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.