Self-Publishing Vs Traditional Publishing II

I return with a post about self-publishing vs trad publishing. I write this in the light of strange data concerning my sales. I notice that mu sales in the UK are going up, but my sales in the US are going down. I have been thinking a lot about this, and the difference in the readerships and other factors. Because the US population is five times bigger than the UK population is stood to (my) reasoning that the sales should be approximately five times greater as well, if all things were equal.

But apparently they are not equal. So this got me thinking. The first thing my meandering stumbled upon was that the US has more people, but it also has more writers uploading more material. This is what some in the academic environs might call the quantitative analysis. As far as qualitative analysis, well... this is harder, but I  think that perhaps the American reader prefers faster fiction, and more violent fiction, and neither of these things is my forté. 

Now......... what has any of this got to do with self-publishing Vs traditional publishing I hear you ask. In the world of self-publishing, writers have more control over their output. By this, I mean they can publish more often than with pro houses, but also they are the final judge of the material and what most (if not all) trad houses would reject as too violent, etc., the self-published writer can just go ahead and give to the world. 

In the brave sorties I make for you, my Blog Reader, into the world of self-published writing, I have started to notice a common theme among those writers claiming to make a lot of money, and that is that they write quite graphically violent material, or pornographic material as well, particularly those who call themselves "paranormal erotica" but what you or I would call vampire porn. 

My thinking on this is that the sales are high for these authors because they are writing and publishing stuff that just cannot be bought anywhere else because traditional publishing houses just will not touch stuff that graphic. For this reason, people who are looking for this kind of stuff go to Amazon and pick it up from a self-published writer. The more violent or pornographic it is, the quicker word spreads about the content and the higher the sales go. Then this process starts to snowball because the higher the sales the higher the book goes in the sales rank, and then more people notice that writer and round it goes again. 

The problem is that other writers, whose stuff isn't incredibly violent or stuffed with people giving vampires blow-jobs, find that their stuff just gets lost in the white noise. People can read what these writers are writing simply by going into a book shop and buying it there, after all, but what they cannot do is go into a book shop and buy stories with incredibly violent depictions of murder, or stories of what happens when a werewolf tries to have sex with a leprechaun, or whatever the hell is in those "paranormal erotica" books. 

It is no accident that the biggest sellers of self-published books are in the fields of porn and violence, and this is because if people want to read that stuff, the only place they can get it is on Amazon. So, the moral of the story is if you want to make big sales on Amazon then it looks like you might have to start writing "paranormal erotica" or very violent crime or horror stories, because that is where cash is for the reasons I have written about here. 

New Wave Zombies

Zombies are popular again. The last time they were this popular the Viet Cong were launching the Tet Offensive across South Vietnam, Robert Kennedy joined the race for Democratic nominee and Apollo 7 was launched into orbit. That's right - it was 1968 and George A. Romero was gripping people with Night of the Living Dead. If there was one film that really sparked zombies in the imagination of people then this was it.

It was a tumultuous time back then - Vietnam was getting ugly, Northern Ireland was about to kick off and the Civil Rights Act was dividing people in the US. Then, like now, with our deteriorating economies, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, zombies offered a way for film-makers and writers to deal with these issues. Zombies are allegorical, or they can be if the writer is inclined that way, and as such they can represent something in the real world - in this case mindless obedience to a centralised authority or cult figure.

How long will zombies remain popular in cinema and books? Not long, is my guess, and the reason is that trends move along much faster these days. In the last 10 years we've had wizards, vampires, werewolves, aliens and zombies, all at the top spot. What comes next? Who knows...I have watched the rise of dystopia fiction with interest (led by Hunger Games (2008) which many claim has too many similarities with Battle Royale (1999) by Koushun Takami, but I've never read either so cannot comment).

I attribute the rise of dystopia fiction to two things: 1) exhaustion of all other scifi concepts, and 2) a reflection of how people feel about the collapsing economy. I'll write about "collapsitarianism" in another post, but it's pretty rampant right now, and publishing houses have been keen to jump on the End of the World bandwagon for at least five years. What comes next I don't know. I wondered if realism might raise its head, or at least magical realism, but that might not be enough to fill the space left behind by less subtle escapist fiction, particularly when aimed at the YA market.

So, if anyone has any ideas about the next big thing...............

Publication of Razed 2: The Gathering

After the success of Razed 1: Into the Night, which rose to the heady heights of the bestseller list for occult fiction on Amazon, I was encouraged to move along with the second part of the trilogy, and after proof-reading it and making a few other edits I am pleased to say that it is being published today worldwide on Amazon.

The story sees the various factions of post-apocalypse survivors in France, England and America as they make sense of what has happened to the world, try and deal with the strange changes to their minds and bodies and start the process of gathering together in order to build a new society from the ashes of the old one.

The front cover looks like this:

And I'm glad I decided to stick with the cover-art theme established by the first part of the trilogy.

As other authors will know, writing a book can be rather arduous, and is a real labour of love. It demands a lot of hard work, physically (sitting up typing into the small hours) and mentally (researching, checking, writing, checking, proof-reading, checking, editing, checking, reading, reading, re-reading, etc.) and it's something you can do only if you are very serious about it from the start. The fact that so many people are buying Razed 1: Into the Night means a lot to me for these reasons and so many heartfelt thanks to all my readers.

Dan Brown

In my last post I wrote about a few problems I have with modern crime fiction, particularly with the issue of how simple crimes are no longer enough and a massive conspiracy must be lurking somewhere. There is a fictional crime programme airing on British television at the moment named Broadchurch. I haven't seen this but the review I watched here http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/video/2013/mar/12/broadchurch-mayday-parks-recreation-video-review?INTCMP=SRCH strongly hinted that after a child is found murdered everyone is hiding something. Of course they are, because as I have said, now all murders have to be part of a conspiracy.

I blame Dan Brown for this. After his massive runaway success The Da Vinci Code (2003), hundreds of copycat novels were published in an attempt to cash-in on the conspiracy genre - the classic outline of which, as superbly demonstrated in the excellent Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), is always about a murder or a problem of some kind that leads the protagonist down a rabbit hole where he must solve a mystery rooted in the depths of antiquity, etc.

The Da Vinci Code was along the same lines, using Christian iconography and history to create a mystery from the past that had to be solved by someone in the present, but its enormous success changed a lot of genre fiction, and I'm not just talking about the insane number of books about Knights Templar and codes and so on that came out immediately afterwards. I'm talking about a broad demand from people looking for more of the same that manifested its way into many other genres of fiction, usually in the form of some kind of conspiracy. Of course conspiracy books have always existed, especially in the political thriller genre, but post-DVC things got totally out of hand. Now, people expect every mystery to lead to various exotic locations and have a cause that will CHANGE EVERYTHING YOU HAVE EVER BELIEVED, etc., when once upon a time Poirot bumbling around the village green was enough. Some might think I am conflating two genres here - mystery thriller and crime, but I don't think so.

It is an interesting development that in the last few years private detective books have ballooned in success - but they are not seen as private detective books. Robert Langdon is a private detective, who solves a murder to resolve a storyline problem, yet he is called a professor. Jack Reacher is a private detective who solves a murder to resolve whatever story he is in, yet he is called a "drifter", not a private detective. Let's face it - all these books are simple crime novels whose settings or characters are tweaked slightly to elevate them out of the crime genre and place them somewhere else - such as "international mystery thriller" etc.

With the publication of Inferno in May, we can expect a deluge of international mystery thrillers set in Florence, with the protagonist and his beautiful Italian assistant running through the Vasari corridor or through the hidden tunnel under the River Arno, hiding in secret passageways in the Palazzo Vecchio or any of the other things they will have to do to solve the five-point mystery plan. I'm guessing Inferno is going to be about Cybernetics and cybernetic immortailty, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortality#Cybernetics, for anyone who is interested, but I might be wrong. I say this because every Dan Brown novel is a blend of science and religion, and immortality through cybernetics is something that could easily be linked to Dante.

If I'm wrong, I suppose I could always write about it myself - and it's my idea! I'm claiming it if Dan Brown hasn't got there first... and then I can throw petrol on the fire by adding to the genre and writing about something that WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING YOU EVER BELIEVED IN....

Pseudonyms and Genres

As I might have mentioned, I am published under a different name (in a different genre - historical) and this has made me think quite a lot about the issue of identity. Not about deep and meaningful subjects like existentialism and ontology, but about the nature of why writers publish different genres under different pen-names.

In my case, I suppose I wanted to keep the genres very clearly separate both when published and in my mind. Others have said that if you write romance and then all of a sudden publish a graphic horror novel, you will alienate both readerships. I'm not sure if this is true or not, and might experiment with it at some stage to see if it is the case.

Pseudonyms are also a way of allowing an author to reach different audiences independent of one's previous work. Stephen King did this when he published under the name Richard Bachman, and it's probably what J. K. Rowling should have done when she published The Casual Vacancy.

My favourite genre is scifi-horror, growing up as I did on a diet of The Invaders and The Twilight Zone, and it is with a sincere affection that I try to add to the genre. I do have other interests, stemming from academic work I have done, and this is why I have published some historical fiction, and I think I will probably publish more, if I can, over the years.

Another genre I love from a "reader" (or viewer) perspective is crime, and I am really keen to give it a go, but I find I have trouble with this genre. I have tried many times to write a crime novel and they have all ended in failure. Part of the issue for me is that the American new wave of crime fiction introduced too much emphasis on science and forensics and also a weird obsession with serial killers and graphic violence, especially towards women, presumably citing Hammett and Chandler as forefathers.

What puts me off this genre now is that the nature of the crime has changed. Once, a murder was sufficient, or a blackmailing, and then good writing and an interesting plot was enough, but now everything has to be about a conspiracy, usually at government level. Also, where once a murder against an individual sufficed, now the crime must be against society - a mass serial killer, a trafficking ring, etc. It's no longer good enough for a murder investigation to play out at a golf course - no, now they must play out on a much broader canvas and take in several countries and usually have strong elements of organised crime.

I'm not sure why this is. It goes back to our old friend the conspiracy theory, whose salience in fiction I have promised to write about before and do so again here. It's no longer enough for the vicar to have killed the organist because he was being blackmailed for stealing the charity money. Now the vicar has to have killed the organist because he saw him holding a black mass with the French President as part of a secret society whose goal WILL CHANGE THE WORLD FOREVER. etc etc.

So, with this in mind, I'm not sure if me and the crime genre are suited to each other. I respect and enjoy the stories of Conan Doyle and Christie (famously hated by critics of course), also Simenon whose Maigret books are very good, although I have only read the French versions and perhaps this lends an exotic feel to them that is not present in the translations. But I still harbour a dream to write a crime novel...

The Problem of Too Many Ideas

I often read about people who say they want to write but they can't think of any original ideas. Now, I'll write about the nature of originality another day, but going to the bit about a dearth of ideas, it occurs to me that too many ideas is just as crippling a problem too few.

Right now I'm writing Razed 3, which is longer and more involved than the two previous novels because it needs to bring the entire story together, plus it must be fast-paced as well. (Razed 2 should be published at the weekend of the proof-reading gets finished on time).

So far so good, but...

In between writing Razed 3 I am plagued (if you excuse the pun) with other ideas and some of them are so exciting that I have to write them down. By this I essentially mean start them as future works on their own word files. In the last few weeks I have had so many ideas I know I could never finish them all, and this is where the frustration is. There is not enough time in the day to write all the novels I have sketched out even if I took years to do it, and yet I am compelled to put them on paper (or in pixels) just in case I forget them. Just this year I have sketched out three scifi-horror novels and two novellas in the same genre, plus I have started tinkering with a crime novel as well, although I am less confident about that genre.

The problem is all of these ideas go down into word files and start to expand (the three novels are 12,000 words, 8000 words and 2000 words long and the two novellas are 23,000 words and around 1000 words).  Great - but while this is happening Razed 3 is stagnant. The trick is to prioritise, so I have ranked them in order of when they have to be published and tell myself to stick to that order. But then... another idea comes along and my main project gets pushed back again.

I expect Razed 3 to be published in May or June, depending on proof-reading, and how many new ideas push it back as I sketch them out as I describe above, and this is great because it will bring an end to a very broad trilogy and enable me to to start working on some of these new ideas. After being so deep inside a serial for so many months I am really excited about writing some "standalone" novels and getting some of these ideas out of my mind and onto the page.

In the meantime, it is essential that I accept that not every idea that pops into your head is worth writing down, and focus on the main work of that time.

Proof-reading & Sales

Proof-reading is one of those things you either love or hate. I used to love it, but now I hate it. The reason I hate it is because it's so time-consuming, and that means time that could be spent writing. Yet it is essential both for coherency of the text and and also as a matter of respect to the reader. One day it might be possible for me to pay a professional to do this, but at around 2 cents per word we're talking thousands of dollars for most novels, this isn't viable at the moment.

I proof-read Razed 1 once, which was a mistake, and it got published with a few typos. The thing is, when you sell hundreds of copies of a book, as Razed 1 has already in just a few weeks, any typos are going to get noticed by a lot of people and commented on - and rightly so. The readers have paid to read a story and don't want it interrupted by stupid typos, even though they are an inherent feature of long texts. I recently read a novel professionally published by one of the Big Five publishing houses and I couldn't believe how many typos were in it.

With this in mind I'm now proof-reading Razed 2 for the third time, but I just know there are going to be typos lurking in it somewhere, like scorpions under your pillow just waiting to strike in the night. The benefit of reading your book so many times is you get to see other problems with it, such as character inconsistency or just plain old-fashioned mistakes in the story. Certainly juggling so many characters over such a broad canvas has been hard, and I have outlined a faster, simpler zombie novel that I expect to publish later in the year (one set purely in England) with this in mind.

As I have alluded to above, my sales are doing really well. I will get more specific about sales figures as time goes on, but for now suffice it to say I'm selling hundreds of copies and that's in just a few weeks (with many thousands of promo giveaways). This is great because I really love the scifi genre, especially dystopia, apocalypse and zombies, etc., so to be able to sell books writing about something I love rather than stuff you're writing just to make a dollar is really exciting and fun.

Self-Publishing Vs Traditional Publishing I

I have been writing fiction for a long time, and in that time I have on various occasions forwarded my work to literary agents. I never expected to get anywhere doing this, but I was motivated to do it because I felt it was too much of a loose end not having done it.

It's not something I have done very much, and I never sent Razed to anyone - that went straight to Amazon. On the few occasions when I sent work off the routine was always the same, and back in those days it was all paper and ink, of course. For people unfamiliar with how it used to work, it went like this: you wrote your novel, which could take anything from two to six months, then you would edit and proof-read (more on proof-reading in another post) the thing and print off the first three chapters. With these you would include a cover note and a brief synopsis of the work, and then the whole package was posted away to a relevant literary agent.

After a cursory glance it would be arbitrarily rejected and posted back to you. Sometimes you got a note, sometimes not. In all my cases the literary agents were professional and polite, and I got encouraging notes from all of them. These days it's basically the same routine but you save on paper costs because you email them, and they send their auto-rejection back by email as well. (To literary agents who refuse to accept electronic submissions: this is 2013, not 1913).

Now, I make it my business to keep up with new published authors and I always look into their background, and I started to get pretty tired of the number of new writers who had "previously worked in the publishing industry". OK, we get it - they have contacts in the industry and this world isn't modelled on Little House on the Prairie so the nepotists win. Recently I read about a writer (who shall remain anonymous) over whom an inordinate amount of fuss was being made. A little bit of research revealed to me that an immediate relative of the new writer in question just happened to be one of the biggest literary agents around, and it was that very agent who signed the writer.

The word nepotism derived from the Latin nepos, which means "nephew" and of course alludes to helping  family into choice jobs, etc., irrespective of ability. I'm not using this post to tell the world that there is nepotism in publishing, because we all know that; it is no different from any other industry. What I'm meandering to is that these days Amazon makes all of that much less relevant. These days anyone can self-publish and actually be read. Thousands of people have read my books and stories thanks to Amazon Direct to Kindle and Kindle Select.

The problem we have now is that Amazon is essentially a monopoly in the ebook business, and most independent writers will tell you that they sell far more on Amazon than on all the other platforms put together, and the worry with that is that what they can give to indie writers on one day, they can take away on another. Even this precarious situation is better than wasting your time emailing material to literary agents, and as others have pointed out - an ebook is for life. The rights on that book is yours for life, and you can slowly add to your titles over the years.

The danger now though is that the market is being flooded by self-published writers and when you put a book out there it's just swallowed up in the white noise. One of the most common questions asked by new indie writers is "how can I get my book noticed?" I have a few thoughts on this, but they are for another day. I have made this post "Self-Publishing Vs Traditional Publishing I" because I'm sure there will be more.

Wordcount Musings & Series Vs Serials

A lot of people have asked me about what is the right wordcount (I make this one word, apologies to those who prefer it as two), and so here are my thoughts on this subject.

The novel has changed in form in many ways over the centuries. If we stick to the period following the rise of Dickens back in the 1830s we can see that the wordcount is also subject to major revisions. Back then and leading into the 1860s, Dickens published fairly long novels (Little Dorrit (1855 - 1857), David Copperfield (1849 - 1850) & Bleak House (1852 - 1853) spring to mind) although most of his novels were published in serial form (more on that later). In the 20th century, particularly in American fiction, we see a drop in wordcount, such as The Great Gatsby (1925) which is something like 55,000 words compared to a lot of Dickens's stuff which is 350,000 words or thereabouts.  Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) is also relatively short, and a few years later another short novel came along in the form of Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (1951).

During the 1970s, books started to put on weight again, and we started to see much bigger stories getting published as we left the brevity offered to us by the modernists for the pulpy epics of the genre writers. However, the internet seems to be reversing this trend, and I have noticed that many of the higher selling books on Amazon are those with wordcounts between 50,000 and 80,000. Gatsby is arguably a novella (though I have seen some people describe works less than 10,000 words as novellas), and these days I think people are happier with shorter books again, even in the genre fiction area. My view is that 120,000 is around the minimum length to be considered a traditional genre fiction novel, while 80,000 would suffice for a literary work.

Razed will wind up being something like 180,000 words I suspect (but nothing concrete yet on that), and that brings me to my second meandering - series vs serials.

Uncle Charles, as I mention above, published his novels in serial form, i.e.,  a set of stories that were published in a line over time without a proper conclusion until the last one was published. These were very popular in his day, (Stephen King's The Plant is an example of a modern on-going serial novel) but today, series are much more popular, i.e., a complete story with a beginning, middle and end, published, but then the same characters wheeled out again for a new conclusive story the next year, or whenever. These are much more popular in our era, as can be seen in the explosion of popularity for crime books and TV shows where the same characters solve essentially the same crimes over and over every week. Usually, there will be some form of serialised storyline running as a subplot in the background, but for the most part everything gets neatly wrapped up at the end and it's back home for coffee and cakes in the final paragraph.

I wondered if the internet and Amazon might cause a renewed interest in the serial form, but now I'm not so sure. It seems to me that the most popular form is for a story to be wrapped up at the end in toto only for the same characters to be set another challenge in the next book or TV episode.

Point of View & Violence in Apocalypse Fiction

Just a few quick words about point of view in fiction. I decided to put Razed in the third person because I wanted a broad story with many characters in various countries, in order to show the true scale of the infection, but I've noticed that a lot of the new wave Zombie Apocalypse stories are in the first person. I have written in the first person in other genres (and they are published on Amazon with pen names), but  I was never all that comfortable with putting an apocalypse book in the first person viewpoint.

The argument for it is that it brings an immediacy to the work, and it's certainly a hell of a lot easier to write than juggling the thoughts and emotions and activities of 25 characters in the third person, for sure. The argument against is that the story of the apocalypse - a global event, naturally - is confined to one person's world-view, so there is an inherent prejudice. Also, the new post-apocalypse world is revealed to us only through the filter of our narrator's subjective eyes, and of course his or her knowledge is terribly limited.

To me, third person allows for a greater description of the new world, and a wider range of emotions as we drop into the thoughts of various characters from different viewpoints, however, I have noticed, on my travels in internetland, that the first person apocalypse stories generally seem to be much more popular than the third person ones. I attribute this to the hypothesis that first-person is easier to write and read and is much more popular in general at the moment.

I have been considering writing a zombie apocalypse novel in the first person for some time now - not a sprawling saga which is what Razed seems to be turning into, but a compact fast-paced novel set over a relatively short time period. Not sure when I'll get the time to do this as I have two writing projects at the moment (Razed 3 and another unnamed sci-fi horror novel proving that you really should let sleeping dogs lie), but hopefully this year.

On the subject of violence in apocalypse fiction, I have noticed that the more violent the better, at least as far as sales are concerned. With Razed, my aim was to write a longish story about a group of survivors handling the deconstruction of their world. I wanted violence (and there is much more violence in the third and final part) but to couch it in a broader context so it wasn't just a mindless gore-fest. My (limited) research indicates, however, that the bigger the mindless gore-fest, the bigger the sales. As I say, in the final part of Razed, which I am writing now, the violence increases, but I am determined that it is not just going to be there for its own sake, but as part of a broader context dealing with the issues of social collapse, self-determination and morality.