Will Once's Blog, page 21
October 13, 2014
No thanks
It shouldn’t have been difficult. All we wanted were two cups of black coffee, two sandwiches and two muffins. That’s all. But nothing had prepared us for the horror that was about to happen. It was late on Sunday evening. I am tempted to say that it was a dark and stormy night because it…
October 12, 2014
The life of pea
There is a hidden war happening on your dinner plate. A desperate battle for supremacy and survival in the midst of your meat and two veg. The pea wars. You might not know that this war is going on. It’s a subtle war. A conflict fought in the shadows. A battle between master ninjas. What’s…
October 11, 2014
The death of the music album
Kids don’t buy albums any more. Okay, so that’s a sweeping statement. I am sure that some kids buy some music albums. But for many the internet has replaced the music collection. If my son wants to listen to music he will search for it on Youtube. That is a fresh Google search every time…
October 3, 2014
Two new books!
I've not posted a Goodreads blog for a while. I've been busy on my wordpress blog: www.willonce.wordpress.com.
And working hard to get two new books out.
Global Domination for Beginners is a comic novel about the other side to the James Bond/ Jason Bourne/ Austin Powers story. What would happen if the bad guy won for a change?
Global Domination for Beginners
More importantly, what would it feel like to be that would-be tyrant? What would you do with all that power?
It's your everyday story of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy takes over the world in order to get girl back.
And if that wasn't exciting enough, I'm also publishing a 10,000 word short story called Hero.
Hero
It's a near-future science fiction story about a 145 year old superhero. How does a 145 year old man manage to be a superhero? You'll have to read it to find out.
And working hard to get two new books out.
Global Domination for Beginners is a comic novel about the other side to the James Bond/ Jason Bourne/ Austin Powers story. What would happen if the bad guy won for a change?
Global Domination for Beginners
More importantly, what would it feel like to be that would-be tyrant? What would you do with all that power?
It's your everyday story of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy takes over the world in order to get girl back.
And if that wasn't exciting enough, I'm also publishing a 10,000 word short story called Hero.
Hero
It's a near-future science fiction story about a 145 year old superhero. How does a 145 year old man manage to be a superhero? You'll have to read it to find out.
August 17, 2014
How to win any argument
Okay, okay, maybe not any argument. That would be asking a bit much.
It would also be a physical impossibility. If both of you, the arguer and the arguee, knew the same secret then neither of you could win. Or then again, maybe both of you win. We’ll come back to that later.
But I had to grab your attention, so I slipped the word “any” into the title. Sorry. I hope you don’t mind. This is actually about how to win most arguments.
I’ll make you a deal. If you read to the end of this blog and you think I’ve not delivered on that, then I’ll give you your money back. Plus 50%. How does that sound?
First we’ve got to define what an argument is. I’m going to use two types of argument – marital and internetial. What do you mean, internetial is not a word? It is now. Microsoft Word likes it so much that it keeps on underlining it every time I type it. Which is nice.
I guess that most people who have been married know what a marital argument is. Especially most people who have been married more than once.
A marital argument usually starts small. One or other of you makes a teensy weensy mistake. You might squeeze the toothpaste from the wrong end. Your gaze might linger just a little bit too long on the check-out girl in Tesco. You might have bought a thirty year old classic sports car without adequate spousal consultation. By which we usually mean, without any spousal consultation.
Your partner takes issue with you. You take issue with him or her taking issue with you. It’s not such a big deal.
Of course, it’s a big deal. Don’t you respect my feelings?
Why does this always have to be about your feelings? Don’t I have feelings too?
If you had feelings, you wouldn’t have done what you just did.
Yes, but if you had feelings you wouldn’t have complained about it.
And another thing…
You can tell when an argument is going badly when one of you says “and another thing”. This is when all the pent up anger and rage comes out. Your mother has never liked me. Three years ago you said or did … How come you never take me out anywhere nice? And, no, MacDonalds doesn’t count. You’re only nice to me when you want something.
If you have too many arguments like that, the lawyers start rubbing their hands in anticipation of being paid and you start nervously trying to work out how much half of not much is going to be worth.
Ug.
When you start an argument you are really hoping for the forehead-slapping moment. You produce a piece of evidence or a line of debate that is so devastating that the party of the other part slaps their hands to their forehead.
“OMG! You were right! I was soooo wrong! I see it now.”
This almost never happens. We desperately want it to happen. We try so hard to make it happen. But it’s a mirage. It’s powdered unicorn horn. Rocking horse poo. It’s the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow that turns out to be … the beginning of another rainbow.
Internetial arguments (it’s that word again) are similar. You are typing away in good faith in your favourite forum. Oh, I don’t know, yakking about politics or split infinitives or whether the Subaru Imprezza is better than the Mitsubishi Evo.
And you write something that is … shall we say? … a little contentious. A bold statement. A tad strong. It’s probably something that you believe in. A pet theory. But, let’s be honest, we don’t think too carefully before posting internetially, do we? If it’s more or less right, we hit the submit button and off it goes into the ether. This is not a job application or that first novel that we spend ages on, refining and polishing until it’s right.
Then someone takes offence. They read your post and their hackles rise … wherever and whatever hackles are. They get into fighty mode. They hit the reply button and start to bash out a devastating response. You are sooo wrong … and they are about to prove it.
Here I must relate a hidden secret about life, the universe and everything. Many internetters secretly like to prove other people wrong. So they patrol the internet like self-styled vigilantes, looking for mistakes to pounce on. Oh, sure, they think that they are being helpful or defending a cause or something like that. But deep down they want to prove someone else wrong because they proves that they are right.
It’s okay. It’s human nature. I do it too. I think many of us do.
Incidentally, this also happens when we drive. Many drivers dearly love to see another driver make a mistake, so that they can switch into high and mighty mode by pointing it out. Look, that plonker didn’t use his indicators! We think we are saying “what a bad driver he is”. What we are really saying is: “What a good driver I am”.
Anyhoo, back to our internetial argument. You make a post, someone else challenges it. But there’s something about the way they challenged it that irks you. When we write, especially on something as fast and throw-away as the internet, it’s so hard to get the tone right. We might think we are being friendly and jokey, but it can come across as sarcastic and petty.
So you defend yourself, incidentally taking a swipe at their argument. And that locks us into a mutual arms race. Mano a mano. Your arguments against his or hers. You give examples plucked from google. They give counter examples, also plucked from google. It starts to get nasty. Insults fly. Neither of you is going to back down. The moderators have to step in before someone gets really hurt.
And of course, what you are hoping for all along is that forehead slapping moment. That wonderful moment of realisation when they say: “OMG! You are right! I see it now.”
Which, as we have already said, almost never happens. And even if it did, it would not be the sweet victory that you are expecting. The other person would be so hurt and damaged that you would feel as if you have stepped on a cute puppy’s paw.
So how can we win an argument? What is the magic secret, known only to a few bald-headed kungfu masters and their disciples?
I will tell you. The only way to win an argument is to be the first to apologise. You see, once you are locked into that downward spiral of violent disagreement, the vortex is going to keep on pulling you down and down. You are both going to get very hurt, until you are either too exhausted to fight any more or someone else stops up.
So you say sorry. A real sorry, not one with sneaky barbs left in. “I am sorry. I said some things that I wish I hadn’t. I didn’t express myself well enough.”
If this works, the other person will now feel guilty. They will know that they have said some silly things too. They are also hoping for a way out of this vicious circle. But you have taken the moral high ground by apologising first. In a large number of cases, they will feel obliged to apologise too.
In effect, you have switched the argument into who can deliver the best apology. And that is a virtuous circle, not a vicious one.
If you are really really lucky, at this point a marital argument could turn into hugs, kisses and a chance to open the dressing up box. That doesn’t happen so much on the internet. At least not in the forums that I frequent.
Here’s a bonus. If the best way to end a marital argument is to be the first to apologise, then the best person to marry is someone who also knows this secret. If you are both trying to be the first to apologise, you can’t have an argument. It simply cannot start.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t get annoyed with each other. That’s healthy. But if she is complaining that you squeeze the toothpaste from the wrong end, the best reaction is probably not to fight it. It may not mean that much to you, but it matters to her. And that ought to be enough.
In the final analysis, the best way to win a marital argument is to see it from the other person’s point of view. And that usually means that you damn well ought to apologise for something.
It would also be a physical impossibility. If both of you, the arguer and the arguee, knew the same secret then neither of you could win. Or then again, maybe both of you win. We’ll come back to that later.
But I had to grab your attention, so I slipped the word “any” into the title. Sorry. I hope you don’t mind. This is actually about how to win most arguments.
I’ll make you a deal. If you read to the end of this blog and you think I’ve not delivered on that, then I’ll give you your money back. Plus 50%. How does that sound?
First we’ve got to define what an argument is. I’m going to use two types of argument – marital and internetial. What do you mean, internetial is not a word? It is now. Microsoft Word likes it so much that it keeps on underlining it every time I type it. Which is nice.
I guess that most people who have been married know what a marital argument is. Especially most people who have been married more than once.
A marital argument usually starts small. One or other of you makes a teensy weensy mistake. You might squeeze the toothpaste from the wrong end. Your gaze might linger just a little bit too long on the check-out girl in Tesco. You might have bought a thirty year old classic sports car without adequate spousal consultation. By which we usually mean, without any spousal consultation.
Your partner takes issue with you. You take issue with him or her taking issue with you. It’s not such a big deal.
Of course, it’s a big deal. Don’t you respect my feelings?
Why does this always have to be about your feelings? Don’t I have feelings too?
If you had feelings, you wouldn’t have done what you just did.
Yes, but if you had feelings you wouldn’t have complained about it.
And another thing…
You can tell when an argument is going badly when one of you says “and another thing”. This is when all the pent up anger and rage comes out. Your mother has never liked me. Three years ago you said or did … How come you never take me out anywhere nice? And, no, MacDonalds doesn’t count. You’re only nice to me when you want something.
If you have too many arguments like that, the lawyers start rubbing their hands in anticipation of being paid and you start nervously trying to work out how much half of not much is going to be worth.
Ug.
When you start an argument you are really hoping for the forehead-slapping moment. You produce a piece of evidence or a line of debate that is so devastating that the party of the other part slaps their hands to their forehead.
“OMG! You were right! I was soooo wrong! I see it now.”
This almost never happens. We desperately want it to happen. We try so hard to make it happen. But it’s a mirage. It’s powdered unicorn horn. Rocking horse poo. It’s the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow that turns out to be … the beginning of another rainbow.
Internetial arguments (it’s that word again) are similar. You are typing away in good faith in your favourite forum. Oh, I don’t know, yakking about politics or split infinitives or whether the Subaru Imprezza is better than the Mitsubishi Evo.
And you write something that is … shall we say? … a little contentious. A bold statement. A tad strong. It’s probably something that you believe in. A pet theory. But, let’s be honest, we don’t think too carefully before posting internetially, do we? If it’s more or less right, we hit the submit button and off it goes into the ether. This is not a job application or that first novel that we spend ages on, refining and polishing until it’s right.
Then someone takes offence. They read your post and their hackles rise … wherever and whatever hackles are. They get into fighty mode. They hit the reply button and start to bash out a devastating response. You are sooo wrong … and they are about to prove it.
Here I must relate a hidden secret about life, the universe and everything. Many internetters secretly like to prove other people wrong. So they patrol the internet like self-styled vigilantes, looking for mistakes to pounce on. Oh, sure, they think that they are being helpful or defending a cause or something like that. But deep down they want to prove someone else wrong because they proves that they are right.
It’s okay. It’s human nature. I do it too. I think many of us do.
Incidentally, this also happens when we drive. Many drivers dearly love to see another driver make a mistake, so that they can switch into high and mighty mode by pointing it out. Look, that plonker didn’t use his indicators! We think we are saying “what a bad driver he is”. What we are really saying is: “What a good driver I am”.
Anyhoo, back to our internetial argument. You make a post, someone else challenges it. But there’s something about the way they challenged it that irks you. When we write, especially on something as fast and throw-away as the internet, it’s so hard to get the tone right. We might think we are being friendly and jokey, but it can come across as sarcastic and petty.
So you defend yourself, incidentally taking a swipe at their argument. And that locks us into a mutual arms race. Mano a mano. Your arguments against his or hers. You give examples plucked from google. They give counter examples, also plucked from google. It starts to get nasty. Insults fly. Neither of you is going to back down. The moderators have to step in before someone gets really hurt.
And of course, what you are hoping for all along is that forehead slapping moment. That wonderful moment of realisation when they say: “OMG! You are right! I see it now.”
Which, as we have already said, almost never happens. And even if it did, it would not be the sweet victory that you are expecting. The other person would be so hurt and damaged that you would feel as if you have stepped on a cute puppy’s paw.
So how can we win an argument? What is the magic secret, known only to a few bald-headed kungfu masters and their disciples?
I will tell you. The only way to win an argument is to be the first to apologise. You see, once you are locked into that downward spiral of violent disagreement, the vortex is going to keep on pulling you down and down. You are both going to get very hurt, until you are either too exhausted to fight any more or someone else stops up.
So you say sorry. A real sorry, not one with sneaky barbs left in. “I am sorry. I said some things that I wish I hadn’t. I didn’t express myself well enough.”
If this works, the other person will now feel guilty. They will know that they have said some silly things too. They are also hoping for a way out of this vicious circle. But you have taken the moral high ground by apologising first. In a large number of cases, they will feel obliged to apologise too.
In effect, you have switched the argument into who can deliver the best apology. And that is a virtuous circle, not a vicious one.
If you are really really lucky, at this point a marital argument could turn into hugs, kisses and a chance to open the dressing up box. That doesn’t happen so much on the internet. At least not in the forums that I frequent.
Here’s a bonus. If the best way to end a marital argument is to be the first to apologise, then the best person to marry is someone who also knows this secret. If you are both trying to be the first to apologise, you can’t have an argument. It simply cannot start.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t get annoyed with each other. That’s healthy. But if she is complaining that you squeeze the toothpaste from the wrong end, the best reaction is probably not to fight it. It may not mean that much to you, but it matters to her. And that ought to be enough.
In the final analysis, the best way to win a marital argument is to see it from the other person’s point of view. And that usually means that you damn well ought to apologise for something.
August 15, 2014
The ballad of Ug's Hammer
Which side are you on in the Amazon-Hachette war?
Is this a case of a nasty big corporation trying to stomp on a not quite so nasty and slightly less big corporation? Is Amazon trying to create a monopoly where it sells everything worth selling? Or is a brave and forward thinking company trying to create a new and modern marketplace for books, where there are gazillions of readers and they all want to buy my books?
Or are you thoroughly confused and fed up with all of it?
On Goodreads recently there has been a debate about whether big business is good for us, or an evil that we could well do without.
I’d like to offer my humble opinions, wrapped up in a little story about Ug’s hammer.
Who knows? Maybe one day, Ug’s hammer will be a well-known concept. People will mention it in the same breath as Schrödinger’s cat, Foucault’s fulcrum, Flaubert’s parrot, Michael Jackson’s monkey or Freddie Starr’s hamster. Until then, it’s just a story.
Once upon a time, there was a primitive cave dweller called Ug. His wife, children, grandparents and friends were also called Ug. His cave was called Ug, and the sky and .. you get the picture.
One day, Ug was in the middle of his morning commute from his cave to woolly mammoth feeding grounds where he worked.
It was there that he stubbed his toe on a large sandy brown rock hiding by the side of the path. Had this happened several millennia later, our hero might have realised that he had been involved in an accident that was not his fault. He could call one of those nice injury lawyers and earn a bundle in a no-win no fee sort of deal.
But it wasn’t several millennia later, and so he didn’t.
What he did do was to shout the worst and foulest swear word known to Neolithic man at the top of his lungs. The rocky canyon resounded to the echoing sound of him yelling “UG!!”.
Then he did what all Neolithic men did in such situations. He knelt down and gave the offending rock an almighty punch, or as he would call it an almighty ug.
And then his hand was hurting as well as his foot.
At this point in the story, events could have taken a very different turn. He might have cut his losses, carried on walking and later complain to his co-workers that he had stubbed his ug on an ug and it had ugged like ug, and so he ugged it and that ugged even more.
But Ug was a resourceful fellow. He spotted another rock not far away. A rock about the same size as the first, but much tougher looking. A macho rock. He picked up this rock, marvelling not for the first time that opposable thumbs had their uses. And then he brought the second rock crashing down onto the first.
The second rock disintegrated into a satisfyingly large number of pieces. As Ug could not count, any number larger than three was satisfyingly large. And this certainly qualified.
Mostly by accident, Ug had just invented mankind’s first tool. We now know it as a hammer, but back then he decided to call it his uggity ug. Ug was so impressed with his uggity ug, that he decided to take it with him. He wrapped it up in a fold of his fur loin cloth, incidentally also inventing the world’s first pocket.
When he arrived at their semi-detached cave later that evening, his wife noticed that something was different.
“Is that an ug in your pocket,” she said. “Or are you pleased to see me?”
“It’s an uggity ug. I can ug things with it.”
He then went on to extol the virtues and advantages of mankind’s very first tool. With this very ug, he could build stone walls, fashion a castle, build an empire, erect a pyramid to honour the gods they hadn’t invented yet, conquer nations and eventually put a man on the moon.
“If it’s so marvellous, why don’t you put those shelves up at the back of the cave,” she said. “If you do that, I’ll treat you to an uggy ug under the mammoth skin duvet.”
What self-respecting red-blooded troglodyte could resist such an offer? And thus was the barter system created.
Before long, news of Ug’s marvellous hammer spread around the neighbourhood. Everyone wanted to borrow it, although history does not record whether this was to put up shelves or to barter for more ugging under their own mammoth-skin duvets.
It didn’t take much longer for Ug to realise the next obvious step. He decided to become a maker and purveyor of hammers. His first uggity ug was just the prototype. Soon he extended the range. There was the wooden-handled hammer, the pointy pin hammer, the war-hammer, the mallet, the sledge – even the classic shape with the hook attachment for pulling out nails (which also hadn’t been invented yet).
Soon business was booming. Ug was quite the talk of the cave-town. He had all the barters he could possibly want plus lots of ugging under the woolly mammoth duvet. So much in fact, that they had to invent money in order to pay him when they ran out of things to barter.
It couldn’t last. Soon other Neolithic men were looking enviously at Ug’s success, both in the pocket (which he had invented) and under the duvet. They also decided to make and sell hammers. And thus was born the free market. People could now buy Ug’s original hammers, or they could wander down the canyon to the cave where Ag was undercutting Ug on price. Not only that, but there was that new fella living in a tent who would sell you two hammers for the price of three.
The days of competition had arrived. You might think that Ug would be annoyed to have rivals. And, to tell the truth, he was pretty ugged off about it all. But then a strange thing happened. The competition actually forced them all to make better hammers.
This is the part of the story to cheer the heart of people who like a free market. Ug couldn’t just sell any old hammer. His customers wouldn’t accept fist-sized rocks any more. He had to sell the best or the cheapest or … the something-est. Anyone selling rubbish hammers would go out of business. The people selling the best hammers would thrive.
Ug made his hammers out of flint. His competitors discovered metal and moved into the bronze age. Ug retaliated with iron. His competitors invented steel.
He made his hammers by hand. His rivals used steam power. Ug switched to electricity. They invented the production line. He branched out into robotics.
The Ug corporation bought sailing ships and sent his merchants into far-away lands to find new ways to make hammers and exotic materials to make them from. Although Ug didn’t know it at the time, his hammer-selling business was driving the advancement of human society.
Mankind’s inventions and scientific breakthroughs have not simply happened because of our need to learn or our curiosity about the world. We have grown as a civilization because of our love of money, and the need to build a better hammer. Okay, and a few other things as well.
When we started making things, we quickly found that we needed craftsmen. This then drove both the agricultural and industrial revolutions. We started to live in villages, then towns, then cities. We traded with each other, swapping Ug’s hammers for duvet time and other goods. From this came language and counting, and all manner of good things.
This is the dream of the free marketeers. Competition forces businesses to develop better products and/or ways of making those products more effectively. This drives innovation. It also makes Ug and his descendants filthy rich and that drags thousands if not millions of people with them. The state should not try to intervene in the market. The market is good. The market will regulate itself.
By now, Sir Ronald Ug, the 3 thousandth, is sitting pretty as the head of Ug Inc – an international company specialising in the manufacture of domestic tools.
History – and prehistory – has been good to the Ug family, just as it has been good for all of us. It is undeniable that the free market has helped to shape our civilization. It is demonstrably better than the alternatives. The capitalist economies won the cold war, didn’t we? The market is good – yes?
Ah, no. There is a problem. In fact, there are several. If we stopped now, we would only be telling half of the story. You see, the Ug corporation has a confession to make.
Competition doesn’t just give us the good stuff - better products and more efficient manufacturing processes. It also brings along a host of things that are a lot less welcome...
… the early Ug factories used child labour to clean the machines – working long hours and in unsafe conditions. When the Western world decided that this wasn’t a good idea, the Ug corporation exported all their manufacturing to third world countries so they could carry on using child labour.
… the Ug corporation built the ships that made the slave trade possible.
… they merged with smaller companies to create a monopoly
… they used their dominant market position to drive other companies out of business, making their workers unemployed.
… they used smart marketing techniques to make their customers to buy stuff they didn’t need.
… they exploited any tax loophole they could find.
… they helped to destroy the environment, whilst telling their customers that they had an ethics and morality policy.
The Ug corporation didn’t want to do all this. But they knew that their competitors would use these techniques if they didn’t. In order to maintain their competitive edge, businesses have to keep on looking for advantages over their rivals. They have little choice.
And in the meantime, this system has created a world where there is a huge disparity between those who have money and those who don’t. We invented money so that we could swap our labour for the things that we wanted, such as Ug’s hammer. What we now have is a monster which we cannot stop, where most of that money has gathered into big blobs under the control of a very small number of people. That wasn’t what Ug intended when he first stubbed his toe on a rock.
It is probably no surprise that many people are highly suspicious of big businesses. In order to be competitive, the Ug corporation has to find every single way to drive down costs, increase sales and improve profits. But they also have to present a friendly and trustworthy face to their customers.
They have no choice. They have to be shifty and they also have to hide just how shifty they are being. The market forces them to do this.
And that’s the conundrum of capitalism. It has been remarkably successful at creating our civilization. It works. We don’t yet have anything better to replace it with. But it creates massive problems and there is an immense amount of distrust about it.
Let’s return briefly to Amazon vs Hachette, although we will give the last word to Ug in a little while.
Amazon needs to make money. More money than it is making right now. To do that, it needs to build a monopoly and it needs to sell ebooks cheaply, which in turn means taking on the Hachettes of this world. We could see that as nasty Amazon trying to take over the world. Or we could see it as the free market in action – in all its glory and its problems. If Amazon didn’t do it, someone else will. And if Amazon don’t do it now they will try again later. They have to.
Don’t blame a sabre-tooth tiger for being a carnivore. Or Ug for wanting to sell more hammers.
Which probably means that the future is more likely to be Amazon’s approach of a monopoly selling books cheaply, but we don’t have to like it.
For me, the bigger question is whether capitalism and the free market is still fit for purpose. But maybe that’s a story for another time. What seems very certain is that we are a long long way from Ug and the dream of the perfect hammer.
Let’s end with Sir Roland Ug the thousandth. Today he has stubbed his toe on something new. One of his researchers is demonstrating a 3D printer.
A machine that can make just about any object, including a hammer.
A machine that may one day be cheap enough to be available in any home.
A machine that will totally take away the need to pay peanuts to third world workers for working in awful conditions, but also depriving them of an income.
A machine which could put every single manufacturing company out of business.
At that moment in time, Sir Roland shouted the worst and foulest swear word known to modern man at the top of his lungs. His steel and glass office resounded to the echoing sound of him yelling “UG!!”.
Is this a case of a nasty big corporation trying to stomp on a not quite so nasty and slightly less big corporation? Is Amazon trying to create a monopoly where it sells everything worth selling? Or is a brave and forward thinking company trying to create a new and modern marketplace for books, where there are gazillions of readers and they all want to buy my books?
Or are you thoroughly confused and fed up with all of it?
On Goodreads recently there has been a debate about whether big business is good for us, or an evil that we could well do without.
I’d like to offer my humble opinions, wrapped up in a little story about Ug’s hammer.
Who knows? Maybe one day, Ug’s hammer will be a well-known concept. People will mention it in the same breath as Schrödinger’s cat, Foucault’s fulcrum, Flaubert’s parrot, Michael Jackson’s monkey or Freddie Starr’s hamster. Until then, it’s just a story.
Once upon a time, there was a primitive cave dweller called Ug. His wife, children, grandparents and friends were also called Ug. His cave was called Ug, and the sky and .. you get the picture.
One day, Ug was in the middle of his morning commute from his cave to woolly mammoth feeding grounds where he worked.
It was there that he stubbed his toe on a large sandy brown rock hiding by the side of the path. Had this happened several millennia later, our hero might have realised that he had been involved in an accident that was not his fault. He could call one of those nice injury lawyers and earn a bundle in a no-win no fee sort of deal.
But it wasn’t several millennia later, and so he didn’t.
What he did do was to shout the worst and foulest swear word known to Neolithic man at the top of his lungs. The rocky canyon resounded to the echoing sound of him yelling “UG!!”.
Then he did what all Neolithic men did in such situations. He knelt down and gave the offending rock an almighty punch, or as he would call it an almighty ug.
And then his hand was hurting as well as his foot.
At this point in the story, events could have taken a very different turn. He might have cut his losses, carried on walking and later complain to his co-workers that he had stubbed his ug on an ug and it had ugged like ug, and so he ugged it and that ugged even more.
But Ug was a resourceful fellow. He spotted another rock not far away. A rock about the same size as the first, but much tougher looking. A macho rock. He picked up this rock, marvelling not for the first time that opposable thumbs had their uses. And then he brought the second rock crashing down onto the first.
The second rock disintegrated into a satisfyingly large number of pieces. As Ug could not count, any number larger than three was satisfyingly large. And this certainly qualified.
Mostly by accident, Ug had just invented mankind’s first tool. We now know it as a hammer, but back then he decided to call it his uggity ug. Ug was so impressed with his uggity ug, that he decided to take it with him. He wrapped it up in a fold of his fur loin cloth, incidentally also inventing the world’s first pocket.
When he arrived at their semi-detached cave later that evening, his wife noticed that something was different.
“Is that an ug in your pocket,” she said. “Or are you pleased to see me?”
“It’s an uggity ug. I can ug things with it.”
He then went on to extol the virtues and advantages of mankind’s very first tool. With this very ug, he could build stone walls, fashion a castle, build an empire, erect a pyramid to honour the gods they hadn’t invented yet, conquer nations and eventually put a man on the moon.
“If it’s so marvellous, why don’t you put those shelves up at the back of the cave,” she said. “If you do that, I’ll treat you to an uggy ug under the mammoth skin duvet.”
What self-respecting red-blooded troglodyte could resist such an offer? And thus was the barter system created.
Before long, news of Ug’s marvellous hammer spread around the neighbourhood. Everyone wanted to borrow it, although history does not record whether this was to put up shelves or to barter for more ugging under their own mammoth-skin duvets.
It didn’t take much longer for Ug to realise the next obvious step. He decided to become a maker and purveyor of hammers. His first uggity ug was just the prototype. Soon he extended the range. There was the wooden-handled hammer, the pointy pin hammer, the war-hammer, the mallet, the sledge – even the classic shape with the hook attachment for pulling out nails (which also hadn’t been invented yet).
Soon business was booming. Ug was quite the talk of the cave-town. He had all the barters he could possibly want plus lots of ugging under the woolly mammoth duvet. So much in fact, that they had to invent money in order to pay him when they ran out of things to barter.
It couldn’t last. Soon other Neolithic men were looking enviously at Ug’s success, both in the pocket (which he had invented) and under the duvet. They also decided to make and sell hammers. And thus was born the free market. People could now buy Ug’s original hammers, or they could wander down the canyon to the cave where Ag was undercutting Ug on price. Not only that, but there was that new fella living in a tent who would sell you two hammers for the price of three.
The days of competition had arrived. You might think that Ug would be annoyed to have rivals. And, to tell the truth, he was pretty ugged off about it all. But then a strange thing happened. The competition actually forced them all to make better hammers.
This is the part of the story to cheer the heart of people who like a free market. Ug couldn’t just sell any old hammer. His customers wouldn’t accept fist-sized rocks any more. He had to sell the best or the cheapest or … the something-est. Anyone selling rubbish hammers would go out of business. The people selling the best hammers would thrive.
Ug made his hammers out of flint. His competitors discovered metal and moved into the bronze age. Ug retaliated with iron. His competitors invented steel.
He made his hammers by hand. His rivals used steam power. Ug switched to electricity. They invented the production line. He branched out into robotics.
The Ug corporation bought sailing ships and sent his merchants into far-away lands to find new ways to make hammers and exotic materials to make them from. Although Ug didn’t know it at the time, his hammer-selling business was driving the advancement of human society.
Mankind’s inventions and scientific breakthroughs have not simply happened because of our need to learn or our curiosity about the world. We have grown as a civilization because of our love of money, and the need to build a better hammer. Okay, and a few other things as well.
When we started making things, we quickly found that we needed craftsmen. This then drove both the agricultural and industrial revolutions. We started to live in villages, then towns, then cities. We traded with each other, swapping Ug’s hammers for duvet time and other goods. From this came language and counting, and all manner of good things.
This is the dream of the free marketeers. Competition forces businesses to develop better products and/or ways of making those products more effectively. This drives innovation. It also makes Ug and his descendants filthy rich and that drags thousands if not millions of people with them. The state should not try to intervene in the market. The market is good. The market will regulate itself.
By now, Sir Ronald Ug, the 3 thousandth, is sitting pretty as the head of Ug Inc – an international company specialising in the manufacture of domestic tools.
History – and prehistory – has been good to the Ug family, just as it has been good for all of us. It is undeniable that the free market has helped to shape our civilization. It is demonstrably better than the alternatives. The capitalist economies won the cold war, didn’t we? The market is good – yes?
Ah, no. There is a problem. In fact, there are several. If we stopped now, we would only be telling half of the story. You see, the Ug corporation has a confession to make.
Competition doesn’t just give us the good stuff - better products and more efficient manufacturing processes. It also brings along a host of things that are a lot less welcome...
… the early Ug factories used child labour to clean the machines – working long hours and in unsafe conditions. When the Western world decided that this wasn’t a good idea, the Ug corporation exported all their manufacturing to third world countries so they could carry on using child labour.
… the Ug corporation built the ships that made the slave trade possible.
… they merged with smaller companies to create a monopoly
… they used their dominant market position to drive other companies out of business, making their workers unemployed.
… they used smart marketing techniques to make their customers to buy stuff they didn’t need.
… they exploited any tax loophole they could find.
… they helped to destroy the environment, whilst telling their customers that they had an ethics and morality policy.
The Ug corporation didn’t want to do all this. But they knew that their competitors would use these techniques if they didn’t. In order to maintain their competitive edge, businesses have to keep on looking for advantages over their rivals. They have little choice.
And in the meantime, this system has created a world where there is a huge disparity between those who have money and those who don’t. We invented money so that we could swap our labour for the things that we wanted, such as Ug’s hammer. What we now have is a monster which we cannot stop, where most of that money has gathered into big blobs under the control of a very small number of people. That wasn’t what Ug intended when he first stubbed his toe on a rock.
It is probably no surprise that many people are highly suspicious of big businesses. In order to be competitive, the Ug corporation has to find every single way to drive down costs, increase sales and improve profits. But they also have to present a friendly and trustworthy face to their customers.
They have no choice. They have to be shifty and they also have to hide just how shifty they are being. The market forces them to do this.
And that’s the conundrum of capitalism. It has been remarkably successful at creating our civilization. It works. We don’t yet have anything better to replace it with. But it creates massive problems and there is an immense amount of distrust about it.
Let’s return briefly to Amazon vs Hachette, although we will give the last word to Ug in a little while.
Amazon needs to make money. More money than it is making right now. To do that, it needs to build a monopoly and it needs to sell ebooks cheaply, which in turn means taking on the Hachettes of this world. We could see that as nasty Amazon trying to take over the world. Or we could see it as the free market in action – in all its glory and its problems. If Amazon didn’t do it, someone else will. And if Amazon don’t do it now they will try again later. They have to.
Don’t blame a sabre-tooth tiger for being a carnivore. Or Ug for wanting to sell more hammers.
Which probably means that the future is more likely to be Amazon’s approach of a monopoly selling books cheaply, but we don’t have to like it.
For me, the bigger question is whether capitalism and the free market is still fit for purpose. But maybe that’s a story for another time. What seems very certain is that we are a long long way from Ug and the dream of the perfect hammer.
Let’s end with Sir Roland Ug the thousandth. Today he has stubbed his toe on something new. One of his researchers is demonstrating a 3D printer.
A machine that can make just about any object, including a hammer.
A machine that may one day be cheap enough to be available in any home.
A machine that will totally take away the need to pay peanuts to third world workers for working in awful conditions, but also depriving them of an income.
A machine which could put every single manufacturing company out of business.
At that moment in time, Sir Roland shouted the worst and foulest swear word known to modern man at the top of his lungs. His steel and glass office resounded to the echoing sound of him yelling “UG!!”.
August 11, 2014
Zombiholics Apocaholics Anonymous
Hi everyone.
I don’t suppose there’s an easy way to do this. So I’ll just come right out and say it. I am Will Once and I wrote a zombie novel.
You don’t know how hard it is to admit that. Maybe you do. Maybe you’ve been through it yourself. I know I’m not the only one. Hell, do I know that I’m not the only one!
I suppose the story really starts years ago. At first I thought I could handle it. It was a social thing, a bit of harmless fun. No big deal. The occasional George Romero movie with friends. Dancing along to Michael Jackson’s Thriller at a party, back in the days when he was still black. And when I could still dance. Sort of.
Doesn’t everyone do that sort of thing? It’s normal, right? A little bit of zombying helps the mood. It’s certainly better than the alternatives.
I can tell you the day when everything changed. The exact day and time. How many times in your life can you do that?
It was the night before my first wedding to the woman who was later to become my ex-wife. To give you a flavour of the occasion, one of my friends apologised that he couldn’t get the wedding, but he promised to come to my next one. And he did.
I was staying at a hotel, sharing a twin-bedded room with my best friend and Best Man. We had a few drinks in the bar – to settle the nerves, you understand. Then we decided to be sensible and retire before “a few” became “a session”. As I flicked through the television channels in the hotel room, I came across the classic 1978 “Dawn of the Dead”.
Without realising the irony … or the fact that the movie is more than two hours long … we settled down to watch. Yes, the night before the marriage of the living dead, I watched a film about the dawn of the living dead.
The following morning, the family and friends who were squeezed uncomfortably into their best fwocks and hired mourning suits saw my bleary eyes. No doubt they thought that I had been crying or couldn’t sleep or the best man and I had partied the night away. What they didn’t realise is that we had stayed up until the wrong side of 2 am watching a zombie film.
Don’t they say that first sign of addiction is when you need to hide it from those you love?
Years passed like kidney stones. D.I.V.O.R.C.E. became a little more than a Dolly Parton song. Then the pits of humanity – being a balding single bloke in his thirties in Luton. I satisfied my zombie addiction with the only thing worth doing in Luton … takeway food and video rentals. This was the age of VCR and the video nasty. A very low point indeed.
The new Millennium changed all that. Marriage the second time around proved to be everything that the first one was not. I suppose everything improves with practice. I had everything a man could want – a loving wife, a brilliant son, a home, a career. Okay, so my hairstyle was more Jean-Luc Picard, but that didn’t matter when you’re coated in monogamy.
The addiction was hiding. Biding its time. I don’t know how anything bides anything else. Or if you can bide anything other than time. But that was what it was doing … time-biding.
Then came the Wocking Dead. I know, I know … it’s The Walking Dead. But these British ears hear “wocking” and everyone has a “jarb” to do.
Suddenly, everyone was doing it. Zombying, I mean. Shaun of the Dead. A remake of my beloved Dawn. And in case my wife is reading that, that is a film not a checkout girl at Waitrose.
Then came 28 Days Later, which was swiftly followed by the sequel 28 Weeks Later. I must admit that one had me a bit confused. Did the second 28 weeks include the original 28 days? Or did they reset the clock after the first twenty eight days? Which would mean that the sequel should have been 28 weeks plus the original 28 days, which I make to be 32 weeks later.
Heck, even one half of Brangelina was going to make a zombie movie. That’s what happens when your secret (and slightly naughty) obsession becomes mainstream.
It was at this point that I made a terrible mistake. I fell off the wagon. I decided to write a zombie book. It was going to be fantastic. I would hit the wave just as it was cresting. Fame, fortune, Ferraris and other things beginning with F. It would be my very own Harry Potter and the Stench of Putrescence, my Fifty Shades of Decomposition.
“But won’t this trend blow over in a little while?” asked my long-suffering wife when I told her the news.
I gave her a patronising smile. “Never fear, my queen. This is the new black. Zombies are the new werewolves, the new vampires. This trend is here to stay.”
“But everyone will be writing zombie books,” she said, again misunderstanding the publishing scene and men’s fascination for shotguns.
“Ah, but mine will be different, light of my life, ironer of my undercrackers. Mine will be a comedy, told from the zombie’s perspective. No-one else will think of that.”
“I don’t like gory books.”
“My soft, my lily, this one will not be gory. It will be gentle and sweet. There will be a cat in it.”
“Will the cat get eaten?”
“No, of course not. Well, probably not. Only if the plot demands it.”
As the immortal Johnny Cash once said, “I could see in her eyes that she had her doubts.” But she softly nodded and the decision was made.
Through long nights I toiled. The base stock was made of zombies, seasoned with witches, a vampire, the aforementioned cat, a VW camper van, William Wallace, a power-crazed Prime Minister and a dragon singing Tom Jones classics. Not exactly Dawn of the Dead, but then we had run out of parts of the day to stick “the dead” or “the living dead” to. Once you’ve had dawn and day, and night, there’s not a lot left. Somehow I couldn’t see “lunchtime of the dead” working. Elevenses of the dead? Mid-afternoon of the damned?
Then the awful realisation. While I had been writing my zombie book, so had everyone else. If the internet is 90% porn and ice-cream is 60% air, then the self-publishing world is 70% zombies. Or so it seemed to me.
Promote your book on Goodreads, the experts say. But when you spend some time on Goodreads, you find that there are hundreds of authors promoting their books to each other. And just about every blurb has the word apocalypse or zombie or somesuch in the first few lines. And if I get fed up with other people pimping their zombie books to me, how in hell-on-earth, am I going to push my book on them?
We had all thought that zombie was the new romance, the new erotica. Instead, it just seems to be a graveyard for rotting ambitions. Sometimes a genre can come out of nowhere and be fresh and exciting, like Tolkien creating fantasy or HG Wells finding a way to make living in Woking more bearable.
But sometimes a new genre pops up and almost instantly becomes stale. And, sad to say, zombie fiction has a distinctly unsavoury pong about it. A whiff of gangrene and rotting flesh. And not in a good way.
It was at this point that I realised I was living inside the zombie cliché. To be precise, I was living inside one of two clichés. Trust me, this one will make sense in a minute.
Cliché number 1 – you are trapped inside a building, like a shopping mall. Outside are a thousand starving zombies, all desperate to get inside to snack on your pink bits. Only they aren’t zombies, are they? They are zombie books. The world of the living, the last few survivors, are vastly outnumbered by a moany-shuffle (technical term) of zombie books. You might have friends and family out there, or even a book that you wrote. But they are out there and you are in here, and not-good things happen if the outside mixes with the inside.
Cliché number 2 – you look down at your arm and realise that you are bleeding. In the last fight, one of the undead must have sunk its teeth into you.
You know what happens next. You will try to hide it from your fellow survivors. You’ll hope that it’s just a flesh wound. Or that this particular brand of zombies are the non-infectious type. But deep down you know. You’ve just bought a one-way ticket to the underworld, and there’s no getting off.
That’s when you hand your shotgun to your best buddy and ask him to put a bullet between your eyes. Because you don’t want to turn into a zombie yourself. Or the writer of a zombie story.
My friends, that’s the story of my addiction and my shame. And when those “how to self-publish” books say “don’t write a zombie book”, perhaps you’ll think of me and the many others like me. We bought into a dream, but the dream turned out to be infected. And to have an insatiable appetite for bwains.
I’m doing my best to pick myself up. I haven’t written a zombie story for months now. I have a new book coming out soon with not the slightest hint of moaning or shuffling. Apart from the naughty bits.
At long last I’ve found the strength to say the truth. My name is Will Once, and I have written a zombie book.
Thank you for listening.
And while I’ve got your attention, if you’d like to buy a quite splendid story about witches and vampires and a Welsh dragon singing Tom Jones songs, just click on the little stick fella above.
Love, Death and Tea. An end of the world romance …
… which may contain traces of zombie.
I don’t suppose there’s an easy way to do this. So I’ll just come right out and say it. I am Will Once and I wrote a zombie novel.
You don’t know how hard it is to admit that. Maybe you do. Maybe you’ve been through it yourself. I know I’m not the only one. Hell, do I know that I’m not the only one!
I suppose the story really starts years ago. At first I thought I could handle it. It was a social thing, a bit of harmless fun. No big deal. The occasional George Romero movie with friends. Dancing along to Michael Jackson’s Thriller at a party, back in the days when he was still black. And when I could still dance. Sort of.
Doesn’t everyone do that sort of thing? It’s normal, right? A little bit of zombying helps the mood. It’s certainly better than the alternatives.
I can tell you the day when everything changed. The exact day and time. How many times in your life can you do that?
It was the night before my first wedding to the woman who was later to become my ex-wife. To give you a flavour of the occasion, one of my friends apologised that he couldn’t get the wedding, but he promised to come to my next one. And he did.
I was staying at a hotel, sharing a twin-bedded room with my best friend and Best Man. We had a few drinks in the bar – to settle the nerves, you understand. Then we decided to be sensible and retire before “a few” became “a session”. As I flicked through the television channels in the hotel room, I came across the classic 1978 “Dawn of the Dead”.
Without realising the irony … or the fact that the movie is more than two hours long … we settled down to watch. Yes, the night before the marriage of the living dead, I watched a film about the dawn of the living dead.
The following morning, the family and friends who were squeezed uncomfortably into their best fwocks and hired mourning suits saw my bleary eyes. No doubt they thought that I had been crying or couldn’t sleep or the best man and I had partied the night away. What they didn’t realise is that we had stayed up until the wrong side of 2 am watching a zombie film.
Don’t they say that first sign of addiction is when you need to hide it from those you love?
Years passed like kidney stones. D.I.V.O.R.C.E. became a little more than a Dolly Parton song. Then the pits of humanity – being a balding single bloke in his thirties in Luton. I satisfied my zombie addiction with the only thing worth doing in Luton … takeway food and video rentals. This was the age of VCR and the video nasty. A very low point indeed.
The new Millennium changed all that. Marriage the second time around proved to be everything that the first one was not. I suppose everything improves with practice. I had everything a man could want – a loving wife, a brilliant son, a home, a career. Okay, so my hairstyle was more Jean-Luc Picard, but that didn’t matter when you’re coated in monogamy.
The addiction was hiding. Biding its time. I don’t know how anything bides anything else. Or if you can bide anything other than time. But that was what it was doing … time-biding.
Then came the Wocking Dead. I know, I know … it’s The Walking Dead. But these British ears hear “wocking” and everyone has a “jarb” to do.
Suddenly, everyone was doing it. Zombying, I mean. Shaun of the Dead. A remake of my beloved Dawn. And in case my wife is reading that, that is a film not a checkout girl at Waitrose.
Then came 28 Days Later, which was swiftly followed by the sequel 28 Weeks Later. I must admit that one had me a bit confused. Did the second 28 weeks include the original 28 days? Or did they reset the clock after the first twenty eight days? Which would mean that the sequel should have been 28 weeks plus the original 28 days, which I make to be 32 weeks later.
Heck, even one half of Brangelina was going to make a zombie movie. That’s what happens when your secret (and slightly naughty) obsession becomes mainstream.
It was at this point that I made a terrible mistake. I fell off the wagon. I decided to write a zombie book. It was going to be fantastic. I would hit the wave just as it was cresting. Fame, fortune, Ferraris and other things beginning with F. It would be my very own Harry Potter and the Stench of Putrescence, my Fifty Shades of Decomposition.
“But won’t this trend blow over in a little while?” asked my long-suffering wife when I told her the news.
I gave her a patronising smile. “Never fear, my queen. This is the new black. Zombies are the new werewolves, the new vampires. This trend is here to stay.”
“But everyone will be writing zombie books,” she said, again misunderstanding the publishing scene and men’s fascination for shotguns.
“Ah, but mine will be different, light of my life, ironer of my undercrackers. Mine will be a comedy, told from the zombie’s perspective. No-one else will think of that.”
“I don’t like gory books.”
“My soft, my lily, this one will not be gory. It will be gentle and sweet. There will be a cat in it.”
“Will the cat get eaten?”
“No, of course not. Well, probably not. Only if the plot demands it.”
As the immortal Johnny Cash once said, “I could see in her eyes that she had her doubts.” But she softly nodded and the decision was made.
Through long nights I toiled. The base stock was made of zombies, seasoned with witches, a vampire, the aforementioned cat, a VW camper van, William Wallace, a power-crazed Prime Minister and a dragon singing Tom Jones classics. Not exactly Dawn of the Dead, but then we had run out of parts of the day to stick “the dead” or “the living dead” to. Once you’ve had dawn and day, and night, there’s not a lot left. Somehow I couldn’t see “lunchtime of the dead” working. Elevenses of the dead? Mid-afternoon of the damned?
Then the awful realisation. While I had been writing my zombie book, so had everyone else. If the internet is 90% porn and ice-cream is 60% air, then the self-publishing world is 70% zombies. Or so it seemed to me.
Promote your book on Goodreads, the experts say. But when you spend some time on Goodreads, you find that there are hundreds of authors promoting their books to each other. And just about every blurb has the word apocalypse or zombie or somesuch in the first few lines. And if I get fed up with other people pimping their zombie books to me, how in hell-on-earth, am I going to push my book on them?
We had all thought that zombie was the new romance, the new erotica. Instead, it just seems to be a graveyard for rotting ambitions. Sometimes a genre can come out of nowhere and be fresh and exciting, like Tolkien creating fantasy or HG Wells finding a way to make living in Woking more bearable.
But sometimes a new genre pops up and almost instantly becomes stale. And, sad to say, zombie fiction has a distinctly unsavoury pong about it. A whiff of gangrene and rotting flesh. And not in a good way.
It was at this point that I realised I was living inside the zombie cliché. To be precise, I was living inside one of two clichés. Trust me, this one will make sense in a minute.
Cliché number 1 – you are trapped inside a building, like a shopping mall. Outside are a thousand starving zombies, all desperate to get inside to snack on your pink bits. Only they aren’t zombies, are they? They are zombie books. The world of the living, the last few survivors, are vastly outnumbered by a moany-shuffle (technical term) of zombie books. You might have friends and family out there, or even a book that you wrote. But they are out there and you are in here, and not-good things happen if the outside mixes with the inside.
Cliché number 2 – you look down at your arm and realise that you are bleeding. In the last fight, one of the undead must have sunk its teeth into you.
You know what happens next. You will try to hide it from your fellow survivors. You’ll hope that it’s just a flesh wound. Or that this particular brand of zombies are the non-infectious type. But deep down you know. You’ve just bought a one-way ticket to the underworld, and there’s no getting off.
That’s when you hand your shotgun to your best buddy and ask him to put a bullet between your eyes. Because you don’t want to turn into a zombie yourself. Or the writer of a zombie story.
My friends, that’s the story of my addiction and my shame. And when those “how to self-publish” books say “don’t write a zombie book”, perhaps you’ll think of me and the many others like me. We bought into a dream, but the dream turned out to be infected. And to have an insatiable appetite for bwains.
I’m doing my best to pick myself up. I haven’t written a zombie story for months now. I have a new book coming out soon with not the slightest hint of moaning or shuffling. Apart from the naughty bits.
At long last I’ve found the strength to say the truth. My name is Will Once, and I have written a zombie book.
Thank you for listening.
And while I’ve got your attention, if you’d like to buy a quite splendid story about witches and vampires and a Welsh dragon singing Tom Jones songs, just click on the little stick fella above.
Love, Death and Tea. An end of the world romance …
… which may contain traces of zombie.
August 9, 2014
Authors are from Mars, Readers are from Venus
A number of recent discussion threads on Goodreads and Absolute Write have got me thinking about the relationship between authors and readers. There’s too much to say in the forums, so I thought it would make a good blog post.
A common theme amongst authors is: “I have written a damn good book - why doesn’t anyone want to read it?”
This is often closely followed by: “Many of the books that do sell by the gazillion are rubbish. My book is better than those. It’s so unfair.”
The flipside of this is that many Goodreads forums are full of authors pimping their books. Some readers are getting fed up with the avalanche of author fly-by posts. “Read my book! Free for a limited time! Book one of a series!”
And if you are tempted to look at these books, in nine times out of ten you are put off within the first few sentences. Many are badly written. Glaring spelling and grammar mistakes. Poor technique. Dull characters. Derivative plots. There are some gems, but to find them you have to wade through one hell of a lot of dross.
We have had a thread recently about readers giving feedback to authors. Some authors don’t seem to want feedback, and when they do get it they argue with the reader, saying that it is the reader’s fault that they did not like the book.
But then it is hard to know what makes a book good or not. Some books get almost universal praise on Goodreads, with mostly 4 and 5 star ratings. Others seem to divide opinion - books like the Da Vinci Code and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo which seem to receive both 1 and 5 star reviews.
So what exactly is going on? How can we find a way through this mess, whether as authors or readers? An apology in advance. What follows may annoy some people.
The bottom line for me is that this is a commercial market, and this means that the reader is King. Or more often these days, Queen. Readers will read those books that give them the experience they want. If they want to read mostly fantasy, romance and erotica, then that is what they want to read. There is no point in an author complaining that there is no market for books about the mating habits of turtles, or whatever it is that they have just written. We have to follow the market.
Some rare authors and/ or books can create markets, but not very many. Tolkien, EL James, JK Rowling come to mind. Most authors will be following trends not creating them. Let’s put these outliers to one side, where they belong.
Publishing is currently in the middle of a gold rush. People have heard of the JK Rowling and Hugh Howey success stories. They want something like that for themselves. And the introduction of e books and the internet has meant that it has never been easier to publish your own book. Hence the gold rush.
Like the various gold rushes that history has seen, only a small proportion will get rich. Most will be utterly disappointed and fall by the wayside. The vast majority of self-published books will not sell in anything like the numbers that their authors want.
Why? There are two reasons – quantity and quality.
The quantity argument first. With so many books out there, not all can succeed. There simply aren’t enough readers. What we will inevitably see is what the statisticians call a “normal” distribution which means that, at one end of the scale, a very small number of authors will sell a very large number of books.
At the other end of the curve, a very large number of authors will sell a very small number of books.
And somewhere in the middle will be the mid-listers experience varying degrees of success.
The $64,000 question, of course, is how do you move from one category to another. How do you get from struggling newbie to surviving midlister? How do you go from midlister to superstar?
Most successful authors tell a similar story. They started the business by being rejected oodles of times. They didn’t let that stop them. They carried on trying, learning from their mistakes, writing, reading, submitting, failing, submitting again. Some lucky few make it on their first attempt, but most writers have to suffer a few knocks before success.
Now we need to talk about quality. Most writers and publishers know that there is a minimum standard for writing. There are some basic rules about what makes an acceptable book. Not a great book, just acceptable. Things like these:
• No spelling or grammar mistakes (unless justified by the plot).
• Convincing characters
• A strong plot
• A sense of danger
• Well written enough so that the reader can understand it.
• An absence of purple prose (prune those adjectives)
• A well written blurb that hooks the reader
• A good cover.
Many self-published books fail at this point. And this is where something interesting is happening. In the days before self-publishing really took off, the publishing industry had gatekeepers. Editors, publishers and agents would reject books that they didn’t think would sell. Many authors found this to be a frustrating process, but it did impose a certain minimum quality threshold. The successful authors were generally those who learned what the gatekeepers wanted. They improved the quality of their work until the agents and publishers started to say yes.
Those gatekeepers are being bypassed at the moment. Self-publishing allows an author to go straight to market without any checks or balance. What this means is that the gate-keeping role has shifted. Instead of the publishing industry reading through the slush pile, it is now the readers who are doing this job. We are all editors now.
And that means that readers are getting good at the sort of things an editor or agent would do – reading a blurb or the first few words of a book and deciding whether it is any good or not. Many experienced editors can tell within the first few words of a book whether it is something that has a commercial prospect. Not the first few chapters or the first few pages – the first few words. And we as readers are developing those skills too.
So when an author complains that nobody is reading their books, there are two main explanations – either they are not marketing their book well enough or they are not giving readers what they want. That is why it is really important for authors to ask for feedback and act on it.
On the face of it, that sounds really easy. Give the readers what they want, act on feedback and success and riches will surely be yours, yes?
Um, no. There’s a problem. You see a writer can easily become word-blind. They spend ages crafting a sentence until they are happy with it. What they can’t always do is to see it how a reader would see it. They are absolutely convinced that what they have written is great while their readers are more in the territory of “meh” or 1 star reviews or simply not bothering to read it.
That’s why I think that writers are from a different planet to readers – even though most writers are also voracious readers. A writer will focus on the minutiae of the craft – this word or that word? Should I add an adjective here or leave it out? A comma or a semi colon.
At this level of detail, most readers don’t care. They want excitement and plot. They are reading far faster than any writer can write. That sentence that you spent an hour crafting? Your reader zipped over it in a second.
Writers often obsess about words and sentences. Readers are far more interested in paragraphs and chapters.
Some authors think that books will sell if they are written well, if every page is a literary masterpiece. The reality is that most readers tend to be more interested in character, situation and plot. A book can be successful if it tells a great story, even if the standard of the writing is not of the highest quality. The writing needs to get over the minimum quality thresholds, but it doesn’t have to be perfect.
There is an answer. When we bypassed the gatekeepers, we lost access to a vast amount of understanding and experience. Editors and agents are not just those nasty so-and-so’s who rejected our wonderful manuscripts. They are also very good at knowing what the public wants. They insist on minimum quality standards. They promote books that will excite readers, whether this is by peerless prose or just a lot of bonking in books like Fifty Shades (which most certainly does not have peerless prose).
A publisher would also deal with the marketing of a book, the editing and proof-reading, the cover, the blurb. In many cases, each of these tasks would be handed to an expert who would be pretty good at their job.
For self-publishers to be successful they need to add back in that level of expertise and quality. This may mean developing those skills for themselves. It may mean buying in an expert to do the things that you can’t, such as developing a cover or running a marketing strategy.
The future, I think, is that the gap between self-published and traditionally published will narrow. More and more self-publishers will run their writing as a business. They will hire professional cover designers, proof-readers, marketing experts. Their books will become indistinguishable from trade published. In effect they will become mini publishers themselves.
But the root to all of this is the relationship between the reader and the author. Authors need to give readers what they want and the reader is (nearly) always right.
A common theme amongst authors is: “I have written a damn good book - why doesn’t anyone want to read it?”
This is often closely followed by: “Many of the books that do sell by the gazillion are rubbish. My book is better than those. It’s so unfair.”
The flipside of this is that many Goodreads forums are full of authors pimping their books. Some readers are getting fed up with the avalanche of author fly-by posts. “Read my book! Free for a limited time! Book one of a series!”
And if you are tempted to look at these books, in nine times out of ten you are put off within the first few sentences. Many are badly written. Glaring spelling and grammar mistakes. Poor technique. Dull characters. Derivative plots. There are some gems, but to find them you have to wade through one hell of a lot of dross.
We have had a thread recently about readers giving feedback to authors. Some authors don’t seem to want feedback, and when they do get it they argue with the reader, saying that it is the reader’s fault that they did not like the book.
But then it is hard to know what makes a book good or not. Some books get almost universal praise on Goodreads, with mostly 4 and 5 star ratings. Others seem to divide opinion - books like the Da Vinci Code and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo which seem to receive both 1 and 5 star reviews.
So what exactly is going on? How can we find a way through this mess, whether as authors or readers? An apology in advance. What follows may annoy some people.
The bottom line for me is that this is a commercial market, and this means that the reader is King. Or more often these days, Queen. Readers will read those books that give them the experience they want. If they want to read mostly fantasy, romance and erotica, then that is what they want to read. There is no point in an author complaining that there is no market for books about the mating habits of turtles, or whatever it is that they have just written. We have to follow the market.
Some rare authors and/ or books can create markets, but not very many. Tolkien, EL James, JK Rowling come to mind. Most authors will be following trends not creating them. Let’s put these outliers to one side, where they belong.
Publishing is currently in the middle of a gold rush. People have heard of the JK Rowling and Hugh Howey success stories. They want something like that for themselves. And the introduction of e books and the internet has meant that it has never been easier to publish your own book. Hence the gold rush.
Like the various gold rushes that history has seen, only a small proportion will get rich. Most will be utterly disappointed and fall by the wayside. The vast majority of self-published books will not sell in anything like the numbers that their authors want.
Why? There are two reasons – quantity and quality.
The quantity argument first. With so many books out there, not all can succeed. There simply aren’t enough readers. What we will inevitably see is what the statisticians call a “normal” distribution which means that, at one end of the scale, a very small number of authors will sell a very large number of books.
At the other end of the curve, a very large number of authors will sell a very small number of books.
And somewhere in the middle will be the mid-listers experience varying degrees of success.
The $64,000 question, of course, is how do you move from one category to another. How do you get from struggling newbie to surviving midlister? How do you go from midlister to superstar?
Most successful authors tell a similar story. They started the business by being rejected oodles of times. They didn’t let that stop them. They carried on trying, learning from their mistakes, writing, reading, submitting, failing, submitting again. Some lucky few make it on their first attempt, but most writers have to suffer a few knocks before success.
Now we need to talk about quality. Most writers and publishers know that there is a minimum standard for writing. There are some basic rules about what makes an acceptable book. Not a great book, just acceptable. Things like these:
• No spelling or grammar mistakes (unless justified by the plot).
• Convincing characters
• A strong plot
• A sense of danger
• Well written enough so that the reader can understand it.
• An absence of purple prose (prune those adjectives)
• A well written blurb that hooks the reader
• A good cover.
Many self-published books fail at this point. And this is where something interesting is happening. In the days before self-publishing really took off, the publishing industry had gatekeepers. Editors, publishers and agents would reject books that they didn’t think would sell. Many authors found this to be a frustrating process, but it did impose a certain minimum quality threshold. The successful authors were generally those who learned what the gatekeepers wanted. They improved the quality of their work until the agents and publishers started to say yes.
Those gatekeepers are being bypassed at the moment. Self-publishing allows an author to go straight to market without any checks or balance. What this means is that the gate-keeping role has shifted. Instead of the publishing industry reading through the slush pile, it is now the readers who are doing this job. We are all editors now.
And that means that readers are getting good at the sort of things an editor or agent would do – reading a blurb or the first few words of a book and deciding whether it is any good or not. Many experienced editors can tell within the first few words of a book whether it is something that has a commercial prospect. Not the first few chapters or the first few pages – the first few words. And we as readers are developing those skills too.
So when an author complains that nobody is reading their books, there are two main explanations – either they are not marketing their book well enough or they are not giving readers what they want. That is why it is really important for authors to ask for feedback and act on it.
On the face of it, that sounds really easy. Give the readers what they want, act on feedback and success and riches will surely be yours, yes?
Um, no. There’s a problem. You see a writer can easily become word-blind. They spend ages crafting a sentence until they are happy with it. What they can’t always do is to see it how a reader would see it. They are absolutely convinced that what they have written is great while their readers are more in the territory of “meh” or 1 star reviews or simply not bothering to read it.
That’s why I think that writers are from a different planet to readers – even though most writers are also voracious readers. A writer will focus on the minutiae of the craft – this word or that word? Should I add an adjective here or leave it out? A comma or a semi colon.
At this level of detail, most readers don’t care. They want excitement and plot. They are reading far faster than any writer can write. That sentence that you spent an hour crafting? Your reader zipped over it in a second.
Writers often obsess about words and sentences. Readers are far more interested in paragraphs and chapters.
Some authors think that books will sell if they are written well, if every page is a literary masterpiece. The reality is that most readers tend to be more interested in character, situation and plot. A book can be successful if it tells a great story, even if the standard of the writing is not of the highest quality. The writing needs to get over the minimum quality thresholds, but it doesn’t have to be perfect.
There is an answer. When we bypassed the gatekeepers, we lost access to a vast amount of understanding and experience. Editors and agents are not just those nasty so-and-so’s who rejected our wonderful manuscripts. They are also very good at knowing what the public wants. They insist on minimum quality standards. They promote books that will excite readers, whether this is by peerless prose or just a lot of bonking in books like Fifty Shades (which most certainly does not have peerless prose).
A publisher would also deal with the marketing of a book, the editing and proof-reading, the cover, the blurb. In many cases, each of these tasks would be handed to an expert who would be pretty good at their job.
For self-publishers to be successful they need to add back in that level of expertise and quality. This may mean developing those skills for themselves. It may mean buying in an expert to do the things that you can’t, such as developing a cover or running a marketing strategy.
The future, I think, is that the gap between self-published and traditionally published will narrow. More and more self-publishers will run their writing as a business. They will hire professional cover designers, proof-readers, marketing experts. Their books will become indistinguishable from trade published. In effect they will become mini publishers themselves.
But the root to all of this is the relationship between the reader and the author. Authors need to give readers what they want and the reader is (nearly) always right.
July 25, 2014
Why do some people like books that others hate?
This one is for Bec. In a discussion about "The girl with a dragon tattoo", she said:
"Only just able to return to this interesting thread, I feel no different, I have to agree with Terrance, as I too, found it long and dreary.
I don't need to like or dislike an author, nor do I need to have ... or not have a will in order to enjoy a story.
I wish I did know what that intrinsic factor is, that factor that makes one book so very enjoyable for me and yet another, so very tedious."
I have been doing a lot of thinking about this. And while I don't think I have the answer (I'd be a zillionaire if I did!) I've got some theories. Here goes...
Writing quality
It's not necessarily about the quality of the writing. I used to think it was all about the wordsmithing, that the most experienced, most accomplished writers would sell more books. But that's clearly not the case. Many high-selling books aren't actually all that well crafted. And many well-written books don't sell in huge numbers.
The funny thing is that many readers don't notice the minutiae of how a book is written as long as it presses other buttons for them. Authors tend to be more picky about writing style when reading other people's books, but readers generally don't mind as long as the writing isn't awful. Readers are more interested in content than style - characters, plot, action. They are more interested in ...
Willing suspension of disbelief
When a book connects with us, we forget that it is a story. The characters become real. We stop thinking about the author. We accept whatever science or fantasy rules that the book needs. This is the holy grail of writing.
Authors create willing suspension of disbelief by injecting realism and empathy. They lose the suspension of disbelief when the author becomes too visible. If an author preaches to me I tend to see him or her and not the fictional world.
Empathy
We want to read about characters that we care about. When this is done really well, we will put ourselves into the characters' shoes. We imagine what it must feel like to be going through what they are experiencing - worrying when they are in danger, exulting when they succeed at something. We feel that "it could be me".
Affirmation
Sometimes a book works because it confirms something that we already believe. If we believe that "all men are evil" then we are more likely to enjoy a book that affirms the belief that all men are evil. This is very hit and miss. An author might connect with one group of people but alienate another.
Curiosity and challenge
Sometimes we like a book because it challenges us to find out what happens next. Humans are basically curious creatures - that's how and why our civilization has expanded. We want to know why things happen and what happens next. Some books will hook us into the action by posing a question and challenging us to find the answer, sometimes before the author reveals it.
Pleasure
Rollercoasters. It's all about rollercoasters. Some books (probably all good books) give us a series of emotions as if we were living through the story ourselves. It might be fear, lust, anger, excitement, hatred, liking, caring.
Escapism
We rarely live as exciting a life as those portrayed in books. Reading a good novel can allow us a guilt-free escape to another world.
There are undoubtedly more, but these for me are the main buttons that a successful book has to press. A book doesn't have to press all of these buttons - just one or two seems to do the trick.
That, for me, is why some people like a book and some people don't. It's more about the content of the book and our personalities than any intrinsic skill or how "well" it is written.
As for the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - it was okay but I wasn't blown away by it. I couldn't suspend disbelief when the author preached at me. Blomqvist was such a boring character and so obviously modelled on the author that I started to lose empathy. Lisbeth came across as two dimensional - simultaneously too good a hacker and too pathetic a victim. And I know full well that the author has a thing about men treating women badly, but that doesn't mean that he has to make me watch a rape or that another rape is a satisfactory form of revenge.
Other people's views will differ. That doesn't make it a good book or a bad book. It just means that it connects with some people and not with others. Personally, I didn't care for these characters. This was a roller coaster ride that I didn't want to buy a ticket for.
But if you liked it I am definitely not saying that you are wrong.
And for Bec, if you found it long and dreary that's possibly because you weren't curious about what was going to happen next and/or you didn't care for the characters. Which is just about what I felt too.
"Only just able to return to this interesting thread, I feel no different, I have to agree with Terrance, as I too, found it long and dreary.
I don't need to like or dislike an author, nor do I need to have ... or not have a will in order to enjoy a story.
I wish I did know what that intrinsic factor is, that factor that makes one book so very enjoyable for me and yet another, so very tedious."
I have been doing a lot of thinking about this. And while I don't think I have the answer (I'd be a zillionaire if I did!) I've got some theories. Here goes...
Writing quality
It's not necessarily about the quality of the writing. I used to think it was all about the wordsmithing, that the most experienced, most accomplished writers would sell more books. But that's clearly not the case. Many high-selling books aren't actually all that well crafted. And many well-written books don't sell in huge numbers.
The funny thing is that many readers don't notice the minutiae of how a book is written as long as it presses other buttons for them. Authors tend to be more picky about writing style when reading other people's books, but readers generally don't mind as long as the writing isn't awful. Readers are more interested in content than style - characters, plot, action. They are more interested in ...
Willing suspension of disbelief
When a book connects with us, we forget that it is a story. The characters become real. We stop thinking about the author. We accept whatever science or fantasy rules that the book needs. This is the holy grail of writing.
Authors create willing suspension of disbelief by injecting realism and empathy. They lose the suspension of disbelief when the author becomes too visible. If an author preaches to me I tend to see him or her and not the fictional world.
Empathy
We want to read about characters that we care about. When this is done really well, we will put ourselves into the characters' shoes. We imagine what it must feel like to be going through what they are experiencing - worrying when they are in danger, exulting when they succeed at something. We feel that "it could be me".
Affirmation
Sometimes a book works because it confirms something that we already believe. If we believe that "all men are evil" then we are more likely to enjoy a book that affirms the belief that all men are evil. This is very hit and miss. An author might connect with one group of people but alienate another.
Curiosity and challenge
Sometimes we like a book because it challenges us to find out what happens next. Humans are basically curious creatures - that's how and why our civilization has expanded. We want to know why things happen and what happens next. Some books will hook us into the action by posing a question and challenging us to find the answer, sometimes before the author reveals it.
Pleasure
Rollercoasters. It's all about rollercoasters. Some books (probably all good books) give us a series of emotions as if we were living through the story ourselves. It might be fear, lust, anger, excitement, hatred, liking, caring.
Escapism
We rarely live as exciting a life as those portrayed in books. Reading a good novel can allow us a guilt-free escape to another world.
There are undoubtedly more, but these for me are the main buttons that a successful book has to press. A book doesn't have to press all of these buttons - just one or two seems to do the trick.
That, for me, is why some people like a book and some people don't. It's more about the content of the book and our personalities than any intrinsic skill or how "well" it is written.
As for the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - it was okay but I wasn't blown away by it. I couldn't suspend disbelief when the author preached at me. Blomqvist was such a boring character and so obviously modelled on the author that I started to lose empathy. Lisbeth came across as two dimensional - simultaneously too good a hacker and too pathetic a victim. And I know full well that the author has a thing about men treating women badly, but that doesn't mean that he has to make me watch a rape or that another rape is a satisfactory form of revenge.
Other people's views will differ. That doesn't make it a good book or a bad book. It just means that it connects with some people and not with others. Personally, I didn't care for these characters. This was a roller coaster ride that I didn't want to buy a ticket for.
But if you liked it I am definitely not saying that you are wrong.
And for Bec, if you found it long and dreary that's possibly because you weren't curious about what was going to happen next and/or you didn't care for the characters. Which is just about what I felt too.
June 26, 2014
Better by beta?
It feels a little like being a juggler at the moment. There is just so much going on that it's hard to keep track of it all. Far too many balls in the air!
First, there is our slightly chaotic home life. The best boy in the world is finishing his current school and getting ready to start as a Charterhouse scholar. It ought to be a difficult time as he has been at his current school for nine of his thirteen years. But as usual he is taking everything in his stride. He has this amazing capacity to live in the moment and not worry about the past or the future. I envy him for that, and quite a few other things besides.
Added to that is that the Mem is currently staying with her Mum nearly 130 miles away. Now that normally is a euphemism for D.I.V.O.R.C.E., but it actually means that her Mum is very ill.
So as a family we are living different lives at the moment. I'm having to do the brave househusband thing and learn how to use the washing machine, the Mem is a full time carer and the BBITW is having a whale of a time boarding with his friends.
My next book "Global Domination for beginners" is currently at the beta/ editing phase. In fact it's been at this stage for the past six months. That's a bit frustrating for me as I would like to see it published. But we pride ourselves on high quality editing, so it does need to be done right.
Meanwhile I am working on my first non-comedy. It's a mixture of science fiction and fantasy but without any of the clichés of Tolkienesque fantasy. No dwarves or elves or rolling rrr's to Morrrdorrr.
Then there's work - a mixture of consulting and writing. That's going reasonably well. There's enough paid work to fill about half my time, leaving the rest of my time for writing and looking for other clients. We're going to need some financial help to pay for Charterhouse - one of the most expensive schools in the country.
As part of the work I'm looking to get some non-fiction writing published. Mostly technical trade press to start with, but it's a start.
Phew! With so much happening, it's hard to know what to do next. I just keep plodding on, one job after the next, turning the handle.
And I'm still confused by shoelaces.
First, there is our slightly chaotic home life. The best boy in the world is finishing his current school and getting ready to start as a Charterhouse scholar. It ought to be a difficult time as he has been at his current school for nine of his thirteen years. But as usual he is taking everything in his stride. He has this amazing capacity to live in the moment and not worry about the past or the future. I envy him for that, and quite a few other things besides.
Added to that is that the Mem is currently staying with her Mum nearly 130 miles away. Now that normally is a euphemism for D.I.V.O.R.C.E., but it actually means that her Mum is very ill.
So as a family we are living different lives at the moment. I'm having to do the brave househusband thing and learn how to use the washing machine, the Mem is a full time carer and the BBITW is having a whale of a time boarding with his friends.
My next book "Global Domination for beginners" is currently at the beta/ editing phase. In fact it's been at this stage for the past six months. That's a bit frustrating for me as I would like to see it published. But we pride ourselves on high quality editing, so it does need to be done right.
Meanwhile I am working on my first non-comedy. It's a mixture of science fiction and fantasy but without any of the clichés of Tolkienesque fantasy. No dwarves or elves or rolling rrr's to Morrrdorrr.
Then there's work - a mixture of consulting and writing. That's going reasonably well. There's enough paid work to fill about half my time, leaving the rest of my time for writing and looking for other clients. We're going to need some financial help to pay for Charterhouse - one of the most expensive schools in the country.
As part of the work I'm looking to get some non-fiction writing published. Mostly technical trade press to start with, but it's a start.
Phew! With so much happening, it's hard to know what to do next. I just keep plodding on, one job after the next, turning the handle.
And I'm still confused by shoelaces.
