Introducing The Coffee Crew – eBooks: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Ebooks Fortnight on Vulpes Libris
Another welcome guest post today. Phillipa Ashley introduces us to:

THE COFFEE CREW
(Aka Phillipa Ashley, Nell Dixon and Elizabeth Hanbury)

The Coffee Crew is a tale for modern times: we met online, drawn together by a passion for writing romantic fiction. Like me, Nell was a new member of the Romantic Novelists Association and I’d come across her on various online romance writing forums back in 2006. I’d known Liz for about the same length of time from C19, a forum initially dedicated to all things North & South but which has developed into a hub to discuss the arts, TV/film and books.

I must confess there’s another reason we were drawn together; we lived within striking distance of each other. We meet at a variety of venues in the Midlands, our favourite being a vineyard on the Staffs/Shrops border. At first our meetings were occasional, now they are almost monthly, family and work commitments permitting.
The closer we have grown, the more productive the relationship has become for all of us.

I feel I can share anything with the crew – problems with plots, worries about deadlines, the agony of submission, the endless waiting and inevitable disappointments. We read and critique each other’s work, if required, and make suggestions, but try never to interfere with individual visions and voices. It’s also enabled us to keep up-to-date with developments in a publishing world that is changing rapidly since the arrival of eBooks, and share thoughts and ideas on advertising and marketing.

However, the most important aspect of the relationship is the support and encouragement. Writing can be a lonely process and, like most writers, each of us at one time or another has felt like throwing in the towel on a book or writing in general. We can now share our triumphs and disasters without bothering stupefied non-writer friends and family. We’ve supported each other through some tough family times, cracked the whip when necessary and given each other permission to take a break too.

Of course, we can also share the successes and in 2012, there have been some rather lovely ones.
In the long winter of 2010, we decided to collaborate on a short story collection. We felt by egging each other on we could enhance our writing and try new things – hence the Brief Encounters anthology.   Brief Encounters was liberating for me. Reinvigorated by the joy of ‘just writing’ and completing something, I went straight on to write a new full-length contemporary romance. That book has received several offers from respected publishers and is being published as an e-book by Piatkus Entice in October 2012. I’m not sure it would have seen the light of day without the Coffee Crew.

Liz went on to complete her third Regency romance, A Bright Particular Star, which also received several publishing offers and has just been released as an e-book by US publisher Astraea Press. She has another novel and a novella due out later this year.

Nell has been epublished since 2004 and writes for a number of publishers in the UK and the US. Collaborating on Brief Encounters spurred her on to seek out new avenues for her work culminating in her popular short and sweet series of Cornish stories and her new book Passionate Harvest published by UK based E-Scape press.

So the Coffee Crew is about far more than coffee and cake (although we love those!); it’s about mutual support and the encouragement to extend your writing horizons. And none of us would have achieved as much without it.

The Coffee Crew’s musings on the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of eBooks

It’s a turbulent world out there in publishing right now. The industry is undergoing huge change and everyone must adapt, and quickly. No one really knows what the outcome will be but e-publishing is a major element in the mix and there’s no turning back.

The Good
E readers are now more affordable, more user-friendly and selling like hot cakes. As a result eBooks are available on a range of platforms, which increases reader choice. Always a plus :0) Another obvious attraction of eBooks, as it was in the music CD versus download race, is ease of storage and transport. How wonderful to be able to carry hundreds of books around without needing a Mary Poppins-style carpet bag! There is also instant gratification for the reader; one purchase click and the book is on your reading device.

EBook contracts usually offer authors a larger percentage on each sale. Although much of the pre-publication work is the same as for print books, eBooks offer inherently less risk for publishers. No more large print runs with the potential for large no-sale returns and eventual pulping.

E-publishing has also increased choice for neophyte and experienced authors alike. Many established authors have published their backlists as eBooks, while the format has opened publishing doors for new authors by allowing them direct access to readers.

The e-book revolution has kicked mainstream publishing up the backside. It probably needed it as much of the industry hasn’t changed for decades. It isn’t the existence of eBooks that threatens mainstream publishers, but the potential for that direct access to readers. Inevitably, quality of eBooks available will vary but with luck, good quality will flourish, like in any market. The great news is that many mainstream publishers are now joining the eBook revolution and able to be more flexible, more open-minded and more responsive to what readers want. Recently some new, self-published authors have even been signed up by mainstream publishers following stand-out eBook sales figures.

EBooks can be read without anyone knowing what you are reading because there are no embarrassing covers to hide. So if it’s your thing, and you want to read the current BDSM erotic fiction sensation Fifty Shades of Grey while waiting to collect the kids from school, no one will be any wiser ;0)
EBooks mean more choice, more flexibility, easier storage, more opportunities. What’s not to like about that?

The Bad
The advent of e-publishing has contributed to the demise of bookshops. The few independents that remain are holding on by offering great service and a wider range of print books.

The wonderful sensory response to a brand new print book is lost with an eBook. There is no smell and feel of crisp, newly-printed pages to enjoy with a download!

New authors might gain reader access by self-publishing eBooks, but proliferation is a double-edged sword. With so many more books available, how do readers discover new authors? Finding ways of bringing books to the attention of readers is complicated and time-consuming. Targeting marketing effort is becoming vital. Authors can easily spend more time blogging, Facebooking, Tweeting etc., than actually writing.

With self-published eBooks, there is often a lack of quality in both writing, editing and typesetting and it’s difficult for readers sort the wheat from the chaff. When many eBooks are cheap and readily available it’s tempting to download first only to discover later that you’ve purchased a dud.

Finally, there is the effect of eBooks on libraries here in the UK. They are already being hit by budget cuts and the eBook revolution is yet another blow. In the current economic climate, it’s unlikely that the Government will make efforts to set up a national e-book library loan system soon and, as a follow-on, look at paying PLR on eBooks.


The Ugly
One word: piracy. If you know how, eBooks are relatively easy to pirate. People are ‘file sharing’ books with impunity and it’s impossible for authors to keep track and alert the publishers. Even then publishers rarely have the resources to do anything about it unless it’s being carried out on a huge scale. The battle against book piracy promises to be every bit as tough as the battle against music piracy.


Despite the Bad and the Ugly, there is no doubt eBooks are the way ahead. Print books won’t die out any time soon (this very funny video parody on ‘normal’ books is well worth a look) but eBooks will take a bigger share of the market and open up new opportunities for readers and writers.

But in the end how a book is published isn’t as important as it being a good book.
In the brave new world of epublishing, everyone should hope good books will continue to emerge, to thrive and to stand the test of time.

The photo of a miraculous cup of coffee is from the Flickr photostream of Old Shoe Woman, and is reproduced here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) licence.

Publishing an Ebook – quick tips and pointers

Part of Ebooks Fortnight on Vulpes Libris.

Like many writers at the moment, I launched myself into ebooks due to the apparent contraction of the publishing industry in the face of the recession.  With more and more concentration on genre and celebrity, less new writers being taken on and what appears  to be a dearth of comedy novels either represented by agents or on the bookshelves, I decided that my previously published first novel would suit “ebookification” and set to commissioning a cover and reediting for the ebook format.

Covers

Cover design by illustrator Lindsay Grime

An early sketch

Like others before me have talked about this week, the whole experience was a fun and freeing one – it was particularly enjoyable looking at artists’ work on the internet and working on a brief for the cover. I researched covers on Amazon and wrote down various themes. Enormous close-ups of one single eye is a popular one. Or a face. And for comedy – bums. My focus on this brief was to create an interesting shape when the size of a postage stamp and for the the tones to be very contrasting so that it would reproduce well in black and white. I think you will find a small bottom in the background of my book but hopefully it is more comedy than pornographic in style and it was a pleasure working with the talented illustrator Lindsay Grime who produced the finished article.

Editing

Editing the manuscript for ebook was also interesting. I uploaded it as a pdf onto my ereader and read it as an ebook to experience it anew in that format.

I found that due to the smaller page size that the ebook suits smaller chunks and faster pace.

One of the interesting things about ereaders and how people use them are they are  more public devices. You can take them anywhere. Just as it’s different listening to a radio play whilst in the car or in a busy environment than it is watching a play in a hushed auditorium – so it is slightly different reading an ebook in a host of different environments, versus the privacy of reading your book by yourself in the bath or late at night before you go to sleep. I found that I began to favour some of the bolder choices and visuals for the e-version, that I had introduced to the story when I worked on it as a screenplay. Fiction and scripts are different, of course. But I found the ebook form seemed to push me to the clearer visual choice. It also led me to remove a good 7,000 words from the original text.

Pricing

When you do upload your ebook (hopefully with the help of a kindly geek if you haven’t got any geeky credentials of your own) you will find you are offered a number of free days.

These are days you can use to promote your work by making it free for 24 hours.

Having no real strategy or plan, I experimented with my first free day with no publicity or thought. I did not even realise which day it would be free for.

The experience was a huge amount of fun. I watched, heart in mouth, as my book popped up in bizarre categories like Music and Performance or Non-fiction (eh?) and started competing with the likes of Canal Boats in South East England and Telephone Boxes their History and Variety. Reverting back to the paid charts, the book was suddenly visible and the promotion worked as people started to buy it for real and in good numbers.  I cheered as I finally managed to go head to head in comedy category with Les Dawson (oh the honour!) and Russell Brand.

It was a proud moment as a week or so later I topped no. 1!

However the free book thing is complicated. You are given 5 days to use in total and I blithely assumed that if I did a free day again it would be as miraculously successful as the first time. Not so. The second free day ended up with my book descending the charts. I couldn’t understand it – what was going on?

Doing a free day whilst the book is sailing up the charts doesn’t necessarily have a positive effect. Making it free at the point where people are buying can just interrupt the forward direction -  as they cash in on the free download instead and fail to part with their cash. It was a hard lesson to learn but learn it I did.

I’m still experimenting with price and the effect it has on visibility and purchasing. Those really in the know work out how to pitch their product just right and manipulative the price up and down and it’s worth doing a dummy run with a short story first to work out strategies for that big novel.

Promotion

And now, lastly, the final bit of the jigsaw. The part I tend to put off. The part I usually end up running away from. Blog tours, reviews on websites, Twittering and Facebooking are all part of the expected repertoire of the ebook-published. There are those that complain they can’t log on to Facebook without being inundated with updates about the position of their friends’ books on Amazon charts or the latest Twitter review. To some extent this is true (and I certainly couldn’t wait to broadcast the news as I shot past some tome about River Estuaries that first giddy Free day). But I doubt there’s many writers who enjoy this side of things. Where people used to talk about what they had for breakfast, they now talk about their 50p off promotions. Yes, it’s depressing. But isn’t all promotion depressing?

(Don’t answer that.)

The Good, the Bad and the Digital

I hope that this ebook fortnight signals the beginning of something new on Vulpes Libris and a greater engagement with this growing format. Whilst ebooks will continue to have their haters, there are real opportunities for readers as well as for writers in this brave new digital world. Anne has already mentioned the refuge digital publishing has provided for short stories, with novellas also seeming to thrive in eform; experienced midlist authors are able to continue what they love and deliver work to their loyal readership; new and original books of all genres and for different age-groups can find a home and be discovered by those that want something different; and comedy novels – that I’ve been told by so many are presently unfashionable in the publishing industry – can go boldly forth out into the world and go head to head with Telephone Boxes as no comedy novels have done before.

Ebooks may have their problems, but for the moment at least I welcome this outpouring of creativity and the chance to rediscover something writers and readers both so often forget:

Having fun.

——-

RosyB is a comedy writer. Sadomasochism for Acccountants was originally published in 2009 and was published in ebook format in 2012. Rosy is presently working on her second feature screenplay.

Ebooks – Where are the Gatekeepers and Does it Matter?

From pcgn7′s photostream on Flickr, reproduced under a Creative Commons license

There have been few subjects that have provoked so much controversy in the den as ebooks and how we cover them.  Some people hate the whole idea of reading off a “machine”. Books are a quaintly old-fashioned pass-time and we all have different associations with relaxation.  For some of us, anything that resembles a laptop, powerbook or mobile phone is synonymous with work, not relaxation. For others, the smell, the feel the look of books is all important. All part of our associations with the immersive reading experience. It is mainly this idea of defending the printed book that leads to so much ire being directed at ebooks. Once scoffed at by all and sundry, now there are few who would deny that the ebook has not made significant inroads and looks to be a major part of the future of publishing.

As usual, gathering my thoughts together on what I might want to write about for Ebook Fortnight, a lot of disparate issues to sprang to mind. I want to talk about issues surrounding ebooks in general, and also more specifically about the experience of ebook publishing – including covers, price points and free lists.

Having struggled all morning to unite these disparate strands, and being greedy enough to want to write about them all,  I’ve decided to go for the old Making-it-look-like-it- all-makes-sense by adding in Headings trick. And going to post up a couple of short articles today – articles that are maybe too truncated for a full post, but together might put out there a number of questions, thoughts and musings to provoke general thoughts and debate. So please join in if you have any thoughts on any of these issues, big or small, today. So for my first truncated and slightly unsatisfactory piece, here we go. Heading No. 1:

Where are the Gatekeepers? And does it matter?

One of the big arguments we have in the den is the place of the gatekeepers. Many of us, being writers, love the idea of kicking over the traces and going it alone. No more waiting. No more rejection. The ability to edit at will. To have a cover that finally suits our work, our perception of our own work and what we want to say…

The publishing world is full of gatekeepers. It is a small industry with a lot of people wanting in. Agents, who previously worked for authors, can be as hard to gain as a publishing contract itself. Many publishers are not open to unsolicited work or only accept submissions from agents. Agents themselves may refuse to submit to smaller publishers. And that’s just the start of it. Add in the other establishment gatekeepers: the editors, the marketing departments, the book buyers, the reviewers, the newspapers, the wider media…And you realise that there is a whole series of hoops to jump through. How many writers last the course? And with advances reducing all the time, it is not surprising that many might see going down the ebook route as the more attractive option.

Traditionally, there has been a tendency amongst the would-be published to revere the gatekeepers. Many people on a writing forum I used to frequent would talk of them as ultimate experts – almost as though they were getting their homework marked by a teacher or sitting an A-level. They would talk of the bar that your work had to cross (I always had visions of manuscripts pole-vaulting onto agents and editors’ desks). They would analyse the way that your accompanying letter would be analysed and attach enormous importance to doing things the “correct way” and according to the system.

Of course, when you meet people who actually work in that system you find out things are not really like that – they are human like everyone else struggling with other demands.  You find out that many slushpiles are lucky to get a cursory glance, let alone someone pouring over your cover letter analysing it for signs of the right mixture of winning personality and grammatical perfection. You find that it can be tougher to get an agent than a publisher. You get disillusioned with the numbers of vaguely well-known people or journalists or just people who know people in that world who seem to have doors opened for them whilst struggling would-be writers are still plugging away sending their stuff in to the slushpile – year in, year out.

Epublishing offers writers that tantalising opportunity just to get their work out there. Just do it. Not wait for permission anymore.

After all, what do all these gatekeepers know and who do they think they are anyway, we can say to ourselves, standing proudly and looking windsweptedly proud and alone, balanced on our rocky promontory,  into the future.

Getting rid of the gatekeepers allows greater flexibility, more originality. People don’t have to shove themselves uncomfortably into genres that don’t quite fit anymore. They don’t have to get a yay from editors, just to fall at the hurdle of the marketing department.

And, as a woman, they don’t have to accept a cover THAT IS PINK.

But there is a price to be paid.

There are the obvious questions – how do readers sift through the inevitable piles of dross out there?

Yes, there is the weird and the wonderful and the eccentric. Just a cursory look around the self-published work on the Kindle reveals the idiotic to the mildly disturbing (Telephone Boxes, their History and Variety is a particular favourite, along with  Ten Step Guide to Pissing in Public.) But what about the illiterate, unedited and unspellchecked? And believe me, there is  a lot of it around. How do the good books – the hidden gems – get a chance to be found, let alone shine, when buried in a tonload of rubbish?

Isn’t ebook self-publishing the equivalent of dumping the publishers slushpile online? With the poor reader expected to do the job of sifting it through?

And there’s another, more serious, question recently raised in the den by Bookfox Eve, specifically in relation to self-published books for children – but applicable across the board.

If the doors are open to everything, how can parents in particular be assured that self-published ebooks for kids won’t contain disturbing or even completely unacceptable material?

A couple of years ago the book world exploded during the whole age-ranging debate – with many published writers fondly recounting how they had read things far too old for them or with “adult” themes that  benefitted their writing imagination. However, the uncharted and unvetted offerings of the internet set up a whole new minefield of issues.

Books on telephone boxes and pissing in public may be charmingly eccentric and harmless, but it does not take a huge leap of the imagination to realise that, with no gate-keepers, there is nothing to stop the truly disturbing getting through. At least until the site administrators realises it’s there.

This is a serious problem. But I would argue,  it is a problem for parents in relation to the whole of the internet, not just ebooks.

How we approach the problem of gatekeepers from both a quality and content point of view is going to be very interesting as ebooks develop. Will new gatekeepers emerge? Will people will rely on trusted websites or blogs? Perhaps directories of vetted and read and reviewed self-published books will emerge. Will readers pay extra for such services?

I am reminded of earlier debates about reviewing itself and blogging. Blogging, it was argued, would destroy the mainstream reviewing in newspapers. And the online world would destroy that of the printed paper. In many ways, this has started to come to pass, with all the associated debate we are now having about the ebook – about quality, about veracity. About suitability of content.

But it seems to me that these are important debates to be having whatever the form. We cannot stop the way the internet and digital has changed, and continues to change, the way we receive information. But we do need to be honest about the issues that surround it. As a great fan of bookblogs, I tend towards that side of the debate. But I can also see the many problems – of subjectivity, of exploitation, of how on earth anyone – writer, critic, journalist – ever gets paid.

We may rejoice in this moment where the gates have opened. But, in time, will we find we turn to new gatekeepers – but who will they be?

This article is part of Ebooks Fortnight on Vulpes Libris.

Snake Beach, by Lisa Glass

Ebooks Fortnight on Vulpes Libris.

Interview with Lisa Glass by former Book Fox, Emily Gale.

I met Lisa Glass on a forum for aspiring and published writers several years ago. I was drawn to her brilliant sense of humour and her boldness – easy enough to be bold online, you could say, but that courage was also very much present in her first published work, Prince Rupert’s Teardrop (Two Ravens Press; 2007). I vividly remember sitting on the edge of my sofa as I read one particularly brutal chapter. She’s a writer with guts as well as striking, elegant prose.

So when I was given the chance to read her first YA novel, Snake Beach, I had high hopes. It didn’t disappoint. Here is a story with grit, originality, romance without schmaltz and a main character you want to champion all the way.

My opinions on self-publishing have really changed over the last few years and writers like Lisa Glass are a huge part of that process of coming around to the idea. Snake Beach should be out there, it’s a great YA title (scroll to the end to find links to buy). So please enjoy this interview with Lisa and add Snake Beach to your TBR pile.

The blurb:

“It was before the birds fell out of the sky. Before them girls went missing . . . ”

Life is good for Jenny Grand, living in a beachside chalet on the Cornish coast, chilling out and body-boarding, until one day her ex-boyfriend Han returns to her home town of Hayle. Shortly afterwards, the town is invaded by TV modelling talent show Britain’s Next Catwalk Queen, and everything begins to go wrong.

Part romance, part mystery, and part coming-of-age story.

Lisa, tell us about your move from writing adult fiction to YA…

This is going to sound corny but I started writing YA after having a baby. About six weeks after having a baby, to be precise. I had this mad urge to do something creative (creating a life had obviously gone to my head) and so I dusted off ten chapters of an adult novel I’d been writing before I got pregnant, which happened to have a young protagonist, and I thought I’d try to rewrite the manuscript into a teen book. In the hormone-soaked highs of new motherhood, I just couldn’t write the extremely dark literary fiction I’d happily written before. Call it love, emotions, chemicals, whatever, but as a new mum I was experiencing the most profound euphoria of my life, and I wanted to write something unapologetically upbeat and fun. Having said all that, Snake Beach is still a bit weird and dark around the edges, because so is its author.

Snake Beach has been called “original” by just about everyone who has read it (me included). How did plot and characters evolve?

I went on a holiday to my favourite place in the world and the dunes that year were overrun with adders. It was like an invasion, I remember thinking, and it felt quite ominous. I’m not anti-snake and I think adders are beautiful, but I was terrified that my dog (a collie-cross-springer mutt called Digger) would get bitten. I knew that none of the local vets had any anti-venom as the barman of the local pub had told me as much, and several dogs had died.

When I came back home I started writing about those snake-infested dunes, and then I discovered that a girl I knew, who worked in my local supermarket, had been accepted onto Britain’s Next Top Model. She was a really talkative, positive and confident young woman and I was interested to see how she would fare on the show. She and the other contestants were sent to a model bootcamp at an army barracks out in the countryside, where they were given all sorts of daunting challenges. This seemed like a great place to start a novel, so I took the model bootcamp and moved it to Cornwall. At this point, I still thought the book would be an adult novel. Although, even now Snake Beach is probably a bit “crossover”, as plenty of adults seem to find something they can connect with in the book.

As for my acquaintance, she was eliminated pretty early in the competition after some harsh criticism of her strut by that legend of America’s Next Top Model, J. Alexander, who was a visiting judge, but she managed to find a lot of work post-Britain’s Next Top Model, so the show was a good move for her. I met up with her after the show had aired and we went for a few drinks in a beer garden with me clutching my notepad and Dictaphone, and then the next weekend we went for cocktails at a nightclub. She was so interesting and gave me lots of behind the scenes information about Britain’s Next Top Model, which was invaluable when writing the book. The next month I discovered I was up the duff, and I spent the rest of my pregnancy not writing, except the odd sentence typed into Google about all the terrifying things that could go wrong in pregnancy and childbirth.

Setting is crucial to Snake Beach – can you tell us more about that? Is the setting very personal to you?

Yes, it is. The book is set in Hayle Towans in Cornwall, which I’ve been visiting since I was six. My family owned chalets there – not my immediate family, we were far too skint for that – but my aunties and cousins, who would kindly let us stay in their chalets for one week, normally during the autumn. All year I’d look forward to those holidays and I thought about them a lot afterwards. The beach at Hayle is spectacular but it also has these massive dunes that are always really quiet. Walking through those dunes in blazing sunshine without a soul around is a special kind of freedom that I try to hold on to wherever I go.

In addition to all of that sunny childhood stuff, I should also mention that eleven years ago I fell in love with my now husband in Hayle Towans and we had our honeymoon there.

How are you finding self-publishing so far?

I love it. It is so exciting and empowering. It is also really nice for family and friends to be able to read a book that would otherwise be stuck on my hard drive. My literary agent has been really supportive of the endeavour, even though he initially had mixed feelings and has since had some negative reactions from editors, who thought such a move by an author seemed headstrong and knee-jerk or whatever. I don’t know. I just wanted my book to get a bit of oxygen. And as another writer said to me recently, “Self-publishing is probably the future for most authors, so why delay learning how to do it and building an audience?”

What’s next for you?

Apart from reviewing as many books as I can for Vulpes Libris, I am writing another YA surf novel. So why all the surf stuff?? Well, firstly I live in Newquay, the self-proclaimed surf capital of the U.K, so I am surrounded by surfers. Literally. My next door neighbours on both sides are surfers, and I wake every day in summer at 6:00a.m to the sounds of their car engines as they race off to the famous Fistral Beach to catch some waves before work. But the surfing fascination has come about mostly because last year I experienced the most exhilarating summer of my life. I had been with my daughter almost every minute since she was born and I wanted to test myself to see if I could manage to be without her for an hour or two. How silly and melodramatic that seems, when written down. Still, I forced myself to go out to a local arts event. My friend had to cancel at the last minute, so I put on my new tie-dyed Orion dress (EBay, three quid), my best bovver boots, and I went to this event on my own.

It was a pre-party for a film premiere called “Minds in the Water,” which was a documentary made by a very inspiring group called “Surfers for Cetaceans”, who are concerned with protecting whales and dolphins currently under threat from pollution and hunting. (I wrote about it for Vulpes Libris here). At the pre-party, just as I was stuffing my face at the awesome vegan buffet table, I met a lovely young woman called Laura who had also come to the party on her own, after her friend cancelled. Basically, she changed a lot for me. She got me out of my house on a regular basis, into the ocean and she taught me to surf. I should emphasise that I surf really badly. Embarrassingly badly. But I love it. It’s such an amazing high. Better than any drugs (she says, never having done any drugs in her life). A few months later, I was also lucky enough to meet young pro-surfer Bethany Hamilton, who spoke so eloquently of her return to surfing after losing an arm to a tiger shark back in 2003.

I went back to Snake Beach and added some more surfing scenes, and later on after a suggestion by an editor, I had my main character Jenny experience the intense rollercoaster of learning to surf, and actually mastering it.

At the end of the summer, my new friend Laura went back to uni, but I continued to surf, and in a new novel I continued to write about surfing and the strength, fun and opportunities that can come about as a result of female friendship out there in the waves. That book is called Surf Girl and it features a young female surfer called Natalie who dares to compete in surf contests. She’s like my much cooler and much more daring alter-ego, but obviously she’s not nearly as ancient.

Order Snake Beach from Amazon for 98p.

Snake Beach on Smashwords.

Interview first appeared on Emily Gale’s blog, here:

Weeping Crocodiles, Little Pigs and Big Bad Wolves

Ebooks Fortnight on Vulpes Libris.
Today, we welcome guest blogger Catherine Czerkawska.

The backlash against eBooks in general – and Amazon in particular – has been rumbling along, sotto voce, for some time, but recently, there have been howls of anguish in both US and UK media. (An American bookseller recently called Amazon ‘The Big Satan’!) The Little Pigs are besieged and Amazon is the Big Bad Wolf, come to blow their houses down. Traditional publishers are what they always have been: honourable gatekeepers, there to nurture, protect and promote writers. They are, in short, the fount of all virtue.

This would be just a little more believable if the last decade or so hadn’t seen mainstream publishers presiding over the slow decline and eventual death of the mid-list, that fertile centre ground of publishing, encompassing everything from well written genre fiction to literary novels, with all kinds of fascinating stuff in between. And for a very long time, they have managed to persuade mid-list writers like myself that it was all our fault. This centre ground used to be the seed bed from which the occasional (generally unpredictable) blockbuster success would spring. Sometimes – if the publisher got lucky – it might be an author’s first or second book; more frequently it would be their fourth, fifth, or even sixth book. And if a book did become a bestseller, some of those profits would be ploughed back into nurturing the other seedlings in the mid-list.

Then, slowly but relentlessly, everything changed. No matter what big publishers may say in their own justification, the experience of many writers – even those with agents – is that editors are now ruled and overruled by their marketing departments, and those marketing departments are looking for instant gratification in the shape of a quick and easy bestseller.

They find those bestsellers in ghost written sleb memoirs or autobiographies of sportsmen and television chefs. And cookery books. Such bricks and mortar book chains as remain are crammed with these glossy invaders which have ousted any fiction which doesn’t slot neatly into a set of increasingly narrow genres. It ill behoves publishers to wring their hands and weep crocodile tears over the death of the book, when they have effectively spent a decade or more kicking it in the teeth. Just about every writer of my acquaintance – and I know a lot of them – would tell of rejection letters all saying the same thing: ‘I love this, I think it’s wonderful and well written, but in the current climate, we can’t publish it.’ In other words, it’s a mid-list novel and the marketing department doesn’t know how to sell it fast enough. Editors have – privately, of course – named various wonderful novels of previous decades which ‘would not now find a publisher.’

Even more gobsmacking is the reiterated threat that ‘writers will have to get day jobs!’ I can count on the fingers of one hand –  minus my thumb – the professional writers I know who actually make enough money from published books to be able to support themselves. Almost ALL writers have day jobs. They teach creative writing, run courses, lecture at universities, or – like myself – work at completely different businesses in an effort to buy time to write. How could it be otherwise, when you can be offered £1000 or £500 or a big fat zero advance (and a small royalty) on a book which has taken you a couple of years to research and write.  The Passive Guy, whose consistently interesting blog (www.thepassivevoice.com ) tackles these issues in the US points out that ‘one of the strange aspects of publishing is that although it constantly requires new products, it is a large business that seldom develops any of its own.’ Looked at from this angle, it is the writer who takes most of the product development risk but reaps only a small reward. Even the ‘web marketing assistant’ within a reasonably big publishing company will be paid £19,000 – £22,000 per annum. The suppliers of the product, without whom none of the other jobs would exist, seldom find themselves so well remunerated.

eBook publishing often involves a ‘slow burn’ with sales taking off some time after publication. By contrast, conventional publishing nowadays demands the immediate and astronomical rise in sales and the ridiculously swift slide towards the remainder pile. With a few lucky exceptions, most writers will have been made to feel guilty about their inability to meet the unrealistic targets set by their publishers, and this with well written, well reviewed and popular books – just not instantly popular enough.

So what if there is a lot of dross out there? There’s plenty of mainstream dross as well and good books are hard to find, even in the real world. In fact good books are arguably even harder to find in the real world. In a virtual world, shelf space is unlimited but people are already hammering out ways of finding what they want. Writers are co-operating with each other, engaging with readers via blogs and review sites such as this one and the more eBook targeted ‘Indie eBook Review’ site. (http://indieebookreview.wordpress.com/)  Besides, your dross might well be my good read.

It’s no surprise that many of indie publishing’s most enthusiastic proponents are older writers with a good, even award winning, track record (and a big back list) like myself, who have encountered obstacle after obstacle - as opposed to youngsters who have not yet had time to become jaded with the system. It would be far more helpful to ‘start-up writers’ to debate grown-up topics: the desirability of honing your craft, the importance of your cover image, of engaging professional editorial help, the need to get your head down and keep writing rather than resting on your laurels after one book – all these things are useful. Elitist hand-wringing is not.

Recently, I found myself reading two non-fiction books by the same writer. I bought one in paperback but because I wanted to consult the second in a hurry, I downloaded it to my Kindle. Both were published by a major publisher. The paperback is fine. But the formatting of the eBook is atrocious. It is clear that this large and successful company has no idea that when you convert a document into an eBook, there are certain conventions that make the whole thing look right (quite simple things such as page breaks between chapters) and that you have to check for the coding glitches that will inevitably occur. The whole thing looks amateurish and unprofessional.
 
All of which helps to explain why, for so many of us, the publishing industry has lost credibility as the keeper of culture it still imagines itself to be. I neither want, nor need to be nurtured. Nurturing is for babies. Being treated in a professional, businesslike manner would be good enough. And guess who does that most convincingly at the moment? I do believe it might be the Big Bad Wolf himself (aka The Big Satan). This may not always be the case, of course, but for now, I’m trying to build my house of bricks while he’s still in docile and co-operative mood.

Catherine Czerkawska

www.wordarts.co.uk
http://wordarts.blogspot.com
 

Coming up on Vulpes Libris …

EBOOK FORTNIGHT:  WEEK TWO

Judging by the visitors’ statistics, everyone’s enjoying eBook Fortnight almost as much as we are (we’re all sad little billy-no-mates – what’s YOUR excuse?) and telling their friends to come and have a look as well.  Richard Ommanney tells us his sales shot up by 1300% – which is both pleasing and little unnerving.

So, here’s the line-up for Week Two – and we hope you find it every bit as interesting and  thought-provoking as Week One.

Once again – please don’t be shy about joining in the debate … your comments are an important part of Vulpes Libris … and ebooks are a subject that EVERYONE has an opinion on!

~~~:~~~

On Monday, a welcome guest post from Catherine Czerkawska, who introduces us to a whole menagerie of threats and opportunities in UK publishing, in Weeping crocodiles, little pigs and big bad wolves.

Lisa’s suggested description of Tuesday’s piece was ‘Lisa waffles on and on about stuff’ – which has the virtue of pithiness, but perhaps lacks something in the way of information – so try this:  We republish Emily Gale’s terrific recent interview with Book Fox Lisa, wherein she talks about snakes, beaches and e-publishing.

Wednesday finds RosyB taking a wide-ranging look at some of the issues surrounding ebooks – from covers and content to giveaways and gatekeepers.

On Thursday we welcome the Coffee Crew, aka authors Phillipa Ashley, Elizabeth Hanbury and Nell Dixon, who, as well as telling us their inspirational story, reflect on eBooks – the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

And finally, Lisa brings eBook Fortnight to a close on Friday with a search for some of the best, brightest (and cheapest) e-books on the market.

(Photo credit:  sirwiseowl on Flickr – reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.)

Why I Hate eBooks by Daniel Roush

A Facebook friend’s status got me thinking about eBooks the other day. At first I was generally annoyed because my creativity has apparently degraded to the point where I have to draw inspiration from people’s Facebook status. I got over that quickly because if I learned one thing over the past year of blogging, it’s that you have to take it where you can get it sometimes. So I refocused on the preliminary thought. eBooks. I dislike eBooks, but why? I never really thought about it before. First to mind was that I like real books. But that is a very shallow reason. If liking real books is the only reason I dislike eBooks, it’s like saying I dislike Star Wars because I like Star Trek, which is not the case. So what then? Further down the same runaway train of thought I guess I fear that eBooks will someday lead to the end of paper books. I suppose this is a valid suggestion.

It’s also strange to point out that in every other facet of my media consumption, I prefer digital copy. I’d go so far to say I hate discs. Music, movie and game discs are unnecessary clutter in my already crap cluttered living space. I see no reason, with present technology, why I need to have a hard copy of every movie, song and game I incorporate into my entertainment routine. Some may say that digital storage without hard copy is a risk. I guess so, although many places provide cloud storage these days and in the event of a major disaster, the last thing I’m worried about is my movie collection. There is no reason to cry about my cracked Resident Evil disc when there are zombies walking down the street for example. So why are eBooks different? For one, I can read a book without electricity. Kindles need to charge, CD’s require a CD player, same for disc movies and video games require a computer or console. A television is also required for both movies and games. I can pick up a book, no matter what is going on, and read it.

I do see the convenience of eBooks. It’s perfectly reasonable to see why someone who travels would want a Kindle or iPad. Maybe I just want to see some balance? Right now there are two teams (if I may use horrible, fascist Twilight terminology) you are either team Paper Book or team eBook. These two groups dislike one another. Paper book fans see themselves as the old sages, here to protect us from ourselves and preserve our history. They believe eBook reader to be smelly, hairy, hippies. eBookers see themselves as cutting edge futurists, ushering in a new age of human advancement. They liken Paper Bookers to geriatric codgers who hate change, youth and solid foods. Is either group wrong or right to think this way? Do they think this way or am I just full of crap? What about this? Why can’t publishing companies put a code in their books that provides a free download of the book in digital format for whatever eReader you prefer? This way I can have my paper, but also have the convenience of digital for travel. That idea probably presents more problems than solutions.

So why do I dislike eBooks? I think it’s a complicated combination of all the above factors. Let me start with the soul. Yes, soul. That book I just finished has a soul. What if page 142 was funny or sad or thought provoking so I dog eared it for later? Maybe the inside cover has an inscription from who ever gave me the book, or even the author who wrote it. I have several books with cracked binding because I’ve gone back to read them again and again. A good book has more of a soul than an eReader ever will. Piles of books do not bother me, they make me happy. The thought that my children may never go to a library depresses me. That’s why I plan to have my own library room if/when I have the finances to see it done. While CDs and DVDs and Blu-rays and games gather dust and take up space, my books become decorations on the shelves; cherished as much as the countless stuffed frogs The Wife has gathered over the years or the Christmas Nativity set or the Lego Mini figs. I’ve never felt this way about the DVD copy of The Matrix on the shelf that I’ve watched maybe twice.

Many eBook readers are also eBook pushers. They won’t be happy until everyone reads only via eReader. If you like your eReader, cool, good for you. Don’t try to convert me. If I see a good reason to start using eBooks, I’ll ask your opinion. Until that time, lay off. Some of you make me intentionally dislike eBooks, not because I loathe the books themselves, but you as heralds of them. It’s like certain sports teams, I don’t dislike the institution nearly as much as the annoying fans who try to convince you their team is the best no matter what. There is a place in this world for both books and eBooks. My fear, and ultimately my core reason for aversion to eBooks is the very real possibility that eBooks will lead to the downfall of print books.

First published in January 2012 on Daniel’s blog DUMP.

(Photo credit:  Krypto on Flickr – reproduced under a Creative Commons licence.)