Here we have a common perception among would-be readers of self-published fiction: Yeah, $2.99 books have been, in my experience, not worth the electrons it took to produce them. Aghast at the cost of ebooks when I got my Nook 2 years ago, I turned to those cheaper price points and time and again was disappointed. There is a reason these books are not picked up by the publishing houses. Let’s face it. The major publishers have been doing literature for a while – they know what people will read, recommend and most importantly, pay money for. Ms. Reed [the successful...

  Writing is a solitary craft, and many writers seem to be less outgoing than the norm. For such people, self-promotion is a nightmare. They see it as little more than boasting, which I suppose it is. Sometimes, in desperation, the writer crosses the line from boasting to begging, and then it’s even more painful to behold.In theory, especially in the past, the publisher relieved the writer of this unpleasant chore. The writer might have been expected to do the odd reading, or bookshop signing, or – if he or she were at least semi-famous already – make an appearance on...

Hachette have "leaked" a memo explaining why they are necessary. One of the many germane comments about the article is this, from Linton Robinson: BTW, anecdotally, of the writers I know who are making decent livings from published books, about half are either letting contracts lapse or heavily considering it, while putting out books on their own. This is what will kill Hachette and the rest. They cannot compete with the independent author on price. It is as simple as that. The indie has no back office to support. He makes more from an ebook at $3 than he would through Hachette were...

My first fountain pen: " Image: BenFrantzDale Writers are obsessed with stationery. The lure of a stationer’s – or even the stationery shelves at some soulless hypermarket – is hard for the scribbler to resist. And for the real addicts among us, the ultimate fix is the fountain pen. Such pens have gone the way of vinyl records (a bit cultish, or favoured by fogeys who can’t get on with technology) and more’s the pity, because when I were a nipper the range on offer was wide and wondrous. My very first, a pearlescent Osmiroid, was given to me on my seventh birthday. By...

First, I am glad that you liked it. Secondly, you are under no obligation whatever to do anything more, but if you want to show some appreciation, consider sampling one of my other books. The Penal Colony is a loss leader, made free in order to bring my fiction to wider attention. It is far from being my best book. The others available are these:The Stone Arrow (approx. 71,000 words). My first published novel. It won a prize, putting me in the company of people like Shiva Naipaul and Kazuo Ishiguro, which astonished me (in case there had been some mistake, I...

I trained as a biologist, and one of the most powerful phenomena in biology is the positive feedback loop, in which a behaviour or process reinforces and perpetuates itself by virtue of its own nature. Feedback loops are seen in many other disciplines, of course, including economics. This post on the Thing-ology Blog at LibraryThing is nearly a year old, but it is remarkably insightful and prescient: the author's predictions are coming true at an astonishing speed. He identifies a number of the positive feedback loops which are destroying paper publishing, at least of mass-market fiction. Here, in abbreviated form, are some...

Amazon is sometimes portrayed as the 800-pound gorilla in the ebook jungle, and maybe it is, but for an author who wants to be read that gorilla runs the biggest game in town. In mid-September The Penal Colony was offered there for nothing (after I’d zeroed the price at Smashwords), and it quickly climbed the freebie charts. Since then, many tens of thousands of copies have been downloaded, and the number of reviews is growing. About a year ago I posted a piece here, in which I opine that: If you write “creatively” at all, the...

Mike Cane ran a post the other day entitled Tweet Of The Day: Print Publishing Is Sinking, prompted by this tweet from literary agent Jonny Geller: I decided to make The Penal Colony free at Smashwords (and hence Smashwords’s partners), knowing that Amazon would follow suit and reduce the $2.99 price to zero. For some reason, Amazon does not allow publishers to set a zero price directly. I don’t check my Amazon stats very often, but yesterday I noticed that The Penal Colony was being offered free at amazon.com, and that some 4,300 copies...

Notice this is on YouTube … free to view, download, embed … and I'm glad to say that Mr. Ellison is still with us.   Via Richard Herley's blog...

I have just released a new book. The title is The Drowning and the extent about 125,000 words. It is set in England and Nigeria between 1944 and 2015 and represents something of a departure for me in that it is a purely literary novel. One of the nicest things about independent authorship is freedom from the shackles of genre. Publishers, especially these days, have become timid. They expect their authors to produce more of the same: hence the popularity of series novels. That puts the author in a quandary. Should he continue on the treadmill, writing the same book over and...

I have just finished drafting a new novel. It was composed using OpenOffice Writer running under Linux, and has now migrated to Microsoft Word on a Mac for further formatting. OpenOffice uses a much more compact file-format than Word. The finished book occupies 305 Kb in odt format and 1.5 Mb in doc format. At the end of every working day during the drafting period, I saved what I had written so far with a name like “101103.odt” (being the saved file for 3 November, 2010). The result is a directory containing 121 cumulative versions of...

It’s always a probem to know how to describe a character’s physical appearance. Often the best course is to say as little as possible, especially if it isn’t relevant to the plot. Better for the reader to form his or her own picture. The more effort the reader puts into this, the more personal and intense will be the imagined result. That’s one of the reasons why films of favourite books often prove so disappointing, and why authors who have any sense will oppose the depiction of characters on covers. In the new novel I am working on now, the heroine...