Chris Page's Blog, page 12

Message to a gobshite gaijin

To the gobshite gaijin at the table next to ours last night when I was attempting to have a nice evening out with my wife: shut the fuck up!

Item: you talk incessentantly as if a moment’s silence would bring an immediate end to the universe, as if your shit were the actual dance of Shiva.

Item: you are full of shit.  I’ll give you a clue: no one gives a fuck for your tales of how much you like or don’t like Justin Beiber or which brand of coffee you drink or your preferred colour of socks. Starting a sentence with ‘I’ does not make it meaningful or worthwhile — only having a clue in your head can create value.

Item: being a gaijin does not make you a rock star. There are 125 million Japanese people on this planet and about 7.5 billion gaijin. Does that help put things in perspective for you?

Item: the couple you were with spoke better English than you do Japanese, so your attempts to translate yourself into their language was not only embarrassing it was patronising.

Item: it really is OK to talk at a normal volume. I don’t think the good people of Buenos Aires on the other side of the world, where I’m sure you were perfectly audible, wanted to hear your shit any more than the people in the restaurant. In fact — and brace yourself for this — I am confident that we would have preferred to listen to the people we were actually dining with.

Item: it is of course your right to speak your empty mind incessantly and at great volume, so can I suggest you do so at the bottom the canal so conveniently provided next to the restaurant where no one will mind and you might even be appreciated by the sludge and turtle poo?

Item: and to the Japanese couple you were with, there really is no need to be so polite. A wanker in any culture is a wanker.

Who’s got the writer’s money? Amazon’s got the writer’s money.

Amazon claims to offer push-button publishing and loadsa-dosh royalties for independent publishers and DIY authors. But as ever with Amazon, the reality may not match the hype.

Books.

Shall I bite the hand that distributes me — again?

Amazon offers fantastic royalties to independent publishers like me. Or so they like to tell everyone. These fat royalties, their story goes, is one of the attractions of doing it yourself. Publish at the touch of a button, cut out the traditional publishers and middle men, sell through the world’s biggest outlet and see the money flood in.

The reality — big surprise coming here; you might want to sit down, lie down, or dig yourself a nice comfy hole — is very different.

Yes, royalties are very good if you sell your books in the US or Canada. Great, in fact. Thirty-five per cent great, or thereabouts.

If you sell your books anywhere else, the returns are laughably crap. Less than 10 per cent crap. And when you’ve squeezed the price of your book down to minimum, that’s 10 per cent of not a helluva lot in the first place.

Guess where I sell most of my books — yeah, anywhere other than North America.

Why the difference in pay?

Well, it has to do with greed. Amazon calls it sales channels, but we’re not fooled. You see, Amazon in America is the real company, and the regional Amazons are nominally different companies and customers of Amazon US. So, when it comes to self-published books, all the Amazons around the world are buying from Amazon US and selling on as separate retailers. Geddit? Me neither.

So piddling are the returns on my non-US sales that I thought Amazon was failing to credit me.  It took some quizzing and careful auditing with an electron microscope to convince me that, yes, despite the hollow echoing noise in my account, Amazon were actually crediting me with books sold.

And it gets worse. Amazon does not combine international sales into one account; for payment purposes they keep the regions separate. I have to pass thresholds in each of the currencies my books are sold in because they won’t add European, Japanese and US sales together.

In other words, I have to vault through financial hoops in both dollars and euros before I see a yen.

Such are the thresholds, I haven’t received a single penny from sales yet.

Not a bean. Nothing. I’m not telling how many books I’ve shifted but it’s more than the nothing I’ve received in payment.

Amazon has the money I made for the books I wrote. The dosh is sitting in Amazon’s account, with all the spondulicks of other people like me, earning Amazon interest and contributing nothing to the writers. And that’s that.

In fact, in order to see any money on non-American sales, I have to attain best-seller status just to clear their bars.

Yes, to hit the reader over the head with a frying pan, Amazon is keeping for itself the income of hundreds of thousands of independent authors and publishers. We are, in effect, working for Amazon for nothing.

An author keeps a close eye on Amazon.

Fine business model if you can get away with it: get a lot of tenacious people high on literary ambition to stock your shelves for you, and just sit on the revenue. Fantastic!

This demands a question, and even from this comfy sofa in Nara, I can hear you asking it: why bother with Amazon? The answer to this question is a whole blog post of its own. Watch this space.

There are lots of reasons to feel scepticism about Amazon: their employment practices, their bullying of traditional outlets and publishers to name just two, their UK tax avoidance to name tens of millions more. Again, this is another blog post and one that will be along shortly.

Meanwhile, readers wishing to avoid the corporate megalith can buy direct from me if they wish. This may be of most interest to Japan-based readers, where Amazon has set the price of The Underpants Tree paperback too high. Buying direct from me, you get a slightly better price. Readers in other parts of the world will feel no monetary advantage because of the postage, but the option is there.

Feel free to continue to buy through Amazon. I am not proposing a boycott, and you will be helping my accrued royalties edge their way toward those distant thresholds.

To find out more about getting your own paperback copies of The Underpants Tree, King of the Undies World, Weed, or Un-Tall Tales, go to this page.

Well, Mr Amazon, maybe you got the money, but we got the measure of you.

New approaches in advertising: call the customer a bastard

I’m trying this more direct and intuitive approach to marketing and advertising. What do you think?

Exclusive: That David Cameron-Xi Jinping meeting — the real issues

David Hameron and Xi Jin-pig talk big stuff

Exclusive: That David Cameron-Xi Jinping meeting — what they really talked about

Many thanks to Chris Storey for the joke.

Exclusive: That Jeremy Corbyn-Xi Jinping meeting — what they really talked about

The great literary sock puppet interview

Author of Weed, King of the Undies World, and The Undperpants Tree, Chris Page isn’t an award winning novelist. He hasn’t won the Booker or the Nobel prize for literature or anything else. The sock puppet interviewed him to find out how much of this has to do with the books he has written.

Sock Puppet: So what’s all this about underpants, then? What kind of subject is that for serious literature?

Chris Page: Underpants? Literary trope, unifying theme, leitmotif; also being fundamental to human life they are a universal in the human condition, a foundation of civilisation, you might say. They are also crucial for catching the drips.

SP: Also very sexy.

CP: Have you actually seen any underpants?

SP: Well, some are.

CP: Citation needed.

SP: And right there in the first chapters of the book you have the ravishing Victoria Gousset changing out of her microscopic bikini into even smaller panties, and doing it repeatedly in front of the hunk she’s trying to bed.

CP: Oh. Is it that obvious?

SP: ‘Fraid so.

CP: Bugger!

SP: Gossamer is a word that comes to mind.

CP: Let’s move on.

SP: When is the Nobel Prize coming to you? 

CP: When the judges get past the panties.

SP: But it’s not just about underwear is it, King of the Undies World.

CP: I thought you’d never notice.

SP: It’s also a hugely funny take on various genres of popular fiction from crime to action to SF, and has digs at popular culture and various geopolitical shenanigans. There’s cunning criminals, rich bastards, North Korean commandoes, aliens, and some very stoned terrorists, aren’t there.

CP: Absolutely, well, you see —

SP: But the underpants are the best bit aren’t they.

CP: I like the jokes.

SP: But mainly the pants.

CP: But the satire, you know and —

SP: And there’s a sequel too isn’t there.

CP: Yes, it’s called The Underpants Tree.

SP: The Underpants Tree. You wrote a sequel to a story that was all about underpants.

CP: Yes, I —

SP: Of all the things you could have written about in the world, in the infinity of human experience, you chose to write about underpants.

CP: Well —

SP: Twice.

CP: Well —

SP: To make a grand total of two novels entirely about underpants, in case anyone is missing the point.

CP: Well —

SP: And there’s a third volume in the works.

CP: As we’ve said, not entirely about underpants. One character in The Underpants Tree actually smokes a pipe.

SP: Smokes a pipe when surrounded by all those underpants? That’s a fire hazard isn’t it?

CP: I didn’t think of that. I don’t want to get the books withdrawn. Come to think of it there are two zombie apocalypses too. Do you think the health and safety people might have opinions about that too?

SP: Not if you don’t tell them.

CP: So that’s 130 to 140,000 words of underpants jokes, with a third volume planned. You’d think there was a Nobel in just that. Never mind the literary merit.

SP: You would think.

CP: Otherwise, it simply wouldn’t be a just universe.

SP: Who knows? Maybe we’ll find out the Nobel committee gave Henry Kissinger the peace prize for the secret bombing of Cambodia or something.

CP: Now that could never happen.

SP: Weed.

CP: Don’t mind if I do.

SP: Weed was your first novel. 

CP: You’ve read my Wikipedia page.

SP: And subpoenaed it too. Underpants and weeds: do you actually want anyone to read your stuff?

CP: Who has ever read a Nobel prize winner? This makes me a clear contender.

SP: Fair dos. So how would you describe Weed to anyone who hadn’t read it?

CP: It has a predominantly white cover with a big green smiley face kind of peeking at you from the corner of the front.

SP: Sounds to me it might be about a bloke who doesn’t fit in with the whole facile mess of consumerism, salaried labour and asinine popular culture, who has a vision of life that transcends our market-made quotidian banality and who is persecuted as a result, until there is some kind of transformative event that brings the corporate edifice down, and which is a magical and surreal gesture of universal contempt, and that the whole story is very funny at the same time.

CP: Very perceptive of you. Can I go now?

SP: But does Weed feature underpants?

CP: Not overtly.

SP: A reason to go on. So you’re working on the next installment of pants jokes.

CP: You spelled instalment wrong.

SP: So, you’re working on the next instalment of pants jokes.

CP: No, next I’m taking a diversion into the world of social and political satire, murder, dismemberment, and the Daily Mail.

SP: Sounds like a rib tickler, I must say. Better get a truss before I read that. And when will this one be out?

CP: When it’s finished.

SP: Pants, weeds, flaky deadlines — why should I not be reaching for a copy of something by Dan Brown or EL James right now?

CP: Because your hands are nailed to your ears.

SP: So this blood-soaked satire is what you’re working on right now.

CP: No, right now I’m having conversations in my head.

SP: Hadn’t you better stop doing that and get on with something useful?

CP: Brilliant! Now that’s why you’re a sock puppet and I’m not.

SP: Now, am I a figment of your imagination or are you a figment of mine?

CP: I dunno. Forgot.

SP: OK. Let’s find out. On the count of three, click the upload button and we’ll see which one of us disappears.

CP: Three, two, one —

Some questions about guns

I am not American, nor do I live there, so I am very circumspect in what I say about that fine country.

What goes on behind another person’s borders is, after all, none of my business. However, I hope I might pose a question in the interests of academic enquiry, a question of reason and logic. I hope this won’t be perceived as sticking my end in where it’s not welcome. This is not a judgment, after all, it’s a yearning to understand.

The question goes out to all the advocates of gun ownership, and it goes like this. It is a cornerstone of gun advocacy that we need guns for self-protection. If this is the case, can you explain why we in Japan or Britain, where there are no guns, don’t get shot all the time?

Think about it. Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.

And while I’m on the subject, we hear much of the right of citizens to own guns. Can you clarify: do citizens have a right not to get shot? I ask because we don’t hear very much about that. Which carries greater legal and moral weight, the right to carry guns or the right not to get shot?

As I say, these are questions of logic, an honest enquiry into how things work, not an assault on or criticism of America.

In other words, please don’t shoot the questioner.

Going completely plotty

Plotting for the next story. Thousands of words of notes on the computer. Putting important plot points on scraps of paper and arranging them by hand to get the story arc right. What I have here represents about two-thirds of the likely story. More pieces of the jigsaw to find and put into place yet, but so far so good.

Hatching fiendish plots.

Rather more ideas coming up than I can easily manage, hence the copious notes.

No, this is not the promised third volume of underpants, this is something a bit different.

I’ll not say what because talking the details of a project before it’s finished often kills it.

When I conceived this story, I was intending a quick fun write/read, possibly as short as 50,000 words. However, like many tall tales, it seems to be growing in the telling.

Have been plotting for a couple of months but real life events have thrown me off time and again. Wrote the first chapter while on holiday in the UK in order to get the tone and find out more about the main character. This was an enormous help. Wrote it in more or less one sitting, late at night with a bottle of wine as my muse.

Much more work to do in finding the characters and sorting out the gaps in the plot. However, as you go along, one thing leads to another and you find what you are looking for eventually (though occasionally the find can be a last-gasp reach of constructive desperation).

The current story seems to be the most involved bit of plotting I have attempted so far.

For many years I sneered at planning stories and wrote by the seat of my pants. Weed and everything in Un-Tall Tales came about that way. Eventually, I began to wonder whether planning and plotting might speed up the process. That was, very specifically, 2012 when I came out of the magazine and was looking for an early score in the fiction writing department, looking for a story that I could produce quickly and use to build up some momentum. I began plotting and then writing a particular novel. That story is not finished. It is a good one, but very ambitious, and will take years to write, so I’ve put it aside for the sake of some less ambitious projects.

The next story was King of the Undies World. I think I created the plot outline in about 20 minutes on a lunch break. Perhaps that’s not literally true, but that’s the way it feels. It was a sketchy outline, as it turned out, and I had to fill in the details as I went along, so the world planned might only apply tangentially.

The story arc of The Underpants Tree came to me in one go as soon as I started thinking about it. I then worked up a synopsis on that curve and did that badly. I had to change it as I went along, so like KOTUW there was a lot of improvisation as I worked at it.

Simplicity is my muddle name.

The current project: keep it simple, I thought. Simple, direct, with a linear uncomplicated plot. Make it something you can write in three months.

Well. I’m still working on the plot, having started in July, but that’s fine because for all this browbeating, the arc is looking good and some very silly plot points are coming out.

I still have no idea of the ending. I just know it can’t be a happy one.

Oops! Was that a plot spoiler?

Not a burning question, a merely lukewarm query

A question to the many millions of people who know a lot more about Facebook and promoting stuff online than I do.

Conventional wisdom has it that as a person who writes and tries to flog books, I ought to have a Facebook page.

I already have four Twitter accounts, two blogs and a static site and can’t keep up with all that as it is. If I were diligent about updating my digital online empire, I would simply have no time to write the stories I am supposed to be promoting.

So, do I really need a Facebook page too? And what would I put on it different to the content of the other bits and pieces?

Is an FB page helpful?

Do you have any thoughts on the matter?

I thank you in advance for doing my thinking for me.