Tony Walker's Blog, page 9
February 20, 2014
It's a numbers game - or is it...?
A long time ago when I used to organise events for a sort of living, we put on a Rum Festival at Whitehaven. We got free rum from lots of rummeries (is this a word?) from all over the world and offered it to the public. We did other things such as organise a (fake) public hanging in 18th Century dress which made the front page as the local churches wanted to get us to stop it! Great publicity. And we had pirates on stilts and pirate dance bands and we released a cloud of parrots into the air (that isn't actually true, though the rest is). There were wigs and dandies galore too.
But the big attraction was the free rum. We had a tent where people doled out free tots of rum to a never ending queue. It was very popular with everyone but the police who had to deal with the effects of it. It was a really hot day and people were walking round in shorts and t-shirts. There were thousands of people on the streets and of course businesses did well.
I was talking to the owner of a local menswear shop and he said that he actually sold more full three piece suits that day than any other he could remember. It was no weather to be wearing a suit, so the message I took away was that it's a numbers game. The more people who see what you're selling, the more people will buy it. It's just stochastic like.
I guess your product should avoid being shit too.
But, today 20th Feb I've sold 102 books...
Feels ok even if it's not quite sufficient to retire to Whitehaven.
But the big attraction was the free rum. We had a tent where people doled out free tots of rum to a never ending queue. It was very popular with everyone but the police who had to deal with the effects of it. It was a really hot day and people were walking round in shorts and t-shirts. There were thousands of people on the streets and of course businesses did well.
I was talking to the owner of a local menswear shop and he said that he actually sold more full three piece suits that day than any other he could remember. It was no weather to be wearing a suit, so the message I took away was that it's a numbers game. The more people who see what you're selling, the more people will buy it. It's just stochastic like.
I guess your product should avoid being shit too.
But, today 20th Feb I've sold 102 books...
Feels ok even if it's not quite sufficient to retire to Whitehaven.
February 19, 2014
Mash Ups
When is a Public Domain Book not a Public Domain Book?
There is a book called The Adventure by Miss Moberly which details a timeslip at Versailles at the beginning of the 20th Century. I became aware of this book years ago when I was teaching nightclasses on ghosts and the paranormal. It is a classic and available at Archive.org.
There are also a couple of version on Kindle. One at least has a decent cover. The problem with The Adventure is that Moberly uses footnotes extensively and also uses a lot of French in sometimes long passages which she doesn't bother translate. The OCR has totally butchered the text with the footnotes being incorporated into the main text rendering it nearly unreadable. Also the French, though it has copied pretty well has been stripped of its accents and diacritic marks, so that it really isn't French at all.
I had thought I would clean up the text, restore the footnotes and re-do the French. I thought I'd also translate the French for the benefit of those who don't speak it.
The footnotes are of two types - extra commentaries and references to other books. I thought I would remove them altogether by using modern Harvard style referencing rather than footnotes and just incorporating the extra commentary in-text.
Further than that I wanted to add an introduction and link it to subsequent reports of timeslips such as Dunnichen Hill and Broad Street, Liverpool as well as some told to me directly by my students over the years. I have a nice one from Pembroke Castle for example.
When I've done all this - is this still public domain, or is the work my copyright?
Here's a link to US copyright law summarised by Project Gutenburg.
And there's a nice summary of the UK position by Tony Laidig (no relation) here, which is more complex than the US position.
Given that roughly the law is that 70 years after an author's death the works pass to the public domain, here's a list of the date of death of authors...
List of Authors by Year of Death at KingKong.
Like who would? But I'm glad they did.
There is a book called The Adventure by Miss Moberly which details a timeslip at Versailles at the beginning of the 20th Century. I became aware of this book years ago when I was teaching nightclasses on ghosts and the paranormal. It is a classic and available at Archive.org.
There are also a couple of version on Kindle. One at least has a decent cover. The problem with The Adventure is that Moberly uses footnotes extensively and also uses a lot of French in sometimes long passages which she doesn't bother translate. The OCR has totally butchered the text with the footnotes being incorporated into the main text rendering it nearly unreadable. Also the French, though it has copied pretty well has been stripped of its accents and diacritic marks, so that it really isn't French at all.
I had thought I would clean up the text, restore the footnotes and re-do the French. I thought I'd also translate the French for the benefit of those who don't speak it.
The footnotes are of two types - extra commentaries and references to other books. I thought I would remove them altogether by using modern Harvard style referencing rather than footnotes and just incorporating the extra commentary in-text.
Further than that I wanted to add an introduction and link it to subsequent reports of timeslips such as Dunnichen Hill and Broad Street, Liverpool as well as some told to me directly by my students over the years. I have a nice one from Pembroke Castle for example.
When I've done all this - is this still public domain, or is the work my copyright?
Here's a link to US copyright law summarised by Project Gutenburg.
And there's a nice summary of the UK position by Tony Laidig (no relation) here, which is more complex than the US position.
Given that roughly the law is that 70 years after an author's death the works pass to the public domain, here's a list of the date of death of authors...
List of Authors by Year of Death at KingKong.
Like who would? But I'm glad they did.
February 17, 2014
A Difficult Start
So, I've sold 78 books so far this month and we have about half of it left. That's good. As for free downloads they are in the 100s. I read +Joe Konrath 's blog and it is inspirational.
But chicken and egg. If people haven't heard from you it's difficult to connect with them - or make them want to connect with you. And without that base of people who are interested, how do you get the word out in the first place?
Seems the answer is slow. I was reading in +Brenna Aubrey 's blog that she gave out lots of Advance Reader Copies before publication and this worked so well that she sold 9,129 books in December. That's the sort of figure to knock your block off.
How's that done? Probably by writing something pretty good that people want to read and then knowing how to market it. I have nothing wise to say about this, except that it feels a long way off.
But chicken and egg. If people haven't heard from you it's difficult to connect with them - or make them want to connect with you. And without that base of people who are interested, how do you get the word out in the first place?
Seems the answer is slow. I was reading in +Brenna Aubrey 's blog that she gave out lots of Advance Reader Copies before publication and this worked so well that she sold 9,129 books in December. That's the sort of figure to knock your block off.
How's that done? Probably by writing something pretty good that people want to read and then knowing how to market it. I have nothing wise to say about this, except that it feels a long way off.
February 16, 2014
Smashwords Update
So I mastered the template. All good. Haven't got the hang of the cover yet as no matter how big an image I use, it doesn't like it. I am going to have to get a a professional cover designer involved. But, the books don't sell in the numbers that justifies a cover costing $300. A conundrum As we sit here now, I have "sold" about 230 copies of a novel on Smashwords. That's in about 48 hours. Fantastic! I let the reader set the price, so they pay me what they think is fair. Weirdly 230 of them have all decided on the same price! Yep, you guessed it - they all thought my work was worth $0. All of them set the price as zero! You would have thought there would be one kind soul who thought it was worth a dime, but not so far.
February 13, 2014
Reader Set Price
Ok, this is a cool feature of the Smashwords Store - the Reader Sets Price.
It's pretty much the same as a free promotion - the books fly out and most people set the price as 'free'. Who knew? But some kind souls, or people who value what you wrote, don't set it as free!
This is my excitement for the day. Now back to writing.
It's pretty much the same as a free promotion - the books fly out and most people set the price as 'free'. Who knew? But some kind souls, or people who value what you wrote, don't set it as free!
This is my excitement for the day. Now back to writing.
Visibility
When I was at school, which is some time ago now, there were only a few bands you could listen to. I would say that all the bands that anyone listened to - that were on the radio, that were in your record store, that your friends, and even your enemies listened to or went to see was less than 200.
That included every genre, every style. So, amongst those 200 some got to be very big. They had all the focus and all the visibility.
But what happens now is that there are thousands if not tens of thousands of bands. Some of them are pretty good. You'd really like some of them a lot, if you could only find them. The music industry is now fragmented and diffuse. There are some big names up there still of course which have huge marketing machines behind them, but increasingly good musicians are playing to smaller audiences.
It strikes me that the same thing is happening with authors. There are hundreds and thousands of authors publishing their books and ebooks now. Most of those are never ever going to be professionally reviewed. Unless they break out and sell millions like John Locke or Amanda Hocking that is.
So, even if you have a good book, you are going to struggle to be visible. And by the old statistical bell curve of normal distribution, some books are going to suck, a lot of books are going to be ok, and some books are going to be brilliant. But how to tell?
John Locke says that his books are ok. I read one recently and it was absolutely that in my humble opinion. I'm not saying I can write better - I certainly can't sell better.
But we like to think that our work would succeed on merit - that if it was a wonderful piece of writing then it would rise to the top of the pile.
There are two questions I have here:
1) Would it though? Even if wonderful, does the huge ocean of other books drown it out?
2) Is our writing really that good? It might be ok, but the critical acclaim (I'm not talking about 2-3 positive reviews) is still not there. Maybe because it just moderately blows. And even if it doesn't blow, maybe it just doesn't shine.
Only time will tell (this is my favourite saying at the moment).
That included every genre, every style. So, amongst those 200 some got to be very big. They had all the focus and all the visibility.
But what happens now is that there are thousands if not tens of thousands of bands. Some of them are pretty good. You'd really like some of them a lot, if you could only find them. The music industry is now fragmented and diffuse. There are some big names up there still of course which have huge marketing machines behind them, but increasingly good musicians are playing to smaller audiences.
It strikes me that the same thing is happening with authors. There are hundreds and thousands of authors publishing their books and ebooks now. Most of those are never ever going to be professionally reviewed. Unless they break out and sell millions like John Locke or Amanda Hocking that is.
So, even if you have a good book, you are going to struggle to be visible. And by the old statistical bell curve of normal distribution, some books are going to suck, a lot of books are going to be ok, and some books are going to be brilliant. But how to tell?
John Locke says that his books are ok. I read one recently and it was absolutely that in my humble opinion. I'm not saying I can write better - I certainly can't sell better.
But we like to think that our work would succeed on merit - that if it was a wonderful piece of writing then it would rise to the top of the pile.
There are two questions I have here:
1) Would it though? Even if wonderful, does the huge ocean of other books drown it out?
2) Is our writing really that good? It might be ok, but the critical acclaim (I'm not talking about 2-3 positive reviews) is still not there. Maybe because it just moderately blows. And even if it doesn't blow, maybe it just doesn't shine.
Only time will tell (this is my favourite saying at the moment).
February 12, 2014
Sales so far
38 books sold up to 12th February. I don't think that's bad for a beginner.
February 11, 2014
Smashwords
I've spent pretty much all night trying to format a manuscript for uploading to Smashwords. I would say "in the end" - but it wasn't the end at all - I downloaded the template manuscript and I spent a long time following it, to what I thought was the letter. However, I still have autovetter errors.
The trouble is, it tells you that you have them, but it doesn't tell you what they are. Or at least as far as I can figure out. So I now need to go through the whole manuscript and guess what Smashword's Autovetter thinks is wrong.
I see from trawling the internet on this subject that I am not alone.
Still, going through the Youtube tutorials, reading the style guide and ploughing through the template have made me a better person.
But, it will make me give up on trying to publish on Smashwords unless someone can convince me it's worth the crazy effort of trying to second guess what their autovetter thinks is wrong.
The trouble is, it tells you that you have them, but it doesn't tell you what they are. Or at least as far as I can figure out. So I now need to go through the whole manuscript and guess what Smashword's Autovetter thinks is wrong.
I see from trawling the internet on this subject that I am not alone.
Still, going through the Youtube tutorials, reading the style guide and ploughing through the template have made me a better person.
But, it will make me give up on trying to publish on Smashwords unless someone can convince me it's worth the crazy effort of trying to second guess what their autovetter thinks is wrong.
Reviews by Family
My girlfriend bought and read one of my books to be supportive, but she actually liked it. So she went on Amazon, again to be supportive and left a 4 star review and what I thought (though I am biased) was pretty accurate and her own opinion. But Amazon seemed to have pulled this review...
I feel hurt. I don't think they're being fair. However you don't want to upset the big Amazon bear by poking it, or it might just swipe you out of existence.
Anyone else have any views on this?
I feel hurt. I don't think they're being fair. However you don't want to upset the big Amazon bear by poking it, or it might just swipe you out of existence.
Anyone else have any views on this?
