For the next few days Bad Intentions is on free promotion! Get your copy from Amazon here.
Tuesday, 4 June 2013
Sunday, 26 May 2013
THE STORY OF BOOKS
From as far back as we can trace, people have felt the need to share stories. Wasn't early cave man a forerunner of the fisherman boasting about 'the one that got away'? Imagine a prehistoric hunter with limited language but terrible injuries, posturing about the sabre toothed tiger that 'got away'. The cave man lived to tell the tale. Isn't that 'telling the tale' part of what differentiates us from other species of animal?
We hear a lot about the decline of reading, but I'm not sure that's actually a true picture of what's happening. Because we need stories.
I'm a great one for voicing fears of a 'doom and gloom' vision of a dystopian future without books. Long before the phenomenal increase in ebooks I was writing about the 21st century version of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 where books become obsolete not through political suppression but simply from people not longer reading; we have the technology to become a post-literate society.
My first series offers a snapshot of what has happened in the world of publishing. When Cut Shortfirst came out, in 2009, I remember an author friend urging me to ask my publisher to bring it out as an ebook. I wasn't quite sure what that meant, but duly passed the message on. Six months later, the ebook appeared. Road Closed followed a similar pattern in 2010. By 2011, with Dead End, the ebook and print book were published on the same day. Since then, with Death Bed in 2012 and Stop Dead and Cold Sacrifice in 2013, the ebook has become available to download six months before the print book is published.
The medium itself is not the key issue. The important question is whether fewer people are reading as a result of this change. That's an impossible question to answer in terms of my own books. What I can tell you is that sales of the ebooks have been phenomenal and I suspect they have reached a far wider audience as a result of reaching Number 1 on iTunes, and amazon, than they would have done had they been published solely as print books. Of course that's anecdotal, and the 'people who know' - (whoever they are, I'm certainly not one of them) - may have another story to tell.
Which brings me back to the point of this post. For several hundred years (how long is that in man's history?) books have provided a medium for sharing stories. I am passionate about books. I love bookshops, libraries, the feel of a new book... but think about a book you have read and loved. What lives on in your mind are the characters, the emotions and insights you experienced while reading, the images of scenes and actions. Books can change us, not because of the feel of the paper, but by their content.
What matters is the story a writer tells.
Leigh Russell writes the Geraldine Steel series http://leighrussell.co.uk
2013 sees the launch of the spin off series for DS Ian Peterson
This post was first published on http://leighrussell.blogspot.co.uk
Wednesday, 15 May 2013
Wednesday, 8 May 2013
Free Summer Reading Starts Here!
Endeavour Press have these crime books on free promotion for the next few days:
Friday, 15 February 2013
The lost libraries?
By Peter Stuart
Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Tom Kasey, Thomas Payne
and Jack Steel)
This will be my last blog post for about three weeks
because on Sunday I'm flying out to Hong Kong to join the Queen Mary 2
for a cruise lasting about two and a half weeks, and as usual I'll be giving
lectures on the ship before I fly back from Sydney. It'll be a couple of quite
long long haul flights, which I'm not really looking forward to, but at least
there'll be a lot of sea time as the ship heads south across the Pacific Ocean
to Australia, so there'll be no excuse for not getting quite a bit of work
done.
One thing
this liner does have, as well as its more unusual and better publicised
features, like the world's only oceangoing planetarium, is a decent library,
and that sparked a train of thought. With the increasing domination in the
marketplace of electronic books, pieces of text that in at least one sense
don't really exist, what is the future for libraries? Suppose one of the many
predictions about the future of the publishing industry comes true and most
novels end up being released as ebooks rather than paperbacks? Can you have a
virtual library, and if you can, how would it work?
In fact,
libraries do seem to be under threat. You may recall the British government's
ill-advised plan to close down most of them, the spin doctors claiming by a
piece of tortuous illogic that this would somehow improve the service to the
public, and now it seems that much the same thing is happening in America.
Obviously in a time of recession cuts do need to be made in many services, and
it's probably only fair that libraries should also share the burden. And of
course libraries do require funding if they are to remain up-to-date and
relevant, not least because they have to buy books, and books cost money.
According
to a report in Library Journal, almost two thirds of libraries in
America saw an increase in their budget last year, albeit a maximum of only 2.9%,
and with an overall average figure of just over 1%, but costs, expenses and
salary increases far outpaced this, leading to a net reduction in operating revenue,
while the remaining third of libraries surveyed saw a significant drop in their
funding. About a quarter of libraries were forced to cut staff simply to make
ends meet. Predictably, the bulk of the materials budget – about 60% – is
applied to book purchases, while spending on ebooks, audiobooks and music
languish in single figures.
The other
thing which is clear about libraries is that they do need to change to reflect the
changing lifestyles of their potential customers. It's no longer enough just to
fill wooden shelves with hardback books and wait for people to walk in through
the door. They needed to make going to the library a pleasurable and relevant experience,
which might well mean branching out in non-traditional directions, such as
providing comfortable chairs, a coffee bar, Internet access (though many do
this already) and anything else which will help improve the experience of their
customers.
But
without doubt they still fulfil an important need, by bringing people in the
community together, and providing comprehensive and professional access to all
manner of reading and communication materials in one place. This is
particularly important for people who may not have enough disposable income to
buy books for themselves, or may simply lack the skills needed to operate a
home computer.
They are also important for authors, and not just
because of PLR payments. I have done many talks in libraries around the United
Kingdom, which has assisted me in generating publicity and gaining recognition
as a writer, and I would like to think that in some small way I helped the
budding authors who came along to listen to me. And, finally, even in this
digital age, libraries hold reference materials and written resources which are
frequently not available anywhere else.
In short,
our libraries are important and we need to keep them, guard them jealously and
do whatever we can to make sure they survive. And authors are particularly
well-placed to help in one way.
Whenever a new book is released, the publishers
invariably send a number of free copies to the author. It has long been my
policy that my local library in England is one of the first to receive a copy.
It cost me nothing, but it puts my books on their shelves, which not only saves
them money, but also must increase my exposure, and generates a little bit of
free publicity.
But
exactly how the library system will work when the ebook finally comes to
dominate the market – which I'm quite convinced that it will – I have no idea.
You can contact me at:
Twitter:
@pss_author
Facebook:
Peter Stuart Smith
Blogs: The
Curzon Group
Website link: Brit
Writers
Saturday, 9 February 2013
A strange year
By Peter Stuart
Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Tom Kasey, Thomas Payne
and Jack Steel)
By any standards, 2012 was a very strange year in the
world of American publishing. Nielsen Bookscan, the industry analyst which
monitors roughly three quarters of all sales of printed books, produced some
quite fascinating statistics. Perhaps predictably in terms of overall sales,
the three top spots in the charts for the year went to one single author – E L
James – for the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, which of course began its
life as a self-published book. The following three spots went to another individual
author, Suzanne Collins, who wrote The Hunger Games series. As a result
of this domination of the charts, half of all the bestselling books in the top
twenty for 2012 came from only these two authors.
Perhaps
more of a surprise was the fact that two of the places in the top eleven books
were held by the American political commentator Bill O'Reilly, a man virtually
unknown outside America, and even more surprisingly the female author who took
of the world by storm with the Harry Potter series only managed to get
as high as number 18 with her latest novel The Casual Vacancy. In
fairness, the reviews of this book could best be described as 'mixed', and it's
clearly nothing like as popular as her earlier works, with only fairly limited
appeal.
Although
Nielsen is probably the most accurate of all the monitoring systems, its figures
are far from comprehensive. The company doesn't track the sale of every printed
book, and has no facility for tracking either ebooks or audiobooks. Interpreting
the numbers is made more difficult by the fact that some books only appear as
printed versions while others are only produced electronically. And although
the two big retailers – Amazon and Barnes & Noble – both sell broadly the
same titles, there are some books which are available from one company but not
from the other, and vice versa. So it’s far from being a complete picture.
But one
trend which the 2012 charts quite clearly show is that some authors do seem to
attract brand loyalty. People who bought any one of the Fifty Shades of Grey
have apparently then gone out and bought the other two novels in the series,
and the same thing seems to have happened with the Suzanne Collins books. And
it was a similar situation a few years ago with the three books in the Stieg
Larsson trilogy.
The fact that Nielsen does not cover ebooks
definitely means that the 2012 figures are inaccurate, not least because of an
unrelated but parallel study by Bowker Market Research. Considering only the
format of books sold, trade paperbacks led the field at 31%, followed – perhaps
surprisingly – by hardcover books at 25%, just ahead of ebooks at 23%, while
mass-market books languished at 12%. This means that almost a quarter of all
books sold in America in 2012, the entire ebook market, is reflected nowhere in
the Nielsen figures.
What's
particularly interesting is taking a look at how the market has changed in the
recent past. Three years ago, hardcover books and trade paperbacks each held a
little over a third of the market, at 35%, while ebooks accounted for a mere 2%
of all book sales. Trade paperbacks still seem to be holding their own, while
hardbacks have dropped back slightly, but ebook sales have increased
enormously, taking over much of the share previously held by mass-market
paperbacks.
The
pricing model in America has changed as well over the same period of time, the
average ebook dropping from a little over $10 to less than $6, and some
categories, most notably romance, costing under $4 each. In contrast, the cost
of print books has increased very slightly.
So can we
learn anything from this? Probably, yes. First, both of the bestselling authors
of 2012 were exploring largely new markets. Instead of following a trend, they
were both establishing one, much as J K Rowling did with her Harry Potter
novels, writing books which presumably appealed to them personally and which
very clearly struck a chord with the reading public. The difficulty that every
writer faces, of course, is knowing what the next 'big thing' in publishing is
going to be, because following a trend very rarely works, as the plethora of Fifty
Shades of Grey clones demonstrates. Setting a trend is always the biggest
challenge.
The
second point is that if you do have a brand-new idea, a type a book which
hasn't been done before, your chances of interesting any commercial publishers
in it are probably fairly slim, simply because it will be unfamiliar territory
to them. So your best bet is to ignore the conventional publishing route and
take the ebook option immediately. That way, if the book takes off it can sell
in enormous numbers very, very quickly, while if it doesn't your costs are
extremely limited.
In
today's market, and if you're lucky, publishing an ebook can make you a fortune
for almost no initial outlay. It really is a business opportunity – because
writing is a business just like any other – with an unlimited upside and
virtually no downside. And if you don't believe me, just ask E L James.
You can contact me at:
Twitter:
@pss_author
Facebook:
Peter Stuart Smith
Blogs: The
Curzon Group
Website link: Brit
Writers
Saturday, 2 February 2013
Kindling controversy
By Peter Stuart
Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Tom Kasey, Thomas Payne
and Jack Steel)
There’s one aspect of the electronic publishing revolution
which is now becoming clear and which is also beginning to cause concern among
people who actually care about the English language.
Because quite literally anybody can now publish
virtually anything as an ebook, without the benefit of any form of writing
ability and ignoring even the most rudimentary attempt at editing, there are
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of ebooks out there which are borderline
illiterate and in some cases completely illiterate, full of grammatical errors,
spelling mistakes and faulty punctuation. The corollary to this is that there
are very clearly also tens or hundreds of thousands of readers who either don’t
know what’s wrong with what they’re reading, or simply don’t care. Presumably,
as long as the story romps along in a reasonably satisfactory fashion, the fact
that the author can’t spell and has no idea what to do with an apostrophe or
what a gerund is, simply doesn’t bother them.
The
author of the novel Beautiful Disaster, Jamie MacGuire, for example, has
been criticised for poor usage and command of English, but that hasn’t stopped
the book getting into the top 40 on the Amazon bestseller list. And the same
criticisms and have been applied to Tracey Garvis Graves, the author of On
the Island, but the novel has sold over 360,000 copies in ebook format, and
she’s recently signed a contract for a reported seven figures with a Penguin
imprint, yet another example of a self-published book being purchased by a
mainstream publishing house. Which presumably means that at least the printed
version of the book will be literate.
Some
people are deliberately taking advantage of the freedom offered by the Kindle
to make a kind of obscure joke, perhaps the best recent example of this being The
Diamond Club by Patricia Harkins-Bradley. The author doesn’t exist, being a
creation of ‘Not Safe For Work’ comedy website presenters Brian Brushwood and
Justin Young.
And
the book itself isn’t really a book, either, in that it doesn’t tell any kind
of a coherent, logical or even vaguely sensible story. It was basically spawned
by the success of the Fifty Shades of Grey series, and the authors – if that’s
the right term – simply created an attractive cover and a blurb which promised
far more than the book could possibly deliver, and stuffed the inside with pretty
much anything they could find.
Their
masterstroke was to acknowledge the joke, putting the book on the iTunes store for
only 99 cents and encouraging people who bought it to post a hilarious
five-star review. And it worked.
The book
was published on 29 July 2012 and by 15 August it was at number four in the
iTunes’s bestseller list with over 2260 reader ratings averaging at 4.5 stars.
On Amazon.com on 23 January 2013, and priced at $1.59, it stood at number
28,225 with 95 reviews averaging 4.1 stars, while on the same day on Amazon UK
it was at number 133,131 with only seven reviews averaging 3 stars. So maybe
British readers are less able to see the joke, or want far more for their 99
pence than this offering. By any standards, the book is awful, with no
discernible plot, just a series of largely unconnected sex scenes and simply
terrible writing. But that, of course, was precisely the point of the exercise,
to write a best-seller that was completely unpublishable by any sensible
standard.
And on this subject, I do
have a suggestion that might help readers decide what ebooks to buy. At the
moment, the only way a reader can decide whether a particular ebook is likely
to be worth reading is to look at the name of the publisher and glance at the
reviews. If it’s a commercial publishing house, that should mean that the book
will be grammatically accurate, and if it’s got good reviews then the story
might be entertaining as well.
Perhaps a system could be
initiated whereby for a small fee a self-published book could be submitted to
an independent assessor who would analyse – not the story – but the way the
story has been written, the way the language has been used. Any book which is
deemed to be literate could then be awarded a kind of seal of approval, a stamp
of quality, something like the old kitemark we used to have in Britain.
It wouldn’t
be much, but it might be one small step towards stemming the tide of electronic
illiteracy that is now threatening to engulf us all.
You can contact me at:
Twitter:
@pss_author
Facebook:
Peter Stuart Smith
Blogs: The
Curzon Group
Website link: Brit
Writers
Friday, 25 January 2013
The rise of the ebook (continued)
By Peter Stuart
Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Tom Kasey, Thomas Payne
and Jack Steel)
Free
ebook this weekend only! This Saturday and Sunday you'll find my ebook Falklands: Voyage to War available for
free on Amazon.
Some figures released by the Association of American
Publishers for 2011 make interesting reading. In that year ebooks became ‘the
dominant single format’ in the adult fiction category, accounting for 30% of
publishers’ sales and more than doubling the 13% recorded the previous year.
The revenue from adult fiction ebooks amounted to $1.27 billion, an increase of
117%. Also in 2011, the number of self-published books increased dramatically
to 211,269 over the 133,936 released in 2010, not quite twice as many, and
roughly 45% of these were fiction. New writers were discovering that, for the
first time, they didn’t actually need publishers in order to get published.
And it’s still clear that mainstream commercial publishers
have little or no idea how to take advantage of the new medium. One example:
the author Eric van Lustbader, who wrote more than 25 bestsellers, suddenly
discovered that many of his most successful novels weren’t available as ebooks.
As his publisher was apparently unable or unwilling to release his work in this
format, the author has reclaimed all the relevant rights to these novels and is
in the process of releasing them as ebooks himself, without the assistance of
any publishing house.
It’s worth bearing in mind another factor which has
characterized the ebook revolution: not only can unknown writers publish
anything they want, but professional authors can release books that no
mainstream publisher would even consider. This is particularly the case with
short stories. Very few authors have had short stories published in book form,
and those that have managed this have usually seen these only as collections,
released after the author has already become established as a bestselling
novelist. Some magazines take short stories, but for most writers this is an
ephemeral and unsatisfactory method of getting their work out to their readers.
But the rise of the ebook has changed everything, because the length of the
work is now virtually irrelevant.
I have had two short non-fiction books and a
collection of ghost stories published by The Endeavour Press that I could never
have hoped to see released by any commercial publishing house because the
length of all three works was simply wrong. But as ebooks, they are selling
well, and the low asking price reflects the fact that they aren’t full-length
works.
Stephen Leather is a well-established and popular novelist,
and he, too, is exploiting the short story medium with his ‘Inspector Zhang’
series. Reportedly, he sells roughly 6,000 of each every year, usually for
under £1, and in 2012 he claimed to have sold about half a million ebooks in
all, the majority being short stories.
This didn’t go down well when he spoke at the Crime
Writers Association conference in Harrogate last July, and he was booed and
hissed by the audience, apparently for having the temerity to properly embrace
the new technology which is available. Clearly the people who listened to him
speak objected very strongly to the entire concept of the ebook, and in
particular the idea of cheap ones.
Personally, I think he’s quite right. The fact of the
matter – as I hope I’ve shown in this blog post, if it wasn’t already perfectly
apparent to everybody – is that the ebook is here and it’s here to stay, and
there’s absolutely no point in not taking advantage of it and the opportunities
it offers. We are never going to return to a time when a handful of publishing
houses were able to decide what was – and what was not – suitable material for
the reading public, and the sooner everybody realises that the better.
You can contact me at:
Twitter:
@pss_author
Facebook:
Peter Stuart Smith
Blogs: The
Curzon Group
Website link: Brit
Writers
Friday, 18 January 2013
Porn – sort of
By Peter Stuart
Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Tom Kasey, Thomas Payne
and Jack Steel)
Many apologies for the long delay since my last blog post
here. It was a combination of circumstances, including the inevitable Christmas
and New Year celebrations when nobody really feels like doing very much, and a
month on a cruise ship sailing down to the Caribbean and then returning to
Portsmouth just before Christmas. That, I hasten to add, wasn’t a holiday, but
work, because one of my secondary duties, if you like, is lecturing on such
vessels, which usually means I stand up on my hind legs in front of a largely
disinterested audience every other day and for about 40 minutes or so I bore
them into submission.
The talks
I give vary from the sublime – Cold War espionage in Berlin – to the ridiculous
– the secrets of the Bermuda Triangle – but my bread and butter is destination
lecturing, talking about the next port the ship will be visiting. Of course,
when I’m not standing up in the theatre or wherever my time is my own, so
although it is work it really isn’t desperately hard work and I can usually get
quite a lot of writing done, at least when the ship’s at sea. When it’s alongside
in Barbados or Tortola, it’s very difficult to think of a really good reason to
stay on board and work.
The early part of this year is going to be fairly
hectic as well, because I have to do two cruises in fairly quick succession.
For the first, they’re flying me out to Hong Kong to join the Queen Mary 2,
returning from Sydney, and a couple of weeks after I get back I’m off again,
this time to Bangkok to join the Aurora, and then flying back from
Dubai.
But that’s
enough about my troubles. What I really want to talk about this week is porn.
Mummy porn, to be precise.
The
somewhat startling news was released this week that the Fifty Shades of Grey
series has sold 35 million copies in America and a further 35 million copies in
the rest of the world. However you slice it, 70 million sales for three books
that even their staunchest fans have to admit are barely average is pretty
impressive. These books have now outsold the entire Harry Potter series
and turned the author into a multimillionaire, all in just two years. According
to one industry insider, at the height of their popularity in Britain the
trilogy was selling around 1 million copies a week in paperback and 2 million
as electronic downloads, meaning that the author was banking almost £1 million
a week.
In the
good old days of traditional publishing, novels would be released first as hard
covers then, after a decent interval, as paperbacks and, if there was
sufficient interest, the publishers might later consider audiobooks or
something of that sort. But the American publishers of the Grey series
are doing it all backwards, and the next version of the books that will appear
will be hardbacks, and on the Valentine’s Day to boot, which has to be sending
some kind of a mixed message. Romance is dead – pass me those handcuffs? Or
maybe ‘Say it with whips’?
And in
these days of spin-offs and derivatives it’s probably only a matter of time
before we see the influence of this kind of mild mummy porn on the small
screen. How about a brand-new series called Weird Sex in the City?
You can contact me at:
Twitter:
@pss_author
Facebook:
Peter Stuart Smith
Blogs: The
Curzon Group
Website link: Brit
Writers
Saturday, 3 November 2012
Abandoned books
By Peter Stuart
Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Tom Kasey, Thomas Payne
and Jack Steel)
Some interesting news about books was published recently,
but from an unexpected source. In the United Kingdom there’s a popular chain of
budget hotels known as Travelodge, and they recently issued a report which
listed the number of books which had been left behind in their hotel rooms, and
which of these novels – which had clearly so displeased their owners that they
simply discarded them, not even being prepared to carry them out to their cars
– had proved to be the most popular, or rather the most unpopular.
It may
not come as a particular surprise to anyone to learn that the book which came
top, with around 7,000 copies being abandoned, was the erotic bestseller by E L
James, Fifty Shades of Grey, which accounted for almost one in every three
books which had been dumped, Travelodge stating that in all a total of 21,786
books had been recovered from its 36,500 hotel rooms during 2011. It will
probably also not be entirely surprising that the other two books in the
trilogy – Fifty Shades Freed and Fifty Shades Darker – also made
the ‘Books Left Behind’ worstseller list at numbers 4 and 7 respectively. I
haven't read any of these three novels, and so I'm not qualified to comment on
their literary worth, but I do think it's significant that most people I've spoken
to who have read them, or have tried to read them, have dismissed them as
boring rubbish.
But I am
familiar with the work of the late Steig Larsson, whose three novels have also
featured prominently in this list, and again their inclusion does not come as
any kind of a surprise to me, because I thought the books were really very
average indeed. In fact, I couldn't even be bothered to finish the last one in
the series. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins also proved to be
unpopular, as did her other two books. But as well as this collection of
entirely forgettable novels, there were also some surprises, including The
Fry Chronicles by Stephen Fry and John le Carre's classic Tinker,
Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
The full
and unexpurgated list is as follows:
1. Fifty
Shades of Grey E.L.
James
2. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Stieg
Larsson
3. The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest Stieg Larsson
4. Fifty Shades Freed E.L.
James
5. The Hunger Games Suzanne
Collins
6. The Girl Who Played With Fire Stieg
Larsson
7. Fifty Shades Darker E.L.
James
8. Catching Fire Suzanne
Collins
9. Mockingjay Suzanne
Collins
10. The Help Kathryn
Stockett
11. One Day David
Nicholls
12. A Tiny Bit Marvellous Dawn
French
13. Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography Steve Jobs
14. Diary Of A Wimpy Kid Jeff
Kinney
15. The Brightest Star In The Sky Marian
Keyes
16. The Fry Chronicles Stephen
Fry
17. Room Emma
Donoghue
18. StrengthsFinder 2.0 Tom
Rath
19. The Confession John
Grisham
20. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy John
Le Carre
There are of course a number of conclusions one can draw
from this report. It could be argued that the abandoned books are an accurate
reflection of the changing reading habits of the British public, and a
spokeswoman for Travelodge confirmed that they had noted a change in the types
of books. Previously, the majority of dumped books were either celebrity
biographies or chick lit, both of which categories had clearly failed to live
up to the low expectations of their purchasers. So, in 2007 the most abandoned
book was The Blair Years by Alastair Campbell, which reportedly failed
to satisfy on any number of levels, while the following year it was Piers
Morgan's equally unimpressive Don't You Know Who I Am? In 2009, the book
most commonly tossed aside by Travelodge customers was Katie Price's
autobiography Pushed to the Limit, which presumably she paid somebody to
write for her, just like all her other books: at least E L James actually wrote
what she put her name to.
Perhaps inevitably, ‘unusual’ reading material was
discovered at several hotels in the chain, including a bag of Kama Sutra books
found in a room previously occupied by an elderly couple in Scarborough, and in
Peterborough a company CEO left behind a suitcase filled with comics.
And I really don’t quite know what to make of that!
Finally, and nothing to do with the topic of this
post, I will not be posting anything else until January 2013, assuming that the
world doesn’t end on 21 December 2012, as some people are claiming the Mayans
predicted, because we will be travelling and also taking a cruise. I’m a guest
lecturer on the Fred Olsen ship Boudicca,
sailing from Portsmouth on 18 November on a round trip to the Caribbean.
You can contact me at:
Twitter:
@pss_author
Facebook:
Peter Stuart Smith
Blogs: The
Curzon Group
Website link: Brit
Writers
Friday, 26 October 2012
The electronic revolution
By Peter Stuart
Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Tom Kasey, Thomas Payne
and Jack Steel)
Almost every time you open up a newspaper or magazine
aimed at writers, agents or publishers, the topic which is sure to dominate is
the rise of electronic publishing, normally backed up by figures which are
either reassuring or alarming, depending upon exactly where you stand and which
part of the market is likely to affect you.
One of the problems with reports of any kind is
deciding how accurate the figures actually are, and in the case of book sales,
with the huge variety of outlets and discounts and methods of purchasing, it is
very difficult, perhaps impossible, to sort out exactly what is going on.
Typical of this is a recent report by the Association of American Publishers
and the Book Industry Study Group, which came up with the following data about
publishing in the United States:
·
Book publishing revenue fell by 2.5% in 2011,
with total sales of $27.2 billion
·
In contrast, the total number of books sold rose
by just under 3.5%, to 2.77 billion books, the implication being that lower
revenue on increased sales was caused by people buying more lower-priced ebooks
·
388 million ebooks were sold in 2011, an
increase of 210% over 2010, and ebook revenue doubled to $2.074 billion
·
Most books are still sold through physical
shops, but in 2011 sales declined by just over 12.5% to $8.59 billion, a loss
primarily blamed on the closure of over 500 Borders’ book stores
·
Online retail sales grew by 35% to $5.04
billion, this figure representing approximately 18% of total book revenue, and the biggest
growing sector of the market was for books aimed at children and young adults,
which saw a rise in revenue of 12%
In contrast, another recent report stated that in the
last quarter of 2011, almost 30% of all book sales in the fiction category were
ebooks, and 16% of all non-fiction sales as well, showing a marked increase
over the same period in the previous year, when the respective percentages were
12% and 5%. These represent gains of approximately 250% and 300% respectively
in these two categories, which proves – as if anybody still had any doubts
about the reality of the situation – that ebooks are here to stay. Sales of
juvenile ebook fiction tripled last year as well. The report concluded with a
forecast that similar growth figures to these would probably be recorded over
the next couple of years, after which growth in ebook sales would be likely to
taper off slightly, but would still be very significant.
A
corresponding report, but looking at physical book sales, and drawing its data
primarily from Nielsen Bookscan, stated that print sales were down
significantly, with mass-market paperbacks selling over 25% less than last
year, paperbacks 12% down and with hardcover books the least affected and
showing a reduction sales of about 9%. Perhaps predictably, there was almost no
reduction in sales of books intended for toddlers and very young children.
The twin leaders
of the ebook revolution are of course Amazon, both the world’s biggest online
bookstore and the world’s largest electronic retailer, and the hugely
successful Kindle ereader. However, not everything in Amazon’s garden is rosy.
The company has seen a jump in sales this year, reporting gross revenue up by
29% to $12.8 billion dollars in the second quarter, and a hike in the share
price on Wall Street to $223. The other side of the coin is that profits
decreased by a massive 96% in the second quarter of 2012 compared to the
previous year, and the company’s profit was a mere $7 million, a remarkably
small amount of money considering the gross revenue.
One
reason for the greatly reduced profits is, oddly enough, the Kindle, but the
Kindle Fire, which is selling in much smaller numbers than had been expected. I’ve
mentioned this device before in this blog, and I’m by no means convinced that
it’s a good idea, mainly because of the enormously reduced battery life it has
– Amazon is only claiming about 11 hours, which probably means 8 or 9 would be more
realistic – compared to the original Kindle, which you can use for weeks at a
time without recharging it. The culprit, of course, is also the selling point:
the colour screen which requires a constant power feed. And by launching the
Kindle Fire, Amazon has to some extent stepped outside of its comfort zone and
entered a world already occupied by tablet computers of one sort or another, a
world dominated – for reasons I have yet to understand – by the grossly
overpriced and barely adequate iPad.
It
remains to be seen if Amazon can exert the same level of dominance in this
market as it has achieved in the world of electronic books and online retailing.
You can contact me at:
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@pss_author
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Peter Stuart Smith
Blogs: The
Curzon Group
Website link: Brit
Writers
Friday, 19 October 2012
Should we burn books, or just ban them?
One of the blogs I read had an entry a short while ago
about banning books in America. In fact, it was referring to an annual
programme called Banned Books Week, intended to call attention to threats to
the First Amendment of the United States’ Constitution, a programme which has
been running for 30 years. Believe it or not, books still get banned in
America, about 400 incidents being reported in the last year, and the programme
is trying to get Americans to support the idea that all books, regardless of
content, should be disseminated.
This
banning is not the work of the government – unlike certain books published in
Britain which have incurred official displeasure and been forcibly removed from
the shelves, everything from Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Spycatcher
– but imposed by libraries and bookstores. Two of the most surprising, or
perhaps predictable, depending on your point of view, classic novels to suffer
this fate in America this year were To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher
in the Rye, but in the past a huge number of other volumes have been banned
in the States and elsewhere. These range from incomprehensible choices like Black
Beauty and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the virtually
unreadable Ulysses and almost equally unreadable The da Vinci Code.
All of
which raises the obvious question: how free is free speech? Are there some
books which are so bad, for whatever reason, that it is better for the public
not to be able to see the text under any circumstances? Perhaps it would be
better to look at the matter from the other side, as it were. What kind of
damage would be caused to a reader’s psyche or moral outlook if they were
exposed to, for example, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone? And,
yes, it was banned. Are they immediately going to race out and buy magic wands
and learn the words of various spells? And if they do, does that really matter?
The
argument against that book was that it promoted witchcraft. Well, I read it,
and it didn’t seem to me that it was doing that: I just thought it was a good
story. But even if that was what somebody read into it, was that necessarily a
bad thing? It’s perfectly possible to argue that every religion in the world is
simply a form of superstition, because by definition it is impossible to prove
a single fact about what is claimed by its adherents to be the truth. In this
respect, witchcraft is no less viable a religious concept than Christianity, so
why shouldn’t it be promoted?
So should
there be limits at all? Should a book which promotes the idea of murdering
police officers be banned? Or one that espouses paedophilia, or racial hatred,
or serial killing?
The
reality, of course, is that today, with the rise of the electronic book and the
Internet, it is effectively impossible to ban anything. Anyone, no matter what
their agenda, can publish whatever they like. On the Internet, you can read the
kind of books that no commercial publisher would ever consider publishing, in even
their wildest and most deranged of dreams.
Until
about two months ago, I would have happily stood up in any forum and defended
the right of any author to write whatever book he or she wanted, no matter what
its contents, and no matter who would be offended by it. I genuinely believed
that the right to free speech transcends all other issues. And, in fact, I
still believe this to be the case with regard to novels.
And then
I had the misfortune to read a book by a man named Ken Ham called The Great
Dinosaur Mystery Solved, and my views concerning non-fiction books changed
almost overnight. This book, without the slightest shadow of doubt, deserves to
be banned, simply because some people who read it might actually believe that
there is some truth in the collection of rabid nonsense he has produced as a
theory. Basically, this man believes that dinosaurs didn’t live over 65 million
years ago but a mere 6000 years ago, despite the utterly overwhelming and
completely undisputed scientific evidence to the contrary, evidence from almost
every scientific discipline from geology to meteorology, as well as palaeontology.
He’s promoting creationism, obviously, which as a
theory is just as valid as my own personal ‘Theory that Fairies live at the
bottom of my Garden’, and makes no sense whatsoever. Everybody, of course, is
entitled to their own point of view, but I firmly believe that a book
purporting to be non-fiction should at least fulfil certain basic criteria, the
most obvious of which is that it should be based on fact. If he was writing a
novel, it wouldn’t bother me, but this man is advancing this as a serious
proposition, and to me that seems very dangerous.
In fact,
this isn’t a book that should be banned. This really is a book that should be
burnt.
You can contact me at:
Twitter:
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Facebook:
Peter Stuart Smith
Blogs: The
Curzon Group
Website link: Brit
Writers
Friday, 12 October 2012
The real Jack the Ripper?
Yesterday Simon & Schuster published my latest book – The Ripper Secret – and the initial
marketing push looks as if it’s been quite successful, with the novel being
available in all the major supermarket chains and the high street retailers. As
well as the usual kinds of promotions, the publishing house is also
broadcasting a podcast I recorded on its website and featuring a short article
I wrote about Victorian detection methods in the ‘Dark Pages’ section.
It looks
as if the timing has been quite providential as well, with the second of a
two-part BBC documentary being broadcast last night, the same day as the book’s
publication, and with the level of interest in this most notorious of all
serial killers still being remarkably high. When I input the search term ‘Jack
the Ripper’ into Amazon, it came up with just under 3,400 items, an astonishing
number of books and films bearing in mind that his killing spree took place
almost a century and a half ago. Doing the same thing on Google produced almost
ten million hits.
The BBC
documentary was interesting, though the conclusions it came to were somewhat
predictable and – like a lot of the things the BBC produces – very selective. Their
principal suspects were Montague John Druitt and a Polish Jew named Aaron Kosminski,
though no believable evidence was advanced to indicate that either man could
have been Jack the Ripper. And it’s worth pointing out that in all over 200 different
suspects have been suggested over the years, and some 30 of these have been
seriously considered, ranging from the sublime (Prince Albert Victor with or
without the assistance of Queen Victoria’s Physician-In-Ordinary Sir William
Gull) to the ridiculous (‘Jill the Ripper’ or the ‘mad midwife’).
The documentary
also provided reconstructions of some of the events, and these were not always
as accurate as they certainly should have been. For example, when Israel
Schwartz witnessed an altercation between a man and a woman who might have been
Elizabeth Stride, he also described another man on the opposite side of the
street, a man who then began following him. In the BBC’s version, this man didn’t
appear at all, and the scene showed Schwartz passing very close by the arguing
couple and getting an excellent look at the man involved, which certainly wasn’t
the case according to his testimony.
They also
were highly selective when considering the medical evidence. With a single
exception, every doctor who examined any of the victims of the Ripper concluded
that the killer had to have had at least some medical knowledge. The single
exception was Dr Thomas Bond, who stated that he didn’t believe the murderer
had any surgical ability, but conspicuously failed to explain how the Ripper
had managed to remove Catherine Eddowes’s left kidney without damaging any of
the surrounding organs in complete darkness in Mitre Square in under 15 minutes,
a difficult and complex surgical procedure even on a corpse.
With
regard to the killing of Annie Chapman, the divisional police surgeon Dr George
Bagster Phillips stated that if he had performed the mutilations to her body,
even in the well-lit and ordered surroundings of an operating theatre, the
procedure would have taken him at least an hour. His views were echoed by the
other doctors involved in examining the victims.
Probably
unsurprisingly, the BBC ignored all the evidence recorded by every other doctor
at the time, and simply took Bond’s statement as gospel, claiming that the
killings showed no medical knowledge or ability whatsoever, presumably so that
they could offer Druitt and Kosminski – neither of whom had medical training –
as believable suspects.
Personally,
I believe that it is undeniable the Jack the Ripper – whoever he was – at the
very least had some medical and surgical training, and that of course would
narrow the field of suspects very considerably and also, incidentally,
eliminate at a stroke the most popular contenders.
The man
who was Jack the Ripper in my novel, on the other hand, is a far better fit
than most. Records from this period are notoriously patchy and incomplete, but
there is evidence to suggest that this man was living in London at the time of
the killings, had trained and then worked as a surgeon, and had a history of
violence against women, with quite probably at least one murder behind him
before he arrived in the city. He is also one of the least known of all the
Ripper suspects.
The Ripper Secret is of course a novel,
but the story is tightly woven around the killings which are described as
accurately as possible after such a passage of time. I’ve taken considerable
care to make sure that the facts are right, and in my opinion the story does
work as a possible explanation for the murders. In particular, it provides logical
answers to six questions which almost no non-fiction writer has ever managed resolved
satisfactorily:
·
Why did the murders start?
·
Why did the mutilations get progressively more
severe?
·
Why were there two murders on one night?
·
Why did the murders stop?
·
Why did Sir Charles Warren resign simultaneously
with the final killing?
·
What was the significance of the geographical locations
of the murders?
If you read the book, let me know what you think.
You can contact me at:
Twitter:
@pss_author
Facebook:
Peter Stuart Smith
Blogs: The
Curzon Group
Website link: Brit
Writers
Friday, 5 October 2012
Only a fool doesn’t write for money
By Peter Stuart
Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Tom Kasey, Thomas Payne
and Jack Steel)
Obviously I’m not the first person to make a statement
like the title of this blog post, but a recent article in another blog site
caught my eye and emphasised very clearly just how little money most authors of
ebooks actually make as a result of all their hard work.
The article
referred to a report by Bowker which stated that the average price of
commercially published ebooks in the United States fell by about 8% from 2010
to 2011, for fiction from around $5.69 to $5.24, with non-fiction dropping even
more dramatically from over $9 per book down to around $6.47, a drop of about
25% in price. It’s worth mentioning that non-fiction ebooks were still costing
about 20% more than novels in 2011, but the year before the price difference
was 65%, so the gap between the two types of book is narrowing, and it’s also
clear that prices across all genres are falling steadily.
And it’s
worth emphasising that these prices are for commercially-produced ebooks, not
self-published novels, which are typically selling for substantially lower
prices, often between 50 pence and £2.99 (roughly 75 cents to $4.50).
In fact,
the blog article pointed out, some ebooks are selling for less than the cost of
a monthly magazine, and it suggested that one reason for the uncertain state of
the world of publishing was not a lack of good books and decent writers, but
simply the huge reduction in profits because ebooks are now so cheap. And all
this at a time when hardback coffee-table books are surging in price, some now
costing around £50/$75 each.
Perhaps the
most dramatic figure the article came up with was that the ebook price of an
average novel of about 100,000 words meant that the author was actually earning
about 1 cent for every 200 words written, and that the only recourse for the
publishing industry was to immediately and dramatically increase the price
charged for every ebook they sell.
Most of
which I completely disagree with, because he’s missing several important
points. In fact, I think most people in the industry are missing these same
points.
There is
a fundamental difference between an electronic book and a physical book which
reports of this kind consistently fail to acknowledge. To produce a hardback or
paperback novel requires a conspicuous consumption of resources – paper, card,
ink and so on – plus warehouse space to store it, and the inevitable transport
costs to distribute it, all overlaid by the staff costs at the publishing house
and the company used for typesetting and printing. For a typical novel with a first
print run of around 25,000 copies, the total cost is likely to be well in
excess of £20,000/$30,000. The royalty paid to the author will be around 7% of
the selling price – not the cover price – of the book.
To produce an electronic book, once the manuscript
has been prepared, costs almost nothing – certainly well under £500/$750 even
if a professional cover is designed – and the finished product can be sold as
often and as quickly as the market demands. The author’s royalty will be around
20% of the selling price from a commercial publisher, or 40% or 70% if the book
is self-published. Although the content of the two items is identical in terms
of the text, in all other respects they are entirely different in every way. Trying
to compare one with the other is pointless.
You cannot
assess the earnings of any author on the basis of revenue received per words
written. This only works for short stories and magazine articles where the
writer is paid a flat sum for his contribution, irrespective of the subsequent
sales of the publication. In fact, there’s a very valid argument that ebooks
are still far too expensive – not far too cheap – simply because each sale costs
the publisher virtually nothing and the reading public knows that.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I genuinely believe
that the market will only really take off when the price of a commercially
produced ebook drops to the level at which it becomes a genuine impulse purchase,
and I normally assess that as the cost of a cup of coffee – certainly under
£3/$4.50 – and ideally less than that.
There’s
an old story concerning the invention of the ballpoint pen, which I believe to
be true. An English company began marketing the pen at the highest possible
price they thought the market could bear, and about the same time an American
company started selling the new pen as cheaply as they possibly could. The English
company went bankrupt, and the success of the American firm is reflected in the
fact that almost everybody these days calls a ballpoint pen a ‘biro’, in most
cases without having the slightest idea where the name came from.
I believe
that the most successful publishers of ebooks will be those companies which
embrace the ‘pile them high and sell them cheap’ marketing concept which has
worked so consistently in the past, and those that go to the wall will be the
ones who cling onto old concepts of the value of the written word.
As always,
time will tell.
You can contact me at:
Twitter:
@pss_author
Facebook:
Peter Stuart Smith
Blogs: The
Curzon Group
Website link: Brit
Writers
Friday, 28 September 2012
The Ripper revisited
By Peter Stuart
Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Tom Kasey, Thomas Payne
and Jack Steel)
You’ll be relieved to hear that this week I’m not going to
be banging on about the parlous state of publishing and the uncertainties for
the future of the industry of which I am a very small part. You might be less
relieved to learn that I’m going to spend my time telling you about my latest
book.
The Ripper Secret is my second book for
Simon & Schuster and is, like the previous novel The Titanic Secret, set around a series of real-world events, in
this case the brutal killings perpetrated in the Whitechapel area of London at
the end of the nineteenth century by an unknown murderer who acquired the hideously
appropriate nickname ‘Jack the Ripper’. What I’ve always found interesting
about this particular serial killer – he almost certainly wasn’t the first man
who met this definition by embarking on a killing spree over a period of time,
but he’s definitely the most famous – is that even today, almost a century and
a half after the events which cast a cloak of terror over the East End of London,
his actions still throw a shadow over the city.
People still
travel to Whitechapel and the surrounding areas, looking for the streets where
the Ripper walked in search of his victims, and organized tours of the murder
sites – or rather what remain of the geographical locations because development
in this part of London has hidden almost all of the sites under new roads and
buildings – are still a popular tourist attraction.
And not only that, but almost every year a new non-fiction
book is published which positively identifies yet another new subject as Jack
the Ripper. The one characteristic most of these books seem to share is that
the author has a very clear idea of exactly who the Ripper was, and then spends
almost the entire book cherry-picking those pieces of evidence which support
this contention, ignoring those which flatly contradict it and, in some cases,
invent ‘facts’ from dubious sources to reinforce his or her argument. Very few
books even attempt to carry out a proper and unbiased investigation of the
Ripper killings and then come to a reasonable conclusion about the identity of
the perpetrator.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, my novel does neither, precisely
because it is a novel. I am not attempting
in this book to provide compelling evidence that my chosen subject was Jack the Ripper, although
suggestions have been made in the past that he could have been. Nor am I trying
to be selective in choosing which facts will be a part the story. Instead, I’ve
tried to weave a believable plot around the Ripper killings, while sticking as
rigidly as possible to the historical reality of that dark time in east London.
While I was researching the historical background of
this book, a number of questions occurred to me, questions which very few
people writing on the subject have ever attempted to answer. Most books have
attempted simply to identify the murderer and little else.
In particular, few people ever seemed to have
considered the following:
·
Why did the killings start?
·
Why did the mutilations get progressively more
brutal with each succeeding murder?
·
Why did the killings stop?
·
And what possible motive was driving the
murderer?
I don’t pretend that my novel actually identifies the
real Jack the Ripper, but what it does do is provide logical and believable
answers to those questions.
As to the actual identity of this most notorious of
all serial killers, I’ll leave you to make up your own mind about that.
The Ripper
Secret will be published by Simon & Schuster in the United Kingdom on
11 October 2012.
You can contact me at:
Twitter: @pss_author
Facebook: Peter Stuart Smith
Friday, 21 September 2012
Nothing new under the sun
There’s been one interesting development reported in the
press recently which again serves to underline the widening gap between
conventional – paperback and hardback – publication and electronic media. According
to USA Today, the bestselling American
author Tess Gerritsen released a mini e-book in advance of her new novel,
published in August. The ‘teaser’ e-book, for want of a better expression, sold
for only $1.99, making it a true impulse purchase, and was clearly intended to
both appeal to her large existing readership so that they would have something
else to read ahead of the publication of her novel, and also provide a cheap
e-book that would allow people who’d never read a Gerritsen book to sample her
writing and see if they liked it.
The
beauty of this kind of exercise, of course, is that the time taken between an
author or publisher deciding that a novella or mini e-book is a good idea, to
the finished work being available on Amazon can literally be a matter of a day
or so after the manuscript has been completed. Contrast that with the length of
time it would take a conventional publisher to achieve the same thing. Granted,
my first published novel was a fairly weighty tome, well over 100,000 words,
but that was delivered as a finished manuscript to the publisher in May 2003,
and the book was finally released in August 2004, almost a year and a half
later.
The
ability to react quickly and produce a book at short notice is completely
beyond the ability of most publishing houses, and this is in no way their
fault. The extended timescale is forced upon them by the various processes
which are involved in the printing and publication of any book. The only time
publishers do release a book quickly is for works like biographies which are
issued a very short time after the death of the subject. And this can only be
achieved, of course, because the entire manuscript has already been written by
the biographer, and the only things missing are the date and circumstances of
the death of that person
I think
this kind of very reactive approach to publishing, of getting additional
publications out on the streets very quickly, is something we’re going to see a
lot more of in the future, and not just as teasers to bridge the gap between
publication dates of major novels. For example, if a book proved to be
unexpectedly popular, the author could release a short work explaining how he
got the idea for the book, the time it took to write it, and other material of
that nature. A controversial work could be followed by a kind of expanded
author’s note, detailing the sources for the published information and the
reason the writer and publisher felt it was important to place the material in
the public domain.
In short,
I believe this very flexible approach to publication could actually start a
whole new trend, and it could only be achieved because of the existence of the
Kindle and other electronic readers.
But the corollary
of this new development, obviously, will be the widening of the existing gap
between readers who like books and readers who like to read books on an
electronic device. As well as the obvious and well publicised advantages of the
Kindle and its electronic kin, this new aspect to publishing might serve to
drive more people towards making the jump to an e-reader of some sort, with a
consequent knock-on effect in the sales of conventional books. And, of course, that
will be another blow that both publishers and bookshops will have to absorb.
And there’s
another possibility as well, a possibility that actually takes publishing
around in something of a full circle. Perhaps authors could consider releasing
their books in serial format, selling them cheaply as electronic downloads in
tranches of three or four chapters at a time, which would allow new readers of
their books to sample their storytelling ability at almost no cost. And, quite
probably, even if the serialised sections were very modestly priced, the cost
of the complete work could be far more than most books are selling for today as
Kindle downloads.
If this happens, it really would be a return to the
good old days, because authors such as Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
released many of their books in this way as a matter of course, publishing
their novels in serial form in popular newspapers of the day.
You can contact me at:
Twitter: @pss_author
Facebook: Peter Stuart Smith
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