I wonder if Jane Austen had this problem?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that anyone who writes consistently will always start planning the next book before finishing the current one. You should be redrafting; researching those topics you unexpectedly found yourself including in the book but know little about; listing plot holes and trying to trap more. There are dozens of things you should be doing and you diligently work through them and persist in making you book the best you can make it.

But there is always at least one part (and usually several parts) of your mind that are racing ahead to the next project and lining up its characters, its themes, the fulcrums of its plot and the choices your characters are going to have to face.

You would think this would be a distraction, but in truth I think it just helps clarify the redrafting and editing, especially when the next book you are planning is the next in the series. It keeps you focused on what you're doing despite it being a distraction. It adds elements of excitement and the new as you continually revise and rework something you have already written.

It stops your work from getting stale as your rework it. As long as your can temper your impatience and not just abandon the editing to jump straight into writing the new book, of course.

And so I go, back to redrafting The God of Las Vegas and to persist in daydreaming about the third California Gothic novel, The Goddess of Los Angeles.

Coffee Shop Writing

I spent a highly productive hour in a coffee shop in Harvard Square this afternoon, dosing up on large cappuccinos and working through the character development arc that will cover The God of Las Vegas and The Goddess of Los Angeles.

Good coffee, good work and I couldn’t help noticing I was the only one in there drinking hot coffee and writing with a pen and notepad rather than drinking an ice coffee with whipped cream and writing on a laptop. Keeping it old school :-)

The Grounds of Coffee

Hello coffee my old friend,
It's good to sip with you again.
Drinking coffee is my favourite thing,
I feel like crap and then I'm full of zing!
And the ennui that was planted in my brain
Does not remain,
Thanks to the grounds of coffee.

The Trials and Excitements of Self-Publishing

So, I've discovered one of the trials of self publishing (although that term has derogatory overtones in the industry; surely 'unsigned' would be more appropriate?). I am spending more time on marketing and promoting my work than I am on writing the next piece.

It's a situation that makes a mockery of the argument that publishing houses are outdated. That argument suggests that publishers are just printers with fancy offices, but of course they are so much more. I'm lucky enough to have a great editor (one of the many things publishers can organize), but there's still the overwhelming 'Everything Else' to deal with.

Publishers are primarily marketers and distributors. To deal with the latter first, the current self-publishing model means you can easily get your work onto the websites of Amazon, Borders, Barnes & Noble and such, but this is a far cry from walking into one of their stores and seeing you book for sale on the shelf. Plus there's the army of independent book stores across the country. No one person can establish a personal relationship with each store and convince them to stock their books. Publishing houses have the resources and connections that allow them to achieve this on your behalf.

And then there's the marketing. Blogging, tweeting, facebooking and such are all things I would be doing if I were signed to a publisher. Without one I'm also talking to people to get them to write reviews, I'm building a readership one person at a time, I'm arranging cover art, I'm calculating book jacket and bleed sizes, I'm talking to independent book stores about having them stock my books.

Self-publishing is running your own business, albeit one with even greater opportunity for self-importance and delusions of grandeur than normal. Because of this I'm also having to carefully consider what are the most cost effective ways of selling my books. For example, a complex, media-rich website that draws people in and generates press would be incredible, but I don't have the time or resources to build it.

It would be fantastic if I could engage a marketing agency to generate interest in my books and drive sales, but that would be a huge overhead. This is the kind of things that a publisher can do to you; they have the time and resources to do all of this and more if they feel they can sell your work in sufficient numbers.

And as much as every author wants to be read and enjoyed, that's what it always comes down to; selling units.

Technology is just now giving writers the freedom that it gave to musicians five or ten years ago. Established acts like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have left the record labels, and artists such as Amanda Palmer have built a fan base and reputation through connecting online directly with listeners.

And whilst all of the above are things I do that aren't writing, I'm finding that I'm enjoying them enormously. Yes, writing is my favorite part of the process, but being able to get hands-on in everything else is fantastic.

If any of the above sounded like complaint, it really wasn't intended to be. The whole process is fascinating and as tempting as it is to think that all of this is getting in the way of writing, it is actually facilitating it. Would it be easier to do all this if I had a publisher? Undoubtedly. But I could quite possibly put as much time and effort into promoting myself to publishers as I do into promoting myself to potential readers. And talking to readers seems to be much more fun.

Valentine Weather

So, I’m managing to make it through not only my first New England winter, but my first winter in five years. Winter in Sydney rarely drops below 60 Fahrenheit, so it doesn’t really warrant the name; you have to remember a light jacket and that’s about it. We had two months in the Himalaya at the end of 2009, and whilst that was cold at night (especially when camping) it was almost always warm during the day.

After leaving Sydney we were a month travelling around the California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona before spending a month in Orange County. Here we contemplated the wisdom of leaving sunny climates and crossing the continent to Boston as planned, but decided to stick with it.

For those who haven’t had to live through it, let me tell you that winter here is cold. On some days negative Fahrenheit cold. You don’t want to go outside. If you own a car you have to spend many a morning shovelling it out from under a snow bank (I’ve seen cars that have been left by their owners for two months beneath five foot of snow that’s only now melting). If you don’t own a car you’re at the whim of public transport and it’s own particular frailties regarding cold weather. Walking short distances can become challenging as the pavements alternate between clear, narrowed to single file by snow banks, treacherously icy or so impassable they force you to walk along the road at the mercy of passing traffic.

Those people who make such an effort with their appearance (and, on occasion, I’ve been known to be one) begin to give up totally, resigning themselves to anything that will keep them warm and which will withstand the punishment of endless waves of ice and slush. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone in a pair of heels since Thanksgiving.

Today, however, brings the tantalizing promise of spring. The snow banks are getting visibly smaller. It’s over 50 Fahrenheit. My enormous Canada Goose jacket (to which I’m convinced I owe my life this winter) suddenly seems excessive. You can hear the city giving a collective sigh, as if we’d just made it through some enormous trial but could see it coming to an end.

Of course, it will be cold again tomorrow and it’s still only February, so there’ll be more snow yet to endure. But this is a welcome, brief flirtation. A gentle kiss from Spring. A Valentine’s gift from Summer, one all the more welcome for the neglect we’ve endured from her the past few months.

This may just be a quick post, but it’s a huge thank you to everyone who’s bought Stripped: Down to the Bone for the Kindle; it’s only been available for sale for a week and I never expected to get this sort of response, so thank you all.
It will be available for other eReaders soon, being out on the Nook next week and available through Apple, Borders and more shortly after.

I’m currently harassing my editor on an almost hourly basis (note: editors really don’t appreciate this) to get Part 2 ready for release and as soon as I have it, it will be going available.

When the three parts are all edited and released, we’ll be releasing a paperback version for all those of you who prefer more traditional reading formats.

What the Victorians can teach us about Digital Publishing

In the nineteenth century the publication of popular novels (and by this I mean both good novels that were popular and mass-market pulp fiction) was a process probably more similar to the way comic books are published now.

Not initially released as whole novels (the story from beginning to end, bound in one book, as we’re used to seeing them), they were serialised monthly, several chapters bound together, and sold at news stands. They even contained advertisements to cover the cost of distribution and generate more revenue for the writer.

Some of these would run for ten, twelve or twenty months, however long was necessary for the story to be told. The authors would be writing their stories during this publication process, not writing the complete novel and then releasing it piece by piece. When the book runs had finished, they would be re-published as a whole novel.

Some of these stories, the soap operas of their day, were endless titles that ran and ran until public interest waned and they were no longer profitable to produce.

Because this was a cheaper means of publication, and therefore available to a wider audience, it suffered somewhat from the stigma of being a means of hack writers shifting poor quality work to an indiscriminate audience. Charles Dickens released much of his work in this format, and in his early career (before his reputation was established) he suffered the snobbery of those who assumed that the distribution method reflected on the quality of the writing.

With digital publishing having firmly established itself in the past 12 months and, given the sale of eReaders over the Christmas period, seeming set to take a growing portion of the market, I think we have an opportunity for this Victorian model of publishing to thrive.

Of course, releasing a novel whilst you’re still writing it isn’t for everyone; writers of Dickens’ talent are few and far between and the majority of us couldn’t get away with it without writing ourselves into a dead end or creating glaring inconsistencies between the beginning and end of the novel. But that doesn’t mean that serial publication can’t be an option once a novel has been finished and edited.

Stripped: Down to the Bone

Stripped, the first novel in my California Gothic series, is currently with my editor. Whilst it’s having the finishing touches put to some of the later chapters, you can start to read it through Amazon’s Kindle store; the first six chapters being made available as Stripped: Down to the Bone for just 99c!

99c for the beginning of the story! That’s the price of a single on iTunes, what do you have to lose? The subsequent two parts of the story will be available at $2.99 each, meaning the cost of buying it separately will be a few cents cheaper than buying the whole book. If you don’t like it you’ve only lost a buck, and you can take revenge by leaving really bad review!

You can try it out and see what you think on Amazon US here:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004MME1G6

And Amazon UK here:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004MME1G6

For reasons best known to Amazon the book’s description isn’t showing up on the US site, but doesn’t that only add to the suspense of the reading experience!

When I started writing Stripped I had the idea to put up my first draft (read through for spelling mistakes and such) online so that people could read it as it was being written. It seemed like an interesting way to get people’s opinions on what I was writing as I was writing it, but it quickly became apparent that there were a few inherent flaws with this.

First drafts get revised into second and third drafts for a very good reason. There are sections where, having written it, you know you have to go back and make more explicit ‘that idea or plot point that you know in your head is so important but which really only has a placeholder in the first draft’. Your characters start off rough sketches as you work out who they are and what they want. You don’t necessarily write the chapters in order, and will probably have a few key chapters missing until right towards the very end of the process.

None of this makes for especially good reading, even for sympathetic friends / relatives / editors who are just taking a look to see where you’re going and offer a few opinions. So that idea was abandoned, but it has re-grown in another form.

My last post was about how incredibly impatient I was to get the book up somewhere that people could read it and, if they liked it, buy it. Through cajoling my editor I’ve been able to prepare the first six chapters of Stripped (about the first quarter of the novel) for publication. After Stripped: Down to the Bone the subsequent parts of the novel will be released as Stripped: Personal Jesus and Stripped: The Darkest Star. The whole novel will be available as on book (and on formats other than the Kindle) after that.

So go ahead. Drop a buck and let me know what you think.

Writer Impatience

One of the problems of being your own publisher (for me, at least) is dealing with your own impatience. Having finished my first draft of Stripped I laboriously worked through a physical copy editing, rewriting, cutting characters, adding scenes and such. Then I went through and typed up all of these handmade changes into a second draft (at which point more changes were made as I fixed up problems with my edits and problems my edits had failed to spot).

Now it’s with my editor (along with my notes on what I feel still needs to be done so I can include her feedback in those changes) and I’m left with a void of time when I don’t have anything to do on the book. When things are outside of my control they are deeply infuriating. I find I have to stop myself from making additional changes until I get the editorial feedback. I must resist the nagging temptation to think, ‘hang editorial input, I’m just going to publish it now!’ Digital publishing means you can make edits post-release, but this should be treated as a safety net, not as a trampoline on which to bounce haphazardly forward.

Compounding this is the fact that Sullen Art: Part One is also currently with its editor (albeit a different editor) so I’m left with the feeling that both my projects are now being worked on by someone else and there’s nothing I can do. Incidentally, please don’t think by this that I’m knocking either my editors or the editorial process; this just happens to be a point of calm after months of frenzied writing.

If you hear a repetitive sound coming out of the internet, it will most likely be me tapping my fingers on my keyboard as I wait for editorial response.