north of midnight

It's that month again, the one where the witchy goings on go on, and the ghosts and the ghoulies come out to play. It's that time when the leaves on the tree light up, and then fall and make rust of the gutters and the pavements. It's the time when kids come knocking on your door for goodies and the cold comes nipping at your bones. It's also that time when I have a new book out and it is, appropriately, witchy-ish, ghostly-ish, and halloween-ish. (I decided not to write ghoulies-ish, because, well, you know . . .) Anyway, it's called North of Midnight, and it is a collection of darkly slanted tales, all with a kink of the supernatural to them. Just right for this time of year, perhaps.

There are nine pieces in North of Midnight, of which about half of the content is published for the first time. Technically, all but two of the pieces should have been published before, but owing to magazines and anthologies collapsing it just never happened. And rather than send the tales out elsewhere, I elected to put them together and make a collection. It's not a massive collection. It's about 240 pages long, if we're to believe the page count, and I think that's a nice length. I'm not a big fan of enormous anthologies and collections. The commitment required to start new story after new story can be a bit too much to ask a reader over the course of 400 or 500 pages. That's how I feel anyway. Give me a 130-pager or at a push a 250-pager any day of the week. Sometimes less is more, and as it's true about the prose in a short story, it makes sense to me that it should be true about how many pages there should be in a collection.

I won't say much about the pieces inside, other than that if you're read my supernatural-flavoured tales in books and magazines, then you'll have an idea of what they are about. If you haven't read any of those pieces before, then hey, it can be a surprise.

North of Midnight is available as a paperback:

HERE for you if you're in the UK

HERE for you if you're in the USA

and via your own local amazon store if you're in the EU (here's the German link. Here's the French. Both are written in English).

All being well, an ebook version should be available before or around the New Year, via Kobo and Amazon Kindle.

Thanks for reading.

Happy Halloween.

what i wouldn't give for kindle unlimited

It’s been a while since I mentioned my ebook novella What I Wouldn’t Give. It’s been a while since anyone else mentioned it too. And still longer since anyone bought a copy.

I’m not particularly surprised. The ebook novella was always an experiment for me, a way of learning how to format such a book, create a cover for it, and to publish it myself for as little money as possible. It wasn’t something that I was going to “market” like a professional. Hell, I doubt I’ll ever do anything like a professional; I rather suspect I’ll be a hopeless amateur the rest of my life. The plan was to simply get it up and available and see what happened. Anyway . . .

The easiest way to go about this was through Amazon, and so that’s where I went to do it. After all, there were plenty of “how to” articles floating around the internet, and some YouTube videos that helped as well; enough of them for me to grasp the basics and put out a no frills ebook.

Being a straightforward novella, What I Wouldn’t Give didn’t require me to insert a contents page or much of the jazzy stuff that can be put into ebooks these days, such as hypertext and so on. It felt like all I had to do was get the writing right, and format away. Simples, as the Meerkats say. All the same, I did a bit of interior work on the book. For instance, starting sections in Bold type, just to differentiate sections from what had gone before, and to make the text look interesting before you even started reading it. (You can catch up about that stuff here.)

It had been in my mind, back then, to make the novella available on other platforms too, after a while: Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and anywhere else that might offer a place to sell it. But that proved more complicated than I was ready for at the time. It was also going to be potentially costly. Where Amazon aced it over most of its competitors was by allowing you to list your ebook without paying for an ISBN or the near-mythical eISBN. (In some countries ISBNs are free; in the UK they are anything but free. And when the budget for the project is the change in your butt cheek pocket, this is a no-go area.)

That’s slowly changed and making use of the other platforms is now a real and desirable possibility. Though Kobo and others prefer an ISBN, to make use of all of their facilities, they now appear to offer in-store equivalents.  Enough to at least get you off the ground. Suddenly, “going wide”, as they call it, isn’t as costly as it once was. And given the dangers inherent when companies have such market dominance they are almost a monopoly, I think more and more writers want to spread the availability of their books, rather than find the terms of their agreements a little one-sided in any one particular company’s favour, and then wind up at the bottom end of the gig economy, out on the street with a Homeless and Boneless sign pencilled on a piece of cardboard.

But ever the contrarian (a word I may have just made up, or at the least misspelled) I have just signed the ebook up to Kindle Unlimited, making it uniquely available through Amazon.  Partly this is laziness, partly it’s me wanting to see if it makes a difference to the number of people who have read it. On Kindle Unlimited it’s possible to borrow the ebook for free, rather than pay the staggeringly high amount of 99p for it (less than a cup of coffee from your favourite coffee chain).

Despite mentioning the ebook in author biographies attached to short story sales – the one bit of marketing you could say I have done – sales of What I Wouldn’t Give have hardly been impressive, even though some kindly souls have put up some nice reviews for the tale. One of the mistakes I’d made was to discourage people from reviewing the title on Amazon; I hadn’t realised that the reviews also boost its visibility and store position and that it’s not simply down to sales alone. Told you I was a hopeless amateur. But it is what it is.

It’s my hope that the Kindle Unlimited offer might see someone else read the piece. If someone does, they might even be nice enough to review it for me.

To read What I Wouldn’t Give in the US, click here.

To read What I Wouldn’t Give in the UK, click here.

after that, this

I’d just come off the back of a big book that I was then calling HEARTSTONES TO ALAEDORNIA. It was a fantasy novel, and it was complicated, and it had hurt my head to write. The first draft was just over 200,000 words long and if it was ever going to look like something anyone would want to read – including me – I was going to have to do a lot of work on it. It was a messy first draft, but okay, at least it was something to work on, and something to work on is better than nothing.

Over the next year, as I continued to write new short stories, I did do that work. I found the thread of the narrative and pulled it tight, pared away the excess (including the TO ALAEDORNIA in the title), and got the book down to a leaner 136,000 words. I polished it. Buffed it up. Then I started to send it out.

During the time HEARTSTONES was collecting rejections, I started on a new book. After all, that’s what you do if you write, isn’t it?

(I mention this because I have met a few people who write their first book and then sit on their hands while they send it off to agents and publishers – and they wait, and they wait, and they wait. Uhm . . . No. Don’t do that. Write the next thing you have to write while the first book is going out. After all, if the first people who see it accept it, you’ll be expected to write another one anyway. So why waste your time? Get on with it. Write.)

HEARTSTONES was a pretty serious piece of work. In my mind, at least, it tried to do all the things that I thought a good book that aspires to be more than disposable entertainment should do. It had themes and subtext, a challenging narrative, a complicated set of characters who grew and changed over the course of the book, and a resolution that felt like it had always meant to be that way. It was technically challenging to write, in that it was really only a one-character point-of-view piece but took place over different times in the characters’ lives and in some unusual locations. But it was a pretty satisfying experience for me, and I thought I had done a good thing in making it, even if it wasn’t perfect. Because, after all, no book is perfect, however hard the writer works on it. I was probably as pleased with it as I could be. Somewhere along the way the book had become the book it wanted to be and not the book I had wished it had been, and that is fair enough and something I have learned to accept when it comes to writing books. They often know what they want to be more than the writer knows.

But . . .

There was one thing I kept coming back to, though, when I thought about the book. That fantasy novel, it was pretty serious, I kept thinking. It was quite grim in places and pulled very few punches. There weren’t many moments of levity in it.

For my own sake as much as anyone who might read it, I decided the next book should be a little lighter. The tone should be easier, even if darkness crept in – which, seeing as I was writing it, I suspected it would.

I didn’t have a title or a plot. I had vague ideas about a couple of characters, including one of their names: Rusby Once. The location for the first part of the book would be the country lanes in which I used to play as I’d grown up, and I wanted to use an old folly in the area as the basis for something, some plot development, some important part of the narrative. That’s about all I knew. Apart from one other thing: I knew I wanted the prose to set up the way the book might come across. I like long sentences, and have to fight with myself not to go on and on when I write. So, with that in mind, I decided to do something a little more punchy than usual. Shorter sentences, shorter book, I was probably thinking. And more dialogue to convey ideas. Make it more easily accessible than HEARTSTONES.

I had an opening line, and like most of the lines that I write, I had little idea where it had come from. But I went with it anyway, deciding to follow where it led to. Here’s what I had for the opening:

Weird 24.

That’s all. But it felt right. I carried on from there, trying to keep things sharp like that, while allowing room for the characters to introduce themselves. In relatively quick time they did, and when the characters come alive then some sort of plot inevitably follows. After a few months that stretched to close to a year (with a few months’ break in the middle thanks to pesky old real life interfering in the process) I had a first draft – what I like to call the story draft – of about 90,000 words and I thought it hung together pretty well and had some nice light moments in it, and yes, some dark ones too.

My girlfriend read the book, while I went back to sorting out what was going on with HEARTSTONES (after a few rejections I did yet more work on it to make it a little shinier, a little more polished, so I could submit it to a few other places). Anyway, the good news was she liked it. She made a really good suggestion, too. That I should up the age of the leads. In the first draft they were 11 and 12. She thought that, by beefing things up a little, the book would be better served with them as older teenagers, and the moments of darkness wouldn’t be traumatic to any younger audience that the book might naturally have picked up with protagonists of more tender years. I thought about this and realised she was quite right, so Gideon Sawyer became 16 years old and Rusby Once fast-forwarded through a few summers at the flick of a pen to become 17.

In the meantime, as HEARTSTONES continued to pick up rejections, and on the back of finishing the first draft of the new lighter fantasy, which at this point I was calling “the Rusby Once book”, I had a sudden window of good health and energy and, in a fit of pique at the fantasy novel getting rejected so sorely and surely, I wrote what would become my first published book, HOUR OF THE BLACK WOLF. It was written at break-neck speed and first drafted in 10 days, and like the Rusby Once book, had some lighter moments in it. It was about 56,000 words long. It was accepted on first submission, on condition I made some revisions. So I did, and it went through the all the usual steps of being professionally edited and proofed and published without a hiccup. It even picked up a couple of good notices when it came out. If there’s a moral to this, or a life lesson to take in and abide by, then I don’t know what it is.

Baffled but pleased, I went back to sending out the big fantasy, and started on the rewrite of the Rusby Once book, wondering if it and HEARTSTONES would find a publisher as easily as HOUR OF THE BLACK WOLF had done. All I was sure of was that I could breathe out now, that I was finally someone who’d had a book professionally published. The rest would happen as it would. Or wouldn’t. But for a working-class kid sending out his own untutored prose, I thought I had done well.

As it happened, HEARTSTONES found a publisher, and then wasn’t published. Because of me. But that’s another story. And I found a better title than “the Rusby Once book” for the Rusby Once book. I decided to call it A CLASH OF ICHOR AND BLOOD and I sent it out to the few agents who’d made nice noises about my earlier books. They made more nice noises but that was about as far as it went. I didn’t have the heart to go through the dreary task of hunting out new agents only to be turned down by them. It felt too depressing and time-consuming. (After all, if you keep repeating the same actions you’re going to get the same results, and I really didn't want the same results.) So I decided to do something different with A CLASH OF ICHOR AND BLOOD.

In future posts we’ll get on to what I’m doing, have a guess at why things have turned out as they have, the good and the bad and the ugly, and what I’m doing about it.

experiments in e-books (iii)

Here are some formatting rules and instructions that I worked out (with the able assistance of my girlfriend – she also designed this blog, by the way, so a round of applause there) when I was formatting the long short story, well, novella really, What I Wouldn’t Give.

I’m assuming there that you’ve already spent your days banging your head against the wall trying to make your work as good as it can be by now. If not, you might like to read some of the earlier blog entries titled “experiments in e-books” - part i and part ii.

Okay, then. Let’s do it.

Remove Old Formatting

First step. Copy your document and paste it into Microsoft’s Notepad function, or another plain text editor. This will take out all the formatting of your document. Leaving you with 12-point type, no justification, no centre alignments, etc.

Copy the Notepad document.

Open a new Microsoft Word File.

Disable all Microsoft Word auto-corrects. Spell-check, automatic page breaks, orphan commands, etc.

Fonts, Typeface Sizes, Italics...

Use Times New Roman typeface set at 12-point as a background.

Now. The only typeface sizes you can use in the text of your manuscript are: 10, 12, 14, 20. This is because Kindle readers only work to those four type sizes. By putting in a 13-point letter, you may wind up with either a 12- or 14-point character in your Kindle reader, depending what mood it’s in.

Present the document as you would like to have it read. Italic words you want italicised. Make bold any words you want bold. Underline any words you want underlined, though be aware the convention is that underlined words are generally thought of as hyperlinks from within the text and can cause confusion if applied otherwise.

Justify

To have even margins rather than staggered margins, apply to the overall text of your document the justification options as you would have it look on a finished page. Justified left and right.

Page Breaks

Insert page breaks as you would ordinarily insert page breaks in Word, but not by using typed shortcuts. Remember, you should have all auto functions switched off.

Never use more than 3 paragraph break Returns in the document without including some type or character of some sort. Kindle doesn’t recognise more than three empty line spaces and will go all Hal-like from Arthur C Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Now, a very important point:

Paragraphs

Kindle doesn’t recognise Tabs consistently. This is why you do the copy and paste through Notepad, knocking out all formatting. Even so, some formatting regarding tabbed paragraph indents may remain. So, you need to delete all tabs for paragraphs in the document. Time consuming and laborious, but it has to be done, otherwise Hal won’t open the pod-bay doors.

Instead of looking like this:

                                                     *
Dave walked out of the door.
        He carried a plank under his arm.
       It was a long plank, and he was lugging it around with him in memory of the fine comedian Eric Sykes, who had recently died. Dave had seen a film in which Eric had carried such a plank around with him and it had made Dave laugh. It was more fun than being Prime Minister anyway.
                                                     *

It must look like this:

*
Dave walked out of the door.
He carried a plank under his arm.
It was a long plank, and he was lugging it around with him in memory of the fine comedian Eric Sykes, who had recently died. Dave had seen a film in which Eric had carried such a plank around with him and it had made Dave laugh. It was more fun than being Prime Minister anyway.
*

(Note: You must remove any spaces behind the last letter or punctuation of any paragraph. There can’t be a “Dave walked out of the door.(space)” because this can skew the continuity of smooth paragraphs one after the other and may result in an unintended section break.)

So. To correct the tabs function and insert paragraph indents to a document without using tabs…

(I should probably point out here that all this is based on Word 97-2000, so you may have to search through newer versions of Word to find the same performance options. But . . .)

On your menu bar go to Tools >Options >General >Measurement units (this is found towards the bottom of the screen) and change it from Centimetres to Points.

Then, highlighting your manuscript, go to Format >Paragraph >Indents and Spacing. In the Indentation dialogue box go to Special and select ‘First line’. Apply 25 points and your document will look like this:

      *
      Dave walked out of the door.
      He carried a plank under his arm.
      It was a long plank, and he was lugging it around with him in memory of the fine comedian Eric Sykes, who had recently died. Dave had seen a film in which Eric had carried such a plank around with him and it had made Dave laugh. It was more fun than being Prime Minister anyway.
      *

Not ideal, but better than it was. Highlight/select your first section break asterisk and the first paragraph (in this case the first paragraph is one line, but in the case of, say, a three-line first paragraph select the entire first paragraph). Then go through the same procedure of  Format >Paragraph >Indents and Spacing. In the Indentation dialogue box go to Special and select ‘First line’. THIS time, select a points value of 0.1 to give the following result:

*
Dave walked out of the door.
        He carried a plank under his arm.
       It was a long plank, and he was lugging it around with him in memory of the fine comedian Eric Sykes, who had recently died. Dave had seen a film in which Eric had carried such a plank around with him and it had made Dave laugh. It was more fun than being Prime Minister anyway.
        *

Then select the first asterisk and centre justify it using the standard toolbar option.

                                                       *
Dave walked out of the door.
       He carried a plank under his arm.
       It was a long plank, and he was lugging it around with him in memory of the fine comedian Eric Sykes, who had recently died. Dave had seen a film in which Eric had carried such a plank around with him and it had made Dave laugh. It was more fun than being Prime Minister anyway.
       *


Highlight/select the trailing asterisk and repeat the points at 0.1 procedure.

It’s a pain, it’s laborious, but you need to do this through the entire document.

You also need to apply 0.1 points to anything you want to centre justify. This includes titles and chapter headings (but more later in another post on chapters for novels and short story titles for collections; here I’m dealing with a one-off long short story document).

Where to Begin

To add a ' Beginning' to a book : Place the cursor where you want the book to start, click “Insert > Bookmark.” In the "Bookmark name:" field, type “Start” (without the quotes) and click "Add."

This will link from the Home button on the Kindle device itself, along with others that should link to Cover, Contents, End, and so on.

In my novella file, “What I wouldn’t Give,” I’ve put the beginning of the book above the line, in one of the first spaces of the first page of prose. Putting it at the start of the text is the convention, but when I did so I found the neat marker line I’d inserted as a graphic to tart things up a bit had disappeared.

Save As

When you’re happy with how your document is looking, save the file through Word as a “web page, filtered” and that’s the one you upload to Kindle Direct Publishing (kdp.amazon.com).

You can upload as a Doc but we found the chances of it going wrong are greatly increased if you do.

Preview and Preview Again

Note: performing the upload isn’t publishing it but this is your official book file! At this stage it’s advisable to take a preview and put it on something – ideally a Kindle – to check it all through. Kindle Previewer is available as a free download from Amazon and shows the basic form settings for Kindle, Kindle Fire, Kindle Touch, Apple Kindle apps, etc….

DRM?

There’s stuff to think about like Digital Rights Management then. In short this is a sort of crappy copyright protection control that’s easily overcome by anyone wanting to pirate the ebook. Nice in principal and you may as well apply it, but it seems from a casual glance that other ebook files such as ePub and PDF are obviously easily copyable.

To Conclude...

And that’s about it for formatting your work. It’s wise, as I say, to go over the document on a Kindle, to read it through. By now you should be sick to death of the book, but it’s still worth checking, because you may find typos or lines you want to edit.

Believe me, there’ll be no special alchemy that transforms a duff line into a grand one when the book is finally available on site for download.

Next time out we’ll talk about covers.

experiments in e-books (i)

So you’ve written your novel, your novella, your short story, your short story collection. Maybe you’ve written more than one novel. Maybe you have short stories coming out of your ears. And perhaps you’ve had some luck finding homes for the stories and even the odd novel. You’ve flirted with mainstream publishing – by which I mean an established publisher of books, rather than a guy producing his own imprint out of his bedroom (honourable and noble enough though this is of him) – and it didn’t lead to a lifelong romance. You still love writing. You still love books. Your heart’s not broken, but possibly it’s bruised.

You’ve got a novel that’s not seen print. Maybe more than one. You’ve a hundred thousand words or so of short stories that never really found a home. That novella, who was ever going to publish it anyway? I mean, come on, realistically. It would be commercial suicide on a publisher’s part. And besides, you didn’t really know whose door to knock on to help get it into print in the first place.

So . . .

At some point the lure of the e-book gets to you. If it’s not at the top of your list of publishing ambitions, then somewhere further down – take a glance below “Winning the Nobel Prize for Literature” and search somewhere around “Getting At Least One Person To Buy Your Book At A Book Signing” – you’ll eventually find it. Straight-to-e-book, like the good old days of straight-to-video.

But is it a good idea?

I think the only answer to that is “it depends”.

Depends on how much work goes into it, depends on how much work you want to put into it, depends on who’s publishing it, depends on what your expectations for it are, depends on what exactly it is you’re publishing.

For the sake of brevity (and because it’s something I have a clue about) we’ll stick to publishing fiction.

The first and finest course a book can take to print is still through a mainstream publisher. Some – many – self-published authors who’ve had some success may dispute that. They’ll talk about how much more they’re earning by selling directly through Amazon or Smashwords etc, how they wouldn’t give away their back catalogue unless they had a bigger stake in the royalties than any publisher will offer, creative control in promotion, and a bunch of other things up to and including someone to pet their poodle while they use the lavatory. (I exaggerate, of course, for comedic effect. But only a little.)

It’s interesting to hear them talk. To a point.

Because mostly all they seem to talk about is the money. Every self-published e-book author you read interviewed or talking on the net usually starts off by telling you how much money he’s making. He tends to gloss over the actual writing and craft. Read some of the stuff that comes through into printed books after it’s found success electronically and you could believe that the quality of the writing was hardly ever a concern in the first place. At least not to the writer.

Often all it would take to fix those books is someone casting a sharp, critical eye over the manuscript and offering suggestions to improve things here and there. Like making the lead character’s name consistent throughout the book or pointing out that it’s quite a feat of biology to “shake his hand with a warm smile”.

There are things every writer needs, from the initial sympathetic (or stern) feedback from early drafts, to editing, copy-editing, proof reading, and even to someone saying “Hey, you know, this sucks. But if we delete this chapter and move this one here…” I won’t pretend all mainstream publishers give you that. The industry has changed from what it once was and there are now writers who’ve never met an editor in person and have just seen the Word file sent to the publishers printed and bound and out on the shelves. But for the most part, your chances of getting the things you most need to make your book better than it was come from being published by professionals.

The next question up is how can you tell the professionals from the hopeful amateurs?

The answer is it isn’t always easy. Especially in the case of small e-book publishers, which is what we’re concerned with here. Some e-book publishers are taking on plenty of half-decent and good works (often from writers who’ve fallen off the track of mainstream publishing) in the hope that one of them goes viral and starts selling in big numbers. And that’s fair. It’s commerce, which is what they’re interested in. But is that good for you?

Swings and roundabouts.

Although some of these e-book publishers will take the drudgery of producing the books and setting them out in the correct(ish) format and provide a cover, and they may even offer some feedback and editing, it’s doubtful that they’ll invest in you as heavily as a publisher sinking money into actual print copies. You’ll be listed on their imprint’s homepage, promoted in newsletters, linked to from their site. But beyond that… Well. Lap of the Gods stuff.

But you will have had one very important boost if you are picked up by one of these e-book firms. Someone will have read your work (unless the whole thing’s a con act, like old vanity press publishing) and deemed it worthy to see print. And that is satisfying indeed and gives a certain sort of stamp of approval. It legitimises what you’re doing. Takes away that whiff of desperation self-publishing often carries with it.

Something worth considering, then.

But what are your expectations? And how are they limited by opting to try your luck with a small e-book publisher?

If you want to put the books up on Amazon at the lowest list price (local sovereign currencies around the world will automatically adjust to the 99 cent lowest list price offered in the USA), an indie imprint e-book publisher is unlikely to help you there. Most indie imprint e-books sell for 1.99 to 4.99, depending. If you want to run promotional offers, or discount coupons, then the same issue is going to arise. And what if you’ve a variety of e-books you’d like to put up, in various genres? So far indie imprints seem to be as conservative, in their own way, as mainstream publishers who’d baulk at you handing in a crime novel after a science fiction thriller after a love story.

Maybe self-publishing is the way you’ll want to go if that’s the case.

It’s what I’ve tentatively decided to do with a few things that, for one reason or another, I’ve never really been all that confident will find a safe home elsewhere.

And so, as an experiment, learning as I go, I’m putting up on Amazon a 15,800-word novella or novelette, whatever you want to call it, depending on where the ever-shifting distinctions between the two are at right now, to see what will happen.

It’s called What I Wouldn't Give, and I’ll talk through the stages of starting out from nowhere – beginning with the writing – to the end point and actually coming up with product descriptions and listing the book on Amazon. I guess I’ll learn about the marketing as I go.

Stick around. Could be interesting.

publishing and how to avoid it

It’s really not what I thought.

When I was a kid – and a not very smart young adult – I thought all you did was write your book, type it up, and then take it down to the local library.

You’d hand your weighty tome across the counter. Some helpful librarian would regard you with stupefied awe because you’d actually Written A Book. And then said librarian would take your precious manuscript into the bowels of the building (actually, as a kid, my local library was a narrow, mid-row terrace with both its small downstairs rooms knocked into one and shelved with books, no real room for any bowels, though it did possess a legend about its cellar and secret tunnel used by a local highwayman, but that’s a story for another time) and once in those bowels printing presses of mysterious metals and grim inks would be charged up and a book or ten made and put on the lending shelves.

If the book was taken out enough, then maybe the library would go on to print enough of them to sell in WH Smiths, where people went if they wanted to buy a book and not just borrow it.

If you got really lucky, enough people bought it and made you rich and you got one of those jackets with leather elbow-patches and eventually sunk a swimming pool in your back garden.

That was my thinking.

It took me a while to figure out that things didn’t work like that. Slowly the shuttle weaved in and out and my mind began to pick up the thread of how publishing actually worked. Unsolicited submissions. Rejections. Small Press print. Rejections and acceptances. Vanity Presses. Always acceptances – for a fee. Agents. Rejections and acceptances and then despair when the books can’t be sold. Publishers. Rejections. And then an acceptance. Editors. Rewrites. Copy Editors. Arguments. Oh, you know. The whole kit and caboodle.

And somewhere amongst all of that it’s easy to forget that a book has to be written, rewritten, refined and found to be of commercial value. And that last is the real kicker. Commercial value. Meaning it has to fit in. It has to make money, or be thought likely to make money. Just because it’s good enough to be in print doesn’t necessarily mean it will see print. That one in particular was a hard lesson for me to learn when two agents who were interested in my stuff reluctantly came to the conclusion they didn’t think they could sell it. 

So in some ways I prefer my naive version of publishing. It seems nicer, more geared up towards writing and what we might, just now and again, call art.

I suppose the advent of the e-book, in particularly Amazon’s Kindle self-publishing facility, is making my old and naive notion of what publishing is about a reality. For good or ill, regarding the quality of the work. You write your book, type it up, then show it to the world and see what happens.

But there’s a crucial difference. Libraries were open to everyone in my world. You didn’t need to find a hundred notes to buy an e-reader or have to be able to afford broadband internet access... My naive notion of publishing wasn't that elitist. 

Commerce. It gets everywhere.

PS – Did I mention my book’s available to buy here?