Wellll... *something* is definitely working...

I like graphs:

That's the graph (which has appeared several times before on this blog) of downloads of Second Realm episodes on Smashwords. Each data point is a week, and I've been tracking since late May 2012, so it's basically two years' worth of data. The particular thing I like about this graph is that bit where it shoots up on the right-hand side; traffic has rocketed over the last couple of months.

Last week, as you can see, was the biggest week ever for the series. That's the blue line, which is the simple 'how many downloads this week' line. Notice too, though, that the red and green lines, which are rolling averages, are up in a big way - that's a measure of  how consistent traffic is, aiming to even out the spikes created by the fact that I only release one episode a month. The green average, which is the longer-term of the two, now stands at almost 150% of its previous peak, in August of 2012.

Hits on this blog are up pretty substantially, too; March is on track to smash the previous record (from last March). This is presumably because I'm updating regularly again - though it's worth noting that I'm blogging half as much as I did this time last year, to significantly greater effect. There seems to be more throughput from blog to downloads, too, so maybe I'm finally getting the hang of this blogging thing. I have tried to change my approach lately - aiming to be less preachy, less pompous, and to write more about my personal experience.

There is, of course, another relevant piece of information:

(Yes, I know I said I'd stop bitching about the damn PhD soon. Obviously I meant 'but not just yet' ;) )

Actually, that graph is slightly misleading, but it is true that the big dead spot which you can see through last summer corresponds to the most intense period of work I've done on the PhD; something similar goes for my failure to capitalise on the massive spike from the summer before. The PhD still isn't quite over, but I'm already starting to feel like I've been unleashed.

To cap it all off, I got a lovely 5-star review on Smashwords yesterday from Rebecca Whitlock (many thanks and I hope you continue to enjoy the series, if you're reading this). All in all, it's been a very good start to the year and I hope I can keep it up. That will, of course, require me to somehow manage to finish the next episode *and* my PhD in the next three weeks or so, but I'm getting there...

It's Like Game of Thrones Without the Sex and Violence...

It's a good time to be a fantasy author. The Hobbit and Game of Thrones are riding high. For a broader conception of fantasy, one could also draw on the success of Harry Potter and (*shudder*) Twilight, but The Hobbit and Game of Thrones are much closer to what I'm doing.

I've been trying to work out how best to 'pitch' The Second Realm to potential readers. It's something I've struggled to do for a long time, because it's quite a difficult story to summarise - 'There's this world that's a bit like a post-apocalyptic version of ours, but the apocalypse was it crashing into fairyland, and...' It takes quite a long time to get to the characters, the real meat of the story.

And you don't get a long time to sell someone on your work, usually only a sentence or two. It would be great if I could say 'You like Game of Thrones? Well, you'll like my books!', but that's a long way from guaranteed. And if I say, 'Well, it's like Game of Thrones, but with less sex and violence', people say things like 'What does that leave?' (In truth, The Second Realm is like Game of Thrones but with no sex and far less violence).

Part of the problem is that fantasy, even if we limit ourselves to 'secondary-world' fantasy (fantasy not set at least partly in 'the real world'), is a very broad genre. It stretches from the Sword-and-Sorcery pulp of Conan the Barbarian and Fritz Leiber's Swords of Lankhmar to classic epics like Lord of the Rings and Michael Scott Rohan's The Winter of the World, to the character-driven political stories of Game of Thrones or Robin Hobb's Six Duchies and Rain Wild books, all the way out to contemporary deconstructionist works like Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicles and Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastards.

And most people have only heard of three things on that list - Conan, LotR and Game of Thrones. You can be a fantasy author and be writing stories which are nothing like what most people think fantasy involves. Indeed, arguably, since the tropes in Conan, LotR and Game of Thrones are somewhat played-out (no criticism intended to their respective authors), a good fantasy author should be trying to get away from those classics.

But that does make it very difficult to pitch your project. I need to get a pitch out of this summary of The Second Realm:

Set in a world somewhat like a post-apocalyptic version of ours, where technology has fallen back to medieval levels, this is the story of a group of elite warriors, augmented with magical superpowers, who must work together to protect 'ordinary' humans from both terrifying supernatural invaders and their own superpowered brethren, not all of whom see the business of 'saving mankind' in the same terms.

Actually, in some ways, I think the closest analogy from a storytelling perspective would be a superhero comic. Probably the X-men. I quite like the idea of telling people that I'm writing 'X-men: Middle Earth'.

If that sounds like your thing, by the way, The Second Realm starts here and is also available at Smashwords, formatted for all major ebook platforms. I hope to have print collections available later this year (he says, for the third year in a row...), but for now it's all free. Enjoy!

Pricing and Giving Things Away

When Season 2 of The Second Realm launched, I decided to try releasing it on Smashwords' 'Pay What You Like' system, where users can choose any price (even free) to pay for a book. I thought of it as a sort of 'tip jar' - it's always been my intention that The Second Realm should exist primarily to be read, not to make money, but if people wanted to give me money for it, I wasn't going to say no.

Rather dishearteningly, no-one seems to have wanted to give me money for it. Worse than that, the number of people downloading Season 2 for free is much smaller than the number of people still downloading bits of Season 1 (which has always been and will remain free). While some season 1 episodes now have over 500 downloads, the early parts of season 2 have only even been *sampled* a handful of times each.

What this suggests is that most of the people accessing Season 1 are doing so out of curiosity, and then not coming back, or being put off by the fact that you do actually have to sign up for Smashwords to get at Season 2. I'd like to think that what's happening is that rather than click through a bunch of screens on Smashwords, people are coming here and reading The Second Realm on this blog, but that seems a little optimistic.

Anyway, the really nice thing about self-publishing is that there's no great faff involved in changing something that isn't working. This experiment has gone on for fifteen months now, with no positive results and some negative, so it's time to bring it to an end. As of now, Season 2 of The Second Realm is free on Smashwords.

I'm not recommending this as a universal strategy, by the way. As I said before, the purpose of The Second Realm has always been to get people reading stories by me, not to get them paying for stories by me (I'm of the opinion that I ought to have to prove myself - through something other than a blurb and marketing - before I can expect people to pay). Trying to put a tip jar system in place has ended up creating a barrier to that purpose, so I'm getting rid of the barrier.

It will be interesting to see whether anything very much changes in the performance of season 2. Episodes of Season 1 are still being downloaded at a pretty steady rate even two years after release, so unless the episodes of Season 2 have some sort of anti-downloading plague there should be quite a significant jump, but these things are always unpredictable.

Anyway, it's now even easier to get hold of Second Realm episodes. Go to! (And I hope you enjoy ;D)

Freedom and Free Stuff

Today, I'm going to draw a connection between two interesting, but at first glance very different, studies.

The first suggests that books which are 'protected' by copyright seem to have a shorter shelf-life than those which end up ex-copyright or public domain. This runs counter to one popular argument for copyright, which claims that allowing publishers to hold copyrights for longer gives them a reason to keep them in print (i.e. to continue exploiting the copyright). It's easy to see why this argument might be wrong - publishers simply hold more copyrights than they can handle, and many older works are unlikely to justify what they'd cost a big corporation to keep in print.

The second suggests that promotions based on giving away ebooks for free can help print sales. It comes with a few big caveats, like being quite a small study and, crucially, being three years old now (it's plausible that reader attitudes to free books could be starting to shift in response to the deluge of rushed self-published material, though I'm wary of claiming that they actually have - more studies are definitely needed).

The link I want to make is that both of these studies seem to support a more liberal attitude to monetising your writing. It's not that all content should be free and public domain (though maybe in an ideal world where we didn't need money to live...). It's just that fighting to 'control' or 'protect' content against 'predators' may well ultimately be financially counterproductive.

And really, this should be obvious. Compare the number of readers out there with the number of people you think might be running piracy businesses specialising in books. Books have never been a hugely lucrative industry, and certainly aren't these days. DVD and video game piracy are everywhere - around these parts, you'll occasionally be pestered in a pub by someone trying to sell dodgy DVD rips - but book piracy?

It's certainly out there, as Scott Turow found out, but, as Techdirt found out, it seems to be a supply-side-only business. People may well be sticking huge file dumps of pirated ebooks up on the web, but that's probably not where people who actually want to read a book are getting their books from (and yes, this is one anecdote, but here's another one about the effects of piracy if you're going to make a fuss).

And honestly, we want readers to borrow and share books, generally speaking. It's the most effective way to reach new readers. By contrast, damaging incidents of piracy - incidents where we actually lose money, or have our reputations besmirched by shoddy copies - are low-probability events. The possibility of them is an easy one to get upset about, but that's at least in part due to the fact that we greatly overestimate how possible they are.

The thing we as authors don't worry enough about is languishing in obscurity forever. We've all got that little voice at the back of our heads which pops up periodically to reassure us of our vast genius and inevitable Rowlingesque success. We have to believe that the graveyard of total obscurity is an impossible fate because otherwise we give up - but it's the graveyard we need to worry about.

And the way out of the graveyard is to get people to try your work. If you keep raising the entry barriers to doing so - with DRM, or high prices, or other behaviours grounded in the fear of piracy - then you make it harder and harder to get people to take a look. Your work should be able to convince people to support you on its own merits - if they like it enough, even if they got it for free, the second study suggests that they'll contribute to you financially, whether it's by buying a copy for themselves or for someone else, or by recommending and/or reviewing it. If your work can't convince people to shell out, the problem is far more likely to be one of marketing or quality than of piracy.

Relax. Don't fight for control of your work. Let it stand on its own merits.

Blogger It

So, I mentioned in yesterday's recap of progress so far that there are things to be said about my blogging and this blog. Let's start with a quick apology for having been AWOL last week and inconsistent for a couple of weeks before that. I was simply extremely busy and struggling to keep up. Things have settled down now, and I'll be making up for lost time this week with at least a couple of extra posts, of which this is the first.

These inconsistencies may not matter terribly much, though. I've now been tracking the performance of The Second Realm at Smashwords for almost a year, and a quick analysis of available data shows no clear correlation between activity of any kind on this blog and Second Realm traffic. To whit:

The top graph shows pageviews on this blog (apologies for the scaling - Blogger's stat tracker isn't terribly good at graphs); the bottom graph shows downloads of The Second Realm each week (the blue line), plus four- (red) and twelve-week (green) rolling averages. They don't match up perfectly, but the big spike on the bottom graph is for the end of August 2012, so they're lined up pretty well.

The big spike on the top graph is for March, and represents the peak of an assault by Swedish spambots which is also responsible for a big chunk of January and February traffic. The total drop-off at the end is a bit of an illusion because while April was at about the same level as February, when this screencap was taken, May was only three and a half days old and is actually on-course to outdo April by a small margin. The red line represents a rough guesstimate of what the non-spambot traffic has done.

If blogging (or at least, my blogging) was an effective way of marketing fiction, we would expect the bottom graph to resemble the top one, or at least not show the slight downward trend that it appears to show. If you squint hard at the green line, it does look like there might be the beginnings of an up-turn, maybe, but it doesn't look terribly significant compared to the big rise in blog traffic.

I have another graph which plots my activity (in terms of posts per week) on here against the blue line measure of Second Realm figures, but there's such a severe lack of correlation on it that it's almost illegible, so there's little point my sharing it.

So the bad news is that this blog doesn't appear to be doing much to help the performance of my fiction. I'm sure that's not the case for all blogs, but I suspect that my growing focus on non-writing-related issues, and possibly the way I write, are not attracting people who are looking for the kind of fiction that I write.

That said, there is a definite rise going on in blog traffic since I started blogging regularly and carefully again. It remains to be seen whether the dip in activity over the last couple of weeks will have produced a visible dip in pageviews (or indeed, whether this week's burst of extra will produce a spike), but there's no denying that since late December and my New Year's resolution to put out at least a hundred blog posts this year, there's a clear upward trend.

Blogging, it seems, is a pretty good way to promote a blog at least. It's been good for me in other ways, too - good discipline, good writing practice, good thinking practice while I've been too busy with day-jobs to work on my thesis and so on. It's also pushed me to engage more with the world at large, and I can't discount the effect of the positive feedback I keep getting either.

So whether or not my blogging here is effective promotion (and I'll check in again on this later in the year, just in case that green line is on an upward trend), I'm going to keep blogging. I enjoy it and it's both a useful habit and a useful outlet. If you're looking to use blogging to promote your fiction, though, it might be better to use me as a 'what not to do' than a 'what to do' guide.

If you have any suggestions about how I could strengthen the link between my blogging and my fiction, by the way, I'd love to hear them ;).

High Drama (part 2)

Remember this? I do occasionally come back and tie off loose ends...

In that blog post, I talked about a problem that arises when we try to define 'fantasy' as a genre; specifically, that it's hard to pick out the essential component of something being 'fantasy', when stories with fantastical trappings - dragons, swords, magic etc. - can vary from A Song of Ice and Fire to The Lord of the Rings to The Lies of Locke Lamora and all the way back again.

I phrased this in terms of a concept drawn from video game theory, the concept of a core aesthetic - defined as the underlying emotional reason that we go to a particular genre or category within a form. A core aesthetic is, ultimately, the experience we go to a work of art in search of. Today, I plan to outline what I think the core aesthetic of fantasy (literature) is.

First, though, two things it's not. In the first part of this post, I linked to this video, which outlines the theory of core aesthetics in videogame genres. Now, they actually offer a definition of fantasy as it applies to videogames, which is that fantasy is vicarity - fantasy, in videogames, is what allows you to become something you are not; a soldier, or a gangster, or a pilot etc. etc.

That works very well for videogames, but it's much harder to do in literature. Because when reading you don't have control over the choices that the characters make, it's very rare to find fantasy literature which involves fantasy in this sense. There is a degree of vicarity, to be sure, in our enjoyment of the heroic and exciting deeds of protagonists in all genres, but in literature I think vicarity is the province primarily of horror and (erotic) romance, which are the most visceral, experiential forms of writing - the genres most focussed on making you feel what the characters are feeling.

But, intuitively, lots of things that are quite definitely 'fantasy' aren't primarily about vicarious enjoyment - there's no better example than A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones. No-one's getting any pleasure from vicariously living in that world (okay, psychopaths notwithstanding). Similarly, there are things that intuitively don't seem to be fantasy which are deeply vicarious - the aforementioned erotic romance, for example.

So vicarity doesn't make a good definition of fantasy. Quite separately, we need to make clear the distinction between 'fantasy' and 'magical realism'. Tempting though it is to uphold Terry Pratchett's charming quip that magical realism is 'like a polite way of saying you write fantasy', there is a key difference, and it's an illuminating one to discuss.

In essence, the difference is this: in a magical realist story, when the ghost or spirit or monster or whatever turns up, no-one worries too much about why, or how it works, or what the logic that governs its behaviour should be. No-one pays any attention to the system of the magic.

In fantasy, however, one key element is showing that there is some system to the magic. So, whereas in a magical realist story, a ghost would just be a character who was dead, when I wrote Heaven Can Wait, my fantasy novel about a ghost (which is coming back soon, I fervently hope), the story explored the mechanics of being a ghost and the spiritual implications of life after death just as much as the character dynamics of the protagonist trying to relate to the life he'd left behind (which would be the sole focus in magical realism).

That's not to exclude fantasy stories where the magic isn't what we call 'rules-based'. Heaven Can Wait is a rules-based magic story; what this means is that the reader should be able to figure out and sometimes predict things the magic system makes possible before they actually appear on-page (in fact, the very best rules-based magic systems will leave the reader thinking about all the cool things you can do with magic which there wasn't time to fit into the book). The Lord of the Rings, by contrast, doesn't have rules-based magic. Tolkein never explains how Gandalf's powers relate to or differ from those of the One Ring, for example.

But The Lord of the Rings definitely is fantasy, not magical realism. Why? Because things we know about the magic itself - that the ring is corrupting, that it must be destroyed to curb the power of Sauron - are significant to the plot. Put simply, there is a relation between character and setting which is essential to fantasy but not essential to magical realism.

Therein lies the key. Fantasy is about what fantastical settings allow you to do with characters, not in general (because other genres, like sci-fi, horror and magical realism also rely on setting-character interactions) but in respect of a particular core aesthetic, which I call high drama.

By high drama, I mean a particular feeling you get at the climax of a fantasy novel. Think about Frodo and Sam as they stand on the edge of the precipice in Mount Doom, as Frodo finally succumbs to the Ring's power. (Those of you who've read the final volume of the Wheel of Time, think about Rand at Shayol Ghul - this is probably the best possible example of what I'm talking about, but slightly less well-known as yet than the climax of LotR).

It's that moment where the whole world hangs in the balance of one character's decision; that is high drama. It puts the character under a microscope, shows you how all the stresses of a lifetime can shape morals and wisdom. It can be achieved any number of ways, in the everyman who finds a lost artefact of power (Frodo), or the destined hero who faces up to the ultimate trial (Rand in the Wheel of Time), or the crook who stumbles over a sinister plot (Jimmy the Hand in Raymond Feist's Riftwar trilogy), or the ruler who faces up to the corruption of her government and/or nation (Mara in Feist and Janny Wurts' Kelewan trilogy) and so on.

The heart of the matter, and the reason genre fantasy books and series end up so long, is that to give that one moment of decision weight, you have to feel the character's life adding up to it. Whatever the reputation of the genre for shallow, stereotypical characters, when done right it is more character-focussed than any other form of literature.

I can't think of a fantasy story that I've read that didn't supply this core aesthetic. I can think of books with magic in, some of them very fine (Balthasar's Oddysey by Amin Maalouf, arguably), which don't do this, but they don't feel like fantasy to me. Dragons, swords, stupid character names and hypersexualised she-demons (naming no names, Cersei Lannister) have nothing to do with it.

(Addendum: I realised after writing this post that high drama doesn't have to be reserved entirely for the climax of an entire series - there can be other moments of high drama in a series, as for example at the climax of season 1 of The Second Realm or even, arguably, in the red pill/blue pill choice in The Matrix. It's still that sense that everything we know about the character has a part to play in this crucial decision that he/she is making. I might need to do a full post expanding on this point at some later date; there isn't space to do it justice here.)

High Drama (part 1)

(This is not the next installment of the series I've promised on WEIRDos - I'm planning to run that on Thursdays/Fridays, but there won't be one this week because the new Second Realm episode is out this weekend. It's also not the blog I was promising yesterday about my cock-up with Smashwords, which will run on Thursday)

Instead, today, before the moment fades, I want to start on a topic I've been prompted towards by the final volume of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, a fantasy epic I've been a fan of for over a decade. The final volume came out a couple of weeks ago, and I'm finally reading it (it's very good - and don't worry about spoilers; I won't be discussing it in detail, and I haven't finished it yet so I can't spoil any of the really juicy stuff).

The Wheel of Time captures what I feel to be the essence of 'fantasy' as a genre, and thus forms a very good jumping-off point for an attempt to define the genre. You might be thinking that you know how fantasy is defined - after all, there are sections in the bookshops for it (actually, and I feel this is a point in my favour, most of the bookshops I've been in lump fantasy and sci-fi together) - but I want to pose the question in a slightly new way.

This is a video about design theory for video games, and to those of you not literate in games, it may be a little bit dense, but it provides the basics of a framework for genre definition that I think we need to bring into the SFF world in books (I don't mean, by the way, that I want to use their definition of fantasy - I think it works just fine for games, but isn't what 'fantasy' is truly about in literature).

Put simply, the video lays out a way of analysing genre which cuts things up in terms of core aesthetics rather than superficial ones (the superficial aesthetics in games being the mechanics). The core aesthetics of a piece of art (for some legitimate-but-broad definition of 'art') are the things that we go to that particular piece of art for rather than any other.

The presenter claims that outside of the video game world, where art within a medium is broken up by genre, the genres are defined by core aesthetics. This is certainly true, I think, for cinema (which makes sense, since it's the field which has made most effective use of the concept) - it's easy to see that romance, drama, horror and so on are fulfilling different emotional/psychological needs. Something similar is true for most forms of literary genre - after all, you can tell what a person goes to erotica or horror for pretty clearly, but the same is generally true of literary fiction, thrillers etc. etc.

But there's quite a difference between the way sci-fi and fantasy are handled in films and the way they're handled in books. By way of example, despite all involving fictitious science, Armageddon is a disaster movie, while The Matrix is an action film and The Day The Earth Stood Still essentially a kind of political thriller.

By contrast, consider my favourite science fiction novel, Dan Simmons' Hyperion (actually, my favourite is the second in the series, but never mind that). Hyperion contains, in order, a horror story, an erotic romance (though not a massively explicit one), a bizarre cross between a reflexive meditation on art and a psychological thriller, a family drama, a Hollywood-Chandleresque detective story, and an unmistakably literary character piece tale-within-a-tale.

All of them have elements of fictitious science, with characters undergoing relativistic time dilation effects, or visiting dozens of worlds, or travelling through vast galactic computer networks, or being hunted by sinister automata, but the underlying stories are of vastly different types.

So what makes them all science fiction? Well, in a lesser collection of stories, the answer would be 'space ships and laser guns' - there are certainly many works of sci-fi which are really just thrillers transposed into a spacey context. In the case of Hyperion, though, every one of those stories involves an element of fictional science whose effect on the characters could only be achieved by that means - one character, for example, is made immortal; another sees his lover only a handful of times, between relativistic journeys that mean she ages through a whole life-span while he stays young.

The key to defining sci-fi, then, is this link between scenario and characters - this is what links all of Hyperion's stories with the much more precisely scientific sci-fi of Arthur Clarke's Earthlight or  Greg Egan's Diaspora. We shouldn't fall into the trap of saying that everything set in space is sci-fi; Star Wars, for example, is just the monomyth in space, no different from the myth of Orpheus or, fundamentally, The Lord of the Rings. The space-ness of it doesn't add anything except visuals - superficial stuff.

So much for sci-fi, then. But this post is primarily about fantasy, and this raises a more difficult question. Think for a moment about cinema; is Bruce Almighty a fantasy film? What about Twilight or Evil Dead? Equivalent books could (and, indeed, do, at least in the case of Twilight) find their way into the fantasy section in a bookshop.

It might be tempting to say that fantasy is about worlds that are alternatives to our own, either in terms of being (like Harry Potter or The Chronicles of Narnia) worlds with a hidden magic element, or in terms of being secondary-world fantasies (like The Wheel of Time or A Song of Ice and Fire). But I've already discussed the absurdity that that leads to.

I hope that so far, I've shown that there's a problem here worth talking about. To put it bluntly, I feel like most of the people in charge of genre branding for books use the following decision process: 'Does it have magic in it? Okay, it's fantasy.' (and yes, magical realism blah blah blah, I'll come back to the topic of magical realism later). Okay, we now have various labels like 'YA fantasy' and 'Dark fantasy', which I suppose are steps in the right direction, but you still see a big lumping-together of stuff on the fantasy shelves.

One last example: Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson is a fantasy version of Ocean's Eleven - it's a heist caper (which, in cinema, is a surprisingly clear-cut and distinctive genre, albeit a quite rare one), with all the particular kinds of character interplay and authorial sleight of hand that implies. And yet it sits on the shelf right next to his The Way of Kings, which is unabashedly a straightforward epic. Okay, author branding makes it good to keep all his books in one place, and most bookshops don't have a section for capers (though they'd normally end up in 'crime' alongside a bunch of books better described as 'thrillers'), but the two books are very different in feel and style.

So there's a problem here. I'm going to split at this point (ooo, cliff-hanger ending), and next week, I'll pick up the theme and offer my definition of fantasy as a genre (and then I'll get back to that WEIRD stuff).

Publish Something!

Well, this is going to be the closest thing I have to offer to a wrap-up for the year. Because of an organisational cock-up on my part, the first episode of Season Two of The Second Realm, Through the Fire and Flames, won't be available until Monday, so I can't put this post out then, as I was intending to.

Here's the short version; at the start of 2012, I had two publications available, 'Heaven Can Wait', which had seen all of about 5 sales, and the first episode of The Second Realm, 'I Can See Clearly Now'. Unfortunately, I have no record of how ICSCN was doing at that time, but if memory serves, it was on somewhat less than 50 downloads total. I didn't start tracking my figures at all until the end of March, around the time I published the fourth episode, and I don't have detailed numbers from any earlier than late May.

However, in 2012, I published 10 whole episodes of The Second Realm, plus the standalone short, Immortal Remains (which isn't getting much love, at least as yet). I did unpublish 'Heaven Can Wait', though I'm hoping I'll be able to re-release it soon. In total, The Second Realm has now seen (at time of writing) 2,259 downloads, which means I can be pretty confident of claiming that for the year, I've seen 2,200 downloads across the 11 episodes - an average of 200 each.

In fact, since the series' total word count is around 110,000, I can claim one download for each 50 words published. It's a long way short of what I predicted back in June, but I've already discussed the drop-off a bit, and I openly acknowledge that my blogging and general public activity has been too low in the last three or four months to change that in any substantial way.

Overall, though, I'm happy with the year. I suspect if I could really get my head around what's happened, I'd be ecstatic (though as I said back in June, the time-frame of this kind of success always dilutes its impact). If you'd told me this time last year that I'd see average downloads of 200 per episode in 2012, I'd have taken it. Depending on my mood, I might well have told you you were being stupid.

Because if there's been one really palpable effect of this initial success - and success it is, however small - it's this: my last significant period of depression was back in January, before the publication of episode 2 of The Second Realm. I'm pretty sure it was caused in part by a sense of creative and career stagnation in the last couple of months of 2011. Since then, it's been up and up and up.

I've also learnt a great deal; some of the things I've tried for self-promotion (notably tweeting and various guest blog-type activities) have failed to produce any kind of noticable effect. On the other hand, my rare periods of regular activity on here have corresponded quite closely to steeper periods of growth in download numbers, so I know I need to blog more (I'm drawing up plans at the moment for a really concerted effort).

On top of promotional tactics, I've learned about design, practiced my secondary skills like formatting, editing and writing marketing copy, and, of course, written a lot. I wrote the better part of 100,000 words of The Second Realm this year, plus Immortal Remains (8,000 words), three novellas at about 20,000 words each, and the first draft of my PhD thesis at 70,000 words. And that's not counting the 55,000 words I wrote for NaNoWriMo.

All of this has been really good for me, and the bulk of it has also been fun. I don't have a good idea of what it's done for my authorial platform (though given that Immortal Remains has only made $9 so far, not as much as I might have hoped - it's early days yet), but those 2,200 downloads on Smashwords can't all be robots, and given how they're distributed across the series, I think there's at least some grounds for saying that some people must be reading me.

So, by way of a recommendation to ALL my writer friends, for 2013, I'm saying publish something. Doesn't matter what; by the end of 2013, get your name out there. If you can sell to a publisher, and the deal's good, go for it, but if not, self-publish something. A short. A novella. Get it out there.

It's exposure, it's practice, it will help your understanding (and everyone else's) of the business, it will thicken your skin, and it's just satisfying. It's the start of your career; we talk a lot about how 'being a writer' isn't a mythic status, but something everyone who writes deserves. Being a career writer, though, means being in print, or online, or anywhere else you can be read.

Now, obviously I'm not saying you should rush into print. Don't cut corners. If your main project is massive and still thirteen months from completion, don't just chuck a few chapters to save time and publish next December. Take a break at some point, write a short, edit it and put that out. It shouldn't take more than a month to get a short story ready for print, if you're proactive about writing it and you find a decent beta reader or editor (shout-out to my heroic trooper of a beta, Lynne Hunt, who's read well over a hundred thousand words for me this year).

I've argued before that every writer should self-publish at least once, and I stand by that, but I also think that however you want to publish, 2013 is the year it stops being OK to wait for publication. We've seen the first print-only deal for a book that became a hit as an ebook, which means that trad houses are starting to wake up to the idea that they can still make money from books without having the ebook rights - and we authors can self-publish as a step on the road to trad publishing (though I maintain there are big changes I want to see before I'm willing to go to a trad house - more on those another time).

And there's no reason to worry, I feel, about the risk of releasing something with a flaw you missed during editing. After all, I did that with 'Heaven Can Wait', and I don't think I've suffered for it. If you publish something that's flawed, it will not be an eternal blight on your name. It will sink without trace and be forgotten in a month, and you'll be free to try again.

Don't publish expecting to make any money, mind - I've made less than $10 this year, though I rather hope to make more in 2013 - but publish, because the longer you wait to start publishing, the longer it will be before your publishing has any effect.

For my own part? Well, I mentioned above that I believe regular blogging is the best way I can bolster my download and sales numbers. I'm aiming to have new content on here twice a week every week (except maybe the first couple of weeks of November - NaNo week and NaNo detox week ¬_¬). Eleven episodes of The Second Realm, two to four other publications (starting, I hope, with 'Heaven Can Wait'), and then eighty-some blog posts.

If I'm going to publish that much this year, then surely you can manage at least one thing, right? Go for it, and good luck!

Writing is Like Masturbation part 2: The climax is important.

I mentioned last time out that I had more to say on this point than on any of the others, so here's a post dedicated specifically to climaxes.

To start with a complete non-sequitur, I hate sit-coms. I also don't enjoy them, but for a different reason. The reason I don't enjoy them is that I can't help imagining myself being caught in whatever situation the comedy is being drawn from, and most situational comedy (or at least, all of it that I've ever seen) has involved situations that would be a nightmare for me if I found myself in that situation.

The reason I hate them is that most of the sitcoms I'm at all familiar with begin most episodes by giving you two to five minutes of witty exchanges between fundamentally likable, sympathetic characters. They have to do this because it's how sitcoms work - give you a bunch of characters you like, then kick them all in the proverbials for comic effect. The appeal of the characters is what holds the audience's attention.

And that means that my attention gets held. To the point where sometimes I can't look away as the scenario develops. In one or two extreme cases, this has actually left me with the same kind of half-awake nightmare-type experiences I get from horror films (a subject for another time). I've learned to look on all sitcoms as particularly sadistic psychological traps.

What's all this got to do with masturbation? Well, it's a rare sitcom that escapes some sort of masturbation joke, but that's entirely beside the point. I just needed an inuendo to meet quota.

The point is how this relates to writing more generally: if you hook someone, you'd better be delivering them something they want, or they're going to feel manipulated and maybe even cheated. The hook - the beginning of your novel - had thus better match up to the rest of the story. The important bit in terms of a reader's overall response is always going to be what happens after they're hooked.

Think about it this way. A story is what happens when a character changes. In the hook/beginning, you're given the character. Then you get the conflict that's going to force them to change, and then you get the change. The crucial part of a story is the motion up to and including the climax.

Imagine you pick up a book, check the first few pages and get completely hooked - you fall in love with the main character instantly, and they seem to be setting off in an interesting direction. You buy the book, get home and devour the first few chapters. You keep reading, but the direction and drive begin to fizzle out. You love the character, so you press on... until the point, ten pages from the end, where he wakes up to find it was all a dream.

You'd be furious, I'm sure (unless there's a good way of doing 'and then he woke up and it was all a dream' that no-one's found yet, but I doubt it). On the other hand, a book that you try on a recommendation, where you don't really get into it until half-way through, but which gets better and better up into a knock-out finale is always going to leave a good taste in your mouth.

As an example, this was more or less my experience with the first Harry Potter book. I hated the Dursleys, found them repugnant to read about, and felt that they overstayed their welcome by many pages. I didn't get on too well with the early parts of Harry's schooldays, and the odd bits of fish-out-of-water stuff where he didn't really know his way around wizarding culture. But by the end of the book I loved it as much as anyone lucky enough to read it at Harry's age.

I'm not saying that nothing besides a good ending is important for a book. I'm just saying that you can't have a good book without a good ending. Anything else (except, maybe, the relationship between character and plot - again, a subject for another time) can be merely alright, but a strong climax is vital.

Which brings us neatly back to masturbation. I said last time out that one way in which writing is like wanking is that if you want people to pay for you to do it for yourself, you're going to have to put on a good show. People won't pay unless they think you can deliver, and the most important thing they're going to want is the climax.

The trouble is, you can't market your climax. Well, you can, I guess, if you're marketing your masturbation. But if you're marketing your stories, not so much. If you spoil the ending anywhere before the reader's read the book, there's no point them reading it.

It's particularly bad if you're a debut self-publisher. The main promotional things you can control are your cover, your blurb and your sample on Amazon/Smashwords etc. Hopefully you can also get some reviewers to say nice things about your ending, but that's doubly out of your control - first because you can't control the reviewer, and second because you can't control whether any given reader trusts any given review. Your sample and blurb can only give away your beginning, maybe a tiny bit of your middle. No ending.

I was going to go on a lot longer on this point, but it stopped being funny and became a whole separate post about where the value of a book comes from, as against where its price comes from. I'll write that one when I've come up with a decent inuendo (sorry, an indecent inuendo) for it.

In the meantime, think about the puzzle of how to market your climax without giving it away. Because nobody should be climaxing for someone else's benefit for free...

A Year and a (few) Day(s)

It's been a little over a year since I started this blog (yeah, I'm a man, I miss anniversaries. Deal with it ;D), and I realised that actually, I do have a few reflections on the year that may be of interest, because I happened to start blogging at a pretty good time for marking years from in publishing terms.

Specifically, I started this blog on March 27th, eight days after Konrath and Eisler published the first of their dialogues about self-publishing (which I think at some point got christened 'Be The Monkey', but I haven't looked into that too hard, out of fear). That's not a coincidence; the linked piece was the sum total of my motivation for deciding to self-publish.

I'm going to be arbitrary and say that the Konrath/Eisler piece marks the point at which self-publishing went mainstream (at least, as mainstream as publishing business models ever get). Maybe it went mainstream earlier, but certainly not any later - anything I've heard of is mainstream, because I have my ear to the ground on exactly nothing. If nothing else, Barry Eisler admitting that he passed up a half-million-dollar advance to self-publish was a huge event, without any precedent that I'm aware of.

That there's been a gold rush going on ever since is undeniable. It's too early to say whether the rush has finished. On the other hand, it's starting to look like the gold has gone, and that's what I want to talk about. By 'the gold', I mean the better-than-average chances of success for authors who decide to self-publish.

Let's get one thing straight off the bat; I'm not saying that self-publishing has ceased to be a good option for authors at all stages of career. I maintain that 'big 6' 'traditional' New York publishing is too wasteful a model to be good for authors. All I'm saying is that it's time to stop rushing. There's still gold in the hills, but you're not just going to trip over it lying on the ground any more.

Why's that? It's a question of access to readers. Twelve months ago, it was sort of plausible for Konrath to say (as he frequently did) that the only promotion he needed for his self-publishing was a post on his blog and a note in the Amazon Kindle forums. In fact, it was plausible for him to say that was all anyone needed to do, provided the note in the forums went in the right place. It may even, briefly, have been true.

It's easy to see how the gold rush got started, isn't it? Even people like John Locke, who advocated much more intensive marketing strategies (and Locke's results speak for themselves, with him being one of the first self-pubbers past the million-sale mark) relied on fairly easily-accessible marketing channels, with Twitter being a particular favourite.

I didn't have a book ready for publication at the time, so I didn't try for myself, but I know there were a bunch of people who carved out their niches going through that kind of easy-access channel; Twitter, the Kindle boards, Goodreads and so on. I'm prepared to allow that it worked at the time.

The channels, though, have clogged up. Really badly. I tried dipping my toe into Goodreads when I published 'Heaven Can Wait', but I couldn't find a single group that I thought contained more book-buying readers than book-selling authors (and yes, authors buy lots of books, but they don't go on Goodreads to find books to buy, they go there to find readers to sell to, and I was as guilty of this as anyone else). The only people I communicate with on Twitter that I feel are likely to buy my book are authors, most of them pushing their own writings.


As a community, writers can be a bit blinkered (this probably goes for all communities everywhere, one way or another). We forget that most people who read books aren't writers and probably don't even think of themselves as 'readers'. They're just people who are literate, usually have a book on the go, and probably know a handful of other literate people. They hear about books mainly through newspaper-type reviews, or from similarly literate friends, or from advertisements, or by wandering through their preferred bookstore sections and seeing what looks interesting.

Kindle briefly changed that, because it was a new gizmo and that meant all the 'early adopters' - people who are interested specifically in new technology - got into reading ebooks. This is a group of people who tend to be heavily engaged in social networking (because it's the only thing besides GPS that justifies owning a smartphone). They're also people interested in the technology for its own sake. They're interested in who made it. That means that when looking for content, they're going to go to the technology's source as much as to usual content sources.

For the brief, transitory moment that the Kindle was 'new technology', this meant there was a consumer demographic that was available through social media and retailer forums like the Kindle boards. Unfortunately, it's also a demographic that was always going to lose interest quickly in the event of a gold rush.

What does that mean for us writers, then? Mainly, it means it's back to business as usual. The key to success now is patience, perseverance, and concentrating on getting access to the big channels; newspaper reviews, major genre-specific interest mags and websites and, ultimately, Oprah. It's back to building up word of mouth one reader at a time. The chance for lightning-strike success is back down to the usual one-in-a-million (as opposed to the peak rate of maybe two in a million ;D).

The really important consequence, and I can't stress this enough, is that there's (still) ABSOLUTELY NO POINT spamming your Twitter feed with plugs for your work; a handful of tweets, well spread out over several days, arranged to catch the key time zones, around release time, is all you should go for. Instead of wasting everyone's time plugging, use Twitter for actually networking with other authors (which is still important; I've learned more about writing that way than from anything else in my life) and work on getting good reviews for your book so that Amazon's automated system will plonk it in front of ordinary customers.

This post is getting a bit long, and hasn't really covered everything I want to cover. The TL;DR of it is: there probably was a time for Twitter plugging, but it's over. The industry has moved on already.

It's not working! Or is it?

So... I'm just over a month into my self-publishing journey, and I've sold 4 books, 2 to family, and given 2 more away, one as a giveaway and one to a reviewer. I've already blogged about my drastic false start (read the comments as well as the post), so I'm taking a slightly different tack with this self-indulgent whinge blog post.

The question I want to muse on today is how long you have to persevere with a strategy before you can legitimately decide that it isn't working, or at least that you are failing to make it work and need to change how you are doing it.

Let's start with the concrete example of what I've actually been doing. The largest part of my 'marketing strategy' has been the idea that if I'm charming and friendly on Twitter, and make a bunch of friends, some of them will buy my book, because they like me and they're willing to go out on a limb to try the book out.

So much for that good idea. I sold one book on Smashwords just after my launch, and likewise one on the Kindle store just after that launch, and I think that's the sum total of books I'll shift that way. I do have friends on Twitter, people I tweet with regularly who seem to enjoy my company. They're often willing to check this blog out, retweet stuff I say or plug, and generally be good citizens of the Twittersphere.

But it doesn't translate into sales. And neither, so far, has any friendship I have with anyone in 'real' (offline) life. There are all sorts of reasons why I haven't seen any progress, ranging from the fact that most of my real-life friends are relatively technologically ignorant of ebooks (I've had to explain several times that you don't need a Kindle to read ebooks), to a failure on my part to push my agenda hard enough. The fundamental point, though, is that it isn't working.

I know that it should be possible to sell more than 4 books in a month. Equally, I know that ebooks are a long-game prospect. Do I change my strategy?

I'm not a patient person. Like, seriously not. Not without reason - in about a year and a half, I run out of education system to hide behind, and I am desperate to avoid having to get a 9-5 day job - but without enough reason to justify being quite as impatient as I am. I was intending to have sold hundreds of books by this point, dammit!

Okay, while I can dream, I was a bit more realistic than that. I'd be happy to have sold a dozen books by now total. But what bothers me isn't really the number of books I haven't sold so much as the fact that the only thing I've done that's generated any sales seems to have been the actual publication. I've tweeted snippets and elevator pitches, posted samples to this blog and elsewhere. I've also done one interview and one guest blog (yes, in an ideal world I'd have done more, but I'm not massively convinced it would have made much difference). While all this activity has generated a few downloads of samples on Smashwords, no-one seems to be interested in actually shelling out.

It's pretty discouraging. Combine that with the slog I'm having getting through mh PhD work, the problems that the beta process has turned up with 'Some Kind of Angel' (yeah, there might be some delays with publication on that one), and OCTOBER, and I'm having a hard time keeping my spirits up. I've stopped putting plugs for the novel up on Twitter.

Instead, I'm trying other things; one thing I have none of at the moment is reviews. I remain confident that 'Heaven Can Wait' is a good book with a solid target audience, and I believe it will fare well in reviews. I've got a couple coming in later this month or sometime next, and assuming they turn out OK, I'll get in as many more as I can, because whereas people read guest blogs and interviews and so on out of curiosity, they read book reviews looking for something to read (or at least, I assume they do. I don't read reviews very often at all, usually only to get a second opinion on books someone's recommended to me by word-of-mouth). The '0 reviews' tags on my Amazon and Smashwords pages are starting to look really bleak.

There's also The Second Realm. The first story should go up on Monday, and I'll be posting the whole thing free on this blog (it'll be free on Smashwords and 99c on Amazon, until Amazon price-match it down). I may not be able to get people to buy something using Twitter, but I can get some traffic onto this blog, and I have this feeling that all I need to do is get a few people from my target audience to actually read some of my stuff, and we'll be away.

Lastly, I'm making an effort to participate in various bits of the fantasy community online, which throws up a whole wealth of problems of its own - blog post on those early next week, I think - but does at least put me in touch with readers more than writers.

Anyway, what do you think? Am I jumping ship on the Twitter strategy too early, or are you so offended that I'd think of trying to use your friendship to get you to buy my book that you'll never speak to me again? Would a positive review make you more likely to buy my book?

Why YA? (Isn't that a Rush song?)

At some point, I've really got to stop with the blog-titles-that-are-really-cheesy-jokes thing.

Maybe.

Anyway, I've realised I've hit a little bit of a problem with my self-promotion (okay, I've also hit the big problem of being naff at it, but that's a different blog post) for 'Heaven Can Wait'. I've billed the book as YA fantasy - which it is, at least in the sense that it's about being a young man in love, and it's got ghosts and magic and monsters in it - but while I have read a fair amount of YA fantasy, my bookshelves are mainly laden with high and epic fantasy, and some sci-fi, little if any of which could reasonably be described as YA.

This might not have been a problem in the pre-social-media age, but marketing these days, particularly for new writers, is focussed so much on engagement with potential readers that it presents a real issue. I just don't have enough knowledge of the genre (sub-genre?) to engage with these people.

Then there's the issue that for some people (I think), 'YA' is rather too strongly associated with Twilight, or they look at 'YA' and see 'children's book'. It may be that in branding the book as YA, I've shot myself in both feet - I can't engage with the YA market very well, and I'm turning off some people from the 'grown-up' market who probably would enjoy my book quite a lot.

The thing with all the YA I've read is that it's all been recommended to me by my mother (hence 'Heaven Can Wait' is dedicated to her). I won't do her the disservice of revealing her age to the whole internet, but let's just say she celebrated her ruby wedding anniversary in August. I know there's a big audience for YA among As who really can't claim to be very Y anymore (except at heart, right mum?), but I'm not sure that group do a lot of social networking.

As such, I'm contemplating rebranding the book as straight fantasy. I can talk fantasy until my ears bleed, it's more in line with the other stuff I write (by the by, check this out; the announcement of my next project), and this list of three would sound a lot better with a proper third item (sorry).

Obviously, it's not as simple as all that; for one thing, there isn't a lot of straight fantasy which is very like 'Heaven Can Wait'. Oddly, one of the closest touchstones I have for it is Scott Lynch's 'The Lies of Locke Lamora' (though the similarity is much stronger between 'Lies' and 'Some Kind of Angel', and my books are rather more child-friendly), a book I didn't actually enjoy that much.

Still, I think I can make it work, one way or the other. I'd appreciate your thoughts, though; how do you look at the 'YA' label, as against a straight-up 'fantasy' billing?

Sometimes you go through the wringer...

Well, I've had an interesting last week-or-so. On Thursday there was a hell of a party. On Friday, there were at least two hells of a hangover. Then over the weekend I quit my band (amicably and by mutual agreement, for the best interests of the band, but it still takes some getting my head around).

As a result, I didn't write this blog post on Saturday, when I should have. I also didn't plug this interview that I did on Thursday nearly enough (apologies, Anne!). Which means the answer to this might be obvious:

Why aren't you buying my book?

Well, apart from my shameful lack of self-promotion over the last few days, anyway. I'm not actually being as petulant as that sounds, either. What I mean is, what would convince YOU to buy my book? I've sold 2 copies in the 17 days the book's been on sale, and I can't help thinking that even a brand new starting author should have managed a bit better than that.

Here are a few things I think have been holding me back thus far. I'd really appreciate it if you could tell me which, if any, of these would encourage you to buy.

1 - Availability on the Amazon Kindle store. I'm guessing this is the biggest thing holding me back. I launched on Smashwords first because the royalties are so much better there and I wanted to be able to see how much of a difference Amazon availability made. Obviously, I won't know until I get the book up onto the Kindle store, but I'm hoping I'll at least see some progress. I was hoping to do this late last week, but obviously circumstances intervened. I hope to find time before the end of the month, but that's beginning to look a little optimistic.

2 - Hardcopy. Kindle penetration isn't anything like as widespread in the UK as in the US, and I think a lot of people over here don't realise that you don't actually need a Kindle to read ebooks. Of the people who do know that, however, many aren't keen (and who can blame them?) to read a whole book off a computer screen. Certainly, I've had several people tell me they wouldn't read an ebook. Unfortunately, hardcopy is going to have to wait, at least until I can afford the entry price for CreateSpace's premium service. I've done some playing around with the royalty calculator and such, and I think I can put the book out for about £7/$11. Would you be interested in a dead tree (edition) at that price? Also, what's the going rate for a trade paperback in the states? Here they tend to be £8-9.

3 - Reviews. I haven't organised any yet, because I feel really awkward (and slightly terrified) approaching reviews. Sidebar: if you're a YA and/or fantasy reviewer and you'd like a copy, let me know. I'm painfully aware of all the places where my book is showing up as 'unrated' or '0 reviews', and it can't look terribly professional.

4 - Price. I remember reading a J.A. Konrath article that said that $1.99 seems to be an unpopular price point, though I remain unconvinced that price alone could put someone off a book. It happens to be my ideal price at Smashwords' royalty rates, but if it's holding people back I might go to $2.99 when I move to Amazon. Or I might move in the other direction. I've blogged long and hard against high prices for ebooks (and I have another in the works, I think), but I'm really tight for cash at the moment. Either way, do you think about price points when buying ebooks?

5 - Writing a different book. I know YA fantasy isn't everyone's thing. If you wouldn't buy a YA fantasy book regardless of any of the above, please disregard this message. I think as YA books go, 'Heaven Can Wait' reaches pretty far outside its core target audience, but it's still a story about a teenager in love, even if he does have to fight a bunch of ghosts and demons along the way. I will be writing other, less-YA-ish projects once I'm done with the Non-Agency, so there'll be something for you eventually. Bear with me!

Please, please, please, leave any advice you can. Balancing promoting my book with not failing my PhD is hard, I need all the help I can get!

Thanks

I am not a brand, I am a free number! Wait...

Have you ever been persuaded to buy Axe/Lynx deodorant (for yourself or someone else) by one of those ridiculous adverts? You know, the ones where any woman who so much as catches a sniff of the smell goes absolutely rutting wild for the man wearing it?

Thought not. And yet, I have to admit, I buy Lynx deodorant (hey, I'm poor. If you think I should go up-market, buy my book). Not because I believe it will make the ladies unable to resist me - if I ever thought it might, the last eight rather pitiful years of my love life would have disabused me of the notion - but because when I think 'I need to buy some deodorant', Lynx is the first brand to spring to mind. Because the ads are so ridiculous, and they stick with you (and okay, the animated ones with the caveman biker riding the buffalo chopper were pretty funny).

What's this got to do with anything? Well, it's a very good way to advertise massive super-brands. It's a terrible way to advertise a book, particularly if you're a just-starting indie author. It's a matter of understanding what kind of advertising you're trying to do.

Big brand advertising works by raising brand consciousness so that a particular brand is the first thing to come to mind when you think 'I want a...'. There's nothing persuasive about it; the Lynx ads aren't really trying to convince you consciously that Lynx will make you more attractive. Apart from a few super-rare exceptions (J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown, Stieg Larsson), that doesn't work for books.

When it comes to books, it's all about persuading a reader that your book is worth not just their money but also their time. You're asking for a big investment. You're probably also asking for a click-through process involving several clicks before any money changes hands; from your advert to your distributor and then through to checkout. At each step of the process you need to be upping the interest, because you're asking that little bit extra from your target.

Fortunately, you have at least one weapon that the people making Lynx adverts don't (sidebar: I once participated in a focus group that was part of the research for the next addition for the Lynx/Axe line, and the Unilever people seemed like pretty cool guys). You're selling a story, and human beings naturally want to know what happens next in stories. You're selling something with a bunch of mysteries in, and people want the answers.

Soooooo that's what you focus on. And here's the important part, the reason this lesson is important:

Brand-based advertising is basically spamming. It's shoving something in your target's face until they're so sick of it that they can't stop thinking of it when they go to the shops. Spamming will get you nowhere with trying to sell your book.

When you're advertising your book, you can't just keep linking to it (I'm looking at you, people whose book-plugging tweets go '[title] now on Kindle! [link] #then #a #string #of #hashtags'. DOING IT WRONG). You've got to get your target thinking 'What happens next?' or 'Where's this going?' - occasionally 'where's this come from?' works too, but there's a risk of confusion.

That means you need content in your adverts. Since my main networking is done on Twitter, I'm mainly thinking about Twitter, and I'm working on two main kinds of promotional tweet. The first is elevator pitches (and yes, more than one; if you can only make one elevator pitch about your book, it's too one-dimensional.) Here are a couple I'm using;

'Tom's fallen for the daughter of the man who killed him, and the Non-Agency will stop at nothing to keep them apart.'

'The Non-Agency can't convince Tom he's dead. But if he keeps resisting, they'll show him there are worse things than dying.'

I'm still working on the second one - I'm convinced I can get it a little bit shorter - but note that they stress two different sides to the book; the first is more romantic, the second more action-y. I'm currently looking for one that will stress the fantasy/magical aspect.

I've already done a post about writing blurbs and elevator pitches, so I won't say more about it now. The other part of my Twitter strategy focusses on the #novelines hashtag, created by Al Boudreau. This is where you take a line from your novel and post it up with the hastag and a link. In real terms, your chosen quote has to be less than 115 characters, and this is hard to achieve, but my writing style seems to suit it fairly well. I can't really explain how these lines work, and I'm still trying to figure out which work best, but here are a few I have tried or am going to try:

'“You mean, I’d get a chit from a priest that’s good for one murder?”'

'I begin my testimony, "In the small hours of the morning after my death..."'

'"Is there no-one you regret hurting?” If there was, I wasn’t about to talk about it with a man who oozed.'

My one definite piece of advice for playing with #novelines is to try to focus on the things that could only happen in your book - the things that make it unique. I've seen a few #novelines tweets along the lines of 'Her breath caught in her throat, her heart pounding. [link]', and no-one's going to buy that. That could be in any book, and something like it probably is in half of all books with female characters; the kind of situations that make for good stories tend to make for that kind of tension.

And that's it, really. I can't claim to be much of an expert (I've been published four days and sold 2 books, one to my mother. I consider this good going, but I'm sure if I had any real expertise I'd have done better), but that's my two cents.

Any advice on this or any other aspect of advertising? I meant to get on to other bits of my marketing strategy, but that can wait for another post, I think. Anyone want to confess to too much spamming/brand advertising? (once again, my book is on sale here ;D)