The Curzon Group

TEMPTING THE PUBLISHERS?

2012-01-25T05:32:00.000-08:00

Mel Sherratt is a talented debut British writer, who's just published exactly the kind of highly commercial, first-in-a-series, gritty detective crime novel a lot of mainstream publishers and editors constantly claim they're crying out for. Only Mel has published it herself.

TAUNTING THE DEAD is currently riding high at Number 37 on the Amazon UK Kindle chart and is receiving plenty of positive reviews. I should know, I've just given it one myself (see below). Not because I know Mel, but because her novel is really good.

I've since found out that Mel is lucky enough to be represented by a very good agent at super-agency Curtis Brown, who's been knocking on all the right doors. The trouble is that in a risk-averse publishing climate such as we're suffering right now, it's often easier for editors to not buy (ie keep their heads down and stick with marketing the talent already on their books) than take a chance on someone new.

What I'm interested to see now is what effects Mel's continuing high sales rank will have. One imagines that any editor worth their salt will keep a keen eye on the charts (ebook as well as paper). In an ideal world, her agent will have already had a few calls from publishers interested in taking Mel and her series on.

I'm hoping there's a good editor out there for Mel. It would be good to know that writers such as her, who've got the talent and ambition to push their books solo, can also be given the full and proper commercial chance they deserve. It would certainly make for a more interesting and diverse crime writing community if this were so.

Anyway, here's my review:

"A really enjoyable debut, introducing DS Allie Shenton. The plot races along smartly, with the victims piling up, before culminating in a series of twists that hit you like body blows. DS Shenton feels real and ends up balancing all kinds of conflicting desires as the murder investigation progresses. A terrific cast of villains. The Stoke underworld depicted here, in all its viciousness, smacks of authenticity. Fans of Martina Cole will devour this is one sitting. I'm already looking forward to reading DS Shenton's continued exploits."

Emlyn Rees is the author of Hunted, out now in hardback and ebook.

The New Cold War

2012-01-21T09:50:00.000-08:00

By Matt Lynn

I did a blog for the The Spectator last week, about the Arctic as a thriller setting. But for anyone who missed that, here it is....

The Cold War produced some of the great classics of British spy fiction. From the gadgets and babes with exotic Eastern European accents of the James Bond books, to the non-stop action of Alistair MacLean or the dark treachery of John Le Carre and the intricate office politics of Len Deighton, it served as the perfect vehicle for just about every type of story a writer could imagine. More scenes were set in the few yards around Checkpoint Charlie than anyone could keep track of.

But now there is a new type of cold war – one that is more literal than metaphorical. The Arctic is perhaps the most compelling region in the world to set a thriller in 2012 – which is why I chose to set my new novel ‘Ice Force’ in the frozen wastelands around the North Pole.

What makes a great location for a thriller? Well, there needs to be intrigue, of course. And conflict as well. The Arctic has plenty of both. The world’s last great untapped reserves of oil lie under the Arctic Ocean – about 25% of the world’s remaining fossil fuels, according to the latest estimates. But who owns it? For the last few hundred years, no one cared very much. There was nothing out there, apart from a few polar bears. Now everyone wants a share. The Russians claim that much of the Arctic is their territory, and have been provocatively planting flags wherever they can. The Americans – via Alaska – claim a chunk. So do the Canadians. And so do the Danes (via Greenland).

And oil, of course, is power in today’s world. Russia is already the largest oil producer in the world, pumping 10.5 million barrels a day. Add together its existing domestic production with all the oil potentially in the Arctic, and the Kremlin would effectively control the world’s energy supply. Nor would it be afraid to use it. Vladimir Putin has already shown he regards oil as just another weapon in big power politics. It is no great surprise then that the race for the Arctic oil has been described as ‘the new great game’.

Next, some hardship helps. The more rugged the terrain the greater the test you are setting for your characters – and the more peril you can put them in. Nowhere in the world is rougher than the Arctic. The temperatures drop to fifty or sixty below zero. Ice forms inside your sleeping bag as you sleep. Water freezes inside its bottles, and engines have to be re-heated bolt by bolt with blow torches before they will start. The ice breaks up, creating ravines where you can fall into the freezing water. It is the most brutal, inhospitable place on earth.

Finally, your setting needs to be different. What readers really want is to be transported somewhere different. To go somewhere they’ve never been before, and may indeed never get to. To be taken to a different world. Easyjet can fly us most places for a few pounds. Not to the North Pole. It really is a completely different place, and one of the pleasures of reading a thriller set there is that you get to learn about the terrain, and how to survive it.

It ticked all the right boxes. The research was fascinating, and an education in itself. The weather is more likely to kill you than your enemy. Nothing works. You need a specially adapted gun, for example. Wearing thick gloves your finger won’t fit into the trigger, but if you touch metal with your bare fingers they will drop off. So you need the right sort of gun (the Swedish Army specialises in them, in case you were wondering). Or else you need to saw off the underside of the trigger. Even then, you need an array of special oils to keep your weapons working. You need to wear night-vision goggles through the long Arctic winter. For half the year, there is practically no light. And you need to watch out for the animals. Polar bears have a great sense of smell, and they are always hungry. They will creep up on you – and their hides are so well insulated, only a few traces of their breath will be visible on your night-vision equipment. If you do get into a scrap with one, though, thump them from the right – polar bears are left-handed, so that is their weaker side.

There North Pole might never become as familiar to thriller readers as Checkpoint Charlie was. But in the next few years it might well become a small genre of its own – and rather like Robert Peary, it is nice to have got there first.

Shiver Me Kindles

2012-01-20T04:33:00.000-08:00

By Richard Jay Parker

With today's new of the file sharing Megaupload site being shut down in the US it will probably be viewed as a major victory against piracy. The fact is piracy - of movies and music - has been around for decades and will be in the future because it always finds a way.

Since books embarked on the high seas of digitisation they have also become part of the debate.

Which of us hasn't passed on a book to a friend without consent from the copyright owner? Think of this on a global scale and how many royalties an author won't receive because of it. But this is exactly how books get popular.

Battling piracy is a costly process but what seems to be the key to reducing the number of readers, listeners and viewers tempted by downloading copyrighted works for free is for the copyright holders to be reasonable about the product price.

Over two decades ago a music cd could cost fifteen pounds and above. Now a chart cd costs about seven pounds. Since the price of cds came down so has the number of people downloading music. It's still a massive problem (particularly during a recession) and this isn't going to close down the piracy sites overnight. But consumers are responding to a reasonable pricing scale and recognise that they're not just paying for the physical medium or downloadable file but the amount of people who have to be employed to bring a polished product to fruition as well as the intellectual property.

It's still very much a suck and see process for publishers (literally) but I think readers are loyal and will continue investing in their favourite authors if they feel the they're paying an equitable price that still allows for sufficient profit so the industry can continue to thrive and be able to bring them great material in the future.

It won't stamp out piracy - nothing will - but even though times are hard it will mean readers will think twice about downloading often inferior material illegally when they could get it officially for a reasonable price.

Deciding what that price is exactly is going to be the challenge.

Visit Richard at: http://www.richardjayparker.com/

Home again, and a change of name

2012-01-14T05:59:00.000-08:00

By Peter Stuart Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Tom Casey and Jack Steel)

The last couple weeks been busy, and somewhat confusing. We’ve been on the road again, which is hardly unusual, driving up to Andorra from France, which means coping with a significant change in altitude. The house in France is just a few hundred feet above sea level, but to reach our home in the Principality we have to climb up to almost ten thousand feet at Pas de la Casa, on the northern border of the country, and then drop down on the other side. We actually live at an altitude of around four thousand five hundred feet, and getting acclimatised does take a little while.

We did the journey in our 4x4, as we always do in the winter because of the snow, only to find that there wasn’t any. The ski stations here are open, just, but the only snow that fell was towards the end of December, and we’ve literally been basking in the sun ever since we got back. It’s actually been warm enough to sit outside a café as long as you could find a spot out of the wind. For a ski resort, this definitely isn’t good news, but the forecast is that the snow will arrive towards the end of next week, so everybody here has their fingers crossed. We won’t be here to see it, because we’re off to southern Spain for about a week to stay with friends.

The reason for the confusion, I suppose, is because I’m working on three different books all at the same time. I’m editing the fifth ‘James Becker’ novel for Transworld, which has required a certain amount of rewriting to fill in some of the holes my editor identified in the plot. This, by the way, just confirms what I’ve always thought about authors: they are simply too close to their book to see errors which are glaringly obvious to a third party. This has meant focusing my mind again on events which took place in Europe at the end of the Second World War. I’ve nearly finished doing that, and I’ll be able to send the finished manuscript to Transworld next week.

In the meantime, I’m still ploughing on with the second Simon & Schuster novel, which has meant carrying out a lot of research about nineteenth century London to get the atmosphere and descriptions as accurate as I can manage, which is rather different from Germany and Poland in 1945. I’m now in the interesting position of probably having too much historical fact in the book, and too little story, so there’ll have to be quite a lot of rewriting and pruning to do before I deliver the finished product.

And I’m also in frequent contact with the American arm of Simon & Schuster, getting the last few details of the first ‘Jack Steel’ novel right for the US market, and answering queries raised by the copy editor. The ‘Americanization’ of the book was comparatively painless, the changes to the spelling and punctuation only throwing up a handful of errors, but I still had to read the entire manuscript again, just to make sure. All of which takes time, of course.

The good news is that despite Christmas and New Year, I’m still pretty much on track and on time with regard to deadlines.

That’s the other thing about being an author: you never actually stop working. As soon as one manuscript has been finished and delivered, you’re already working on – or at least thinking about – the next one. And no sooner have you started working on book two, than you have start editing book one. It really is a continual process, constantly reading, constantly writing, and constantly correcting. Some people would hate it – I’m lucky, because I love it.

And finally this week, eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that one of my aliases – ‘Philip Berenson’ – has disappeared from the list above, and a new name – ‘Tom Casey’ – has appeared. This is just a slight rejigging of my noms de plume, because names on the spines of books matter. I came to the conclusion that ‘Philip Berenson’ sounds faintly literary – and the one thing my books aren’t is literary – while ‘Tom Casey’ sounds like the guy who lives next door or works in the local garage. That seems like a better choice to me. And while we’re on the subject, my novel The Omega Protocols was originally entitled Trade-off, and that’s what I’ve decided to go back to. And so Trade-off by ‘Tom Casey’ will very soon be available as a Kindle download from The Endeavour Press.

You can contact me at:

www.JamesBecker.com

A Reminder

2012-01-13T04:35:00.000-08:00

Richard Jay Parker

Just thought I'd share this clip. With all the discussion about Kindle and the death of paper books it's good to remind ourselves how passionate people still are about a format that, although changing, is still essentially giving us the same experience.

Hope you enjoy this. It was shot in a bookshop in Toronto and was clearly a labour of love.

Visit Richard at: http://www.richardjayparker.com/

Bolted Horse

2012-01-06T06:38:00.000-08:00

By Richard Jay Parker

There has been a very healthy discussion about Kindle on the blog recently. It's a very poular topic with writers at the moment mainly because the technology's potential is opening up all sorts of exciting new opportunities.

Soon, however, it doesn't matter what writers, publishers or agents have got to say about it. It's readers who are shaping its ultimate success. In the UK this Christmas a million more Kindles were sold and Harper Collins alone experienced 100,000 downloads of books on Christmas Day. I was certainly pleased to find out via Twitter messages that my own book had made it onto some brand new Kindles over the holiday period.

With rumours of high street bookshops stocking only chart books in the future it looks like online will be the best recourse for readers eager to disover something fresh and different.

I don't think physical books have been written off and believe there will always be outlets for people who love all the virtues paper has that digital can't offer. It does seem, however, that many readers are now embracing a new way of enjoying books that will ultimately alter the way the entire industry operates.

Exciting times.

Happy New Year.

Christmas and a new toy

2012-01-06T05:45:00.000-08:00

By Peter Stuart Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Philip Berenson and Jack Steel)

A few weeks ago I had a bit of a pop at the Apple iPad, because I frankly couldn’t see what it did that was in any way useful, or why so many people had apparently decided that it was the ultimate ‘must have’ accessory. I’ve been looking at the device a bit more closely since then, but frankly I’m none the wiser, though arguably I am better informed.

Various people have pointed out how light it is and easy to carry around, how it starts instantly, and what clever technology it is – none of which I can argue with. But the bottom line that I’ve gleaned from people who own one of these devices is that the cameras aren’t very good, it’s pretty useless at browsing the web because it can’t display Flash, printing from it is difficult, assuming of course that you can do any useful work on it, which is unlikely because of the virtual keyboard, and integrating it with home wireless networks can be difficult or in some cases impossible.

Nevertheless, the tablet computer still has a kind of appeal, and so I have actually splashed out and bought one. Not an iPad, for reasons which I hope will be obvious, but a Dell Inspiron Duo, a kind of multipurpose machine which is really clever. You can use it as a perfectly conventional small laptop/netbook, with a proper keyboard and all the usual bits and pieces including USB slots and so on. But the screen flips over so that, when the unit is closed, it turns into a classic tablet computer.

The specification is light years ahead of the iPad, with a 320 GB hard disk, 2 GB of RAM and a dual core processor running at 1.5 GHz, and the ability to flip between a regular keyboard and the tablet is really useful. And, of course, because it’s running Windows it will handle Office, display Flash websites and so on, and has a camera, microphone and speakers all built in. There’s also a nifty little stand available into which you can slot the machine when it’s not being used, and which will charge the battery as well as allowing the unit to function as an entertainment centre, playing music, showing videos or still photographs and so on. About the only area where it can be considered inferior to the iPad is battery life, because it will only run for about two to three hours due to the power demands of the hard disk and the other hardware. You can pick up one of these for around £400, but I was lucky enough to find an unbeatable special offer – on Amazon of all places – and paid only £220, which has to be a bargain: it would cost more than that to buy a netbook with a much lower specification.

This now offers me a large choice of different computers on which to work, which is not necessarily a good thing. The temptation to play with the Inspiron has to be resisted because I have one deadline looming – that’s in the middle of February – and I have an entire book to edit as well, plus lots of other stuff to do relating to contracts, promotions and so on. And there are all the other day to day jobs and tasks which have to be attended to as well.

Added to that, the festive season produced its own demands on our time, and especially the extended family lunch on Christmas Day.

This was fairly entertaining, not least because two family members, who labour under the entirely erroneous impression that they are excellent cooks, more or less took over. The result of this was that the meal began at about three in the afternoon with a smoked salmon platter but, thanks to the two master chefs, the turkey and fillet steak didn’t put in an appearance until about two hours later, and the meal then arrived in stages, a tray of unidentifiable burnt offerings first, and the bread sauce finally materialized when almost everybody had finished eating. The Christmas pudding – eight minutes in the microwave – was offered about an hour after that, but the heat and serve custard took another twenty minutes to arrive on the table, by which time the Christmas pudding was of course cold.

But despite all that, it was a thoroughly good day.

You can contact me at:

www.JamesBecker.com

How thriller writers get it wrong

2011-12-30T03:30:00.000-08:00

By Peter Stuart Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Philip Berenson and Jack Steel)

I’ve always maintained that authors, and most especially the writers of thrillers which feature what might be termed ‘boys’ toys’, need to get their facts right. Over the past two or three years, I’ve been asked on several occasions to review books immediately prior to publication so that a short quote from ‘James Becker’ or ‘James Barrington’ could be included on the front, or a slightly longer quote on the back, cover.

I’ve always taken this task seriously, and I’ve always tried to produce the right kind of ‘sound-bite’ quote, and I’ve also tried to be honest about the book, because there’s no point in saying ‘This is the best book I’ve ever read’ or some equally over the top comment if it’s manifestly true that it’s at best a potboiler. So far, I’ve probably been lucky, because I’ve actually enjoyed the books I’ve been sent, and thinking of something complimentary to say about them hasn’t been difficult.

The other thing that I’ve done with these books is to read them critically, because I absolutely know that mine might be the last pair of eyes to see the manuscript before it goes to the printer, so it really is the last possible chance to get everything right. And what has surprised me is how many errors of fact haven’t been picked up by that stage.

I remember one book where the hero – who was of course a qualified pilot, qualified diver, qualified lover and qualified killer – landed his helicopter on the deck of a ship and then climbed out to talk to some people while he waited for the rotors to stop turning. This makes as much sense as getting out of a car doing thirty miles an hour while you wait for it to stop. Ask any helicopter pilot.

I’ve lost count of the number of authors who can manage to fit a silencer – the correct word is ‘suppressor’ – to a revolver. You can do it, of course, but it’ll have virtually no effect on the noise the weapon makes when it fires. On a revolver, most of the sound emanates from the gap between the chamber and the rear end of the barrel. And then there are the people in the books who cock a semiautomatic pistol by pulling back the hammer. Certainly, that will allow the hammer to fall when the trigger is pulled, but unless the weapon is first cocked by pulling back the slide, it certainly won’t fire a round.

This train of thought was sparked by novel I’m reading at the moment – not a review copy, just a book I picked up somewhere – and in the space of half a dozen pages the author, who is an internationally recognised thriller writer, whose work will be familiar to most people who read in this genre, has made several moderately glaring errors.

First, he has somehow managed to create a spy satellite which can hover over one spot on the planet. What keeps satellites in orbit is their speed. If you go outside on a dark night, shortly after sunset, you can occasionally see one passing overhead. They travel in polar orbits, so their path runs from south to north or vice versa, which enable them to cover most of the surface of the planet every twenty-four hours. They’re about 200 miles up, and they travel very fast. The only ‘hovering’ satellites are those in geostationary orbit, and they are over 22,000 miles above the surface of the Earth and enable you to watch QVC on your Sky satellite receiver. In fact, they’re not stationary at all, but are travelling at such a high speed that they appear to stay in one position when viewed from the planet’s surface.

Second, this satellite had a sufficiently high resolution that observers in a secret building in London were able to see the individual hairs on the head of their target. Good trick. Actually, the best of the spy satellites available at the moment have a resolution of about five inches, and the reason for that is physics – a combination of the speed of the satellite, the elevation of about 200 miles (or about the distance between London and Plymouth) and the laws of optics.

And then he had this same hovering, ultra-high resolution satellite sending video images back to its base. Another good trick that simply won’t work. The speed of the platform means that video would just be a blur, so all satellites take high resolution still images which can be built up into a composite or even a 3-D representation of the target.

For the author or anyone else to check these facts on the Internet would have taken about five minutes, but obviously nobody, at any stage of the publication process, had bothered.

Personally, the moment I find an error as glaring as any of these in a novel, the whole book immediately loses a certain amount of credibility, and it certainly spoils my enjoyment in reading the rest of it. I try to do better in my books, but I have had a few comments in the past that suggest I need to try harder …

You can contact me at:

www.JamesBecker.com

Big Brother

2011-12-29T12:22:00.000-08:00

The potential for intellectual liberation through literacy came into its own with the advent of printing. Anyone could express their ideas on a previously inconceivable scale to an unlimited audience, and literacy took off. Of course the same can be achieved far more efficiently online. We've seen this happen recently with the Arab uprisings and, less impressively, with the London riots.
But the printed word can't be controlled, except through legislation, in the same way that online providers could so easily be censored at the flick of a switch. That's what bothers me. Yes, 1984 has been and gone and Orwell's dystopian warnings proved hugely misplaced. But if he were alive today, I suspect he might be issuing the same kind of dire warnings.

Of Course There Is A Future For Books

2011-12-29T11:42:00.000-08:00

by Matt Lynn

Leigh, I think people get too excited about the technology - and many publishers in particular think about this as a technological rather than commercial challenge. E-books are just a slightly different form of paper, plus a different distribution system. All this stuff about enhanced e-books, pictures, audio, etc, is all nonsense. The book will still be the book, just as the song is still the song, whatever the format. That's why I find it strange that so many writers are so hostile. Printers, I can understand. But writers? I don't get it.

Is there a future for books?

2011-12-29T10:46:00.000-08:00

Totally agree with Matt - it really doesn't matter what the medium is, as long as people keep reading. But there is another concern that e-readers raise... because the technology allows for images, 3D images, moving images, story games, sound effects... and voice overs. Will we shortly all be listening to books through headphones? Are we racing towards a post-literate society? Stories began with an oral tradition, after all. As I wrote recently in Crime Time, I believe the story will survive. I'm not so sure about books.

Navigating the Changes

2011-12-29T09:44:00.000-08:00

by Matt Lynn

Leigh raises some interesting points. I think the big question is what happens to bookshops. I suspect the really good specialist shops will survive. But WH Smith? Or Waterstone's? I dunno. There are mass-market retailers, and they are perfectly good at what they do but if 30% of your sales disappear it is hard to stay in business. And of course if there is no bookshop in your local town, it increases the incentive to download instead. That is what I mean by a dynamic process. Most people are still only looking at the first round effects - but it is the second-round that will be really interesting.

But is this really a problem for writers? I don't think so. True, we will have to be more savvy about marketing, but most of us already are - certainly here on the Curzon blog.

A changing market place

2011-12-29T06:17:00.000-08:00

Charlie Rice raises an important point when he mentions in one of his comments here that he is "forced to go to B&N as the smaller stores have closed." Matt talks glibly of a further 30% of sales online, but what's the tipping point? Can bookshops afford to lose another 30% of their dwindling sales?
Once the bookshops have gone, where's the market place for physical books? Buying online, is purchasing a physical book so very different to downloading an e-book - with its immediate delivery at a vastly reduced cost to the consumer? If (perhaps I should say when) the dedicated bookstores disappear, the industry producing physical books will collapse. Will successful authors of the future be those best able to manoeuvre their way through the online jungle? Will creativity be less important to the writer of the future than expertise in search engine optimisation?

Not A Complete Dodo

2011-12-29T05:39:00.000-08:00

by Matt Lynn

I suspect Leigh is not a complete dodo. I think the interesting thing is that after this Xmas, the Kindle is going to be seen as a big and permanent part of the books industry, rather than just as add-on, or as a niche market. Every industry is dynamic. So let's say, for example, that e-books take 30% of the reading market. How do writers, publisher, and bookshops, the three traditional arms of the industry, respond to that?

Spot the dodo

2011-12-29T04:04:00.000-08:00

Posted by Leigh Russell
I feel uneasily excited about the sales of my books on kindle. Last year my e-sales, small as they are, outdid the print sales of my books. Sales are gratifying in themselves, since they mean people are actually reading the books. The % authors receive on e-sales is far higher than on physical books as the publisher has no further costs once the 'book' is available online. So in money terms, royalties on the physical and e-books are not very different. And in terms of revenue, it's far better to sell say 100,000 books @ £1 than 1,000 book at £5. Scale that up, and the big names must be raking in millions on e-books at promotional prices.
Agreed e-books open up new possibilities. Small independent publishers like mine don't have the clout or funds to get books into supermarkets, or on the telly (I know, my books were never going to reach those dizzy heights, but a girl's gotta dream...). E-books level the playing field to some extent. Death Bed is on the 12 Days of Christmas list along with PD James and Peter James. Where else could that happen? (OK, on the shelves at Harrogate Festival, but seriously, where else?)
I take your point that many traditional publishers are set in their ways, viewing e-books as a way of promoting sales of physical books, rather than an end in themselves. Without physical books, authors can upload books themselves. Many do. Where does that leave publishers, unless they embrace the change? And what is their role if they do?
In my case, the complete opposite seems to be the case as my publisher is (fortunately!) more e-savvy than I am. That isn't typical. I'm the dodo here, not my publisher. Uploading and negotiating with amazon doesn't interest me. It sounds like a lot of hassle. Amazon wouldn't offer me a better deal than my publisher gives, and my publishers are great people to work with.
The physical book has had its day and like I said, I'm feeling uneasily excited. But I'm not ready to get an e-reader yet... one day... some day... maybe...

To Kindle Or Not?

2011-12-29T03:10:00.000-08:00

by Matt Lynn

I'm surprised that Leigh doesn't have a Kindle (see below). Leigh, you should get one right away. They are magnificently designed, and I don't think you can really understand what impact they are going to have on the book business until you have tried one out. For writers, there isn't any question that e-books are a great invention, opening up new sources of readers, and new revenue streams, and providing a forum for innovation. The interesting question, actually, is whether you want your books to be published by a traditional publisher, or whether you want to go with one of the new e-book publishers like Endeavour Press, or do it yourself. One of my worries about traditional publishers is that they sell too much on price as well as only paying a 25% royalty. 99p seems too cheap to me for a whole novel, and if you are only getting 25% of that, it isn't a great deal. Too many of the publishers see e-books as a promotional tool rather than a business in itself....and that is a big mistake.

Is your interest kindled?

2011-12-29T02:18:00.000-08:00

Posted by Leigh Russell
I wonder where other followers of this blog stand on ereaders. I'm in two minds. I like physical books, and haven't got an ereader. At the same time, I can't help feeling pleased when I see how well my books are selling on kindle. All have reached Number 1 on the Bestseller list for thrillers, and are selling even more as ebooks than in print. In fact my publisher recently decided to bring my latest title out as an 'ebook original' five months before the physical book hits the shelves in May 2012. It seems to have paid off as Death Bed was promptly selected as 1 of just 35 thrillers placed on amazon's 12 Days of Christmas promotion @ 99p. I'm almost tempted to buy a kindle myself... So where are you on this? As Hamlet might say, if the B was missing from the keyboard,
"To e or not to e... "

Leigh Russell writes the bestselling UK crime series featuring Detective Inspector Geraldine Steel. Leigh’s new book Death Bed is on kindle http://tinyurl.com/Kindle-DeathBed and available in print 2012. Details of all Leigh’s books can be found on http://leighrussell.co.uk

The perfect Christmas present

2011-12-23T04:55:00.000-08:00

By Peter Stuart Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Philip Berenson and Jack Steel)

As most people know, Christmas has got virtually nothing to do with Christianity. In the early days of the Church, the fledgling religion faced competition from all sides, and one of their biggest problems was trying to combat paganism and other faiths, and particularly to subdue their long established festivals and religious days. The 25^th of December was one of these, an important pagan celebration known as the Festival of the Unvanquished Sun, and rather than try to compete with it, the early Church simply hijacked it, decreeing in the mid-fourth century that that day was the birthdate of Jesus Christ.

That's the historical reality, if you like, but you could also argue that no matter what the truth is of the founder of the Christian religion, Christmas today has got virtually nothing to do with Christianity, but for entirely different reasons. It's been turned into an almost entirely commercial event, with the first offers for the festive season appearing in the shops as early as October, and sometimes even in August and September. According to one statistic I saw – and like most statistics it is highly suspect – as much as thirty per cent of the British population will incur significant debts that they cannot afford to repay over this holiday season, because of the perceived need to buy presents for relatives that they otherwise wouldn't see, and might even dislike, and to purchase prodigious quantities of food which will force everyone to subsist on a diet that consists almost entirely of turkey for the weeks following the holiday.

The subject of presents always causes a certain amount of amusement. My uncle in law – in other words, my wife's uncle – invariably buys us a box of biscuits, so the only thing we don't know before we open the present is exactly which brand he's selected this year. We don't really know why he bothers wrapping it. As a gift, it would make more sense if we ate biscuits, but we don't. We normally buy him a bottle of Scotch, which is equally predictable, and easy, and we don't wrap it. The problem comes when trying to buy presents for people that you don't know, and who you might only have met once or twice in the past.

This year will be the last we spend in the house my mother-in-law owned, because next year it will be sold, and so by a process almost of elimination, it was decided that there would be a final family get-together on Christmas Day in that property. This meant buying additional tables and chairs, not to mention a positive mountain of food because it's not just the immediate family members who will be coming – it's the extended lot as well, and that means Christmas lunch for about seventeen.

And you can't have Christmas lunch without Christmas presents, and that's been our problem. Just what do you buy for a fifty-year-old man who you've met once? We don't know if he drinks or smokes or has some other, less socially acceptable, vice that we could cater for, and we have no idea what he watches on TV or the cinema, or listens to in the car, so we can't even buy him a DVD film or a CD. And what about a fifteen-year-old boy? Actually, that might be easier. Twenty fags and half a bottle of Scotch would probably hit the spot, no matter what his parents might think.

At least for my wife and me, it's a lot easier. This year, just like last year, and the year before, and the year before that, and so on, we buy each other neither a present nor a card. Really, really easy. Then we each go out and if we see something we fancy, we buy it for ourselves.

That way, we can be absolutely certain that at least one of the Christmas presents we receive will be exactly what we want, even if three days after Christmas we're taking everything else round to the nearest charity shop in a big bag.

In fact, I have a feeling we might have stumbled upon the perfect way to buy Christmas presents: buy absolutely nothing for anybody else, and just buy yourself whatever it is you want. And, of course, tell all your friends and relatives to do exactly the same, because for me, personally, there's a limit to the number of tins of biscuits and pairs of amusing socks that I can cope with.

You can contact me at:

www.JamesBecker.com

The Return Of The Retro Action Thriller

2011-12-23T04:54:00.000-08:00

By Chris Darnell

A “backwards” action thriller, you ask? Why would we want a return to that? A thriller of times-past, of action in a time of at least 15 to 20 years ago? Why, exactly do we need this? Let me post a thought. Because action thrillers need to offer change, just like the seasons of the year. They should provide the opportunity to look into the recent past and not just be influenced by contemporaneous events. We need a return to the retro action thriller.

There are many terrific action thrillers available today, and a lot of them have heat and high technology built into their DNA. The pages burn with the hostile climate and unremitting heat of the Middle East, Africa, Afghanistan and other countries with a name ending in “-stan”. The heroes and heroines use the latest technology in their struggle against the agents of corruption or militant Islam. Then there are the accompanying movies and the TV series, which sear these heated images into our brains and dazzle our visual senses with the technology. We almost need to be wearing our Ray Bans in order to watch them. But our Ray Bans aren’t 3D. Pity. I love them all, mind, the books, movies and the TV series.

But I like change, too. I like the heat, but I like the cold more. I’m in awe of the technology of today and use and have used quite a bit of it in my work. But I also have a feel for retro and like to look back, because I’ve lived through it. Of course the authors of action thrillers mirrored the times in which they lived, but just re-read Alistair MacLean’s The Last Frontier to feel the unforgiving pressure of Hungary’s Cold War winter, and live with Michael Reynolds as he battles the elements to escape the clutches of the dreaded Allamvedelmi Osztaly. He’s lucky if he has a coat and a pair of winter boots, and he certainly has no technology to help him. Then take one of those unforgiving, uncertain trips to Berlin with Len Deighton’s Harry Palmer in Funeral in Berlin, or with his Bernard Samson in Berlin Game, and you’ll begin to understand how tough it was to be a hero in a Cold War action thriller. In fact, the issue of hero or no hero didn’t always arise; it was all about getting out of the place alive, with or without the right result. Because if you didn’t the outcome was incarceration behind the Iron Curtain and a bland denial on the part of Her Majesty’s Government that you even existed.

Which brings me indirectly to my novel, The Return, a retro action thriller in every sense that I’ve been talking about. It’s low-tech, set within bleak winter landscapes and is authentic. This is the framework for Paul Stanton’s first outing. He’s ex-SAS but is not a member of the Killer Elite in the way today’s ex-SAS are often portrayed - he is not a pulp fiction action hero. Stanton's resourceful, skilled in the art of killing, but he has a soul and is not a Flash Harry. The setting is 1985-86 and a cripplingly cold Northern Irish winter. Stanton’s used to the cold, he was in the Falklands, but this winter is something else. And then factor in the enemy, the Provisional IRA, at the height of their powers, especially down in Bandit Country. They led the world at that time in the use of improvised explosive devices and left a legacy that has been seen with frightening results in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years.

So Stanton is up against it and his 1985 technology is not much help. He gambles on an operation and loses, and is spectacularly “dismissed” and then thrust into the deniable world of Government-sponsored black ops, just like his MacLean and Deighton antecedents.

To tell you more, would, as they say, be to give it all away. I will just say that the heroine, a beautiful MI5 researcher, is half-English and half-German, and her mother city is Berlin.

It’s a return to Cold War Berlin, and that’s retro.

The Return is available as a Kindle download from all Amazon sites. See http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Return-ebook/dp/B005NWHHRE/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1324644743&sr=1-2

To Kindle Or Not To Kindle?

2011-12-20T23:54:00.000-08:00

Chris Darnell's The Return
The first Paul Stanton military thriller

By Chris Darnell

Let me make it clear from the outset: I LOVE books. Physical books. Books you can feel and smell. Books you can pick up and handle lovingly, that make you think again about the enjoyment the words in them gave you whenever it was you read them. I love them and I always have done and always will. Ask my wife, my mother, my family, my friends. And I have many hundreds of them – all lovingly packed into large, airtight containers and stored in my mother’s car-less garage, because I can no longer display them. I don’t have the bookshelf space nor is there the structural strength in our flat to do so.

I was an avid reader from an early age. In my mid-teens, when my father gave me sufficient pocket money to subscribe to monthly book publications, I started collecting the various authors published by Heron Books. Does anyone remember them? Steinbeck, Conrad, Dickens, the great Russian authors. I still have them; along with all my first edition Alistair MacLeans and the worn copies of Hammond Innes and Ernest K. Gann - some of the authors my father said I had to read – and my many and much loved John Buchan books, collected from the wonderful second-hand book shops of Edinburgh when I was commanding my battalion there in the late eighties. They are all in my mother’s garage.

I love books, but I also love my Kindle; and it’s still something of a surprise to me even after six months of ‘electronic reading’, because I thought the ebook format and its reading device might kill or at least dampen my reading enjoyment. The reality has been quite the opposite. It’s just great not having to pack and lug around all the books you want to read when you go away or travel anywhere.

So what has this got to do with the great British thriller? It is somewhat tangential, but in my view the kindle reading experience can enhance the enjoyment of the thriller. At least that’s what I’ve found. It does of course depend on the quality of the thriller and the quality of the ebook product, and as I’ve only just started out on my learning path in both these areas, I’m not an authority.

Publishing an ebook might sound simple but it isn’t. I published The Return in this format because it was the best way at the time to get my thriller into the marketplace where I believed there was an audience for it. I’m a thorough type of person and as I went through the many iterations of trying to create my ebook I found it frustrating how many errors crept into the transliteration of my word document manuscript. The interactive menu is critical for an ebook and this, along with spacings and breaks, requires meticulous checking before you go live with it. But once it is all correctly formatted, then the reading experience is, in my view, fast-paced and page-turning, literally at the click of a Kindle tab, which is how a good thriller should be read. I seem to read far more quickly with my Kindle than I used to.

But it is the quality of the thriller that is the essence. If the plot creation is clever and intriguing, the action fast-paced and the characters and settings mysterious, dark, colourful or whatever captures your interest, then it will make you want to turn the pages. Reading it on a Kindle will not in any way diminish this experience.

The death of the book - again

2011-12-17T02:32:00.000-08:00

By Peter Stuart Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Philip Berenson and Jack Steel)

This week, the BBC devoted an hour of prime-time viewing to exploring the birth, history and ultimate death of the book. It was an interesting programme, hosted by Alan Yentob, but also – because it was the BBC, after all – moderately pretentious.

Two of the authors they interviewed stuck in my mind particularly.

One did all his writing in a log cabin in the woods where he was at great pains to point out that he had neither a telephone nor Internet access, and from his comments he would probably have been quite pleased if there’d been no electricity either. Presumably, he would have been absolutely delighted if we had to go back to hammers, chisels and slabs of rock. I’ve never been able to understand the attitude some literary authors have that all modern technology is somehow an unwanted impediment which gets in the way and impedes the flow of ideas and creativity between writer and reader.

The second one was perhaps even more bizarre, or unhinged. One of his proudest possessions was a book which he had eaten. He explained at some length how he had felt compelled to sit down one evening, tear the pages of the book into strips and then chew them thoroughly. And from what I remember, he then unravelled the masticated pages the following day and assembled them into a kind of sculpture. Unless I missed it, he never actually produced an explanation for this bizarre behaviour which made any kind of sense.

They were, of course, both literary authors.

Ignoring the loony tunes that Yentob had managed to track down, the programme was in fact quite entertaining. He visited various museums, printing works and the like, and produced a cogent explanation of the way in which the book had evolved. Once ink and parchment had been invented, the earliest type of book was the scroll, the name still enshrined in the way we move from page to page on a computer screen, using the scroll bars or scroll buttons. The problem with that kind of written medium is that it’s sequential, forcing the reader to start at one end and scroll through the entire text until he or she finds the bit that’s needed.

The next stage was the codex, created by cutting parchment or some other medium into handy sized oblongs and then securing those oblongs along one side with thread or glue. This radical concept allowed the parchment to carry writing on both sides, but also allowed for random access – the reader could go straight to the appropriate page – and this is of course exactly what we have today. Every modern book is actually a form of codex.

And, inevitably, a bunch of talking heads discussed the likely impact of the ebook on the world of publishing, and came to the predictable conclusion that they really had no idea what was going to happen. One interesting point that was made was that the essence of any book is not the cover or the binding or the typeface or anything physical – it’s the text itself, and the medium used to read it is almost irrelevant. Obvious, certainly, but worth emphasizing. One person likened the text of the book to a piece of music. The track of an album can be downloaded as an MP3 file, purchased on a CD or, if it’s old enough, on vinyl, but ultimately it’s just a stream of data, just as a book is ultimately just a stream of data, and the medium used to play the track or read the text doesn’t matter in the slightest.

Whatever your views on Kindles and ebooks, I think it’s fairly clear that this method of reading is going to become more and more important as time passes, and within perhaps a couple of years at most, it’s likely that most people will be reading their books electronically rather than as hard copies, for convenience, if nothing else. I don’t know the size of the average reader’s library, but even the cheapest Kindle will hold 1,400 books, which I think is about three times more than I own, and the 3G Kindle can accommodate up to 3,500, which could well be quite literally a lifetime’s reading.

And I suppose it’s worth just pointing out the other startling advantage of owning a Kindle. If there’s a fire or flood in my house and all my books are destroyed, I have to go out and buy them again. If the dog eats the Kindle, or I pour coffee over it or some other catastrophe strikes, all I have to do is buy a new unit. Every book that I’ve ever bought as a Kindle download will be available to me as soon as I turn on the new machine. You buy a book once but download it as many times as you want, within the same account.

But the book as a physical object is far from dead. Yentob finished up in a bookstore equipped with a print on demand machine and, in the time it took the guy behind the bar to make him a cappuccino, this large machine had sourced, printed, bound and spat out a copy of Treasure Island. He even had a choice of editions and typefaces.

So even if you leave your Kindle behind, at least in some coffee bars you can still select a book to enjoy when you get your daily fix of caffeine.

You can contact me at:

www.JamesBecker.com

Imagination

2011-12-16T15:52:00.000-08:00

Advice about writing books is proliferating online, in books and at creative writing courses. My workshops for The Society of Authors and Get Writing at the University of Hertfordshire are always rapidly oversubscribed, sometimes within a day, and on my author channel one of the most viewed videos is the discussion on ‘How to Write a Good Book’. These days it seems that everyone wants to write a book.
An often repeated piece of advice is to “write about what you know”. In terms of fiction, that has always struck me as rather odd because part of the joy of writing is to explore the unknown. Stef Penney had never visited Alaska when she wrote ‘The Tenderness of Wolves’ which won the Costa ‘Book of the Year’ prize. How many wizards had Tolkien met? Had Shakespeare experienced the frustrations of being a woman in love with a man who thought she was another man? And when did Kafka become a literate beetle? Literature is full of examples because by definition fiction is made up.
An author’s job is to create a credible world for the reader. But if we only wrote about what we knew, either fantasy books would disappear, or we would discover some surprising facts about their authors! I don’t write fantasy, but murder stories. My novels exploring the motivations of different murderers are all bestsellers - but I never felt the need to kill anyone before I could write the stories. It’s all done through the magic of imagination.
Leigh Russell writes the popular bestselling UK crime series featuring Detective Inspector Geraldine Steel. Leigh’s new book Death Bed is one of 35 thrillers on amazon kindle's 12 Days of Christmas promotion @ 99p http://tinyurl.com/Kindle-DeathBed also on amazon.com, and out in print 2012. Details of all Leigh’s books can be found on http://leighrussell.co.uk/

The Worst Christmas Ever

2011-12-16T03:40:00.000-08:00

By Richard Jay Parker

One of the great traditions of Christmas is the retail analysis on the news. One day it's possibly the worst year the high street has ever known and the next it's the best one ever. This year is certainly going to be a leaner one for a lot of people, however. But will it really harm to take the retail emphasis off Christmas?

I know lots of people who are staying away from the shops and resisting filling their online baskets/carts to the brim. With all that pressure off the majority of them are just thankful they made it to the end of another year. It's been a pretty volatile 2011.

The importance of being surrounded by family and friends seems to be becoming the priority again and that's certainly not a bad thing. Claustrophobia and petty squabbling aside you've only got to turn on the news again to see there are certainly worst places to be spending Christmas.

In terms of publishing it's been another year of shifting sands. Technology is still waiting for publishers, agents and writers to catch up. It's going to take a good while longer by which time technology will have probably moved on again. But as well as all the headaches it's also an exciting time so there's plenty of challenges to look forward to in 2012.

So, whether you're part of an industry still finding its feet again or a reader reaping the benefits from a new world of instantly available material, I think we can all agree that we all still love the product, irrespective of how it's brought to us.

However you're spending Christmas, I hope you have a good one and a very peaceful 2012.

Vist Richard at: http://www.richardjayparker.com/

Kindling enthusiasm

2011-12-09T15:51:00.000-08:00

By Peter Stuart Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Philip Berenson and Jack Steel)

Matt has mentioned Kindles in several of his recent blog entries, and in fact so have I, so perhaps it's time to come clean. I never thought I'd say this, but having just humped four boxes of books – a mixture of hard back and paperback – into the back of the car in Andorra, and then unloaded the same boxes at the house in France, I am beginning more and more to appreciate the sheer convenience and flexibility of electronic texts. I've always thought that I would much prefer the physical experience of actually holding a book in my hand, looking at the cover, reading the blurb, and then with a growing sense of anticipation opening it up and beginning to lose myself in somebody else's adventure.

Of course, I still enjoy doing that, but it was something of a surprise to realize that I could also do almost all that on a Kindle. Again, you can look at the cover – it's monochrome, obviously, but you can still get a good idea of what it looks like – and you get access to the entire contents. The Kindle also remembers exactly where you were in the text when you stopped reading it, so there's no need to turn over the corner of the page or stick in a bookmark or anything like that. And if there's a passage that you want to refer to later, you can add a virtual bookmark to the page, and also add your own notes to the text as well, all without altering the integrity of the original manuscript. Personally, I always get irritated when people mark books, because I just think it's selfish to deface an author's work with your own personal opinions, but with the Kindle it doesn't matter.

But far and away the biggest single attribute the Kindle has is that it's relieved the strain on my back. When I finish a physical book which I don't think I will want to read again, I put it in a box so that I can take it to a charity shop. The slight problem I have is that I live in Andorra and the charity shops I normally use are in Kent, hence the reason for loading the boxes into the back of the car.

With the Kindle, all I have to do is delete the entry from the device and the book magically vanishes into the ether. And if I've made a horrible mistake and I've chosen the wrong book, I can simply go to my Kindle account on Amazon and download it again. No more boxes, no more backache.

And when you also remember that you can load an effectively unlimited number of books onto the device, the further advantages of carrying your entire library in your pocket become very, very clear.

In fact, it's got to the point where the first thing I look at on Amazon is not the price of the book I'm interested in, or the number of reviews it's had, or its star rating. It's whether or not I can buy it as a Kindle download and, if I can't, I find that in itself very irritating to the extent that it may well sway my purchase decision.

I've even come to resent the fact that if I buy a hardback or paperback from Amazon, I have to wait a day or two for the book to be delivered to me, whereas if I buy a Kindle download, I can start reading the text within literally about thirty seconds. Talk about convenience?

This device is so seductive, and so useful, that I genuinely believe that within a very few years almost anyone who reads more than one or two books a year – I personally read about that many every week – will have a Kindle and will use it in preference to buying a physical volume, for all the reasons which I've listed above.

So does the Kindle mean the death of books? The question's been asked many times before by people who know far more about the publishing industry than I do, and the short snappy answer is that nobody actually knows. Personally, I don't think it does. There are a number of different types of book, especially non-fiction titles which are heavily illustrated, and the Kindle does not handle images particularly well because they are so small and they have to be depicted in varying shades of grey. If you're looking a photograph of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, say, you clearly won't be seeing it at its best on a Kindle. But for novels and other books that most readers will purchase, read once and then discard, the Kindle is absolutely the ideal medium.

And that, I have to confess, does produce very mixed emotions in me.

You can contact me at:

www.JamesBecker.com

Curl Up With A Friend

2011-12-09T04:26:00.000-08:00

By Richard Jay Parker

With Christmas fast approaching most of us will soon be immersed in the hectic activities that lead up to it. Within a few weeks it will be upon us and, as usual, we'll be exhausted, enjoying the end result and, maybe, we'll be able to briefly relax.

There's always one ritual I make room for during the holidays that I've mentioned in this blog before and that's spending some quality time with my bookshelf. During the year it leans patiently against the wall largely ignored. OK there's one portion of it that houses a stack of new books to work my way through but the rest of its contents are scarcely glanced at.

I always like to pull a few favourites off the neglected shelves, flick through them and realise how many books I have that I'd like to read again. I'll select a few for consumption over the holidays - old friends and guilty pleasures - and if I manage to work through half the stack I'll be happy.

It's a nice opportunity to remind myself of the time when I didn't analyse them so much and thought of them as intriguing objects that fed my imagination.

Am glancing at the shelf now but will resist the urge until I have the time to pay them the proper respect. There's a few shopping miles to cover before then...

Visit Richard at: http://www.richardjayparker.com/

What People Actually Read

2011-12-04T08:50:00.000-08:00

by Matt Lynn

If you look at the Kindle chart and the traditional charts, you’ll notice something quite interesting. They aren’t at all similar. The UK Kindle chart today is topped by Phil Rickman, who is hardly a household name, followed by Damon Galgut and Kerry Wilkinson. The physical chart is led by the latest Wimpy Kid, followed by Jamie Oliver, Lee Evans and Michael Connolly.

Why is that, I wonder? After all, these are all books. Of course you can probably discount Wimpy Kid and Jamie Oliver. Most kids don’t have e-readers yet and cookbooks aren’t a natural for the Kindle. Even so, if you look at the Kindle charts, the ‘big authors’ don’t do so well. PD James and Kathryn Stockett are in the Top 10 and Patricia Cornwell in the Top 20. But heavily hyped writers like James Paterson don’t really do that well. In my own corner of the market, military adventure, I don’t sell as well as Chris Ryan and Andy McNab in the bookshops, but on Kindle I am regularly out-selling them.

One reason might be that the Kindle audience is slightly different from the mainstream audience. It is probably slightly more male – hence the number of thrillers in the chart – and a bit more techie. It may also be more adventurous in its taste.

But the real reason, I suspect, is because it is a much more level playing field. Some books get more push than others online of course. But going into the Kindle store is nothing like going into a bookshop, and nothing at all like the books section of a supermarket. The choice is vast, there are no in-your-face promotions, and word-of-mouth (in the form of reader reviews) is everywhere.

So what we see on the Kindle chart may well be a far better guide to what people actually want to read. I’m not sure the publishers have quite realised that yet though.

In Praise Of Book Covers

2011-12-02T06:35:00.000-08:00

By Richard Jay Parker

As more and more readers opt for ebooks, the demands on book covers are changing drastically. Formerly designed to lure unsuspecting readers onto the rocks of unknown authors a book now has to sell itself in thumbnail size. Images and fonts have to be legible on an Amazon page as it's very often the only bite of the cherry the designer has.

It's always been an art form. Pulp fiction probably benefited the most by seducing customers with lurid covers and titles. This was replicated in the eighties when unregulated home video distributors went right over the top packaging movies with the most outrageous cover images imaginable. In the UK many movies were banned and the covers were partly to blame.

Great covers are crucial for new authors. If a reader hasn't heard of you or your book then the cover has to engage them. Even if the reader doesn't buy there and then, a memorable cover and title will lodge itself in the memory.

With 21st Century demands the book cover has to tick more boxes than just catching readers' eyes in shops. But here's a cool site to remind ourselves of an era when book covers ruled the earth. It's run by a guy named Jim Barker and is great fun.

Visit Richard at: http://www.richardjayparker.com/

Windows 7, anyone?

2011-12-02T00:51:00.000-08:00

By Peter Stuart Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Philip Berenson and Jack Steel)

I'm in something of a state of limbo at the moment, in the unusual position of not having a deadline looming. I've delivered the pre-edited manuscript of the next 'James Becker' book to Transworld, and so there's nothing else I can do until the editor gets back to me with his comments and any feedback from professional readers. My next deadline isn't until next year, when I'm scheduled to deliver the second Simon & Schuster novel in mid-February. I know that actually that's only about ten weeks away, but because it's next year, it still feels somehow distant.

That book, like the first in the 'Jack Steel' series, The Titanic Secret, is written against a background of real events, which makes the book both easier and more difficult to write at the same time. It’s easier, because I have a fixed series of real-world occurrences which in themselves will dictate the timescale and the major events to form the basic plotline, but more difficult because I have to weave my story around these fixed points, which cannot be moved in any way – the date, the place, and the events themselves have to be described exactly as they took place. The good news is that I'm already about a third of the way through the first draft, and I should have the book finished by about the end of January, which will give me roughly two weeks to hack it about and knock it into some kind of shape.

And then, I think, I'll have about six months to write the third book for Simon & Schuster, title and subject entirely undecided at the moment, and by that time I will also be working on the next Transworld novel, so the middle of 2012 is probably going to be quite a busy time.

As regular readers of this blog will know, the fourth 'James Becker' novel – The Nosferatu Scroll – was released as a mass-market paperback late in November, and the initial sales figures look pretty good. In fact, there's already talk of a reprint being ordered, which is good news.

I'm also tinkering away with another couple of ideas, just in case I have any spare time. One is non-fiction, but concerns a subject which seems to have become rather less popular over the last few years, so that might be quite difficult to sell. But precisely because it's non-fiction, I don't have to write the entire book before my agent can begin offering it to publishers: a detailed synopsis and an example chapter should be enough to see if there's any interest out there.

The second idea is pure escapism: a new field, with new characters and, almost inevitably, a new nom de plume. But that's a lot more work, because I'll need to complete the first novel in the series and have a pretty good idea of where the rest of the books are going to be heading before my agent can try and sell it.

And, of course, I have to be sure that I can find the time to write them.

In this regard, I seem to be actively hindered by Microsoft. A few months ago I purchased a brand new laptop, a Hewlett Packard Pavilion which offered remarkable value for money and a very high specification: a fast quad core processor, a 750GB hard disk, 6GB of RAM, USB 3, fingerprint reader and all the rest. It came as standard with Windows 7 Home Premium, and that seems to be the problem. It's better than Vista, but almost anything is better than Vista, and it's certainly not anything like as good as Windows XP.

The particular problem I'm facing is that almost every time I change to a different application – when I open a browser to check something on the Internet, for example – the operating system hangs and displays the irritating message 'Not responding' next to the name of the new application. That state of affairs can last for anything from a couple of seconds to a couple of minutes, and as everyone who uses a computer knows, two minutes spent staring at a frozen screen can seem like an eternity.

I've trawled the Internet looking for fixes, and there doesn't seem to be one, despite the huge number of sites and blogs that deal with the issue, so I presume it's something I'm just going to have to live with until Windows 8 arrives sometime next year. Assuming, of course, that the new operating system will be an improvement on the old one, which is not something you can take for granted when Microsoft is involved.

In the meantime, has anybody got any ideas?

You can contact me at:

www.JamesBecker.com

How Many Kindles Are Out There?

2011-11-28T08:17:00.000-08:00

By Matt Lynn

At the moment, I’m spending a lot of time setting up my new digital publishing venture, Endeavour Press. One of the things that interests me is, how many Kindles are out there. Amazon reported today that over the holiday weekend in the US it had sold four times as many Kindles as it did last year. But, rather irritatingly, it doesn’t actually say how many.

Figures are surprisingly hard to come by. For 2010, the estimates from the analysts are that five to eight million Kindles were sold. Let’s take a median figure, and called it 6.5 million. If Amazon has quadrupled those sales this time around – and based on anecdotal evidence, that sounds realistic – then it should sell around 26 million this year.

Add in the 2010 sales, and, after Xmas there could be 32 million Kindles out there globally. That’s about half the population of the UK. More significantly, I bet nearly all of those people are keener than average readers. After all, there isn’t much point in getting one if you only read one James Patterson book a year. You need to be a 5-10 books a year minimum reader to make the investment worthwhile.

So what proportion of heavy book readers will have a Kindle by 2012? I’d estimate about 40%. That’s what makes this market so fascinating.

Does advertising work?

2011-11-25T09:28:00.000-08:00

By Peter Stuart Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Philip Berenson and Jack Steel)
The big day was yesterday, 24th November 2011. Well, actually not that big, I suppose, but it was the day when the fourth 'James Becker' book – The Nosferatu Scroll – hits the shelves as a mass-market paperback. This novel had been handled by Transworld rather differently to the previous three, because it was actually first released back in June as a hardback, which I think about three people bought, and as a trade paperback.

For those of you not familiar with the distinction, trade paperbacks are the large volumes normally sold airside, in places like W H Smith in the departure lounge at Gatwick or Heathrow, where they have a captive audience desperately seeking any kind of distraction while they wait for their aircraft to arrive from Iceland or wherever it's been delayed. Mass-market paperbacks are the regular sized books you'll find in any high street retailer.

The previous three 'James Becker' novels were all released immediately in mass market format, but I suppose Transworld decided that the fourth book might do better if they tried two bites of the cherry. And they might have been right, because apparently the trade paperback sold quite well, despite the absence of any promotions or special offers. It will be interesting to see how well the book does over the next month or so, because it is a kind of a winter's tale, best read by flickering firelight in a warm and cosy – but, above all, dark – room.

All of which has rather made me wonder just how effective marketing and promotional campaigns actually are. Whenever you travel by rail or underground, you'll frequently find yourself staring at some poster depicting a book which you may or may not have heard about, written by an author that you probably know. You may even have wondered why you rarely see posters extolling the literary efforts of lesser-known writers, and the answer to that, in simple terms, is money. Or, to be absolutely accurate and to use a bit of marketing-speak, it's return on investment.

If a publishing house decides that they have a budget of, say, £50k to throw at one of two authors, and they assume that the campaign will generate roughly 10% of additional sales, the choice of which author to select is comparatively easy. If Author A sells an average of 100,000 books a year, and Author B sells an average of 10,000 books a year, the advertising campaign will generate additional sales of either 10,000 books or 1,000 books. So which do you think they'll choose?

That's why you'll see the latest offerings from Jilly Cooper and Lee Child, to pick two writers from opposite ends of the spectrum, prominently displayed on posters, and why you’ll almost never see any promotions for first novels or for writers who haven't yet hit the big time. In some ways, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and inevitably results in a few bestselling writers selling even more books, and everybody else selling a lot less.

And while talking, albeit obliquely, about Lee Child, you may have heard that his books are going to be turned into films, which is good news for those of us who enjoy his novels, but Hollywood has chosen for the lead role an actor who is so completely unsuited for the part that it's simply laughable. Lee Child's hero is a man named Jack Reacher, well over six feet tall, massively built and a former military policeman. In every book Reacher solves problems by, basically, bashing heads together and generally beating the hell out of anybody who gets in his way. So Hollywood has chosen, to play this ultimate macho man role, Tom Cruise. Five feet tall and eight stone dripping wet. Presumably he's going to beat up the bad guys standing on a box, which is going to be somewhat limiting. Either that or there’ll be some really impressive trick photography.

But back to the plot. So do advertising campaigns work? The general perception in the industry seems to be that they don't.

I know of at least one writer who was poached from his original publishing house by another publisher, allegedly for far too much money, and whose next book received massive, almost blanket, coverage in London. Despite this, the book didn't sell – I didn't read it, but I did try some of his earlier efforts, which were so bad as to fully justify the epithet 'unreadable' – and since that campaign neither the author nor his works have been much in evidence. He's still writing – I suppose his new publisher is still trying to recoup some of the money they spent – and his reviews on Amazon have been, shall we say, 'mixed'.

The best advertising is probably still word-of-mouth, and a good many bestsellers in recent years have risen to the top of the charts mainly because people read them, enjoyed them, and told their friends about them. Mind you, one of my friends out here in Andorra told me that The Da Vinci Code was the best book he'd ever read, which caused me to revise my opinion of him fairly drastically.

But word-of-mouth works, there's no doubt about that, as long as the book itself is worth reading.

You can contact me at:

www.JamesBecker.com

Long Live The Imagination

2011-11-23T04:54:00.000-08:00

By Richard Jay Parker

Following on from Matt's piece about pulp fiction I feel I should add my own positive endorsement of not just pulp fiction but the broader notion of the written word remaining a vital part of everyone's personal development. Whether you like reading Russian classics or riveting thrillers you're exercising your imagination - a faculty that is being steadily dimished by the plethora of 21st Century instant entertainment available to us.

Maybe it's not the fate of printed books we should be campaigning for but simply the idea of perpetuating the unique and personal experience of using words (in whatever format) to populate your mind with characters drawn from your own well.

OK - it's hardly surprising that a writer would be all for this but I really can't conceive of a world where some of the people who entertain me aren't entirely personal to me. When you open/switch on a book your imagination is choreographed by the author but it's the only time your brain fills in the gaps and fleshes out the characters.

TV, DVDs and computer games are great entertainment and enrich our leisure time but they do all the work for us. A little like dragging yourself down to the gym but watching everyone else working out. Fun but not very beneficial. And like your body your brain needs to be stimulated to stay in shape. OK - fifties scaremongering infomercial over.

Simply put, I don't want the human imagination to become a casualty. It's way too valuable and has given us the best books as well as the best DVDs, TV and computer games. We've got to keep it in shape.

Even though I use mine every day I realise it's not relevant to everyone's lives. I just hope this number doesn't rapidly escalate and we lose all those vital triggers to every new concept that entertains us. Can you imagine that?

Visit Richard at: http://www.richardjayparker.com/

The Return of Pulp Fiction

2011-11-19T03:46:00.000-08:00

by Matt Lynn

The most interesting thing happening in writing right now is the way the Kindle is breaking down old barriers. It is creating a lot of new space for writers, and, rather surprising, it is also bringing back some old forms.

One is the long essay, which is really just a recreation of the polemical pamphlet. The other is the e-novella, which is really the heir to pulp fiction.

Pulp fiction flourished as the ‘penny dreadfuls’, lurid, sensationalist tales that filled Victorian and Edwardian railway bookshops in Britain, and in the ‘pulp fiction’ story magazines that were hugely successful in the US right up until the 1960s.

Both specialised in genre fiction, usually written fast by highly professional writers. The stories ere disposable, shocking, and attention-grabbing. And they were sold cheaply.

Look at the Kindle charts and you’ll see a lot of stuff is very similar. Lots of fairly sensationalist cheap fiction.

In effect, new technology has bought pulp fiction back to life.

The interesting point I think is that some great writing emerged from that tradition. The Victorian penny dreadfuls contained plenty of rubbish and so did the American pulp magazines.

But those magazines also provided the foundation for some great writers. Raymond Chandler, Zane Grey, Rider Haggard, and many others. Upton Sinclair was at one point knocking out 8,000 words a day for the pulps.

They allowed writers to write a lot, to develop characters, and push genres. At the moment, Kindle is allowing writers to do something very similar. There is a lot of rubbish, of course, but I suspect when we look back in fifty or a hundred years time we will decide that a lot of the most interesting work is being done for Kindle, just as it was in for the pulps in the past.

CHRISTMAS STOCKING

2011-11-18T08:26:00.000-08:00

By Richard Jay Parker

It seems like such a convenient idea at the time. Christmas is coming and you want to see your loved ones' faces light up on the big day. So you go to Amazon and see all those books begging for attention. You buy one and keep it hidden and then watch their reaction when they open it. But what happens after? Some of those books go to a good home where they're loved and cherished and given attention but many of them have a harsh reality to face in the New Year.

Many are neglected before the Croft Original has been stored back in the drinks cabinet or even before the egg nog has gone sour. It doesn't take long before the kids realise how much hard work they're going to be. Often they end up being ignored by the whole family until they become nothing but a nuisance. Eventually they're taken for that inevitable drive and dumped out of sight out of mind.

Christmas is the time when the most hastily bought books end up being unceremoniously disposed of. Abandoned celeb bios, estranged TV tie-in cookbooks, shunned novels and spurned comedy compendiums.

How many ebooks will suffer the same fate? Enthusiastically downloaded but ultimately unloved.

So before you make that purchase think of how the 'that'll do for Uncle Colin' book will very likely spend 2012 - crammed onto a charity shop shelf with all the other waifs and strays.

Remember - a book isn't just for Christmas... Choose with care and you'll have something that may stay with them a lifetime.

Visit Richard at: http://www.richardjayparker.com/

Cross-genre publishing? Try a Kindle

2011-11-18T08:25:00.000-08:00

By Peter Stuart Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Philip Berenson and Jack Steel)

One of the slightly strange realities of the publishing business is that books have to be both similar and different, at exactly the same time. On first reading, that sentence probably doesn't seem to make too much sense, but it is nevertheless true. When a writer submits a manuscript to an agent or publisher, the work has to achieve two things simultaneously. It has to be sufficiently familiar in its scope and concept that the person reading it will immediately be able to pigeonhole it. He'll be able to recognize that it's a police procedural book, or a romance, or a comedy or whatever. But at the same time, the manuscript has to be sufficiently different to everything else published in that particular genre to be identified as something new.

Most of the time, this all works out rather well. The author knows what he's writing about, and the agent will recognize the genre and be able to submit the book to a publisher who works in that field. And the man browsing the shelves in the bookshop will be able to go directly to the section which holds the kind of stuff that he likes to read.

The problem comes when an author has an idea for a book which simply doesn't fit into any convenient genre. Many years ago, when I was trawling the pages of the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook searching desperately for an agent who would be willing to take me on, I had an idea for a book of precisely this sort, a cross-genre work. What was rather odd was that I did find one agent who was prepared to accept both me and the novel and try to sell both, but in the event I got a better offer and went elsewhere.

This book was first entitled Trade-off, and the majority of the text reads like a straight, mainstream thriller, with a missing girl snatched by a ruthless gang while her boyfriend – a British police officer on an exchange posting with the FBI – criss-crosses America searching for her. The problem comes at the end of the book, when it becomes clear that the bad guys are working for a most unusual organization, and that takes the book out of the thriller category and puts it somewhere else. But this other factor (and I'm not going to tell you what it is, because I'd like you to buy the book and find out for yourself) does not form a sufficiently large part of the manuscript to justify placing the book in a different genre.

It's a true cross-genre, and hence difficult to sell, novel, and despite the best efforts of my agent, we've never found a publisher willing to take it on, despite the fact that I've now achieved a reasonable reputation as a writer, and all my books sell quite well.

For a very brief period, the book was being offered by a small American publishing house which specialised in ebooks in the early days of this publishing medium, and it turned out to be pretty much their biggest selling title. But that didn't last long, and when the firm went out of business, the rights reverted to me again.

I read what Matt Lynn said in an earlier blog entry, and so I decided that it was worth having a go at selling the book myself, as a Kindle download. Fortunately, I already had a cover which had been produced by the American company, so that was one job I didn't have to do. What surprised me was how easy it was to format the book so that it looked OK on a Kindle, and how painless the upload process actually was, which I think both pleased me and depressed me in almost equal measure. This demonstrated very clearly that anybody can write almost anything and have it available for the world to buy and download in a matter of minutes. And in the world of publishing, more choice of material is not necessarily a good thing, simply because until you buy the book you have no clue if the author can actually write or tell a story. But that's a topic for another day.

Anyway, the short version is that the book, with its original cover and revised title – it's called The Omega Protocols – and with a completely different author's name – Philip Berenson – is now available for the world to buy on Amazon for what I personally think is an extremely modest price.

If any of you do buy it, please let me know what you think it.

You can contact me at:

www.JamesBecker.com

Unbound books and the Man in the Shed

2011-11-11T02:12:00.000-08:00

By Peter Stuart Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker and Jack Steel)

Actually, it isn't necessarily a man at all. It could just as well be a writer of the female persuasion, but men are traditionally supposed to own sheds. In fact, I've heard a number of people who claim to Know About These Things who believe that a shed can save a marriage, because it provides space between the two combatants, and gives the husband a place to which he can retire to pursue whatever solitary and sordid pursuits float his particular boat: model railways, smoking, or just viewing high quality porn.

Unbound? Shed? I'm talking about what, exactly? Oddly enough, it's a brand-new venture in publishing. Instead of an author spending a few months or a few years writing a book and then trying to interest a publisher or literary agent into taking it on, with the attendant risk that the book might never be sold, in which case the author has wasted a year or so of his or her life, Unbound (www.unbound.co.uk) has come up with a novel – in the other sense of the word – idea.

Before the writer finishes the book, or even gets properly started on it, he or she can submit it to Unbound and, if the idea for the work is accepted by the website, details of the proposed book will be displayed and members of the public can then pledge money to the author, essentially providing sufficient funding to pay for the book to be written and then published.

It's an interesting idea, because if the proposal stinks, and attracts no or very little attention, the author will presumably slink away, back to his or her garret, and try and come up with a better or more compelling plot. But if the core idea of the book attracts the public's attention, money will flood in and eventually the book will make it onto the shelves of Waterstones and W H Smith. So it is, in some ways, a mechanism for assessing the likely popularity – and hence potential sales – of a particular book without the author going through the tiresome process of actually writing the thing.

And the people who agree to provide funding benefit in some small ways as well. The minimum contribution is a mere £10, and that produces a copy of the ebook edition of the work, prints the contributor's name at the back of the book, and provides access to the author's 'shed', of which more later. Contribution levels differ depending on the book, but typically rise through £20, £50, £75 and £150 to £250, which gets you two tickets to the book's launch party, one or two other bits and pieces, and lunch with the author, which is for some reason seen to be a Good Thing. But I suppose that does depend on the author.

If you've just won the lottery and feel like taking a punt, it's even possible to fund the entire work, which presumably means you effectively own the author for the duration of the project, and possibly acquire some of the headaches – coping with the looming deadline, tantrums, writer’s block and so on – as well.

But – and with most ideas of this type there's always a 'but' somewhere – the bad news is that at the moment the site is mainly commissioning works from published authors, presumably because that way the finished product will hopefully be competently written and won't need weeks of editing to knock it into shape. So this certainly isn't a quick route to publication for somebody with no track record, and is really simply another avenue that published authors can explore. And that, I suppose, is either good or bad, or both, depending entirely upon which side of the publishing fence you're standing.

And there's another tiny little niggle that I have, not with the idea of the site and its aims, but with that one word: 'shed'. It's probably just me, but to refer to the author's shed – which according to the site simply means the author's private area, which could be construed to have some slight sexual connotations as well – just seems a little dismissive. As if the author is simply an inconveniently eccentric family member who's dismissed to the garden shed to pursue his solitary vice away from the public gaze of the adults. Why couldn't they have called it the author's 'study' or 'office' or even 'workroom'?

That aside, it’ll be interesting to see how the project fares. Currently, the site is displaying details of five books which have received 100% funding, including one by a first-time novelist named Jennifer Pickup, and nine other books to which money can be contributed, with the existing donation level displayed by each one. Every book remains on the site for a finite period of time, and at the end of that is presumably removed if it has not attracted sufficient support. Looking at the levels of contribution and the days remaining, my guess is that at least one of the books displayed will not make it into either the bookshops or the world of the ebook.

So will it work? Probably. I suppose you could say that it's really not that different to conventional publishing. Normally, a commissioning editor will pitch a manuscript that he likes to his colleagues, and if enough of them agree with him, the book will be bought. What Unbound is doing is exactly the same, except that there is no commissioning editor, and the people who make the publishing decision are the kind of people who will ultimately be buying the book. So it's really a new slant rather than a brand-new idea.

But it also means that a new expression has entered the world of books: welcome to 'crowd publishing'.

You can contact me at:

www.JamesBecker.com

Chinese Whisperings

2011-11-11T01:17:00.000-08:00

By Richard Jay Parker

My writing has taken many forms but recently I was very excited to be part of an interesting project involving writers from all over the world - Chinese Whisperings - The Yin and Yang Book. I was invited by eMergent Publishing's editor, Jodi Cleghorn, to get involved in an anthology with a difference. All of the stories are set in one location, during a specific event and feed off each other to create a solid whole.

The location is an airport and the event the grounding of all flights by fictitious airline, Pangean. There was much debate about the feasibility of this but, as is so often the case, reality stepped in at an opportune moment when Qantas grounded all of its flights the weekend before last coinciding perfectly with the release of the paperback.

The book serves as a showcase for writing talent from the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, France and Germany with all of the authors using each other's stories as triggers for their own episodes.

It's a neat idea put together by Jodi and eMergent's UK co-founder and editor Paul Anderson and features work by Jen Brubacher, Jason Coggins, Annie Evett, Emma Newman and Carrie Clevenger amongst many other talented people.

The stories are as varied as the contributors and my own piece is an unsettling story with a twist that's pretty dark even by my standards. You can now check out the paperback and the ebook at Amazon etc.

If you're a writer of quirky and original short stories then I thoroughly recommend you getting in touch with Jodi and Paul. You can find their website by hitting the title of the book in the first para of this blog.

Visit Richard at http://www.richardjayparker.com/

E-Books Are Blurring The Lines Between What Is ‘Published’ And What Isn’t:

2011-11-06T09:24:00.000-08:00

by Matt Lynn

About the most interesting thing happening in the book trade right now is that the lines between traditional publishing and self-publishing are getting blurred. My Death Force series is published by Hodder Headline, but my Black Ops series of novellas I am bringing out myself.

More and more writers, so far as I can tell, are going down that road.

One indicator of that this week was the decision by the International Thriller Writer’s Association to allow its members to post the details of their self-published work up on their website. Until now, they had only allowed work bought by major publishers.

A hybrid model is emerging I suspect where writers do some work for major publishers, and some work for themselves, probably forming their own judgements on what mix will maximise their sales, income and creative satisfaction.

Personally I like the combination. I value the prestige of the mainstream publisher, and seeing my books in the shops. But I like the energy and immediacy of doing my own thing as well. And, I suspect I’ll soon be making more money as well.

But how exactly this is all going to work, however, no one really knows.

Back home again

2011-11-04T00:40:00.000-07:00

By Peter Stuart Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker and Jack Steel)

We’re now back in Andorra, where the weather had been fantastic, by all accounts, pretty much until we drove across the border, when the temperature fell like a stone and the rain started. In fact, not just the rain. We’ve seen no snow at our altitude – we live in a house at the end of a valley just outside a hamlet named El Serrat that’s at an elevation of around 5,000 feet, or about 1,500 feet higher than the top of Mount Snowdon, to put it into perspective – but there’s now an almost permanent white cap on the mountains all around us, and we’re expecting the first serious falls of snow within a couple of weeks.

The picture above shows what it can get like here.

Pretty soon all the Mercedes and BMW saloons will vanish from the roads – they’re completely useless in the snow – and the commonest car in the country will as usual be the old model Fiat Panda. The Fiat Panda? The old Fiat Panda? Yes – the old, boxy 4x4 version of this cheap and cheerful little car is far and away the best possible vehicle to drive when there’s snow on the ground, much better than the current model. Its simple four-wheel drive system delivers precisely 25% of the power to each of the four wheels, it has relatively high ground clearance, it has thin wheels which are usually permanently fitted with snow tyres out here, and it can get to places that the big 4x4s simply can’t reach. Every public body here uses them – the government, the comuns, the medical services, even the phone company. We have one as well, just like most people who live outside the towns, and it’s never once let us down.

Pundits here tell us it’s going to be a hard winter, which is good for the country, because it’s a ski resort. Less good for us, perhaps, but we can always escape to France or Spain if it gets really bad. That’s one of the advantages of living in a postage-stamp sized country bordered by two other nations – you can easily and quickly get out if you have to.

The other advantage is the absence of income tax, though it’s also worth pointing out that we’re deprived of all the other benefits of living in the European Union. So we don’t have toxic debt, banks going under, VAT, corporation tax, inheritance tax, capital transfer tax, capital gains tax and quite a few others. It’s hell here, really …

The work’s going to plan as well. I delivered the first draft of the fifth ‘James Becker’ novel to my editor at Transworld at the end of October, and I’m already roughly 5,000 words into the second ‘Jack Steel’ adventure for Simon & Schuster, scheduled for delivery in mid-February 2012. That date sounds like it’s a long way ahead – I mean, it’s next year – but it’s actually only fifteen weeks away, so I need to write about 1,000 words a day, every day, to make the delivery on time. And as usual there’s a fair bit of research to do to make sure that the book has a pretty solid background of fact around which I can try to weave the story, which all takes time.

In fact, I’d better get going right now …

You can contact me at:

www.JamesBecker.com

Will The Kindle Get Men to Read More?

2011-10-29T05:38:00.000-07:00

by Matt Lynn

If you haven’t bought one of the new Kindles yet, I really recommend it. It’s lighter than the old one, which makes it completely portable, but it is just as slickly designed, easy to read, and simple to use.

But I’ve noticed one thing about it. It fits perfectly into inside breast pocket of a man’s jacket. I’m a fairly averaged sized bloke – 42 jacket size if you must know – so I guess that is true for most men.

This is a more important point than most people realise. Men don’t normally have anywhere they can carry a book around. We don’t have handbags. Jacket and coat pockets are two small for printed books (unless you are going for the intellectual look, in which case you might have a copy of Camus stuffed into a big, grey coat). Unlike women, we don’t have anywhere we can slip a book away that we can read on the bus, or waiting for a meeting, or whatever.

On the whole women read more than men – that’s why women’s fiction sells more than men’s fiction. I’m not suggesting the Kindle is a male device – I’ve seen loads of women reading them on the train.

But it might well encourage men to read as much as women – which can only be a good thing.

Post-cruise blues

2011-10-29T01:51:00.000-07:00

By Peter Stuart Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker and Jack Steel)

Just a short follow-up to my previous post:

The following day we arrived at Gatwick to fly to Venice, and at the airport I found a convenient hobby horse onto which I could climb. I turned on my laptop just to see if by any chance there was a wireless system there which I could log onto without making a significant dent in my credit card. The third one listed said ‘FreePublicWiFi’. Now, I don’t know about you, but to most people that name would suggest that members of the public could log on to a wireless network without paying a fee, right?

Actually, wrong. I’ve tried logging onto such networks around the world and every single one I’ve tried has been anything but – not free, not accessible to the public, or in some cases not even a wifi network. But I tried anyway. Gatwick didn’t disappoint, though in a way that I hadn’t expected. It was accessible to my laptop, it was free and it was a wireless network. In short, it did, as they say, do what it said on the tin. What it didn’t do was what I – and what anybody else who logged on to it – would reasonably have expected it to do: it had no access to the internet. Or to anything else.

That, I have to confess, rather puzzled me. Why, in the name of all that’s reasonable, would anybody have gone to all the trouble and expense of setting up a wireless network at a place like Gatwick, and then disabled access to the internet? What, exactly, were they trying to achieve? What was the point? Apart from pissing off the passengers, obviously, which they certainly managed to do in my case.

But the cruise was as good as we’d hoped, with calm seas and excellent weather apart from the day the ship was in Naples, where the skies produced torrential rain all morning but brightened considerably during the afternoon, when we drove back along the Amalfi Coast. The ship, the Crystal Serenity, was just as delightful the second time around, the destinations were all interesting, and I had good audiences for my lectures, which always helps.

Then we flew back to Heathrow from Barcelona. I had a couple of meetings in London, and I definitely knew I was back in England when the illuminated sign in the train announced: ‘Welcome aboarl thas service to Sevenoaks.’ General literacy obviously hadn’t improved while we’d been away …

The publishing schedules roll around seemingly quicker than ever. The delivery date for my next book is Monday 31 October, so it’s just as well that it’s almost finished. That’s the next ‘James Becker’ novel for Transworld, and I’ve also got a little under two weeks to go through the page proofs of The Titanic Secret, the first ‘Jack Steel’ novel for Simon and Schuster, which has just been sold to the American arm of the same publishing house. Then there’ll be the editing to do for Transworld over the following two or three months, as well as writing the next two books for these publishers, because I’m now back to doing three novels a year.

In fact, it might even be four, because my agent – always a font of really good ideas – has suggested another possible plot that sounds interesting. If it works, that’ll mean another nom de plume and probably another publisher, but it all depends on the book working, and him selling it.

And on me finding the time to write it, of course.

You can contact me at:

www.JamesBecker.com

Entrepreneurs

2011-10-22T05:50:00.000-07:00

by Matt Lynn

We tend to think of authors as fairly reclusive characters. The word ‘bookish’ summons up images of fairly self-absorbed, introverted characters, with a slight detachment from the real world. And from the authors I have met, I would say that is, in the most, a fairly accurate characterisation. Some were larger than life – Dickens, perhaps, and certainly Hemmingway – but they also led largely artistic careers.

Now, however, something is changing.

Authors are becoming entrepreneurs.

The books industry has changed. Even when you are published by one of the big houses – Headline in my case – you still need to do a lot of marketing of yourself to make sure your book finds an audience. You need to build a website, get on Twitter, and give talks. There is no point in expecting the publisher to do it all for you.

And, more and more authors are turning to Kindle as well. They are bringing out their own books, and promoting then themselves, either entirely on their own, or in conjunction with traditionally published books. They are in effect setting up small businesses.

One consequence, however, is that the books we all read will be increasingly produced by people who are as much entrepreneurs as writers. That may well not be a bad thing. A lot of fiction in the last half-century has been very inward-looking. It doesn’t have much of the energy and involvement in the world of Victorian fiction.

But it certainly means that the types of books that get written are going to be very different.

Virtual Legacy

2011-10-21T09:08:00.000-07:00

By Richard Jay Parker

Saw an interview on TV with a girl who was in a car accident and thought she was going to die in hospital. She hurriedly gave her best friend her computer passwords so her virtual legacy (intellectual property, sensitive documents etc) wouldn't be lost. Thankfully she survived and has now appointed official keepers of her passwords. She's obviously very trusting.

It's something writers should certainly consider, particularly if their work is stored in password protected locations. Although it's impossible to value intellectual works it would be good to have the equivalent of a curator who knows which discs/locations contain the projects you've slaved over.

We've certainly come a long way in a short time in terms of the way we archive our work. I saw a documentary about Stanley Kubrick and the huge number of boxes he kept stored in a residential warehouse which contained all of his reserch materials, notebooks and scripts. It seemed fitting that his career would leave behind such a substantial personal library.

21st Century writers will probably have one memory stick to account for their entire creative life.

It certainly means less trees are cut down but when all those hours of anguish and hair-pulling can be condensed into something smaller than your nail it doesn't seem like much to leave to the family estate.

But like ebooks it's not the file that it's stored on that is of value but the experiences and hard work of the writer, without which the work would never have been created.

I hope my family will understand that after my death and a fusty man in a suit hands them a very, very small envelope.

Visit Richard at: http://www.richardjayparker.com/

Lost in the land of the illiterate ...

2011-10-19T00:36:00.000-07:00

By Peter Stuart Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker and Jack Steel)

We’ve visited this topic before, but I think it’s both a.) kind of important and b.) desperately sad that we seem to be surrounded by people who very obviously can’t spell or use English properly and who also clearly don’t care that the products of their illiteracy are displayed for all to see.

Of course, we’re all very familiar with the signs posted by greengrocers, who certainly know that a punctuation mark called the apostrophe exists and seemed determined to use it as frequently as possible, which is why you can be invited to buy lettuces’s and potatoe’s and tomatoe’s and apple’s and even, on occasion, xma’s tree’s. We’re used to that, and I think most people accept that these traders are in the business of selling us fresh fruit and vegetables and stuff, not demonstrating their command of the English language, and we simply smile and walk on.

But it’s a bit different when the same lack of even the most basic grammatical skills are displayed in the arts. Then I think we need to start worrying.

When we’re in England, we stay in Sevenoaks, a pleasant market town perched at the top of a hill in Kent. Some people unkindly refer to it these days as ‘One Oak’, because about half a dozen of the old trees around the Vine were blown down in the big storm of 1987. A few years ago, the town was frankly rather dull, staid and boring, and even finding a decent restaurant was quite a challenge, but recently there’s been an influx of new businesses and younger residents, attracted by the excellent rail service, which can get you to Charing Cross in about thirty minutes, with the result that Sevenoaks is now noticeably more vibrant and alive.

One of the old establishments in the town is the theatre, which the council tried unsuccessfully to have closed down a few years ago, possibly on the grounds that they wanted to erect a new office building on the site. That’s the charitable view. There were other mutterings about backhanders and brown envelopes, and it is certainly true that every time a large site in the town becomes vacant, the most likely new construction on it will be yet another office building that the town neither wants nor needs. Down by the mainline railway station there are three of them, all conspicuous by the fact that ever since they were built they’ve stayed wholly or partially vacant. There used to be a decent pub down there as well, but that was demolished some time ago, and most people expect that yet another empty office building will eventually arise, Phoenix-like, from the rubble, to become a fourth eyesore. But whatever the degree of corruption or incompetence manifested by the council, the decision to close the theatre provoked an uncharacteristically vocal storm of protest.

The council relented, and appointed a management team which clearly had not the slightest idea of how to run a theatre and cinema complex in an English country town. The only films they appeared able to show were French art-house productions which mainly involved the smoking of large numbers of cigarettes and the consumption of prodigious quantities of alcohol by the actors, long smouldering glances which appeared meaningful in a meaningless way, inaccurate subtitles and sparse dialogue which was banal even by normal film standards, and no discernable plot. Attendance numbers dropped exponentially, and it was feared that the council’s wish to shut the establishment would be fulfilled. But then another management team took over and simply transformed the place, showing films the public actually wanted to see, and hosting excellent stage productions.

All of which is a rather roundabout way of getting to the point I was trying to make. I spent some time in the theatre restaurant recently, and was looking with interest at the various advertisements and posters which plastered the walls, all announcing some forthcoming production. Almost without exception, they were scattered with spelling and grammatical errors. A new production of ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ was heralded as an ‘amatuer’ production. A performer had worked at some other venue as a ‘compare’, and so on. And all these were on professionally printed posters, presumably created and then approved by the theatre management staff, which implies that both they and the printers they used were illiterate.

That day, I went to London, to be treated on the train to an example of the Unnecessary Use Of Capital Letters, when the illuminated sign warned passengers to beware of the gap ‘between the Platform and the Train’. But at least the words were spelt correctly. In the evening, we had a meal in the local pub, where the theme was continued, the menu offering both ‘cellery soup’ and ‘choccolate brownies’.

We seemed unable to escape to a land of literacy. It’s almost as if there’s a complicated plot being run in the background, orchestrated by a bunch of evil faceless men, and designed to seduce people who are literate over to the dark side.

In fact, I’ve just had a brilliant idea for a book. I’ll call it Teh Iliteracky Cod by ‘Don Brawn’. It’ll sell millions.

You can contact me at:

www.James-Becker.com

THE BOOK DIES SCREAMING!

2011-10-07T09:22:00.000-07:00

By Richard Jay Parker

I've noticed that a large percentage of online pieces about books and technology frequently use the phrase 'Death Of The Book.' It was probably quite attention-grabbing a couple of years ago but now it seems to have lost its impact and doesn't guarantee as many hits. It doesn't stop people using it though, particularly when they want to bring people's attention to an otherwise dull piece (like this one).

Whatever side of the debate you're on re the fate of the printed word maybe a similarly vigorous campaign could now be launched to bring about the death of the death of the book headline.

How about: 'The Protracted Asphyxiation Of The Book,' 'The Ignominious Death Rattle Of The Book,' 'The Gruesome Disembowelment Of The Book' or The Book Dies Screaming Bloody Murder As The Kindle Slips Back Into The Fog With Its Gladstone Bag.'

It would certainly grab people's attention again even if the piece offers no real insight into whether this will ever be the case (like this one).

All flowers and moribund suggestions welcome.

Visit Richard at http://www.richardjayparker.com/

Making It All Worthwhile

2011-10-06T07:17:00.001-07:00

by Matt Lynn

There’s always plenty for writers to moan about. Not having our books prominently displayed in the bookshop for example. A miserable sales ranking on Amazon. And that’s before we even get started on the publishers and agents.

But every so often something comes along to make it feel worthwhile.

A couple of weeks ago I got an e-mail from a woman whose son was very unwell. He wouldn’t be having much of a birthday, she said, and his situation made it hard for him to get out and meet people. But he was a big fan of my first two books, Death Force and Shadow Force. And he would really like it if I sent him a birthday card.

In fact, I sent him a signed copy of Shadow Force.

It’s nice to know your work has got through to someone enough that they would be pleased to hear from you, even though they don’t know you. I guess that is what all writers aspire to.

I hope he has a good day.

Booktrack - what a yawn.

2011-10-05T03:15:00.000-07:00

Booktrack, the iPad app that matches soundtracks and sound effects to the ebook you’re reading is now here. Meaning you can read Sherlock Holmes complete with crackling fires, creaking doors, and continuous ‘foreboding’ muzak, all neatly synched to every turn of your virtual page.

“It’s difficult to imagine a movie with no soundtrack,” Paul Cameron, Booktrack’s CEO said. “Yet, until today, the technology did not exist to synchronize music and sound within an e-book”.

Apart from pointing out to Mr Cameron that he clearly hasn’t heard of the Dogme film movement, which regards soundtracks as superfluous distractions which most modern films could entirely do without, I’d reply - tongue firmly in cheek - that, ‘Sure, Paul, but why stop at Conan Doyle? What about a soundtrack to go with The Waste Land by T.S.Eliot? Maybe even spice it up with a bit of rap: 'My name is M.C.Eliot, my rhythms and rhymes are really hot.'

Because, I mean, in this modern day, why should we have to put up with those tedious subtleties and rhythms of Eliot’s carefully chosen words, when our whole reading/listening experience could be enhanced by having some engineer synch in a bunch of clanky out-takes from the BBC Radio Sound Effects Department instead?

And why put up with a merely brilliantly timed and cadenced cliffhanger at the end of a Stieg Larsson chapter, when its dramatic impact could be so much better emphasised by concluding each chapter with an Eastenders-style, ‘Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-der-derrrr’?

In fact, why not move beyond simple musical and sound effect enhancements? Hell, why should we trust plain old poets and authors to trigger any of our other senses at all, when technology could surely do a much better job?

Why rely on Nigel Slater to titiliate our tastebuds with descriptions of his recipes? Much better, surely, to have ‘lickable’ books, where the real taste comes straight through without all those unnecessarily cumbersome words? They could even be printed on rice paper. Mmm. Yum, yum. A tasty read indeed.

Equally, why have Patrick Suskind waste our time with those exhausting descriptive passages conjuring up a myriad of olfactory sensations in Perfume, when instead we could simply have ‘scratch ‘n’ sniff' patches attached to the bottom of the pages instead?

Actually, maybe the best thing of all would be not to bother with books at all. I mean, all that bothersome reading...it’s just such a drag, isn’t it?

Perhaps Mr Cameron could come up with a way to save us all that hassle completely? Like, I don’t know, how about just getting rid of all the words? Maybe just having pictures instead? Or even moving pictures and spoken words and music. You know, like one of those - watchoocallems? - movies, oh, yeah, that’s already been done.

I don’t know...maybe I’m missing the point...but why can’t a book just be that? I’m well up for movies, or narrative-based computer games, or for whatever else the future might bring...but sticking a soundtrack on a printed work isn’t the future...it’s just tacky...and distracting...and, frankly, something I think we can all do without.

I'll leave the last word to Mr Cameron, though. He sums up his true passion for books better than I ever could, as well as the true appeal to book retailers of the Booktrack app: "What they like about it is its ability to upsell—which you can’t really do with books at the moment. Other products you can—when Amazon sells shoes they can ask: ‘Would you like polish with that?’

Shoes? Books? He's right, of course: there's no bloody difference at all.

* Interesting to note also that Salman Rushdie was at Booktrack's launch party. I wonder what soundtrack they'd give his books. I know, maybe they could kill two birds with one stone, by soundtracking THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH and MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN with one great big, gassy yawn.

You can contact Emlyn Rees via his website http://www.emlynrees.com

A Stupid Tax on E-Books

2011-10-01T08:28:00.000-07:00

by Matt Lynn

E-Books are the best thing that have happened to writers since…well, probably the invention of instant coffee. Sure, there is a lot of nervousness among publishers and bookshop owners and that is understandable. But for writers, they can only be good news. At the flick of a switch, you have a global market. Far more of the money generated goes to the writer. And it opens up markers for all sorts of new kinds of work.

There is one glaring injustice, however. E-books carry VAT, whereas printed books are tax-free.

That is just short-sighted greed on the part of the Treasury. A petition has been started up on the government’s website calling for its abolition. As it rightly points out, e-books are far more environmentally-friendly than the old, paper sort. No trees get cut down. No vans drive them around the country. A book is a book, regardless of the form of delivery. It is crazy to discriminate in favour of one kind through the tax system.

I’d add another point. I bet e-books can be a huge industry for the UK. We have great writers, English is the world’s language, and we have the editors and entrepreneurs who can seize the market. And yet the Government is taxing e-books unfairly – which almost certainly means the industry won’t develop as fast as it otherwise would. Bonkers.

I’ve already signed the petition, but there are only 2,500 so far. So click on the link and add your name today.

Book Makeovers

2011-09-30T03:56:00.000-07:00

By Richard Jay Parker

One of my recent posts was about picking up a book you enjoyed when you were young. The question being should you revisit it as an adult or would that degrade the happy memories you had of it?

It's been the subject of debate amongst friends and it prompted another thought about the way some books date. We often see cinematic remakes but we never see literary ones. Will we ever see publishers take a classic story and give it a 21st Century makeover? You know, update the era, language and attitude as they might a black and white movie.

You can see how a studio would approach a great story the current generation aren’t aware of - sex it up, throw in some CGI and what the hell, make it in 3D as well.

But, so far, no Dickens in the hood, no Bronte with botox, no zombies in Jane Austen.... Wait a moment - OK that's only one extreme example.

Unlike movies the books have done and continue to do their job. The reason for this is simple - no matter when a story is set the reader will interpret it with their imagination and make it personal to them.

The techniques of movies date but a person's imagination converts words into subjective entertainment. It's why books, in whatever format, will always be a part of the majority of people's lives.

It begs another question: If you do go back to a book from your childhood does you adult imagination give it that makeover? The danger is that because of the body of work you've experienced since it may not stand the test of time, however your 21st Century mind re-presents it.

Personally, I still maintain that if you really loved a book but think it might disappoint many years later then there's probably a good reason for suspecting so. Best to leave it on the shelf as a good memory.

Visit Richard at: http://www.richardjayparker.com/

Holiday? What holiday?

2011-09-30T02:38:00.000-07:00

By Peter Stuart Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker and Jack Steel)

It’s going to be a tough couple of weeks. The taxi will arrive outside the house at ten thirty tomorrow morning – if it doesn’t, then I’m in all kind of trouble – and whisk us off to Gatwick to board a British Airways flight to Venice. Waiting for us there will be a coach to take us to the Crystal Serenity which will be our home for the next twelve days or so. It will be the second time we’ve cruised on board this ship, and we’re really looking forward to it, because if there’s one characteristic that sums up the Crystal cruise line better than any other, it’s attention to detail. We’ve cruised with many of the major lines, and Crystal stands out for all sorts of reasons.

It’s not a holiday, of course. I have to deliver lectures on board – three on this particular voyage – and although that means standing on my hind legs in one of the theatres talking for only about three quarters of an hour, the preparation work takes me a lot longer than you might expect, usually at least two full days per talk. On this particular trip, I’m doing destination lectures, telling the passengers about the ports the ship will be visiting, and including the history of the place as well as the economy, what to see and do while we’re there, and any other significant points, all illustrated with lots of good quality photographs.

On other cruises, I’ve talked about everything from the real pirates of the Caribbean to the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle (and the biggest mystery there is why so many people think there’s anything mysterious about that particular bit of sea) to writing and getting published.

From Venice, one of my favourite cities and incidentally the location of the new ‘James Becker’ novel The Nosferatu Scroll (which I’d like to remind everybody comes out as a mass-market paperback in November), the ship cruises to Dubrovnik, Sicily, Sorrento, Civitavecchia (for Rome), Livorno (for Pisa and Florence) and Monaco, and ends up in Barcelona, just over 120 miles from our home in Andorra. From there, we’ll fly back to London, and a few days later retrace our steps south across France to Andorra by car.

It all sounds like a good holiday, but actually I don’t really take holidays. When I go on a cruise, it’s to work, to get some writing done as well as deliver my assigned quota of lectures. These days, I travel with three laptops because I deliver so many lectures that I’ve given up trying to memorize them.

I have my PowerPoint presentation on an elderly Dell running Windows XP – because XP is dead reliable and that computer will talk to any ship’s theatre projection system without any problems – and I have my script, which I’ll paraphrase when I give the talk, on a neat little Asus netbook. And I carry my all-singing, all-dancing HP Pavilion as well, just in case one of the other two should pack up. Plus a selection of external hard drives and USB memory sticks containing back-up copies of everything, just in case any of the hardware gets lost or stolen.

I've always found that a cruise ship is an excellent place to work. Food and drink are available 24 hours a day, a stewardess cleans and tidies your stateroom – though we always try to keep everything neat – and there are always quiet little corners where I can sit in comfort, a stunning view in front of me, and lose myself in whatever piece of writing I'm working on.

This time, I have another deadline looming, with my next book for Transworld to be delivered by the end of October. For a number of reasons, I can't say too much about this project, but I can tell you that it was suggested by my editor there. In fact, what she actually suggested was just a title around which she thought I could create an interesting plot. Unfortunately, a couple of months ago we discovered that for legal reasons we couldn't use that title, and so far we haven’t been able to come up with another one everybody likes. So it’s now just known as ‘Book Five’. Hopefully somebody will have a light-bulb moment between now and the publication date, because ‘Book Five’ doesn’t sound to me like the title of a novel that’s likely to sell well.

As soon as I get back, I have a meeting with my new publishers – Simon & Schuster – to discuss my second book for them, due for delivery early next year. Again, they have a firm idea for the subject matter, but we have to talk about a number of different approaches and in fact different plots.

This will be my last blog entry until we get back on terra firma, and I’ll talk to you all again in a couple of weeks.

Please visit my website at:

www.James-Becker.com

The 28-day novel

2011-09-23T01:33:00.000-07:00

By Peter Stuart Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barringtion, James Becker and Jack Steel)

This image is a draft of the cover design for the first ‘Jack Steel’ novel, to be published by Simon & Schuster in April 2012. I’ve covered the circumstances of writing this book before, but just a quick recap: my agent came up with the initial idea in January, I started writing it on 4 February and delivered the final, pre-edited MS of just under 100,000 words on 7 March 2011. This was a total of 28 days because I lost two days’ work due to editing another book and then having a water leak in the house in Andorra that necessitated driving 200 miles to another house where the concrete floor and staircase weren’t being dug up by a gang of Spanish workmen armed with jackhammers.

Obviously the finished MS was a bit rough, because I simply hadn’t had the time to read it as well as write it, but my agent did some quick and dirty editing on it that knocked it into much better shape, and the finished product was good enough to be picked up by Simon & Schuster as part of a two-book deal. I’ve just finished the final editorial work on it, and in fact there haven’t been all that many changes to the submitted MS.

And that leads me to ask a fairly obvious question: how quickly can – or even should – a book be written? Readers with a mathematical bent will realize that I was averaging well over 3,000 words a day, every day, seven days a week, as well as doing the necessary research to ensure that I got all the details of the RMS Titanic right. It was a very hard month, and I wouldn’t want to do it again, but we were working to an immovable deadline – the London Book Fair – and the end result clearly justified the effort.

Normally I expect to write between about 1,000 and 2,000 words a day, and I gather from other authors that this is a fairly high output. I heard of one author, who was perhaps predictably working in the literary rather than the commercial field, who satisfied himself by writing just 100 words a day, but who insisted that they were ‘good’ words, which wouldn’t need changing or editing. That prompts two obvious comments: First, I don’t care how ‘good’ the words are, 100 words is not much more than a note for the milkman, and is simply a personification of laziness. This blog submission alone will be around ten times longer than that, and I can promise you it’s not the only writing I’ve done today. Second, every manuscript, no matter how erudite and accomplished the author, benefits from editing, because the author is simply too close to the work to see the faults that are obvious to an unbiased reader.

And while on that subject, and without naming names, I know of one or two authors who have acquired a well-deserved reputation for being ‘difficult’ – meaning that they’ll argue with their editor for a couple of weeks over the placement of every single comma – who are simply not having their publishing contracts renewed, and who are being dumped by their agents. One in particular has achieved very impressive sales figures, but he’s such a nightmare to deal with that his publishers would rather take the hit and lose his sales instead of having to work with him any more. These days, and in this economic climate, being able to take editorial direction is simply vital if an author wants to stay in business.

But back to the word count. What is a reasonable output? Should authors take the weekends off, and just work a five-day week like most other people? And, having written your 1,000 words or whatever your daily target is, should you stop at that point and go shopping or walk the dog or something? Or should you carry on until you run out of steam?

Is a book necessarily any better because the author has slaved away over it for half a dozen years? Or does a book which has been written as fast as possible retain more of a spark of originality, simply because of the speed of its creation?

Personally, I do know that if I did ever decide I was going to take five years to write a 100,000 word book, I strongly suspect I would die of boredom before I got half way through it. And if I did somehow manage to complete it, my guess is that most of the readers would suffer pretty much the same fate. If the author isn’t excited enough by the story to tell it quickly, I just don’t think it’s worth telling.

And you can’t even argue convincingly that the research in a book which has taken years to write is going to be any better than one written in a much shorter timescale. Again, no names, but a thriller written by an extremely well-known British author, a literal household name, after – I think – an eight-year gestation period, included a section set on board the British aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal during the Falklands campaign. This would have been a difficult trick to pull off, because the ship was still being built in Newcastle throughout this brief and bloody war, and I know that because I was serving on board HMS Illustrious, which was involved in the conflict, as were the Hermes and Invincible. Checking that fact would have taken him about fifteen seconds on the internet.

So taking years to produce a manuscript is no guarantee of either quality or accuracy, and in this particular case I also wonder if his editor was too frightened of offending the great man to point out his mistake. Because that’s another unattractive trait among certain successful authors – the great ‘I am’ syndrome which so often translates into unbearable arrogance. Publishers normally refer to such authors as ‘demanding’, but few people in the trade are in any doubt about what they really mean.

Personally, whenever one of my publishers, or my agent, asks me if I can do something, my invariable answer is ‘yes’, and I sort out the logistics afterwards. These days, being as accommodating and helpful as possible is essential in the publishing world if you want to have any hope of a continuing career.

Or, at least, it’s certainly worked for me!

You can contact me at:

www.James-Becker.com

Libraries in the 21st Century

2011-09-22T16:32:00.000-07:00

Posted by Leigh Russell

I was pleased to be invited to talk about my books at the relaunch of Bushey library. Before speaking about my own books, I decided to say a few words about how fantastic it is to see a refurbished library in the current climate.

With over 430 libraries closed or under threat, the professional body of librarians CILIP are forecasting another 600 more will soon be under scrutiny. That’s around 20% of our libraries threatened with closure.

Under the Public Libraries & Museums Act 1964 local authorities have a statutory obligation to provide a library service. But the government are changing the rules, claiming attendance has been dropping since 2005, although children’s visits have remained steady.

Libraries, on the other hand, report increased use since the start of the recession. In the past year around 50% of adults in England visited libraries. They go there for free books, information, learning resources, work and ICT. New communities seek help with English, material in their first language, and help with citizenship procedures.

But whatever the true picture, there is no question that funding is a problem, provoking a lot of debate about what can be done. Reducing opening hours would only make visiting more difficult; reducing stocks would have an adverse effect on users’ satisfaction; and replacing staff with volunteers would, in my opinion, be disastrous. Part of the value of libraries is the expertise of the trained librarians. Introducing any of these measures would inevitably hasten the demise of any library, in my opinion. You can’t rescue a good service by making it mediocre or worse.

The question should not be solely about money. As US Publisher’s Weekly says: ‘‘The value of libraries should not be measured in economic terms alone’’, although of course economic considerations can’t be disregarded. We have to decide what we want from libraries in the 21st century, with our 24/7 culture, cheap books, ebooks, and almost limitless information accessible to all without having to stir from our homes.

What kind of society do we want?

Borders closed, the whole Waterstones chain has recently been bought for price of one footballer, and the past 15 years have seen an increase of over 1,000% in lap dancing clubs in London alongside a 6% decline in libraries in the capital.

As book lovers, we should all care about libraries, even if we don’t use them ourselves. Perhaps it’s time for all of us to speak up in support of our struggling library service, because without pressure from the reading public, libraries as we know them may not survive for much longer. To paraphrase Burke: “All that is necessary for the disappearance of libraries is for readers to do nothing.”

Leigh Russell writes the Geraldine Steel crime novels:

Contact Leigh on http://leighrussell.co.uk/

CUT SHORT (2009) - shortlisted CWA Dagger

ROAD CLOSED (2010) - top read Eurocrime

DEAD END (2011) - bestselling kindle detective

DEATH BED (2012)

Swearing in Books

2011-09-20T08:55:00.000-07:00

I had an e-mail this morning from a reader who said he was a big fan of my books, which was nice of course. But he also pointed out that the characters in the Death Force series used the word ‘sodding’ all the time, and it got a bit repetitive.

He’s right, of course. They do, and it is.

There is a reason, however. They are soldiers. In real life it would be fu%£kig this and f!c£king that. And for some reason, I don’t think swearing works very well in books. I don’t have anything against it in real life, and it can work fine in films, but I print it somehow falls flat.

So I use sodding instead.

But maybe that doesn’t quite work either?

To iPad or not to iPad?

2011-09-16T00:23:00.000-07:00

By Peter Stuart Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker and Jack Steel)

Is it just me, or is the iPad a triumph of marketing and hype over usability – and over usefulness, in fact?

Read the reviews and you come away with the firm impression that the iPad, and especially the iPad 2, essentially redefines the tablet computer, being far and away the best of the bunch. Even holding one apparently conveys an almost sexual pleasure, it’s so beautifully designed, sleek and elegant and cutting-edge and just unbelievably cool.

Wonderful. Now let’s just stop for a moment and ask one simple question that never seems to be addressed in any of the reviews. What actual use is it?

It’s been promoted as a kind of ‘all things to all men’ tablet device, a combination of mobile phone, diary, contacts database, e-book reader and laptop but, unless I'm missing the point, it doesn't really seem to do any of those things particularly well. Who, in their right mind, would lug around an iPad to make telephone calls – and you even need a special app to achieve this – when a normal mobile phone is so small it can sit in your pocket and you don't even know it's there until somebody rings you? And every modern mobile can act as your calendar, contacts list and appointments’ diary. As for ebooks, it seems to me that the Kindle, with its excellent battery life and compact dimensions, is a far better, more convenient and more usable device.

Most netbooks are about the same size as an iPad, albeit thicker, and when you open up one of those to send an e-mail or surf the web, you have a real keyboard in front of you, not the ‘virtual’ version provided by the iPad. Composing and sending emails is a lot easier on a netbook because of the real keyboard, and so is surfing the web, not least because Apple won’t allow Flash to be displayed on their equipment, and these days the vast majority of websites use Flash in one way or another. So presumably some websites can’t even be opened on an iPad, and many of those that can be viewed will be incomplete.

And the price of the thing is simply eye-watering. Even on eBay, an iPad 2 with 16 GB of memory will cost well over £400, or about the same price as TWO entry-level netbooks each with 160 GB hard disks and 1 GB of RAM. And 16 GB of memory? I have USB memory sticks with twice that capacity. The iPad’s RAM is a mere 512 MB, and the dual-core processor runs at 1 GHz – hardly what I’d call cutting-edge technology. For pretty much the same price, my HP laptop has a 750 GB hard drive, 6 GB of RAM and a quad-core processor running at 2 GHz.

If you need more memory on a laptop, you simply open it up and add another chip. The same applies to the hard disk. Or you can simply plug in an external hard drive to give you effectively unlimited hard disk capacity. But on an iPad, you can't do any of that. It doesn't even have a built-in USB socket, only a lead that fits its proprietary connector and has a USB socket at the other end. You want more memory? You sell the old unit and buy another. That’s the only way to upgrade. Hardly a choice most people will want to make.

What about connectivity? As an extra cost option, you can buy a dock to sit the iPad in, but otherwise there’s only the proprietary connector and a headphone socket. I’ve no idea how you’d get the thing to print anything, but it’ll probably only talk to a wireless printer, so if you haven’t got one, forget it. Again, with a netbook or laptop, you can connect it to almost anything simply by using the appropriate cable.

I’ve looked at Apple’s promotional video, and the most significant feature of the new unit, or at least the one they spend the most time talking about, is the cover. Oh, and it has two cameras, twice as many as my netbook, and twice as many as I would ever have the slightest use for. And most reviewers comment that the quality of the images the cameras produce is actually only barely average at best.

I’ve also looked at the range of applications, and the vast majority of them seem to be completely pointless. If you want to watch a video, any laptop or netbook will show it in pretty much the same detail as the iPad, and probably with better sound because most laptops have far better speakers. And you can put the laptop down on a desk and sit back to watch the movie, instead of having to sit there holding the unit in front of you. Of course, you can add external speakers to the iPad, as long as you’re prepared to buy the dock, but that means you’ve got to lug around the iPad, plus the dock, plus the speakers, rather than carry just a laptop. If you want to watch a DVD, don’t even think about the iPad because, naturally, it doesn’t have a DVD drive.

I don't play games on computers, so none of those offered on the iPad are of any interest to me. In fact, whenever I get a new computer, about the first thing I do is delete the games folder in toto.

GarageBand? Do people really want to demonstrate their total lack of musical ability to the world? You want to play a set of virtual drums by tapping on the screen of a tablet computer? Clever technology it may be, but give me a break – it’s a completely pointless waste of time. If you’re a real musician, I suppose you might enjoy playing about with it, but it’s never going to be of any use to a serious user, who’ll run a much better professional program on a laptop or desktop PC.

I've never done video conferencing, and am never likely to, but if I had to, I think I'd find it a lot easier on a laptop which I can place on the desk and open, rather than having to presumably prop up an iPad on a pile of books or something, or hold the wretched thing in my hands.

In short, the iPad looks cool and sexy and geeky, the kind of ‘must-have’ accessory people want to use in a train or a café somewhere, so that other people will look at them and think they’re smart and sophisticated but, for me at least, it just seems like a complete waste of quite a lot of money. It doesn’t appear to do anything that I’d find useful, or that I can’t do just as well – and arguably even better – on other electronic devices that cost a fraction of the iPad’s credit card-busting price tag.

Or have I just completely missed the point? Does the iPad have any use whatsoever? What does it actually do that makes it so expensive and apparently so desirable to so many people? Surely somebody out there can set me straight. After all, Apple is predicted to sell 40 million of them this year, and all those customers can’t possibly be wrong.

Or can they?

You can contact me at:
www.James-Becker.com

Gluttons For Punishment

2011-09-14T03:32:00.000-07:00

By Richard Jay Parker

Had an interesting tweet from another writer (thanks, Michael) who said that most of the writers he had encountered on Twitter were from the UK. It's an interesting obervation. For such a small island we certainly have a considerable, creative weight.

As well as our rich literary history I commented that perhaps it's because we're all gluttons for punishment here. Anyone who chooses to find their way in a career of writing knows they have an arduous journey ahead. The rewards, financial or otherwise are never guaranteed.

There are all sorts of theories about why the UK has exuded more than its fair share of creativity on all fronts. One favourite is that our system of benefits has allowed many aspiring artists and writers to find the time to develop their skills.

Whether this is true or not perhaps it's a combination of our optimistic, never say die spirit as well as a touch of insanity.

But having made contact with writers at different stages of their careers worldwide it's true to say that we all share the same dogged approach and, moreover, a global camaraderie and willingness to help and support each other.

Long may it continue.

Visit Richard at: http://www.richardjayparker.com/

The future of publishing?

2011-09-09T09:11:00.000-07:00

By Peter Stuart Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker and Jack Steel)

Emlyn Rees and Richard Jay Parker both mentioned ebooks in their blogs this week, so I thought I’d follow suit.

It’s undeniably true that the impact of this new form of reading technology has alarmed the publishing world more than most people who work in it are prepared to admit. Kindle sales in particular have been spectacular, and for people who enjoy reading on holiday the reason is not difficult to find. Why an earth would you take a dozen paperbacks along with you, with all the weight and inconvenience that that implies, when you can slip a Kindle which contains your entire library into your jacket pocket? Kindles seem to be everywhere these days, but especially on most forms of public transport, and almost everyone seems to own one.

I was having lunch with my agent in London in that bastion of celebrity, the Ivy Club, a few weeks ago and talking about this very subject, when to my surprise he reached into his jacket pocket and flashed his own Kindle at me. I have to confess that I don’t actually own one of these slim grey devices, though I have acquired an extensive library of Kindle books on my laptop, and I do have an Android tablet which will do much the same job as a Kindle, but in Technicolor rather than shades of grey. But I never seem to use it. For some reason, the idea of reading a book on an electronic device is still somewhat foreign to me, and I still go on holiday with a couple of paperbacks.

The publishing world is frightened of ebooks, as far as I can see, because they’re new and they don’t quite know what effect their proliferation is going to have on mainstream publishers, and indeed on literary agents. In five or ten years’ time, will there even be such a thing as a publishing house? What’s the point of an author going through all the aggravation and hassle of writing a novel, finding an agent, letting the agent secure a publishing contract, doing all the editing and fiddling about with the cover design and all the rest, when he could just as easily spend a few hours at the computer converting his words of wisdom into an electronic format that would be acceptable to Amazon, and then sitting back and waiting for the money to roll in?

And if an author goes this route, there’s no agent sitting in the middle to take his 15% or 20% of the author’s meagre income, and we’re not talking about revenues of 7% of the cover price either. The author can pitch the price of his book exactly where he wants it, and once Amazon has taken its slice of the pie, all the rest is pure profit.

A few months ago, I read an article in a British writing magazine which covered this topic rather neatly. The contributor quoted as an example a young female American author – using the word ‘author’ in its loosest possible sense – who had written some twenty ‘novels’ (I’m again using this word extremely loosely, as they were between 8,000 and 12,000 words in length, meaning that they were actually longish short stories) and was selling them all on the Internet. He even quoted a few sentences from one of these ‘books’, which made it abundantly clear that the girl was almost completely illiterate, couldn’t spell most words longer than five letters and had only the haziest idea about grammar, punctuation, plotting and pretty much anything else to do with writing.

But, and this is the real point of this story, she’d priced her ‘works’ at well under $5 each, and had sold in total some 200,000 copies. Even after Amazon or whichever company was handling the sales had taken its cut, this girl, with no readily discernable talent or ability, had achieved the kind of annual income that most British mainstream authors can only dream about.

So is that kind of thing the future of writing? I really hope not. The most important single thing the literary agents and publishers achieve at the moment is the unspoken guarantee that when a reader goes into a bookshop and chooses a novel, that novel will be of an acceptable standard. Of course, not all readers would agree with this statement, even if we decide to leave Dan Brown out of consideration. But I think most would accept that a book which has taken about a year to write, and has been accepted by a literary agent and then bought by a publishing house is far more likely to be worth reading than one which has been knocked together in a few hours by somebody in their bedroom and then flogged as an e-book on the web.

What does the future hold? Nobody knows, obviously, but I do think it’s fairly clear that ebooks will occupy an increasingly large share of the market over the next few years as the technology proliferates. We may even see the demise of some of the High Street bookshops as increasing competition from the online retailers hits harder. But I still think we’ll find both literary agents and mainstream publishers in business. Perhaps a slightly different business from the model they’re used to, but they’ll still be there.

At least, that’s what I hope. As the Chinese say: ‘may you live in interesting times’. And I certainly think we do.

You can contact me at:
www.James-Becker.com

TEXT ON THE BEACH

2011-09-08T10:30:00.000-07:00

by Emlyn Rees

For authors, the beach is a prime spot for spying who's reading your book. But the Kindle makes it more tricky...

So, I’ve just got back from a holiday with my family in Mallorca. Ice creams. Sangria. Pedloes. It should have been a complete break, in other words, from thinking about what weapons and devious plot devices I should use in the sequel to my new thriller HUNTED.

Only as a writer, of course, you’re never really that far away from work. Partly because the old grey matter keeps on chewing over potential storylines. But also because, no matter where you are, you’re never that far from a book.

Nowhere is this more true than on holidays. Books and beaches go together. Like fish and chips. Or buckets and spades.

Even more fascinating for any writer is that on beaches the books aren’t just sitting on shelves, they’re right there in the hands of real live readers.

Apart from being generally nosey, and seeing what kind of person reads what, the narcissistic temptation is always there to see if anyone’s reading one of your own novels. And if so, who? What exactly do your readers look like? Are they men or women? Are they young or old? And, most important of all, are they enjoying the read? Are they furiously turning those pages? Or instead using them to mop up spilt beer?

Only this year my annual bout of book voyeurism never really got off the ground. For one thing, HUNTED was only out as a Kindle edition until September, when it finally hits the shops in the UK. Meaning that, short of peering over people’s shoulders to see what they’re reading on their Kindle, I have no way of knowing whether any of them are reading HUNTED at all.

Another, far stranger discovery is the astonishing lack of electronic reading devices on beaches at all. One. That’s all I saw in seven days. One lonely Kindle. A tiny black spot on a huge domino of white sand.

In the UK, I’m up and down on the Brighton to London train line a lot and have witnessed the proliferation of e-reading devices over the last six months. The e-Book revolution hasn’t only begun, it’s gripped commuterland by its collective short and curlies and shows no sign of letting go.

In the space of six months, the demographic lovingly nuzzling their iPads and Kindles has exponentially expanded from the hip early adopters, to include everyone from school kids catching up on their Lord of the Flies assignments to sprightly sixty-somethings getting to grips with how Freakonomics might affect their final salary pension plans.

So how come I only saw one Kindle on the beach? Amazon and Mac certainly aren’t to blame. iPad and Kindle sales have been rocketing. Amazon has also been busily promoting Kindle summer beach reads for the last month.

But if the Kindles and iPads aren’t on the beaches, then where are they? Left back home in the UK? It seems unlikely, given what great devices they are for getting out of paying for all that extra weight that a similar amount of new hardbacks would cost you on Easyjet.

More likely, then, is that people are leaving them in their holiday apartments. On the grounds, I suspect, that while we don’t mind smearing ice cream or wet sand on our paperbacks, we consider our electronic devices altogether too fragile and sacrosanct for such slipshod treatment.

Interestingly, the one person I did see reading a Kindle on the beach covered it with a towel to protect it from the sand and his children, before rolling over onto his side for a nap. Also interesting is the fact that some friends have said that they've seen plenty of Kindles on pebbly beaches, where there's no sand to worry about.

But I think there’s another reason too why we’re not yet proudly parading our Kindles on the beach. And it’s all about display and the fact that, apart from our swimming costumes and shades, the chief way we choose to advertise ourselves - who we actually are - on holiday is by showing people what we read.

And that’s the one true drawback with Kindles and iPads in their current incarnation. They’ve not got covers. They’re bland to look at. Chunks of IBM-esque hardware, nothing more. Meaning the reason I think we’re not seeing more of them on the beaches this year is the same reason why we’re not seeing more bland grey bikinis, or bland grey beach towels and shades. It’s because they look boring. And that risks making us look boring. And that’s a chance which few of us seem prepared yet to take.

You can contact Emlyn Rees via his website http://www.emlynrees.com

Interact With The Author

2011-09-08T09:42:00.000-07:00

By Richard Jay Parker

Read an article this week about an ebook q&a facility being road tested. It basically allows the reader to address questions to the author while reading their work.

It's another example of how the relationship between readers and writers is being changed by technology. Blogs, Facebook and Twitter are prime examples. Obviously the bigger name the author the less likely it is that they will have the time for regular dialogues with their readers. International bestselling authors usually operate under enormous pressure. There's constant demand for their presence on book tours, at signings, for interviews etc not to mention the limited time they have to deliver another book that will have to tick all the boxes for their readers.

I think this new device will allow a writer to connect with readers on a wider scale. It also offers an opportunity to do so without being tied to a particular timetable. The author can respond when convenient rather than having to speak about their work when they'd rather be immersed in it.

Meeting readers face to face should always be part of every writer's life. They are, after all, the very people who allow the author to earn a living from their imagination. I've spoken to authors who say they have started to feel out of touch with their readers because of deadlines and other promotional commitments. It's good to see that as technology offers ways for writers to make their work more instantaneously available it's also offering imaginative solutions for maintaining this increasingly vital connection.

Visit Richard at: http://www.richardjayparker.com/

Not the best year I've ever had ...

2011-09-02T11:58:00.000-07:00

By Peter Stuart Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker)

It has been, by any standards, a pretty bad year. Last November my mother-in-law – a lady with whom I had a very good relationship – was diagnosed with terminal cancer and despite two very major operations and treatment from the National Health Service that was, despite our fears fuelled by the typical bad press the NHS attracts, startlingly good, she died in July. It’s perhaps not entirely surprising that because of this I have been somewhat distracted, and this has inevitably impacted my job – writing. That’s not an excuse for my prolonged absence from this blog: it’s simply a fact.

Quite apart from the mental anguish that such an event produces for all family members, there are also the sheer practical aspects of the matter to consider. Initially, it was taking her to receive the chemo treatment that was recommended, which occupied about four to five hours two or three days a week. Then, when she was readmitted to hospital when it was clear that the treatment – which was at best a palliative, no more – wasn’t working, it was daily visits. These involved about a forty-minute drive each way, and then perhaps two hours at the hospital, and sometimes we were visiting twice a day. With that level of commitment – which we were only too pleased to make, obviously – almost all other aspects of our lives were to some extent put on hold. Until the diagnosis of my mother-in-law’s condition was made, I had never properly appreciated the fundamental truth of the expression that when one family member gets cancer, everyone in the family gets it. It really is, in all sorts of ways, a life-changing experience.

Now we’ve moved into what you might call the admin phase: obtaining probate, clearing the house, what stuff do we sell, what do we keep, and which of the several charity shops in Sevenoaks should we visit next, carrying large bulging sacks. The staff at several now greet us by name, which I’m not entirely sure is a good thing …

So we move on.

Maybe a brief sitrep about where I am is a good idea, as I see that my last post here was back in April, and obviously a lot’s happened since then.

In my post of 16^th March, I mentioned a brand new writing project, an idea cooked up by my agent which, when the dust had settled and the dates finalized, necessitated writing just under 100,000 words in 28 days, including a lot of detailed research. The good news is that the project worked, and the manuscript was bought as part of a two-book deal by Simon & Schuster. The bad news – well, it’s actually not bad, just confusing – is that because this novel is in yet another different genre, I’ve had to acquire another nom de plume, my fourth.

My agent’s idea was to set a conspiracy thriller on board the RMS Titanic on the ship’s tragic maiden voyage, which was the reason for all the research because, although the ship sank almost 100 years ago, there are thousands of people out there who know almost every detail of the interior and the construction. If my hero walked down a corridor, the description of the corridor would have to be right, otherwise the angry emails would start flooding in. I know how passionate people can get about their pet subject.

I’m reminded of a local geographer here in Andorra who, when he read Overkill, my first ‘James Barrington’ book, actually got in his car and drove all the way out to my house, which is at the end of a dead-end valley, to point out that I’d got the name of a port in Albania wrong.

Anyway, my new alter ego is ‘Jack Steel’ (the publisher is toying with ‘Jason Steel’, but the image in my mind is somehow wrong), and The Titanic Secret will be in the shops to coincide with the centenary of the sinking next April. We’ve just about finished the editing, and I’m waiting to see the proposed cover designs, which I hope will be available next week.
And I now have a new website: www.James-Becker.com, so please visit. You can also find me on www.ContactAnAuthor.co.uk

Real-Time Story-Telling

2011-09-01T03:53:00.000-07:00

The Kindle is a huge opportunity for writers. It is not just a new way of distributing our work. It is also an opportunity to tell stories in a new way. I’m just launching a new series of e-book only novellas called Black Ops. The first one is called Black Ops: Libya, so it is fairly obvious where it is set. The idea, however, is to tell stories ripped straight from the headlines, and put them out instantaneously.

The e-book allows us to do that. Traditional publishing takes a year at least to get a book to the market. So the instant thriller, which is what the Black Ops series aims to be, takes advantage of the technology to tell a story that has the advantage of immediacy. It is real-time story-telling.

In the first one, an ex-SAS guy called Alex Marden and a former Navy Seal called Jack Rogan are dropped into Libya by NATO to retrieve a document in the hands of the old regime that would be hugely embarrassing to the British and American governments if it fell into the wrong hands.

But they soon get themselves caught up in the fighting and chaos as Tripoli falls to the rebels.

It is a cracking adventure story. And the first time anyone has taken advantage of the e-book to try something like this.

Should You Ever Go Back?

2011-08-31T07:42:00.000-07:00

By Richard Jay Parker

Was rolling my eyes along one of my bookshelves recently and they stopped at a book that I hugely enjoyed when I was eleven years old. I took it down and felt tempted to read it again but resisted and put it back. I wondered if I would see it in the same light as when I'd first devoured it or if the reading experience would be tainted by my own.

It's a little like having a great holiday somewhere then going back. Frequently you don't quite recapture the magic. It's not always the case but will reappraising a work you enjoyed as a young reader with the analysis of an adult or that of an even more hypercritical writer change your first perception of it?

I was at the perfect age when I enjoyed The Catcher In The Rye. I don't feel there's any point in going back to that one.

It works better the other way, I think. I read Conan Doyle before my teenage years and thought it very stuffy. I'm positive if I read it now I'd find a treasure trove that I'd missed before.

Reading or writing them every book is a legitimate part of the journey, no matter how our taste and intellect develops.

If you are tempted probably the best answer is to read chapter one again. If it doesn't fire you up as much as it did the first time just put it back and leave the remainder glowing nostalgically at the back of your mind.

Visit Richard at: http://www.richardjayparker.com/

Aint No Cure For The Summertime Muse

2011-08-22T09:06:00.000-07:00

By Richard Jay Parker

Pardon the pun in the title - couldn't resist. It is the holidays. Do writers really get a holiday though?

Writing is a difficult process to quantify. It can't really be measured in terms of how much time is spent at the keyboard or how many words are achieved each day. It's ongoing and the flippers of the creative duck are always frantically paddling under the surface.

Most writers agree that they're never off the clock. Imagination never breaks for the summer. This is the time of the year when I really notice it. With so many people away and the kids off from school a lot of people have a more casual attitude towards work than normal. Phone tennis is played and everyone resigns themselves to the fact that not much is going to get done.

I don't think there are many writers who can put their creativity on voicemail or autoreply for a couple of weeks. Even when we're meant to be relaxing and catching up on some holiday reading everything remains a trigger for our next idea.

But better this way than not being able to find inspiration at all.

So for us it's another long drink and maybe a few hastily scribbled notes by the pool.

Visit Richard at: http://www.richardjayparker.com/

The Possibilities on Kindle

2011-08-15T11:57:00.000-07:00

by Matt Lynn

The Kindle is one of the most interesting things happening in publishing right now. Not all of it is good, of course. The publishing industry may end getting destroyed the way the music industry was. But it also creates possibilities.

There is a fascinating story in the New York Times about the thriller writer Richard North Patterson. He has a book out featuring Osama Bin Laden. But by the time it came out, the man had already been killed, which rather ruined his book. So he went onto the Kindle edition and changed it - just like that.

One of the things the Kindle can do for us is create that kind of journalistic immediacy. In fact, it is a possibility I am working on right now. But more on that later....

Amazon Addiction

2011-08-15T09:02:00.000-07:00

By Richard Jay Parker

I've recently had to ban myself from looking at the Amazon download charts. Having spent a few days sandwiched between Stieg Larsson and Dawn French (a bizarre position to be in) in the Amazon bestseller chart as well as rubbing shoulders with James Patterson, Lee Child and Jo Nesbo in the Top Ten Thrillers and assorted summer sale/mystery charts I realise that monitoring these is not conducive to the writing day.

If STOP ME has gone up a position then the morning is off to an energetic start - down one and it takes the wind out of your sails. The tendency for the book to shift up and down throughout the day is also very distracting.

The fact that my book made it anywhere near a chart let alone got to number 7 should be reward enough. It's bad enough having emails and tweets tempting me away from the page so I must resist this new excuse for not working. I'm now only looking at it once a day...maybe twice.

I think Iain Banks has got it right. He has two computers - one set up for email etc the other solely for writing.

Visit Richard at: http://www.richardjayparker.com/

Rollicking!

2011-08-08T08:19:00.000-07:00

By Richard Jay Parker

It's not very often I use the word 'rollicking' but I'm currently reading a book that can only be descibed as a rollicking good read.

As with most good reads it was passed on to me by a friend. The book in question is AGENT ZIGZAG by Ben Macintyre. It's the biography of World War 2 double agent Eddie Chapman. I'm devouring it in hungry chunks.

Having added the book to my TBR pile and virtual Shelfari shelf I was pleased to get a message from another member saying thank you for putting it there and that they'd read it from cover to cover in a weekend. It prompted me to move it to the top of my stack!

What strikes me about this biog - and most others I've read - is that it's the sort of book readers wouldn't accept if it were fiction. This is something reflected in the review of the book written by MI5. There are so many bizarre episodes that it would seem too far fetched if it had been the product of a writer's mind.

It's often the case that thriller writers have to present a sensible reality and aren't allowed to stray into the sort of outlandish territory that real life characters often find themselves stranded in.

It's why I enjoy an exhaustively researched and engagingly written biog like this one. In fiction, anything can happen, in reality it seems to with even more regularity.

Visit Richard at: http://www.richardjayparker.com/

Handling Rejection Letters

2011-08-01T07:35:00.000-07:00

By Richard Jay Parker

Was having a sort out over the weekend and stumbled upon some old bound box files of rejection letters. They're not exactly meticulously filed but I always made a point of trying to draw something positive from the feedback (even the standard ones...) before adding to my collection.

They sit on the shelf like two encyclopedias of hopelessness.

When they arrive they're the very last document you want to read. A single piece of paper that signifies the negative climax of weeks/months of waiting. They're worth holding on to though, however critical they are of your work.

It takes time to look at them objectively but as you build your full set of encyclopedias they gradually become a map of your writing journey. Often, because of time constraints, they offer nothing in the way of specific pointers but sometimes an editor or agent will be able to tell you something useful - even if you don't want to hear it at the time.

I'm a glutton for punishment. As well as my literary knockbacks I've also got a TV submissions file that starts in 1986. Among them is one apologetic rejection from a producer who returned my work to me over a year later because it had fallen down the back of his filing cabinet. Needless to say, I'd taken the first few months as a good sign. I actually worked with him years later. Needless to say the first letter that informed me of an intention to use one of my pieces is covered in grubby fingerprints. But the rejections continued after that and to this day.

It's a inevitable part of every writer's existence. But even though the moment of rejection gives you that plummeting feeling in your stomach you steadily learn how to speed up your recovery and get back to your keyboard with more determination.

Use the rejection letter as fuel for your creative engine.

Visit Richard at: http://www.richardjayparker.com/

Pushing The Envelope

2011-07-22T08:10:00.000-07:00

By Richard Jay Parker

Do you try to shock yourself? It was a question I was asked recently and I'm sure they were referring to my writing and not my private life.

It's true that there are some very mild-mannered authors out there who create the most outrageous material. When you read their twisted and creatively violent stories it's sometime a surprise to find how (outwardly) normal they are. Is the only way to produce such material to challenge the limits of what they find acceptable?

I enjoy sex and violence in books but it has to be in context. When there's no plot or human intrigue it can sometimes feel like flicking through a catalogue.

I was pretty restrained in my debut because the focus of the story was about loss. The activities of the serial killer had to remain in the shadows for reasons obvious to anyone who has read it. If a story calls for more explicit content I think you should be soliciting a reaction other than titillation or horror for the sake of it. I have no qualms about material that gets a visceral reaction from a reader but it has to be triggered by the story.

Nobody's right about this. I know some readers who are appalled by certain thrillers but will quite happily wade into the cannibalism of Thomas Harris without batting an eyelid.

Knowing when to hold back and when to let the reader have it are skills the best authors have mastered (and I'm still working on) but if you look at reader reviews of every thriller classic you'll see they've never got it right for everyone.

Visit Richard at: http://www.richardjayparker.com/

Summer Reading

2011-07-20T02:55:00.000-07:00

by Matt Lynn

I'm off to Cornwall at the weekend with the kids, so I need to choose a few books for what I hope will be a relaxing week. I've already got a copy of Hunted by fellow Curzon-ite Emlyn Rees, The Big Short by Michael Lewis, who I know a bit from our work on Bloomberg, and American Pastoral by Philip Roth, who I have got back into since attending the Man Booker Prize dinner a few weeks ago in his honour. That seems like a pretty good range - some light fun, some art, and some serious stuff.

Hopefully a fair number of people will be taking 'Shadow Force' with them on holiday. I think of my own books as summer reading. But what makes a great story for the beach?

I think it needs a number of qualities. It needs a rattling good story that grips you from start to finish. It needs some jokes - no one wants to be too downbeat on holiday. It needs some escapism - a holiday is all about getting away from things, and we want a book that does that as well. But it also needs to tell you something serious, and educate you in some way, because a holiday is one of the few chances we have to fill gaps in our knowledge.

I try and touch all those bases in my own work. And I always keep in mind that that is the recipe for a great holiday read.

Death Imitating Art

2011-07-15T01:39:00.000-07:00

By Richard Jay Parker

Was chatting with another writer this week about a storyline she formulated which outlined the perfect murder. She then became concerned that putting it out there might inspire somebody to copy the method.

Is it likely that readers will be tempted to adopt the techniques of a fictional murderer? It's highly likely that anyone 'inspired' by extreme violence in the media has psychotic tendencies already but whoa there - books and movies influencing people is a whole debate on its own.

Let's just say that a reader is tempted to employ a mode of killing they've seen or read. Would there be any point? If it were a work of fiction that was in the public domain surely too many people would be able to identify it. Perhaps putting it out there effectively bars its likelihood of becoming part of a real life investigation.

It begs another question - do the police and those higher have an awareness of the huge volume of creative albeit fictional crimes that healthily rotate on the shelves of our bookshops?

With the amount of paperwork they have to contend with I seriously doubt it so surely it would be readers who would spot any similarities between fiction and reality. I haven't heard of any instances of this but I'd love to hear if anyone has.

Maybe copying a famous storyline would be the ultimate example of reverse psychology - why would anyone copy a well known plot and expect to get away with it?

Strangers On A Train is a great movie. The idea of two murderers swapping intended victims to leave them unconnected to the crimes seems like the perfect murder. Perhaps it has happened in real life but we've never got to hear about it because who would believe somebody would be stupid enough to emulate Highsmith's novel and Hitchcock's movie...

Visit Richard at: http://www.richardjayparker.com/

Kindle The Flames

2011-07-08T06:09:00.000-07:00

By Richard Jay Parker

There seems to be a lot of discussion about Kindle and ebooks this week.  To some writers they seem to be perceived as a bonus on top of the release of their hard/paperbacks but I think they offer a substantial bite of a different sort of cherry.

I was pleased that STOP ME Kindle edition went into the Amazon Top 100 Thriller Chart this week at number 64 and has been pinging up and down between 50 and 70 since. I can only apologise for the increased amount of promo I've been doing on Twitter, which must be pretty tedious for anyone who follows me and has already read the book. I'm eager to get book 2 out there so I hope everyone will bear with me while my agent sheperds it safely to you.

I have no control over the pricing of my book and was initially shocked when, after one month of availability, the price of my Kindle edition dropped - it's currently but only temporarily 0.99 - not least because of readers who had already bought it for its original price. As one reader told me though, she didn't mind because it was the price she was prepared to pay to read it right away and knew that, like all books, the price would drop. She also kindly said she'd got value for money and felt she was supporting the substantial efforts behind the production of the book.

Dropping the price may seem like a disaster from the author's point of view but doing so introduces your work to a new readership.  The fact is, nobody has heard of me and why should they shell out good money for my book when they have their favourite authors to rely on? What's heartening is that a lot of people have and supported it above and beyond the call of duty and I'm enormously grateful for that. My Christmas card list just gets longer and longer.

I think Kindle readers will behave in the same way as paperback readers - willing to pay for books and authors that really interest them and picking up cheaper books they're not a hundred percent sure of. This may then result in them enjoying the book so much that they pay full price for those authors in the future. It's no different to the bargain table/rack/bucket.

Readers share and experiment. They also blog and review when they receive no money for it. They pass books on to friends and family and although the author doesn't immediately benefit from that it may mean they're finding new readers who will seek out their next work.

There's a lot of hysteria about ebooks and piracy but it's no different to what happened with music. People started recording themselves and uploading their own music but downloaders were still looking for talent and quality. Some new writers will definitely be discoverd through self publishing but many will not. Readers are as discerning as music fans.

There's still lots to be ironed out in terms of ebooks and nobody is going to be able to predict their impact for many years to come. Everything is conjecture.

But I think there should be more of a fanfare and launch for Kindle and ebook editions of novels because it offers up a whole new way of reaching people. The average amount of people accessing my work has tripled since the launch of my Kindle version.  A large proportion of those people would probably have never read me.

Visit Richard at: http://www.richardjayparker.com/

21st Century Fahrenheit 451

2011-07-07T02:41:00.000-07:00

I don't own a kindle so perhaps it's ironic that Geraldine Steel is the number one bestselling female detective on amazon kindle. But although a devotee of print books, and a self-confessed techno-ignoramus, I've never been against e-readers; it seems to me there's a place for both print and electronic books. For many people kindles are ideal: travellers, students who want instant access to research tools while reading, people with limited storage space, and many others.
Yet we shouldn't ignore the risks that electronic books pose.
Without production and distribution costs, self-publishing will be readily available to all. Companies offering a self-publishing service are already burgeoning. But is it a threat or a wonderful opportunity that electronic books look set to revolutionise the publishing model, a move that is bound to signal the demise of the bookshop and diminish the role of the publisher?
Of course not all self-published books are second rate, any more than all traditionally published books are well-written. Nevertheless the publishing process provides a filter, albeit a flawed one, as well as an editing and proof reading service. Remove that filter and you pose the danger that the market will be swamped with books that haven't been professionally edited or even proof read. Working alone, writers can be forgiven for not producing near perfect manuscripts. No one can be writer, editor and proof reader all in one.
But if writers skimp on employing editors and proof readers, standards will inevitably fall until the concept of the book is devalued to the point where it ceases to have any meaning at all, indistinguishable from self-indulgent ramblings written by people lacking any talent for writing. Yes, I would defend the right of anyone to write what they want (so long as it isn't offensive) but I'll be worried if we cease to distinguish between quality prose that has taken years to perfect, and incoherent drivel that has been dashed off without revision.
This article first appeared in Crime Time Magazine http://www.crimetime.co.uk/mag/index.php/showarticle/1937

Leigh Russell writes the Geraldine Steel series of crime thrillers.
CUT SHORT, ROAD CLOSED, DEAD END

amazon kindle's number 1 female detective
http://www.leighrussell.co.uk/

Launching Onto Kindle....

2011-07-05T08:32:00.000-07:00

by Matt Lynn

The Kindle is a fantastic device for readers, but it potentially is even more interesting for writers. It isn’t so much the ability to reach readers directly, as the opportunity it offers to try out new forms. The publishers and the bookshops are all focussed on the 100,000 word book. But there are lots of other ways of writing things.

I’ve just launched by first short story on Kindle. It’s called ‘Lethal Force’. It would be free, but Amazon won’t let me give it away, so instead it is 71p. It will be free in iTunes just as soon as I can get Smashwords to give it an ISBN number and get it up. Take a look, you might enjoy it.

But it isn’t just short stories that can find a home on Kindle. There are other forms of writing as well.

I already have one idea, which I’m working on right now. Watch this space…..

Writer Defrag

2011-07-01T04:30:00.000-07:00

By Richard Jay Parker

Had an interesting conversation with another writer this week about how we feel at the outset of a writing project. Personally, I always feel like I'm starting all over. I've been a professional writer since the late eighties and have been involved in a variety of writing gigs from comedy to horror. My last project always evaporates when I turn my attention to the next, however, and I was relieved to find somebody else who felt the same way.

It doesn't matter which stage you're at in your writing career, dispensing with what last fired you up to make way for something you hope will evoke the same enthusiasm is a necessary process.

In one respect you feel as if all the work that's come before should have some sort of impact on the new. Of course, it does in terms of your experience and how that has sharpened your approach to the latest project. But that's not something you necessarily register when you defrag your mind in preparation for it.

It's probably a good way for the brain to operate, however. If it was weighed down by every creative work you've ever produced it would probably be impossible to focus when you sit in front of the keyboard.

There should always be time to reflect on your achievements but it's always good to be compressing those old files and moving forward with fresh ideas.

Visit Richard at: http://www.richardjayparker.com/

Good and Evil and other topics

2011-06-30T14:44:00.000-07:00

Three years ago I was offered a three book deal. As the third in my Geraldine Steel series hit the shelves earlier this month, I've been offered a second three book deal, so life is busy. I know some authors prefer to be signed for their books one at a time, but personally I like multiple book deals. That way I know where I am for the next few books and can concentrate on writing without stressing over when my WIP is going to be published or even, in these difficult times, if it will be published at all. I tend to be a bit of a worrier - a character flaw that helps with devising murder plots! - so the security of a three book deal really suits me. As for thinking up ideas, that's been no problem so far. As long as readers continue to want more Geraldine Steel novels, I'll keep writing them!
There's been some interesting debate recently about the nature of evil so I thought I'd pen a few thoughts about Good and Evil in Crime Fiction and wrote an unusually serious post for me. Here's the link if you'd like to read the article: http://crimespree.blogspot.com/2011/06/good-and-evil-in-crime-fiction.html
I've also been filmed talking online about good and evil, the appeal of crime fiction, what makes a successful book, and other related topics on my brand new youtube author channel. Two videos are already posted and another 16 have been filmed and will be added soon. Check out this link if you'd like to hear my thoughts on various topics: http://youtube.com/leighrussellauthor

A BOOK AND A DISH

2011-06-25T05:12:00.000-07:00

By Richard Jay Parker

In a week chock full of negatives it was great to be pleasantly surprised by some positive energy generated by two generous people who have contacted me.

The first was a talented concert pianist and piano professor, Marilina Tzelepi Pateras, who got in touch and offered to set up a Facebook page for me. I've already got a personal page but she suggested an official place for posting the latest news. You can see the page HERE. Thanks, Marilina.

The second was a reveiwer, Martha Cheves. Martha is the author of the cookbook STIR, LAUGH, REPEAT and runs a great site called A BOOK AND A DISH. On it she reviews a book and has the author contribute their favourite recipe. She was kind enough to review STOP ME last year and, as books and food are probably my favourite activities, I was happy to chuck in my own dish.

Martha is about to publish the reviews and recipes as an ebook for 99c with all the proceeds going to an animal shelter charity. If you're a fiction writer with a published work and like your tucker as much as I do then it's worth getting in touch. I'll be posting this new book on my site as soon as it's available. You can also see my review and recipe HERE

To the kitchen now. Just talking about this has made me hungry.

Visit Richard at http://www.richardjayparker.com/

Why Aren't There More Sports Thrillers?

2011-06-22T02:05:00.000-07:00

by Matt Lynn

Emlyn's post about his plans for a Wimbledon thriller has prompted me to think about an interesting question. Why aren't there more sports thrillers?

Dick Francis, of course, made a great career of writing about horse racing. But there are very few thrillers about football, tennis, boxing, formula one, and so on. It is odd. Sport is full of drama and conflict and double-dealing, all the stuff of stories, and has a huge following.

Maybe no one has really tried. One of the projects in my drawer is a football thriller that Random House made a very low offer on at the same time as I started the Death Force series for Headline. So maybe it is just a matter of waiting for the right author to come along. But maybe its because it is impossible to write about sport in a way that doesn't seem flat compared to the real thing? The spectacle itself is so dramatic, it is hard for a writer to match the intensity of the contest. If so, there never will be a really great sports thriller.

CLIFF HANGER

2011-06-21T02:36:00.000-07:00

by Emlyn Rees

The only thing that obsesses me more than writing thrillers (and eating curry) is tennis. And not just any tennis. One tournament in particular. THE tournament. The only one that counts if you’re British. The only one you really, desperately, please-please-let-it-be-this-year want someone else British to win.

I’ve cheered plenty of pretenders over the years: John Lloyd, Annabelle Croft, Jeremy Bates, Tim Henman, Anne Keothavong, and even ‘Boggo’ Bogdanovic - who, quite frankly, even I might still be able to snatch a couple of games off down the local park.

But now is different. The age of pretenders is over. Now we have a genuine contender. We have Andy Murray. And, yes, yes, I know, he did once joke that he’d support Argentina against England at football. And, yes, yes, granted, there’s the illustrious trio of Djokovic, Federer and Nadal standing between our Scottish hero and ultimate glory.

But Murray’s still good. As in fourth best in the world good. As in only three other people’s sprained ankles or bouts of food poisoning away from being the best. The champion. The first Brit to lift a Wimbledon single’s trophy since Fred Perry. The first with a real chance of finally soothing seventy-five years of hurt.

Which means that the next two weeks for me should be pretty good, right? Wrong. Because I’ve got a whole bunch of work to do over the next two weeks too.

And herein lies the problem. Watching people like ‘Boggo’ never used to eat much into my precious writing time - by which I mean that sliver of peace and quiet when the kids are out at school and our house no longer resembles a war zone. In years gone by, Wimbledon was more of a threat than an actual issue. Because after three sets in the first round, Bates, ‘Boggo’, etc, could be relied upon to be out.

But Murray’s a worry. Particularly on current form. Insofar as he keeps getting into semis, or even going the whole way to the finals of the slams. Hours wise - if he repeats his success at the Oz Open in the next two weeks - I’ll end up watching up to thirty-five sets of tennis, taking up to fifty hours. Factor into this the additional commentary and Twitter banter I’ll invariably get sucked into, and you’re looking at a Guinness Record-Breakingly low word count for the follow up to my new thriller HUNTED for the month of June.

Which is why this year I’ve decided to think smart over Wimbledon. Instead of letting my writing suffer at the hands of my tennis addiction, I’m going to combine the two.

During the next fortnight, I’m going to justify my TV-ogling by planning out the ultimate Wimbledon thriller. I’ve sketched out a preliminary storyline and am now listing a few of the main plot elements I’ve been toying with below. I’d welcome any feedback or suggestions.

Clearly, the televised, public nature of the tournament seems to lend itself easy to a high profile assassination. But who to kill? The Duchess of Kent is the one the players have to bow to, so maybe it should be her? On the plus side, she’s royalty. But, equally, she’s no Princess Di or Kate Middleton. In terms of this thriller’s commercial prospects, it seems unlikely she’d help in securing serialisation in the Daily Mail, let alone film rights with a major Hollywood studio.

How about one of the players then? Fairly obvious victims, the lot of them, just standing out there in the centre of the court. Forsyth’s Jackal would make swift work of them for sure. There’d be plenty of possible marketing strap-lines to toy with too. Such as ‘Roger and Out’, ‘Shockovic’, or even the more prosaic ‘Fed’s Dead’.

But for me, hasn’t it just got to be Cliff? A.K.A. Sir Cliff Richard. A.K.A. “the total and utter King of Rock ‘n’ Roll”, as Rick from the Young Ones once memorably described him. With record sales of 260 million worldwide, and a fanbase covering several generations, he’d be perfect.

Next up: the manner and timing of the hit. A Hammer House style deluge would be most authentic. An irresistible visual image too, with this much loved pop star spinning a brolly Fred Astaire style, as the fatal shot was fired. Just imagine the affront. The public outrage. The cover design. THE BOOK SALES...surely they’d be guaranteed.

Then there’s the escape. How would our shooter make his or her getaway? And who would hinder them? Again, a number of potential heroes and heroines spring to mind. John McEnroe in a Columbo style raincoat. He’d be seriously good. Or how about John Lloyd and Sue Barker hooking up in a Dempsey & Makepeace double act? And surely Becker’s got the hair to get involved Kiefer Sutherland style?

Anyway, it’s all up for discussion. (Apart from the title, because WIMBLEDAGEDDON is a surefire must.) Like I say, these are just preliminary thoughts.

I’ll report back on how it all goes - IF it all goes. Because that’s the other thing with Murray. Even if though he’s number four in the world. Even through he’s in the form of his life. In spite of all this, he’s still British. And maybe, well maybe some things just aren’t meant to be. Meaning maybe, just maybe this year I will still get a whole stack of work done and not have to watch too much tennis after all.

P.S. Oh, and for the record, I should point out that in the plot so far Sir Cliff escapes any actual injury during the shooting. Thanks to a lucky Bible in his inside jacket pocket which stops the bullet in its track. Living legends should, after all, remain just that.

Coincidences

2011-06-19T16:01:00.000-07:00

I tried to post here yesterday but couldn't sign in. That may be as well since Sunday is supposed to be my day for posting. Although I've been so busy with promotional events for my new book (launched 2 weeks ago - is it really only two weeks?) that I've not been posting much here lately. It's a happy coincidence that I managed to sign in now, on the right day.

Life's like that, isn't it? Riddled with coincidences, some insignificant, some life changing. So hands up if you've never experienced a coincidence which seemed unbelievable. It happens to us all. But it only seems unbelievable, because of course these coincidences really happen. I could relate three anecdotes from my own life straight away, one of which is so eerily strange that I hesitate to relate it to anyone in case they think I'm a fantasist or bonkers. Or both. But it did happen, this completely unbelievable coincidence. It happened to me.

Fiction can't behave in that way. I remember being told (by The Editor), "Readers don't like coincidences".In my genre of crime fiction that's true. Writing crime thrillers, I try to make my books plausible and authentic. I think that makes them more frightening. Introducing a coincidence would immediately make the plot less convincing. It's not fair, is it? Real life can get away with the most absurd and unbelievable coincidences. Fiction can't.

On a more positive note, I chanced to sign into facebook yesterday evening where a fellow author had sent a message of congratulations on a great review of Dead End in The Times Saturday Review. I read the message just in time to nip out and buy a copy before the local supermarket closed, so was able to read it for myself. That's what I call a happy coincidence!

WRITER WANTED

2011-06-17T06:19:00.001-07:00

By Richard Jay Parker

There would certainly be plenty of takers for that position - even if the following details were added:

WRITER WANTED

Long, anti-social hours. No guaranteed prospects. Will not require telephone manner as, chances are, phone will rarely ring. High rejection threshold a must. Insane optimism essential.

The fact is, most of us know the risks when we take the job. It's one of the few vocations where it's universally acceped that there's not much money in it. If it's a fast buck you're after then you may as well hand the card back. But, of course, there are the big success stories. Exciting things can happen.

It's the creative fulfillment that most of us pursue, however. The prospect of seeing our thoughts published or realised as a play, movie etc. It's the ultimate goal that drives us on and justifies our journey over the obstacle course.

It's why we gleefully sign up for a job that is predicated on the assumption that we'll eventually get a nibble of a carrot that's being dangled over a razor-filled swamp.

Nothing worth having is ever easy. Sometimes those words can wear thin but when you're the only person who can sack you it's easier to carry on than clear your desk. Where can you really take that sad box with the laptop and desklamp in it?

Better do some work now.

Visit Richard at: http://www.richardjayparker.com/

Our Ranks Are Growing....

2011-06-16T02:36:00.000-07:00

by Matt Lynn

The Curzon Group has a new member. Emlyn Rees has a new thriller out soon called 'Hunted'. Some people might know him from when he used to write rom-coms with his wife Josie Lloyd, including a couple of number one best-seller. But he's back writing thrillers. You can find out more about him over at his website.

Hard Work and Good Luck

2011-06-12T11:58:00.001-07:00

Last week my publisher threw a party to celebrate the launch of Dead End, the third in the Geraldine Steel series.
Along with imagination, empathy, and writing skills, being an author takes a lot of hard work, so it’s fun to party once in a while! But whatever other skills an author depends on, a stroke of good luck never goes amiss. You never know where it might turn up next - even at a party.

A reviewer travelled to London from Edinburgh to join us at the launch party for Dead End because she is a fan of my books, which was a huge compliment in itself. I had no idea that she has a PhD in genetics and is an expert in DNA, a topic I am currently researching; she has already given me invaluable expert advice in a complex topic and I know I can email her with any query and receive a prompt and detailed response couched in terms a layman like myself can easily understand. She is a real find!

As I’m working on the background for Geraldine Steel’s relocation from the home counties to the Met, I was thrilled when a contact at the party offered me exactly the experience I have been seeking.
So the launch party was not only a very enjoyable evening, but also a lucky one for me. As I signed copies of my third title Dead End, I was gathering information for the fifth Geraldine Steel novel.

As Eugene Ionesco wrote: “A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of writing or thinking about writing.’
So although I wasn’t writing at the launch party for Dead End, I was certainly thinking about it.

Are You An Archetypal Writer?

2011-06-10T06:33:00.000-07:00

By Richard Jay Parker

The world is changing very quickly but has the perception of writers altered?

Ask most people what they think of when the term writer is used and many will describe a recluse, locked away in their office with a large glass/bottle of something nearby.

It's the image of writers that has been perpetuated as long as I can remember but is it particularly accurate in the 21st century? Penchant for alcohol aside, is the pariah of so many fiction stories very relevant now?

Most writers I know are very plugged into social media, blog regularly and have a more immediate relationship with the readers they want to reach. It no longer seems to be a matter of choice, writers have to be more involved with the promotion of their work through websites, forums, Twitter as well as physically meeting people at signings, festivals etc

Most writers I know thrive on this and get the sort of valuable feedback from readers and reviewers that they wouldn't have had access to before.

So because of this is the writer and the process of writing becoming less anti-social?

Writing itself is still a solitary pursuit but when you have an internet connection to a group of individuals who share your passion or are interested in what you're doing it is certainly a way of spurring yourself on...or distracting you.

It's something writers have to balance during the creative process. I know some writers who have to disconnect from the Internet while they write.

But once the work is done for the day it's great to know there's a community waiting to share your experiences.

It is possible to disconnect, grab the claret and be the cliche but the majority of us are gradually suffocating it.

But maybe just one more glass of claret before I go back to the keyboard...

Visit Richard at: http://www.richardjayparker.com/

Writing On Trains...

2011-06-08T09:20:00.000-07:00

by Matt Lynn

I seem to have been on a lot of trains recently, which may help explain why I haven't had much time to blog recently. I went to Scotland to promote the Death Force books, and my book on the euro crisis is coming out in Germany soon, so I went there to help promote that. I don't really like flying very much, so in both cases I got the train.

It's a pleasant way to travel, although rather unexpectedly the German train broke down somewhere between Brussels and the border, which meant I had to get a bus the rest of the way to Cologne. Still, it's not as if planes don't get delayed all the time...and when a plane breaks down, it has a tendency to drop out of the sky.

But the best thing about trains is that they give you a chance to write.

I can write pretty well most places. I know some writers like to be in the same place all the time, but I'm quite happy to write in a cafe, or at home, or on a hotel balcony.

Overall, however, I think trains are my favourite.

There is something about the steady motion that aids the creative process. Looking out of the window creates a sense of the world going by, of events unfolding, which makes it very easy to create a similar sense of movement on the page. You can can pause, look out of the window for a while, then crack on with the next sentence. It is just the right amount of distraction. Not too little, but not too much either.

I suspect if I bought a euro-rail ticket and spent six months writing my next book on trains the effect would wear off.

But I got a lot of work done on those two trips.

DOWNLOAD THE VACATION KILLER

2011-06-03T03:52:00.001-07:00

By Richard Jay Parker

As some of you may have gathered by now, due to intense Twitter activity, the STOP ME ebook is now available for download.

This is a whole new ballgame for me and the idea that it's already been pre-ordered by lots of readers willing to give it a go is pretty exciting. The notion of it being auto-delivered to their ereaders before they go off on their holidays/vacation as well as my story being added to the portable libraries of others responding to Amazon reviews etc has also got me quite animated.

But it's just a digitised version of the book and nothing significant to trumpet about, right?

If you've read any of my meanderings on this blog about paperbacks vs ebooks you'll know that I believe one format need not negate the other and that readers will choose which is the most convenient.

The ebook means that readers can check out the sample chapter on my website and, if they want to proceed to chapter two, can be reading the whole book in a matter of seconds. It's instantaneous and allows visitors to act upon the desire to read.

But there's still something equally as satisfying about ordering/picking up a book, stroking its cover and feeling its weight in your hands. Horses for courses.

I'm also very aware of the readers who invested their money in a trade or mass market paperback copy, have read it and are probably fed up with hearing the shameless promo. With them in mind, I've launched a holiday photo competition in conjunction with my publisher Allison and Busby which only requires a snap of their physical copy in a holiday situation - or just them reading it. Details HERE. All the images will be featured in a permanent gallery on the site and they have a chance to win great thrillers by Zoe Sharp and Elizabeth Corley.

I'm hoping that this will be a small thank you for reading my first book and something to do while I work up my second.

Visit Richard at: http://www.richardjayparker.com/

Download STOP ME ebook HERE

CAN YOU TRUST YOUR FRIENDS?

2011-05-27T03:45:00.000-07:00

By Richard Jay Parker

Title of this week's blog sounds like a strapline for a movie about body snatching pod people but I'm actually curious about other writers and how they road test their material.

Nobody immerses themself in a project if it hasn't fired them up in the first place. But once you've completed your short story or novel where is your first port-of-call for initial feedback?

Obviously if you're lucky enought to have an agent it's their job to scrutinise your work. But whether you're seeking one or you're attempting to get a second opinion who do you turn to?

Friends and family are an obvious choice but you won't always get the most objective response. Readers who are close to you can inhabit the two ends of the critical spectrum. Some of your familiar readers will respond from the purest motives by being full of praise because they know you/want to give you encouragement. It can also go the other way with them being hypercritical because they know you/don't want to give you false encouragement.

Like all criticism and praise it's a good to take it all with a pinch of salt and make your own mind up once you've solicited responses from the most unbiased people.

But finding them is no mean feat. Most authors I know gradually cultivate a group of individuals they can turn to before exposing their work to the world. Finding them is as much a challenge as creating the work they read. Once you've found them, treat them well. They're to be cherished!

Visit Richard at: http://www.richardjayparker.com/

DOES WRITER'S BLOCK EXIST?

2011-05-20T05:21:00.000-07:00

By Richard Jay Parker

I've never met an author who has had writer's block. I'd certainly be interested to hear from anyone who has suffered the condition.

Like all writers I've had bad days at the keyboard and even unproductive weeks. It's inevitable that the muse is going to call in sick from time to time. Good stories usually spring from not one but a succession of inspired thoughts and this chain is frequently broken not least by our everyday lives impeding our ability to focus wholly on our imagined worlds.

There are always so many prosaic chores to stifle the thought process - although a lot of writers do most of their best thinking while they're servicing their domestic commitments than when they're seated at their computer.

Writer's block has featured in a lot of fiction but I wonder if there is really a condition that can be blamed entirely for a writer's inability to perform that's not the result of other external influences or events.

I'm hoping there isn't. I'm always prepared to be proved wrong but not happily in this case. I'd hate to think it could be waiting for any of us in the future.

I suppose the key is to keep the brain firing and continue to scribble in the notebook.

You can't live every day like it's your last without seriously damaging your health. I wonder whether we should apply this to our imaginations though...

Visit Richard at: http://www.richardjayparker.com/

Creative Writing

2011-05-14T15:59:00.001-07:00

Can Creative Writing be taught? The question has been knocking around in the public arena ever since the University of East Anglia set up its course, with such brilliant alumni as Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro, and no doubt the question was debated in a quieter way long before that.
It does sound like a contradiction. Creativity is personal; it can be inspired (think Mozart, Shakespeare) a connection with the subconscious on a deep level, an outpouring of... of... heck, I'm finding it hard to define 'creativity'.
Yet here I am, agreeing to teach Creative Writing for a week in France - something I can't explain or describe. Before I put anyone off joining us for a week in France at a wonderful venue with fantastic food and local wines, I should add that this won't be my first venture into teaching Creative Writing. I run successful workshops for the Society of Authors, at Get Writing hosted by the University of Herts, and for a few smaller outfits. So far the experience has proved challenging and great fun.
The name 'Creative Writing' is useful as a label because everyone has a clear idea of what Creative Writing is. Nevertheless the title is somewhat misleading because creativity isn't a skill that can be acquired through training or learning of formulae, although it can be nurtured and facilitated.
What then is the value of Creative Writing classes? The answer is that for most of us it takes more than creativity to turn ideas into a book. Character building, plot development, structure, pace, tension - all the essential elements that make up an engaging narrative, all these are skills that can be acquired and honed, and this craft of writing can be taught.
Perhaps ‘Creative Writing Classes’ is a bit of a misnomer. But ‘Crafty Writing Classes’ doesn’t have quite the same ring, does it?

Posted by Leigh Russell
DEAD END is now out in bookshops and on amazon
Creative Writing in France http://tinyurl.com/CreativeWritingClass

The Mechanics Of Writing

2011-05-13T09:49:00.000-07:00

By Richard Jay Parker

It was announced today that a substantial volume of work by Anthony Burgess has been discovered in his private archives. The work includes short stories, music and scripts as well as unpublished books.

A Clockwork Orange has remained one of my favourite books since I read it as a teen. I know Kubrick purists will want to drag me over the coals but I also think that it’s the director’s best work. Book and movie are two entirely different experiences. The subtext of the story is paid off in the book and not in the movie. The book has an upbeat interpretation of the title whereas the movie has a nihilistic finale. Kubrick wrote the screenplay but one of the finds is the script that Burgess wrote for him that was ultimately rejected.

It already looks likely that the short stories will be published in a single volume. Many of the stories are dark or bordering on horror. Not really what Burgess was renowned for. The previously unpublished stories will now be viewed as an insight into his development as a writer.

I expect his script of A Clockwork Orange will also find a readership. I imagine him dropping it into a drawer in frustration and believing he wasted his time.

I wonder what he would make of today’s announcement? How he would react to the perception of his considerable body of rejected work changing so dramatically that it was suddenly causing a buzz in the publishing world.

The one thing writers can learn from this is to have a reliable filing system! The plaudits may be posthumous but it goes to show that putting away unwanted material is sometimes the equivalent of storing a bottle of wine.

Maybe his definition of A Clockwork Orange is appropriate here. Everything has a natural/mechanical cycle no matter what changes occur or how long it takes for it to be realised.

Visit http://www.richardjayparker.com/

To plot or not to plot

2011-05-12T00:54:00.000-07:00

By Peter Stuart Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker)

Further to my last blog about the enormous advantages of being on board a cruise ship in terms of time to write, no phone ringing, no shopping to do, lack of distractions, etc, etc, I suppose I should also have added the one obvious disadvantage. Unless you pay the quite high charges for Internet access over the satellite link, you don’t get that reassuring – or irritating, depending on your point of view – ping that tells you an email has arrived, or be able to leap onto the Internet to check some obscure fact which is essential to the passage you’re writing.

The other, perhaps unforeseen, consequence of being on board a ship is the way that one day slides almost imperceptibly into the next, and the complete lack of any external indications to tell you what day of the week it is. There are no Saturdays or Sundays at sea: each day on board is just like any other. The shops and restaurants and bars and services are always open. Losing track of time is all too easy, your horizon being limited to the name of the next port and what you plan on doing when the ship gets there.

On the other hand, maybe that’s almost definition of a good holiday?

Now back to work:

A short while ago, Matt Lynn explained the way he writes a book. Briefly, he produces a highly detailed synopsis running to tens of thousands of words which encapsulates the entire plot of the novel and all the twists and turns along the way, even bits of dialogue.

I have to confess that I envy him that discipline. The one thing I dislike more than anything else about writing is producing a synopsis, though of course I have to construct them on a very regular basis. But given the choice between writing a 10,000 word synopsis or a 100,000 word novel, I’d take the novel every time, and this reflects the way I approach every book.

I always know where it's going to start, and I have a good idea about how it’s going to finish, but the bit in the middle is usually pretty much of a mystery to me until I actually get into it. When I do get embroiled in the novel, I often find that the characters start doing things which I hadn't really anticipated, and then the plot starts running off in unexpected directions.

There's an old description of novelists which seems quite appropriate: they're either tree writers or wood writers. A tree writer perceives the novel like a tree, oddly enough, and is able to stand back from it and look all the way up from the beginning, at the very base of the trunk, right the way to the topmost branch, the end of the book, and see all the branches and foliage in between. A wood writer, and this is me to a tee, knows that he's going to walk into a wood at one end, and walk out of it at the other, but has not the slightest idea what will happen inside the wood itself.

So is one method of writing better than the other? No, of course not. They’re just different, and how any novelist approaches a particular book is entirely personal, and will be the method that suits him or her best.

But having said all that, as the next deadline looms and I'm sitting staring blankly at the equally blank screen of the laptop in front of me, wondering just what the hell the hero or villain is going to do next, I have to concede that working from a detailed synopsis does have a certain irresistible attraction.

READING INHIBITIONS

2011-05-06T08:22:00.000-07:00

By Richard Jay Parker

Summer holidays are on their way which, for a lot of people, means the one time of the year they get to read uninterrupted.

People's attitudes change when they're not on their home turf - towards how they let their hair down, sartorial modesty etc. Do our inhibitions about what we read change as well?

I have very eclectic reading tastes and am currently reading a classic. I've only just started it but I'm finding it a little turgid. Experience tells me that sticking with it may be enormously rewarding, however. At the moment though it's a case of 'I feel I should' rather than 'I really want to' though.

It's not the sort of book I'd choose to take with me on holiday. When I'm relaxing I want an engaging but easy read. The worst situation is arriving at your destination and realising that your book is a stinker. Ebooks are making this a thing of the past - allowing readers to load up with books so they can try something new if their usual holiday choice isn't delivering.

Somebody said to me that they like to read pulp fiction on holiday because nobody sees them doing it! With an ebook there's no cover to give you away.

It's interesting that people often cite their holiday read as their favourite. Is this because of the circumstances or because they forget about what they should be seen reading and go for something shamelessly entertaining? Like our holidays - is it an opportunity to try new things? For me it's all of the above.

There's still something to be said for returning from a holiday with several volumes conquered and sunblock on the pages. And ebooks probably make it too easy to abandon a book that may deliver if you persist.

I'm hoping my classic will do this...before I decide which page slammers/skimmers I'm going to take away with me.

Visit Richard at http://www.richardjayparker.com/

Book sales - or not...

2011-05-05T14:54:00.000-07:00

I'm posting early this week as life is hectic when a new book comes out so I thought I'd fit this in now when I have a moment (watching Question Time).
Back in February we read much hype - and some criticism - about World Book Night. I was one of the minority of curmudgeons who failed to understand the benefit to the book industry of giving away a million free books.
“Do they think recipients will respond by putting their hands in their pockets? Of course they won’t! If they aren't already book buyers, those given free books will simply wait for the next free book. It won’t be far behind. Why buy something you can get for free? As for those who already buy books - well, that will be one less sale to them. A double whammy.
World Book Night devalues the concept of books as something authors, editors, publishers, designers, proofreaders, have spent months, in some cases years, planning, researching, writing, revising, discussing and editing. Why wasn’t that time and effort devoted to promoting book sales?”
Those in favour of the initiative were optimistic that this event would improve book sales by increasing interest in books.
So how successful did this venture finally prove in the madness of the contemporary book world?
According to the Office of National Statistics overall retail sales in March 2011 rose by 1.3% compared to March 2010 - yet Bookscan figures showed that in March 2011 UK bookshops takings were nearly £9 million down on takings for March 2010 and volume of sales in bookshops fell by over 12%.
I really wish I'd been proved wrong in this instance - and that another World Book Night hadn't been promised for next year.
Posted by Leigh Russell

Free Tickets....

2011-05-05T09:41:00.000-07:00

by Matt Lynn

On May 16th, I'm going to be chairing what promises to be a fascinating talk featuring Stuart Tootal and Patrick Mercer discussing how their experiences in the Army have helped shaped their writing. More details here. We have a couple of free tickets to give away. To claim them just e-mail michaelamaffia.chalke@hotmail.co.uk. First come first served....

How To Make Money From Writing....

2011-05-01T06:56:00.000-07:00

by Matt Lynn

It might not always feel like it, but there is money in the thriller writing business….eventually. The TV channel Alibi has put together a list of the highest-earning crime and thriller writers, on both sides of the Atlantic. Ian Fleming is top of the British list, with earnings of a £100 million-plus, followed by Agatha Christie, and then by Jeffrey Archer (although I don’t think of him as a thriller writer).

Over in the US, it is headed by John Grisham on an extraordinary $600 million, followed by Dan Brown on $400 million – although I reckon if work it out per book, Brown has done better.

Are there any lessons in this for the rest of us writers? Two, I think. The first is that it takes a long time. All the writers on both lists have been writing for a long time – even Dan Brown published his first book in 1998 and it was a while before he had any success.

The second is that you have to write a lot. All the writers on the list are prolific, knocking out book after book. There are no one-hit wonders.

Anyway, I guess the moral is to keep plugging away. Riches await….although hopefully not after I’m dead.