You lucky, lucky bastard.

What?

You must have slipped him a few sheckles, eh?

Slipped him a few sheckles? You saw him spit in my face!

Oh! What wouldn’t I give to be spat at in the face. I sometimes hang awake at night dreaming of being spat at in the face.

Well it’s not exactly friendly, is it? They have me in manacles!

Manacles?! Ooohaaawwww. My idea of heaven is to be allowed to be put in manacles… just for a few hours.*

I often watch or read the news about some horrific accident, or about a new conflict springing up in some far away place like Syria and think “Actually, my life’s not so bad.”

Never being satisfied is a very western disease, I think and one we’re all afflicted with. Okay, I don’t mean in terms of our work – I’m never satisfied with my writing, but I learned a long time ago there comes a time when you have to put down the mouse or pen and let it go. That aside, we’re often self-absorbed (okay, maybe you’re not), we often forget how good we actually have it and I’ll admit I’m guilty of that.

There are times when it’s very difficult to remember the privileges and advantages one has and so easy to get caught up in depression and want. I don’t know why I want anything more – I’ve got a house full of stuff I’m trying to get rid of at the moment!

I think it’s good idea to take a moment and remember all the things (and I don’t just mean physical possessions) we should be thankful for. Hey, America has a whole holiday just for that purpose. Maybe the rest of us should have one, too.

I’ve got a place to live with heat, water and enough to eat, quite a few luxuries, people who I love and who love me and a pretty good standard of living. I need to remember how fortunate I am more often.

So yeah, I am a lucky bastard**.

* From Monty Python’s Life of Brian, if you didn’t recognise it.
** In the figurative sense of the word, not the literal.

Okay, I don’t normally quote sportswear ads – I’ve never been what you’d describe as ‘sporty’.

But on this occasion I decided to make an exception.

I was thinking about resolutions and saw the quote above at the nearby mega-mall on a poster and it struck me as a personal imperative – oi you: stop thinking, start doing!

I’ve missed too many opportunities by saying things (to myself mostly) like “I’ll think about that…” instead of just getting off my backside and doing something about it.

As many of you know, I’m in a transitional phase having left Fancyapint? in December (not my idea, but I’m not going there) and I keep having odd flashes of things I could do now. Yes, I have to get some kind of job, but there’s lot of other things I could be doing, too.

So, carrying on the theme of resolutions for 2012, I’m going to use this as my mantra this year. I’m going to be doing some of those things I’ve spent too long thinking about. They’re not all going to work, but some of them will and I’m looking forward to finding out which is which.

And no, I’m not going to tell you about them just now; you’ll have to wait like everyone else.

What are you doing today? Stop thinking, start doing!

Yes, I know it’s February today – nothing gets by me.

Still, in the spirit of new year, new yew, I thought I’d put a few of my resolutions for 2012 down on paper (so I can be beaten with them later of course).

• Get a haircut and get a real job*
• Clean out the crap
• Exercise on a regular basis
• Write more and
• Just do more in general

The most critical one is the first one – can’t live off air and pixie dust forever. So I need to get off my proverbial and find that job. It’ll come, I’m sure – 2012 is going to be a great year!

Cleaning out the crap is an important one as I’ve managed to collect quite a lot of it in the 13 years since we moved into this house. At the end of the day, most of it’s taking up space and isn’t used on a day-to-day basis anyway.

Exercise. Well, we all need to do more – damn computers!

I have a lot of goals for writing this year, one of which is to be more regular with my blogs, book reviews and other activity around writing. Now that my third book in the Jaared Sen Quartet is finished, I hope to have some breathing space.

And yes, I need to do more all round. It’s too easy to get sucked into the interwebs and put off doing the important thing. (Who’d have thoughts kittens playing pianos could be so riveting?)

What’s the point of resolutions?

“What’s the point of resolutions?”, I can hear you ask. Well you might, as most of them seem to get abandoned within a few weeks of that kiss at midnight. I guess I like to treat it a bit like a ‘to do’ list – if it’s on the list, I’ve got something to aim for. And frankly, this year, they’re a lot more critical than in previous years.

Besides, I’m just doing what everyone else seems to be doing and sharing the standards by which I expect to be pilloried in 2008- I mean 2012.

Go on, share your resolutions for the year!

*Thanks G. Thorogood

I have to admit to still being in a bit of shock.

After ten years of concentrating primarily on our pub review website fancyapint.com, my founding partner and I have left. We knew there was a possibility of this happening after three years – we had good contracts that got us through the worst of the recession and paid us very well. But I guess we always thought that wouldn’t happen to us.

Well, it did.

We built the site from the ground up in the mid-nineties, scrounging server space where we could when it was still ridiculously expensive, making detailed notes of all our favourite pubs along the way. Fancyapint Ltd was incorporated in 1999, and we had a business. It didn’t do a lot for the first few years, being one of those hobby sites that sprung into being at that time, while we worked for the man (BT – oh, British Telecommunications plc, for those across the pond – the phone company) and did the site in our spare time.

Voluntary redundancy beckoned in 2002, so we decided to put our money where our mouth was and thought we could pay the bills with web consultancy while we developed the site. And it did okay.

Hey we were geeks, not businessmen

So it trundled along, developed a loyal following – and I mean loyal – and there was never quite enough consultancy work or enough revenue from the site.

In 2008 we were approached with a buy offer and we didn’t think too long about it. We said yes and the rest is the proverbial.

I’m not going into the ins and outs of our time under the new man – buy me a beer sometime and I might tell you what happened, but not here. Lets just say it’s not been that much fun.

So what do I do now?

Well, I can do anything.

Maybe it’s the kick in the pants my writing needs. Or I could do web consultancy again (like I ever stopped). Then there’s the small publisher schtick, ebooks are all the rage…

I don’t know exactly what I’m doing next, but there’s lots of options. And I don’t think it’s going to be boring!

Okay, I’m supposed to be writing. I guess I am, but… you know what I mean.

If you didn’t know, it’s Banned Book Week in the U.S., sponsored by the American Library Association. And it’s a subject none of us can ignore. Okay, the situation’s slightly different in the U.S. from Great Britain (as freedom of speech is not a right protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution here, surprisingly*), but I think it’s an issue that affects all of us. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the issue’s much hotter in America and calls are being made every day there to ban books.

I was just looking at the ALA’s list of banned and challenged classics and was frankly shocked and surprised at some of the books included on the list. Not all of them were a shock as a number have lots of sex and violence in them. But to paraphrase what my Dad used to say about TV** “You know how to close the book — don’t read it if it offends you!”

I think you’ll be surprised too at some of the things on the list. Here’s a few to chew on:

• The Colour Purple, by Alice Walker
• Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
• Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
• Rabbit, Run, by John Updike
• The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
• Animal Farm, by George Orwell
• o Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee (recently voted Britain’s favourite novel in one of those polls)
• The Call of the Wild, by Jack London (I mean, come on…)

There’s a lot more, and you can see the entire list on their website – I can almost guarantee you’ll be surprised by at least one of the books on that list.

And the list of contemporary books that have been challenged is equally surprising. The Twilight Series by Stephanie Meyer, The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini, In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak and one I’m going to have to read as it’s upset a lot of people, And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell. Hey, don’t read it if you don’t like it.

The futility of banning books

I used to work in theatre (lighting, sets, that sort of thing) and was a regular at Edinburgh’s Festival Fringe. If you haven’t been, go. There’s hundreds of theatre companies, comedians and other performers putting on shows in the barn to two people and there’s nothing like it anywhere.

Anyway, after several years of spending August in the Scottish capital, we noticed that one of the ways to get your show to do well at the Fringe was to get someone to ban it — or even call for it to be banned. BAM! Instant sell out. Probably a Fringe Award as well. The easiest was to do something slightly or not so slightly sacrilegious, preferably in a Church of Scotland hall, and then invite the vicar or some other member of the church. BAM! Instant sell out!

I think the Church of Scotland got wise to this and stopped banning or commenting on shows at the Fringe, which was probably sensible.

The moral of this story is: banning books only ensures more people will read them, because our bull-headedness goes, “I’d better see what I’m missing — I might be offended!” (I rarely think that last bit as it takes quite a bit to offend me).

So I’m off to read And Tango Makes Three — I think you should read a banned book, too.

* Pleading the Fifth doesn’t work here either. Go figure.
**Dad used to say, “You know where the off switch is — turn it off if you don’t like it!”

We used to be called ‘fanboys’ because we like Apple’s computers and hey, that’s fine. I’ve had various incarnations of Macs over the year, starting with the second hand Apple+ my Dad picked up somewhere in our little town.

Then I spent hundreds of hours on Mac Classics in the computer lab at Norlin Library on the University of Colorado, Boulder campus. I’m afraid I was smitten.

Of course, I spent several years labouring away on PCs at various jobs and, okay, they do work for some things. I got pretty good at Word Perfect and Lotus 1-2-3. (What’s that? Never heard of them? Well, they were much better than Microsoft Word and Excel at what they did, but the massive behemoth ran over them with a steam roller and that was that.)

When I got to London at the beginning of the ‘90s, I managed to reinvent myself as a graphic designer and what do they use? Macs, of course. I managed to get work to pay for the latest machines for the next decade, then carried on when I set up my own company.

Sometime in the last decade, though, things changed. Macs became cool. I know a lot of recent converts who’ve changed to Apple’s products because what you get for the money (graphics, sound, software) as standard in many cases still exceeds what you get on a PC.

Then iPhones and iPads hit the scene and Apple shot to the top of the world, recently holding the slot of most profitable company in the world for about 24 hours before Exxon announced their figures.

So, today of all days, a new Apple Store opened in the “largest urban shopping centre in Europe” just down the road from me. And who do you think was in the queue with me? Yes, there were a smattering of fanboys (and girls), but the rest were quite normal. Students, businessmen, mothers with push chairs and pretty normal people, all in all.

We were trying to work out how things have changed and all we can agree on is that what Apple’s done in the last decade has been to make desirable objects that work. I’ll be the first to admit they’re not perfect – I can probably list 50 things that drive me crazy about the way the Mac’s operating system works, but I still like it better than Windoze.

As an aside (and a dig), one of my good friends updated his mother’s laptop the other day with Windows 7 from Vista and it took – wait for it – 7 hours! At the end, his mum asked if he’d buy her an iPad!

Will the Mac Fanboys dissolve into humanity? Probably not. Will Macs last forever. I doubt it – something better should come along at some point. But in the meantime, I’ve got no plans to change my platform. Now where’s the buy button for that iPad?

I was going to write a polemic about the “christian” right in American politics, but decided my blood pressure couldn’t take the strain today. So, instead I’m writing my overdue review of Harry Connolly’s books, Child of Fire and Game of Cages.

Ray Lilly is a recently released, ex-con with interesting tattoos that protect him from a lot of violent things – and some magic. His boss, Annalise, is part of a consortium doing its level best to project the rest of the world from rampant, uncontrolled magic and Ray is just supposed to be the driver. And, if he steps out of line, she’s going to kill him.

Magic is dangerous and every time they turn around some moron’s found a spell book and is creating more havoc. The numpties are forever summoning strange creatures from neighbouring universes whose sole purpose is to consume the denizens of our planet – it appears we’re quite tasty…

I really enjoyed Child of Fire – it’s a good read for me, as I like fast-paced thrillers a lot and the premise of this one was definitely interesting. It’s got great characters and a spooky town that is like the Stepford Wives multiplied by 1000!

In fact, I liked it so much so that I almost immediately downloaded the sequel, Game of Cages. Ray’s on his own for this one. Well, almost alone – he’s been sent with a researcher, Catherine, to check out an auction for very wealthy individuals for what can only be one of those creatures from another world (yes, the ones that like to eat us) and report back. That’s all they’re supposed to do.

By all means go, read some sample chapters [ http://www.harryjconnolly.com/blog/ ] and you’ll be hooked, too. I’ve already pre-ordered the next one Circle of Enemies and looking forward to reading it on holiday.

You should also watch the trailer – it’s a movie or series I’d watch, any day.

My taste for nostalgia only goes so far.

I was eating my wife’s homemade pulled pork last night (very nice it was, too) and trying to remember where I used to get pulled pork in the ghetto I lived in over 20 years ago in Washington D.C. Most of my friends lived in and around Adams Morgan, just north of Dupont Circle in NW (northwest, as all the Washington areas are quartered into NW, NE, SE, SW).

But that’s not the point. In the course of reminiscing with some of those friends, one of them posted a link to an article about a riot that took place just over 20 years ago in my neighbourhood, Mount Pleasant.

I’d say there are some uncanny correlations between what happened then and what’s happening now in the UK (it’s spread from London, if you haven’t heard yet).

It was Cinco de Mayo, a Sunday, and an important Mexican holiday, so people were celebrating. It was warm as I recall; being D.C. this means humid, too.

The way the story goes, a rookie female police officer told a Salvadoran man, who didn’t speak a word of English, to get rid of his beer or whatever it was. Officially, he resisted and pulled a knife on her so she shot him in the chest. Unofficially, apparently he went to take his belt off because drunk Salvadorans fight with their belts (who knew?).

Unlike the spark that set off our current riots, he did survive. But that’s not the whole story.

According to the article, some 85,000 Latino immigrants lived in the Adams Morgan, Mount Pleasant, Columbia Heights area, a number of whom had fled civil wars in Central and South America. This doesn’t surprise me as I lived next door to a Latino community centre and my friend Julia and I were the only white people living in our building at the time.

I called it a ‘ghetto’ because none of us had money, we were just surviving, working to live. I always figured I never had any problems in the neighbourhood due to the fact everyone knew about the crazy white guy that lived in a mostly black and Latino-occupied building.

Anyway, the police heavy-handedness sparked two days of chaos: burned out police cars littered our neighbourhood’s streets, more than 30 (mostly local) businesses were attacked and looted. I think the only chain we had at that time was 7-eleven, so it’s hardly like they were protesting global capitalism. And I got my first whiff of tear gas (which begs the question: do they use tear gas in the UK? I think it’d change a few minds about rioting if they did! Or water cannon.).

Does any of this sound familiar? A very poor neighbourhood, bad (or at the very least, careless) police behaviour and whoosh the touch-paper is lit. What seems to be much more distressing here is the fact that we’re in a global meltdown where the most disadvantaged are being even more disadvantaged by the fat cats with the financial sector’s hands up their backsides (What? You think politicians run things? Judging by the last two years, the banks run things, resisting any moves to regulate or control them, but I digress.)

Oh, but it was different back then, Rodney King had just been beaten up on the six o’clock/ten o’clock news, Good Morning America, etc. and things were just waiting to explode. I don’t think so. I liked it where I lived. People spoke to each other. Football from South America played on the telly in the laundrette. You could get all varieties of Latin American food or soul food and I seem to remember a Spanish restaurant, too.

By all reports Tottenham, where this all started, was a good community, too. Decades of work by people to make things better had made it a place that got along, a prime example of the multi-culturalism mostly working in modern-day Britain. But now it’s got a burnt-out heart and upset people. The authorities are decrying the looting and violence and, as usual, taking no responsibility for the root causes of the problem.

No surprises there. I’ve been half-expecting diatribes against single mothers again now the Conservatives have taken back power with the collusion of the so-called ‘Liberal’ Democrats. Successive governments have created the economic and social situation we now find ourselves in and none of them are willing to take responsibility for their actions — or to try and make it better.

The best quote I’ve seen so far was retweeted by Cory Doctorow overnight: “Needs repeating: you can utterly abhor the actions, but the causes cannot be ignored.”
But like those single mothers of the last Tory government, they probably will as the authorities are more concerned what this looks like with the World coming to London next year for the Olympics.

State of the publishing nation, pt 4

Following on from my last post, it’s obvious that self-publishers are getting away with murder and the traditional publishers don’t have a clue when it comes to pricing their ebooks (I’m still not going to pay more for an ebook than a hardcover).

Ebook pricing is a bit of an arcane art – but if you do the math, it comes down to two things if you set your own prices:

• How many do you have to sell to live?
• How likely are you to sell that many?

Rank hath its privileges

People like Amanda Hocking and John Locke can get away with Selling their books for $0.99 – sell millions of copies and you’re fine – but for mere mortals I’d say it’s undervaluing what we do and sets a bad precedent in some cases. I do know people who ONLY buy books that are less than a pound or a dollar, but I don’t think I’ll get more exposure by selling them at that rate (and I believe you get what you pay for).

This is topical, as recently someone I follow on Twitter posted that his book was available for $0.99. Great! I thought, I’ll go get it!

Wrong. Due to the print publisher’s way of doing things (and most of them, to be honest, I don’t want to single out just one) the publisher responsible for his book in the US doesn’t control the ebook pricing in the UK, as he’s got two publishers, one for US, one for the UK. I have to ask – what?!?

While I appreciate that traditionally, having a separate publisher for each continent/country was a better deal for authors (was it really?), but I have to ask why? Okay, I can think of some benefits for having continent specific publishers, like switching from American to English spellings and making sure your target audience understands what you’re selling. But is this giving the reader credit? I don’t think so.

Indie publishers, on the other hand, who are doing it for themselves can change the price and it goes down ACROSS THE PLANET – and that’s paper as well as ebooks. Personally, I sell copies all over the planet of my various books and I’ve never had anyone complain about the spellings (mostly English). Personally, I’d rather keep more of the pie, rather than pay two publishers for the privilege (and don’t talk to me about them giving it more exposure as I would still have to do all the work!).

Like the regionality of DVDs (archaic), this is an issue publishers are going to have to sort out. It’s a big planet out there, and there’s a lot of us out here that have money burning holes in our pockets and no, we don’t live in the continental U.S. And as a consumer, I frankly DON’T CARE that I live outside the U.S. And if you want my money – and for me to read your book – you shouldn’t either.

AN ASIDE: You do realise there are a number of sites (Walmart, Bed Bath & Beyond, Pottery Barn, to name a few) in the U.S. that haven’t worked out how to send merchandise abroad? It’s just too freaky man! (said in a stoner voice). It’s like the flat Earthers insisting on flatness. “No, there is nothing outside the continental U.S. but freaks and monsters.”

Look, we know it’s possible to release things and control the prices in multiple places at once – all we need now is for the ostriches to pull their heads out of the sand and get things done!

State of the publishing nation, pt 3

There’s a lot of controversy over ebooks – particularly among publishers and published authors who a) already have a book deal and b) depend on royalties.

The controversy mostly stems from the people who are pricing their books for the very low price of $0.99 or lower. Some people have made a lot of money doing this (see John Locke who’s sold over a million copies of his ebooks), but they have to sell a hell of a lot of books. And as with hardbacks and paperbacks, not everyone is going to sell a million copies, regardless of how cheap it is. There’s also a lot of crap published now, but more on that later.

In terms of publishing, traditional publishers cannot afford to charge that little for an ebook version of their author’s books. It’s simple and I can see their point. Not unsurprisingly, they’re worried about their physical sales.

I was at a Time Out event this week called “Thriller Night” – no, not a Michael Jackson tribute night – where Tess Gerritsen, Simon Kernick and Mark Billingham discussed their writing and getting started. At one point, Tess dropped the comment that she’d had a novel optioned by Hollywood for a $1million. She’s not poor, by any stretch.

What was more interesting was that she reckons last year more than 50% of sales of her books were ebooks. Tess also thinks that those sales are eating into sales of her paperbacks, but not affecting hardback sales. Her new book (Kindle version) is priced at $12.41 on Amazon.com and £7.69 on Amazon.co.uk, hardcover $16.37/£8.54, which is approximately the same price at current exchange rates.

Right, simple math says she has to sell a lot fewer copies of her books to get her royalties than John Locke with his $0.99 specials. The next question is how likely is it at this price? Personally, it would have to be one of my favourite authors or a book I was desperate to read before I’d pay that kind of price. I tend to have an upper limit of £4.99 or just over $8.00 for an ebook generally. And from the Indie publishing side of the fence, that’s a fair price.

I don’t price mine that high (although I seem to have gremlins mucking about with the prices on Amazon at the mo). As I’m an ‘Indie’ publisher I think pricing my ebooks at $3.45 or £2.99 is a reasonable deal (just realised I’m undercharging in dollars – drat!) for something that has cost me nothing to produce beyond my time and the costs of editing and producing a cover.

Complications and predjudices

What is an issue is a general perception of the people who publish their books for $0.99. “They’re trolls who can’t write for shit, hence they can’t get a REAL publisher to look at their book*” is the vibe I get from traditionally published authors. In fact Mark Billingham basically said all $0.99 ebooks are crap and whatever you do as an aspiring author DO NOT go down that route because you’ll be crap too and you’ll never get back. Gee, thanks Mark.

He’s not totally wrong about what’s out there. I recently received a handful of books via LibraryThing’s member giveaways which is a way for new authors to get their work out there and get some reviews/publicity at the same time. Of the six or so books I received, about 50% of them were dire. I’m not being malicious and I’d hardly criticise anyone for something I’m guilty of myself.

The simple fact is the bad ones could have used an editor. The others were polished, professional books that I’d be happy to pay for. The crap ones made me angry. So I can see Mark’s point. Like Desk Top Publishing did for printed material in the ‘90s, self-publishing has lowered standards across the board and we have to depend on the public to ascertain what’s good and what’s bad. Gasp!

But at the same time, the reviews and comments appearing on Goodreads, LibraryThing or Amazon are starting to reflect this, one of the most common I see being: “this book needs an editor”.

I resent Mark’s lumping me into the same category as the rest as I work damn hard to make sure my books are of a professional quality and get the attention the readers expect – no, that I expect – from a book. But at the same time, I suspect his repulsion is fear of losing sales to a medium he doesn’t know. And that’s a problem that pervades the traditional publishing sector.

They just don’t get it.

Next time: No one understands the pricing models

*All three authors admitted that publishing deals are mostly about luck – if that’s true, self-publishers are trying to eliminate games of chance from their publishing experience.