either that or one of my lovely daughters will grow up and leave home and I'll have a spare bedroom I can commandeer. Form your own conclusion about which is likely to happen first!
I do most of my work here, but I do sometimes slouch on the couch instead (and wonder why I get a stiff neck!). I have also been known to take the netbook into the garden and work on a sunny day from the questionable comfort of a deckchair. Not great for posture but does wonders for the tan!
Before anyone kindly points out that it is a little bit, well, messy, I was told once that a tidy desk was a sign of a dirty mind. Not wishing to give that reputation any ground, I will continue to work in my comfortable muddle. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!
September 11, 2012
A Warm Welcome to Kobo Readers!
I am very pleased to let you know that you can now find all my books on Kobo, as well as Kindle! Kobo books are available worldwide, and although my books have only been available on Kobo for a very short time, I am overjoyed to be able to report that already I have had sales in Canada, the United States, Australia and here in the UK. Thank you to everyone who has purchased my stories so far!
To make life as easy as possible, I have added Kobo buttons to all my book pages here on my website, so please have a roam around! The buttons should take you directly to the relevant book page either on Amazon or on the Kobo website, according to which one you select.
Thank you to everyone for your continued support and a special thanks to the readers who have taken the time and trouble to leave a review, it really is appreciated and a few kind words keep a softie like me chuffed to bits for weeks and full of encouragement to get cracking on the next book!
Best wishes,
Bev.
To make life as easy as possible, I have added Kobo buttons to all my book pages here on my website, so please have a roam around! The buttons should take you directly to the relevant book page either on Amazon or on the Kobo website, according to which one you select.
Thank you to everyone for your continued support and a special thanks to the readers who have taken the time and trouble to leave a review, it really is appreciated and a few kind words keep a softie like me chuffed to bits for weeks and full of encouragement to get cracking on the next book!
Best wishes,
Bev.
June 30, 2012
The three main things traditional publishers are getting wrong!
It seems that barely a week goes by without there being another grumble from one of the traditional publishing houses. Times are definitely changing and in my view, their refusal to embrace the growing tide of demand for ebooks is going to lead to their demise. In fact, that’s not the worst of it – here’s my list of the top three mistakes the big publishers have made and are continuing to make.
1. Not giving customers (ie readers) what they want
Do you really want another autobiography by this month’s semi-literate minor celebrity?
They are feeding the market for those who want to get rich and famous without any real effort or hard work. Occasionally, one of these “celebrities” might have an interesting story to tell but have you ever wondered why the supermarket top ten is full of them in the run up to Christmas? People are buying them for someone else.
Do you really want another“celebrity” cookbook? We’ve all probably fallen for it once (or been given one as a present) only to discover that the unpronounceable ingredients are nigh on impossible to find and are too expensive to buy anyway. If you overcome these hurdles, chances are you’ll be rewarded by watching your family ungratefully pushing your latest culinary masterpiece around their plates, with a puzzled look on their faces whilst wondering where the dog is when they need it.
Perhaps you have your favourite authors and you can’t wait for their next offering to be available. Of course, I have my favourites too and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with finding a few authors you like and sticking with them. Sadly, in my case, most of these authors are dead now and there doesn’t seem to be anyone stepping up to take their place. So once I’ve read their whole life’s work, that’s it, the end of the road. I’d like to start down a new road, preferably one where the author is still very much alive and kicking so that there’ll be plenty of new books coming along to feed my habit, but the traditional publishers don’t seem to be opening up very many new roads for me to walk down.
Perhaps I’m being a little harsh, I admit I’ve found the odd recipe of use and the odd bit of celebrity gossip has put a smile on my face for a few minutes. But the point I’m making is: is this it? Surely there has to be more to publishing than the same old same old? And of course there is – this gaping hole in the market has been spotted by eagle eyed writers who are busily self-publishing a wide array of exiting new books across genres to suit every taste, mainly with ebooks.
2. Not giving authors what they want
Ask any writer what they want and the likelihood is that they want to be able to eke out a living doing what they love. Who can blame them? Who wouldn’t want to do that? Some of them may secretly harbour desires of wealth and who could blame them for that either? I suppose you might say they’re being greedy but I prefer to think of it as ambition! Writing is no different to any other industry in that the majority of the workers earn the least amount of money, whilst a tiny minority at the top of the pile earn the lion’s share. Notice I used the word “earn” not “get”. Nothing gets given to you in this job. So how do we get there? Well in the old days, it meant convincing a publisher that you had written something so fantastic that a lot of other people would part with their own hard earned cash to rush out and buy it. This turned out to be as difficult for most people as the proverbial camel passing through the eye of the needle. Time, money, and a lot of hard work went into producing and sending off manuscripts just to have them dumped or (if you were lucky) returned unread. After all that effort, writers quite rightly felt hard done by.
The trouble is, it takes a lot of money to get a book into print and into the bookshops and publishers have learned the hard way not to be an optimistic breed. They’re from the same mould as insurance brokers. It’s all a matter of likelihood. The trouble with likelihood is that it’s much more likely they’ll make some real money on Miss Minor-Celebrity’s life story, dull though that may be, than they’ll make on an unknown writer, no matter how excellent he or she probably is. In the world of publishing, the unknown writer is like a horse that’s never run. No one will back it because they don’t know if it’s any good and there are plenty of favourites in the race anyway, so we’ll gamble our couple of quid on them instead.
All this has changed now that writers can self-publish on ebooks at very little up-front cost and the traditional publishers are losing out by being cut out of the game altogether.
3. Being too slow in embracing the new rules
So, the rules of the game have changed and who wants to play? Amazon picked up the ball and ran off with it but why aren’t all the publishers chasing after them? They’re acting like a bunch of Egyptian crocodiles – they’re in denial (in the Nile – oh never mind!). Don’t they want to play? Well, they do, it’s just that they’re sulking because they liked the game the way it was before. Why wouldn’t they? It worked very nicely for them for a very long time and now that things have changed, they seem to think that by denying it, they can just carry on as usual. The trouble with this plan is that they couldn’t be more wrong. Sales from hardbacks and paperbacks have been plummeting, whilst ebook sales have been rocketing. With more and more electronic devices being devised that can, amongst other things, handle ebooks, pretty soon almost everyone will have access to a device that can work as an ereader. Ebooks are not going to go away.
By not embracing new technology and the new openings that brings, they are standing on an ever shrinking iceberg.
So, what should they do now? In my view, by doing just about anything they are going to increase their chances of survival. At the very least, they should be attempting to harvest this new growth of willing self-publishers by offering them a platform similar to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. Then, like Amazon, they can scrape off a percentage with very little outlay themselves. Perhaps they might like to go a little further and stick their head on the block and actually develop a programme of signing up and supporting new authors to their own publishing houses. Personally I’d be surprised if they were that brave. Perhaps better sales and marketing brains than mine will come up with new and ingenious ways of greater publishing diversity.
Diversify they must, because one thing’s for sure, if they keep acting like pandas, one day soon they’ll run out of bamboo.
Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed this blog. If you agree or disagree with anything I’ve said, please feel free to leave a comment. Perhaps you can spare a couple of minutes to have a look around my website before you leave!
Until next time,
Bev
1. Not giving customers (ie readers) what they want
Do you really want another autobiography by this month’s semi-literate minor celebrity?
They are feeding the market for those who want to get rich and famous without any real effort or hard work. Occasionally, one of these “celebrities” might have an interesting story to tell but have you ever wondered why the supermarket top ten is full of them in the run up to Christmas? People are buying them for someone else.
Do you really want another“celebrity” cookbook? We’ve all probably fallen for it once (or been given one as a present) only to discover that the unpronounceable ingredients are nigh on impossible to find and are too expensive to buy anyway. If you overcome these hurdles, chances are you’ll be rewarded by watching your family ungratefully pushing your latest culinary masterpiece around their plates, with a puzzled look on their faces whilst wondering where the dog is when they need it.
Perhaps you have your favourite authors and you can’t wait for their next offering to be available. Of course, I have my favourites too and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with finding a few authors you like and sticking with them. Sadly, in my case, most of these authors are dead now and there doesn’t seem to be anyone stepping up to take their place. So once I’ve read their whole life’s work, that’s it, the end of the road. I’d like to start down a new road, preferably one where the author is still very much alive and kicking so that there’ll be plenty of new books coming along to feed my habit, but the traditional publishers don’t seem to be opening up very many new roads for me to walk down.
Perhaps I’m being a little harsh, I admit I’ve found the odd recipe of use and the odd bit of celebrity gossip has put a smile on my face for a few minutes. But the point I’m making is: is this it? Surely there has to be more to publishing than the same old same old? And of course there is – this gaping hole in the market has been spotted by eagle eyed writers who are busily self-publishing a wide array of exiting new books across genres to suit every taste, mainly with ebooks.
2. Not giving authors what they want
Ask any writer what they want and the likelihood is that they want to be able to eke out a living doing what they love. Who can blame them? Who wouldn’t want to do that? Some of them may secretly harbour desires of wealth and who could blame them for that either? I suppose you might say they’re being greedy but I prefer to think of it as ambition! Writing is no different to any other industry in that the majority of the workers earn the least amount of money, whilst a tiny minority at the top of the pile earn the lion’s share. Notice I used the word “earn” not “get”. Nothing gets given to you in this job. So how do we get there? Well in the old days, it meant convincing a publisher that you had written something so fantastic that a lot of other people would part with their own hard earned cash to rush out and buy it. This turned out to be as difficult for most people as the proverbial camel passing through the eye of the needle. Time, money, and a lot of hard work went into producing and sending off manuscripts just to have them dumped or (if you were lucky) returned unread. After all that effort, writers quite rightly felt hard done by.
The trouble is, it takes a lot of money to get a book into print and into the bookshops and publishers have learned the hard way not to be an optimistic breed. They’re from the same mould as insurance brokers. It’s all a matter of likelihood. The trouble with likelihood is that it’s much more likely they’ll make some real money on Miss Minor-Celebrity’s life story, dull though that may be, than they’ll make on an unknown writer, no matter how excellent he or she probably is. In the world of publishing, the unknown writer is like a horse that’s never run. No one will back it because they don’t know if it’s any good and there are plenty of favourites in the race anyway, so we’ll gamble our couple of quid on them instead.
All this has changed now that writers can self-publish on ebooks at very little up-front cost and the traditional publishers are losing out by being cut out of the game altogether.
3. Being too slow in embracing the new rules
So, the rules of the game have changed and who wants to play? Amazon picked up the ball and ran off with it but why aren’t all the publishers chasing after them? They’re acting like a bunch of Egyptian crocodiles – they’re in denial (in the Nile – oh never mind!). Don’t they want to play? Well, they do, it’s just that they’re sulking because they liked the game the way it was before. Why wouldn’t they? It worked very nicely for them for a very long time and now that things have changed, they seem to think that by denying it, they can just carry on as usual. The trouble with this plan is that they couldn’t be more wrong. Sales from hardbacks and paperbacks have been plummeting, whilst ebook sales have been rocketing. With more and more electronic devices being devised that can, amongst other things, handle ebooks, pretty soon almost everyone will have access to a device that can work as an ereader. Ebooks are not going to go away.
By not embracing new technology and the new openings that brings, they are standing on an ever shrinking iceberg.
So, what should they do now? In my view, by doing just about anything they are going to increase their chances of survival. At the very least, they should be attempting to harvest this new growth of willing self-publishers by offering them a platform similar to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. Then, like Amazon, they can scrape off a percentage with very little outlay themselves. Perhaps they might like to go a little further and stick their head on the block and actually develop a programme of signing up and supporting new authors to their own publishing houses. Personally I’d be surprised if they were that brave. Perhaps better sales and marketing brains than mine will come up with new and ingenious ways of greater publishing diversity.
Diversify they must, because one thing’s for sure, if they keep acting like pandas, one day soon they’ll run out of bamboo.
Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed this blog. If you agree or disagree with anything I’ve said, please feel free to leave a comment. Perhaps you can spare a couple of minutes to have a look around my website before you leave!
Until next time,
Bev
June 11, 2012
A new Tremawney book in the pipeline!
Following the ongoing success of
The House on Tremawney Hill
, I am currently working on a sequel.
The working title of this is Murder at Tremawney Heights, which I hope will prove to be as popular! I am currently about halfway through the first draft and hope to have the book available in a few weeks' time.
Murder at Tremawney Heights follows on from The House on Tremawney Hill, although it can equally be read on its own. We meet back up with Alison, Lorna and Denise and the story this time is told from the point of view of Denise, who's trying to make the difficult transition from teenager in adulthood. With a gorgeous and rich new boyfriend and his peculiar family to deal with, the last thing she needs is to discover a body! But discover one she does and from then on is drawn into a whodunnit where she needs to find the culprit before the murderer strikes again!
The working title of this is Murder at Tremawney Heights, which I hope will prove to be as popular! I am currently about halfway through the first draft and hope to have the book available in a few weeks' time.
Murder at Tremawney Heights follows on from The House on Tremawney Hill, although it can equally be read on its own. We meet back up with Alison, Lorna and Denise and the story this time is told from the point of view of Denise, who's trying to make the difficult transition from teenager in adulthood. With a gorgeous and rich new boyfriend and his peculiar family to deal with, the last thing she needs is to discover a body! But discover one she does and from then on is drawn into a whodunnit where she needs to find the culprit before the murderer strikes again!
May 30, 2012
Help me to celebrate my birthday with a FREE book!
It’s my birthday on the 31st May and as I can’t afford to buy you all cakes, help me to celebrate by grabbing yourself one of my books absolutely for FREE!
I can’t work out the Amazon time zone, so I have set The Surrogate Vigilante to be free from the 30th May to the 1st June, so wherever you are, you can definitely find it for free on my birthday!
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Surrogate-Vigilante-ebook/dp/B005L9D5P2
May 1, 2012
Goodreads Group Read!
I’m very pleased to announce that The Tonic has been chosen as one of the May group books on the Goodreads UK Amazon Kindle forum!
http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/51445-uk-amazon-kindle-forum
April 20, 2012
New Book - The Tide Will Turn
I am extremely pleased to announce that my new novella, The Tide Will Turn, is now available for download from Amazon.
Lifelong best mates, Gary and Cliff, have found an old trawler for sale on the internet. They can do it up over the winter and take people out on fishing trips next summer. They don’t know anything about boats but they’ve been out sea fishing a couple of times and besides, how hard can it be?
On the journey back from Sunderland to Kent, they’re going to discover more about each other than they ever wanted to know, things that will change both of their lives forever.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Tide-Will-Turn-ebook/dp/B007VMCT6S
April 17, 2012
Goodreads
Find out what’s going on at Goodreads – the book club whereeveryone’s welcome. Discover great newauthors and revisit some old favourites. Follow these links to get you started:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13514141-the-tonic
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13143481-the-house-on-tremawney-hill
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13283050-the-surrogate-vigilante
Hello everybody, I've currently got three novellas availa...
Hello everybody, I've currently got three novellas available for download:
Add caption
Agenerations old natural remedy that seems to cure old age, a pharmaceuticalgiant that wants to produce it and a stubborn elderly lady who’s caught in themiddle. Tradition clashes withtechnology, generosity with greed and nature with science.
Surelythe pharmaceutical company with win this battle of wills? They might do - if only they can identifythose mysterious ingredients.
Or maybethere’ something that’s bigger than both of them…http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Tonic-ebook/dp/B007DXKCY6
New beginnings, thekindness of strangers, disappearance at sea, feuding brothers, strangeoccurrences and a decades old mystery. It’s all going on in Cornwall!
http://www.amazon.co.uk/House-Tremawney-Hill-ebook/dp/B006DYT6F2
You know right fromwrong don’t you? Of course you do. You might not be so sure after you’ve readThe Surrogate Vigilante.
www.amazon.co.uk/The-Surrogate-Vigilante-ebook/dp/B005L9D5P2
Add captionAgenerations old natural remedy that seems to cure old age, a pharmaceuticalgiant that wants to produce it and a stubborn elderly lady who’s caught in themiddle. Tradition clashes withtechnology, generosity with greed and nature with science.
Surelythe pharmaceutical company with win this battle of wills? They might do - if only they can identifythose mysterious ingredients.
Or maybethere’ something that’s bigger than both of them…http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Tonic-ebook/dp/B007DXKCY6
New beginnings, thekindness of strangers, disappearance at sea, feuding brothers, strangeoccurrences and a decades old mystery. It’s all going on in Cornwall! http://www.amazon.co.uk/House-Tremawney-Hill-ebook/dp/B006DYT6F2
You know right fromwrong don’t you? Of course you do. You might not be so sure after you’ve readThe Surrogate Vigilante.www.amazon.co.uk/The-Surrogate-Vigilante-ebook/dp/B005L9D5P2
