FREE till 17 August

It was not until I got the email from Sophie Schiller (see post below) that I realised that a blogger/writer who was any good at marketing would already have remembered to tell people that his latest novel (Kindle version) is available free until 17 August.

Well, better late than never.

Hurry, hurry, hurry, get your copy while stocks last. Or whatever you're supposed to say in these circumstances. Daphne before She Died can now be downloaded free, on amazon, until the end of the week.

David Frauenfelder has written an interesting review on the US Amazon site, and Gladys Hobson ditto on Amazon. co.uk. Both of these reviewers told me things about myself and the book that I didn't know. Extraordinary.

I see that in the first 24 hours of this offer, 293 people have already downloaded the freebie. Which is encouraging. But how they have got to hear of it is a mystery. The web sites which specialise in telling people about free ebooks mostly concentrate on books with about ten 5-star reviews, which I haven't got (yet). And if I try to find Daphne on any list of free books on Amazon itself I can't trace it.

So, not for the first time, I am left reflecting that Amazon works in mysterious ways.

PS David Frauenfelder has his own take on the world over at Breakfast with Pandora. And Gladys Hobson is an excellent writer in her own right. Take a look, for example, at her novel about a granny in search of an orgasm. Obviously one of her favourites (as Daphne is with me), she has recently reworked it.

PPS Half an hour later. OK, done a bit more prowling around Amazon, and I find that, on Amazon.co.uk, there is a page with a list of 'Bestsellers in Family Saga Fiction.' Alongside the list of the top 100 paid books there is a list of the top 100 free books. And Daphne is currently at number 2. Which is even more encouraging.

The theory behind all this, in case you're wondering, is that giving the book away free for a week will get it read by a few people. Not everyone who downloads the freebie will read it, and, of those who do, not all will like it; but of the remainder, the enthusiastic readers, some may tell their friends, some will post a review, twitter, blog, like it on Facebook, and all that stuff that life is too short for me to do for myself. And thus, it is reasoned, both in the minds of Amazon executives and in the fevered brains of rabidly ambitious and hopelessly unrealistic authors, thus are bestsellers made.

Sometimes.

Transfer Day by Sophie Schiller

Well, here's another trusting soul who thinks that a mention on this blog will boost her sales and reputation. Ah, if only. I'm not even good at marketing my own stuff (see next post).

Sophie Schiller has written to me about her new novel, Transfer Day. Set in World War I, its locale is an unusual part of the world which in those days was known as the Danish West Indies. In 1917 it was transferred to the US.

Sophie has done loads and loads of research on this period and location and has embedded all that in a good old-fashioned spy thriller with some larger-than-life characters. And why not. Done the same thing myself in the past, about slightly different times and places (and the Kindle edition will be out soon, folks, watch this space.)

Go take a look on Amazon.

Pubslush

I can't quite work it out. Either people send out thousands of emails, to every conceivable book-related web site and blog, or else they have touching faith that, somehow, a mention on this particular blog will bring them thousands of hits on their site. Misplaced faith, if you ask me, but if someone writes to me and asks for a mention I usually oblige.

So, I am here to tell you, at their request, that Pubslush.com 'has relaunched and is currently accepting new writing submissions.' The organisers of Pubslush think that it could be 'a great tool for authors.'

Well, if you're an author, take a look. Apart from anything else, there's a link to good causes and 'fighting illiteracy'.

Boldness be My Friend

It's funny how some books survive while some disappear after six months. This afternoon, for instance, I was walking past a charity shop when I saw in the window a copy of a book that I read nearly sixty years ago. And yet there it was, in a modern paperback edition.

When I got home I looked it up on Amazon. The title is Boldness be My Friend, and it's by Richard Pape. First published by Elek Books in 1953, apparently, and now available in a 2008 edition from Headline Review. The printer is Antony Rowe, which means that they've done it as a POD edition, and very wise too. I notice that the original copyright notice was in the name of Helen Pape, so perhaps his wife wrote the book on behalf of the nominal author.

Boldness be My Friend was one of the many wartime memoirs of ex-servicemen which were published within about ten years after the end of hostilities in 1945. The most famous of these memoirs was, perhaps, The Wooden Horse, by Eric Williams. First published in February 1948, it was reprinted nine times in the next four months. A huge seller; and it was soon filmed (1950), the film too being a big success. Collins were the original publisher, and Leo Cooper (Jilly's husband) revived it in 2005.

Both these books were about prisoners of war, held by the Germans, who somehow or other managed to escape from their prison camps and made their way back to England. Or tried to. That was their appeal. Captured these men might have been, but they never gave up fighting. That sort of thing. And the appeal, it seems, still lingers. Courage in the face of adversity. Don't underestimate it.

Mark Coker on The Future of Publishing

Mark Coker, as many of you will know, is the founder of Smashwords, the ebook distributor. Turns out that he was recently invited to give a couple of presentations to the 2012 conference of the Romance Writers of America.

On his blog, Mark has some profoundly interesting and useful things to say about romantic fiction. More to the point, he has made available all the slides that he used in his talk entitled 'The Future of Publishing'.

Even if you have been avidly following all the changes in technology and publishing practice over the last few years, I strongly advise you to take a look at this. It doesn't take long to go through it and you will learn a great deal. Much of it is based not on speculation and opinion but on actual sales data from the Smashwords experience. Marvellous stuff.

Mr Coker is not above criticism (in particular his choice of Word as the source file for his operation has been questioned), but generally speaking he is light years ahead of those in mainstream publishing.

Windows (the real kind)

This has got nothing to do with books, but if you're interested in windows here's as impressive a collection as I've seen in a long time. It just seems to go on and on and on.

Oh, and there's one of my pics in there somewhere, which is how I found out about it.

More of mine on Flickr. Haven't done anything in that line recently. Fifteen months ago I bought a big iMac specially for photography and, naturally, have done nothing since.

Fifty Shades of Grey? We have been here before...

Here in the UK, sales of Fifty Shades of Grey have begun to tail off. A bit. Two weeks ago, Grey sold 1.4 million. In a week. But last week purchases of the so-called mommy-porn (or mummy-porn) novel were down. Even so, the book still managed to sell 534,000 copies. Next biggest seller was Kathy Reichs, whose Flesh and Bones sold 23,871. (Figures from The Bookseller, as reported by the BBC.)

Well now, let's have a little think about this.

What we have here, apparently, is a novel which features a highly submissive woman and a dominant man. (I say apparently because you'd never know much about it from the Kindle sales page on Amazon.co.uk. The publisher provides absolutely zero info about the content.) However, going by vague bits and pieces that I've picked up over the past few months, the plot is, basically, that our heroine is into being tied up and beaten and stuff. So it's a kinky, pervy, ooh-missis kind of story (think what Frankie Howerd would have made of it); and it's all stretched out over three volumes.

Well, the best of luck to all who sail in her. I don't begrudge anybody connected with Grey a single penny of their profits. And if I sound a little snobby about the E.L. James trilogy, believe me it's not because I am anti-porn. Far from it. I have, in my time, researched widely in the field of Victorian erotica, and I have fond memories of such classics as Lady Bumticklers Revels. Furthermore, I would buy Ms James's three books instantly if I thought they would put lead in my elderly pencil. But it doesn't seem likely that they would. On Amazon.co.uk, the first book in the series has 2593 reviews, and 835 of them give it one star. With such encouraging headings as 'Absolute, unashamed, utter drivel'.

What I really want to draw your attention to, because many of today's readers are far too young to remember, is that we have witnessed (some of us) this kind of event before. And, I would venture, we've seen it done rather better.

In the early 1950s there was a French woman who was having an affair with a married man, Jean Paulhan. M. Paulhan's mistress was christened, it seems, Anne Desclos, but in her early thirties she became known as Dominique Aury. As Aury herself acknowledged about the affair with Paulhan, she was no longer young (47) and she was not pretty, so she had to find some other means of binding him to her. The solution was found when her lover expressed an admiration for the work of the Marquis de Sade, and said that no woman could possibly write like that. So Dominique Aury wrote a novel which would test the truth of that proposition.

In three months she had completed an explicit erotic novel which she called Histoire d'O (Story of O in English). It is an account of how a beautiful Parisian woman is subjected to brutal humiliation by being whipped, chained, branded, pierced, and penetrated violently in all the obvious orifices. She is asked for, and readily gives, her consent to these activities.

Dominique Aury's lover was sufficiently intrigued by this novel to arrange for it to be published in 1954. The author chose the pen-name Pauline Reage, and worked hard to maintain her anonymity.

From the beginning, the novel attracted much attention. Various attempts were made to ban it; it won the Prix des Deux Magots; Susan Sontag (inevitably) had things to say about it, and so on and so forth. Over the years it was translated into more than twenty languages, became a bestseller in several countries, and sold millions of copies.

In real life, Dominique Aury was a respected figure on the French literary scene, and her authorship of the notorious Histoire d'O was known only to a few. She was a member of the Legion d'Honneur, i.e. highly respectable. Her anonymity was maintained largely by the fact that all sorts of respectable Frenchmen and women were quite happy to have it 'known' that actually they had written her novel themselves.

When Paulhan lay dying, aged 83, Dominique Aury/Pauline Reage/Anne Desclos slept in his room for the last three months.

And fifty years after its first publication, the French government announced that Histoire d'O would be included on a list of 'national triumphs' to be celebrated that year.

I once had a copy of Story of O, and tried diligently to read it. But failed.

If you want to know more about this extraordinary author, start with Wikipedia. And there's a good chapter in Nom de Plume by Carmela Ciuraru (2011, HarperCollins).

PS. Tim Worstall reminds me that Tom Sharpe wrote a satirical novel about publishing, The Great Pursuit, in which a dodgy firm of literary agents hires a young man to pretend to be the author of a rather racy novel. Well, I say satirical. All too easy to believe, actually. And of course it happens all the time with celebrity authors.

Bruce Holland Rogers rides again

Bruce Holland Rogers is a short-story writer with formidable talent, and I have written about him on this blog before: principally here and here.

He is now using Kickstarter to try to raise $3000 for a trade paperback version of his latest collection. Seems like a good idea to me. Here's the Kickstarter page.

If you want to read a story that I, at least, found very powerful, try The Dead Boy at Your Window. And there are links to several other freebies on Bruce's own web site.

There's a moral here somewhere...

I'm sitting here, still in jimjams at noon, about one week into a nasty chest infection, and without the energy to do much -- not even look at naughty pictures on the internet, so that shows how bad it is. Anyway, couldn't let this one pass.

This morning I got a notification from Blogger about a comment on an old post, so I went to the post and deleted the comment. But while I was there I noticed that the post mentioned a new man, recently appointed as the boss of Borders bookshops chain in the US.

At that time Borders was in poor shape, shares at a three-year low. But fear not. The boy genius, one George Jones by name, had ideas. Oh yes. But the thing that struck me was that none of the ideas involved an ambition to be a better bookseller. And there was no mention of writers. (Hey, come on now. Be reasonable.)

At which point I scratched my befuddled head and said to myself, how did that massive company (worldwide in 2006: 1200 stores, 35,000 employees) get on in the next six years? Don't I remember that it sort of... collapsed?

Well, yes, turned out I did. By 2011 the company went bankrupt (in effect), couldn't find anyone to buy it, fell over, coughed, and went to a better place. Wikipedia:

 As of October 14, 2011, the Borders.com website has been replaced by a redirection link to the Barnes & Noble website, effectively shutting down Borders.com entirely.

Daphne before She Died

I gave notice a while back that I was going to publish a new Kindle book. Well, now it's out. The title is Daphne before She Died, and if you care to take a look at the details, you can find it, as appropriate, on either Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

If you care to compare the two book pages, on .com and .co.uk, you will find that they're different. Why? Go figure. I will shortly write to Amazon and ask, but I am not hopeful of a reply.

Obviously, you're not likely to do such a weird thing as compare two pages for ordering the same book, unless you are, like me, a person wrestling with the task of trying to make your book visible and to boost sales (or indeed, create any sales at all, in the first place). But the .com page allows the author to enter far more detail about reviews, and about the author, than does .co.uk. Perhaps the explanation is that server space on .co.uk is in shorter supply? Odd.

During the past couple of months I have been spending a considerable amount of time studying internet book-marketing techniques. My conclusion, after more reading than I've enjoyed, is that the conventional wisdom is roughly as follows:

Write a really good book; design a terrific cover, and see if you can find someone famous to give you a quote for it; issue press releases; write to a vast number of people and ask them to review your book; start a blog, and post daily; get a Facebook page for yourself and one for the book; start twittering; get yourself interviewed on other blogs; interact with all those readers who review, comment or contact you for any reason; talk to them; find out what they like and don’t like; show them drafts of your next book; assemble a database of all the people you’ve contacted, and keep in touch with them for future books; send them a regular newsletter. Make friends with your readers! It’s all about interaction!

Well, yes. Maybe. But my conclusion, after absorbing a couple of months of this kind of thing, was that, if this is what it takes to be a great success as a writer in the digital age, then I am going to have to settle for being a modest success, or even no success at all. There is simply no way, at age 73, that I am going to take on that kind of workload. I would never have time to do any writing.

Fortunately, within the last week or two, I have stumbled across a different approach. It's embodied in a new book by Michael Alvear: Make a Killing On Kindle. Alvear's subtitle (inside the book) is: Without Blogging, Facebook and Twitter.

Notice that word without. Now this really looks promising. I will let you know how I get on.

Oh, and by the way: if you'd like a free review copy of Daphne, please send me an email. Address in the Blogger profile. This offer holds good till the end of July, but by then the book should be anyway offered free (under Kindle Select procedures) for a period of about three days.