A nice new word

Quote of the week, with the bonus of a new word for me!

"Obviously Amazon has a very definitive point of view on what should be done in the publishing business. Those in the publishing world are not totally copacetic with it," Moonves said.

Holiday downloads

Click to enlarge

My novel The Penal Colony has been free at Amazon for the past few weeks, and consistently in the top five of the Action and Adventure and Thriller sections, though in recent days it has climbed higher yet and last night reached No. 10 in the overall chart of free books.

I was curious to see how downloading varied over the holidays, so each evening made a note of the number of registered downloads. Most of the downloads were made at the UK Amazon store; this book is less popular in the United States.

As you can see from the chart, there was a noticeable spike on Boxing Day, then a decline. The lowest figure was for New Year's Day, when people were otherwise occupied – or recovering from hangovers! To make up for this, there was another spike on 2 January.

While this exercise is of limited scientific value, it does show a pattern which surely reflects the number of e-readers and tablets received as gifts. It also shows the extraordinary popularity of ebooks. These days a title shifting 5,000 hardbacks a month is called a New York Times bestseller.

By the way, The Penal Colony's free run at Amazon should be ending soon, so if you want a copy for nothing please be sure to grab one right away!

Author rankings

Writing is a solitary craft, and many writers seem to be less outgoing than the norm. For such people, self-promotion is a nightmare. They see it as little more than boasting, which I suppose it is. Sometimes, in desperation, the writer crosses the line from boasting to begging, and then it’s even more painful to behold.

In theory, especially in the past, the publisher relieved the writer of this unpleasant chore. The writer might have been expected to do the odd reading, or bookshop signing, or – if he or she were at least semi-famous already – make an appearance on radio or TV. But the bulk of the puffing was done by a publicity manager, typically an extrovert who saw nothing wrong with hyperbole. In practice, nowadays, publicity budgets tend to get spent on authors who are already successful: the money is used to retrieve an inflated advance. B-list authors are expected to promote themselves.

Writers should write; publishers should make things public. The imminent collapse of traditional publishing has changed all that. What hasn’t changed is the underlying need of readers to find new talent and for new talent to be given a chance.

In a TeleRead article in October 2008 I suggested one solution, in the form of a dedicated ebook-review site, but now I can’t see that ever getting off the ground. Each ebook distributor (e.g. Amazon, Sony, Apple) has its own set of reviews, on its own site, put up by readers who just happen to use a Kindle, or a Reader, or an iPad. Yet more reviews are scattered all over the Web, at Smashwords, on blogs and boards and social networking sites like Goodreads.

The number of new ebook titles is growing at an explosive rate. Buried in all the self-deluding dross are some really good books – but how is the reader to find them?

For the sake of what follows, we’ll take Amazon as an example.

Books are already ranked there, and that’s fine, but I propose a ranking system for authors as well. Part of this would be an option for a reader to ask to be notified of an author’s next book. The notification could take the form of an email automatically generated when the book-file goes live at KDP. It would contain a link to the new book’s page. Or Amazon could simply send a sample to the reader’s Kindle without further ado. The reader should at any time be able to withdraw permission to be notified about any or all authors, and will need assurances about privacy.

The more notification requests an author racks up, the greater will be his or her ability to satisfy and intrigue readers. Data about the number of reviews posted for that author and their star-ratings, “likes”, etc., could be added to the mix, together with an indication, like a tag-cloud, of the genre or genres the author’s books are in.

The rankings could then be organized in various ways. Overall movers and shakers, who’s hot and who’s not in each genre, who has the highest-rated reviews per book, who’s popular in which country – the details need to be worked out by someone more computer-savvy than me, but you get the idea. A wonderful new writer with only one book would at least get a chance to be noticed.

All this would cost money to implement, but Amazon would be amply rewarded by the increase in sales and loyalty. Notified readers could even be offered a discount, or an exclusive opportunity to read the book before the official publication day. There are all sorts of possibilities, and I must say that Amazon, in particular, would be brilliant at exploiting them.

However, any of the distributors could take up the baton. Indeed, it would give them an edge against Amazon’s dominance of the market. If they all used author-rankings, readers would have a much easier time in finding new books.

As for the writer, he or she would have more time to write. This alone would improve the quality and quantity of the work, but there would also be an incentive to become technically educated, which many beginners are not. For the new novelist this means learning about story structure, dialogue, viewpoint, and all the other skills that must be mastered to make a novel come alive. It also means learning to be professional with respect to editing and presentation: readers don’t like typos and bad covers any more than they like cardboard characters and wooden dialogue.

The net effect would benefit everyone – reader, author, distributor. We would be taking a decisive step away from the capricious and often mistaken judgments of the traditional and self-appointed gatekeepers, and allowing, at last, true merit to rise.

Thank you, readers

Amazon is sometimes portrayed as the 800-pound gorilla in the ebook jungle, and maybe it is, but for an author who wants to be read that gorilla runs the biggest game in town. In mid-September The Penal Colony was offered there for nothing (after I’d zeroed the price at Smashwords), and it quickly climbed the freebie charts. Since then, many tens of thousands of copies have been downloaded, and the number of reviews is growing.

About a year ago I posted a piece here, in which I opine that:

If you write “creatively” at all, the only valid motive is self-realization. You should not expect, and certainly not demand, that other people should read your output, still less pay you for it. If they do either, you’re well ahead of the game – especially if they pay.

When a reader takes the time to read your book, he or she is doing you an honour. That has an uncharacteristically sentimental sound coming from me, but I believe it to be so. Every reader creates a new version of the novel’s world, informed by a unique set of experiences and values; each individual sees the characters differently and places different emphasis on this or that aspect of the story. It’s both intriguing and sobering for an author to know that, all over the world, hundreds or even thousands of different people are simultaneously engaged on a unique creative act inspired by his original, and now rather distant, imaginings.

It’s also intriguing to get such vivid feedback as the online reviews and to see the range of reactions expressed there, some diametrically opposed to the signals I thought I was giving out. For example, one reviewer suggests the depiction of the “Village” is something of a right-wing wishlist, which surprises me, because the book was written partly as a warning: I thought I had made it evident that the whole setup was (a) a Bad Idea and (b) being run corruptly. Indeed, during the Conservative Party Conference in October 1987, just before the London publication, a pressure group called Tory Action prompted the tabloid headline “Cage the thugs on an island, say Right”.

Some readers complain that the ending is too abrupt and would like to know what subsequently happens to the characters. This is flattering indeed, because it means they have almost become real people in those readers’ minds! Let me say that I was working to a space limit, not especially strict, but at 103,000 words the book was already pushing at the acceptable length for a thriller of that sort. During a lunch with Judith Kendra, the sympathetic commissioning editor at Grafton Books who encouraged this project, I believe I even mooted an extent of 80,000 words. More importantly, I conceived the story as being the experiences of the protagonist vis-à-vis the island, and the moment they cease so does the narrative. A generally favourable outcome and the abolition of Category Z may be assumed …

Thank you, then, readers, for giving my novel a new lease of life and for validating the work that went into it all those years ago. It’s an extraordinary feeling.