The writing life,… Smashwords, Amazon Free Ebooks and Wattpad

Some notes on my experience of the self-publishing scene.

There may be other distribution networks for independent authors out there, but so far as I can tell the above listed are the mainstays of the self-publishing world at the moment. Amazon and Smashwords allow authors to charge money for their books. Free e-books, obviously, doesn’t.

I never discuss Amazon much as a platform, other than to warn writers you’ll probably find your stories (like my Sea View Café) appearing on there as pirated versions. Yes Ethelyn Purvines, I mean you, you shameless little bastard! All independent authors are vulnerable in this regard and, though galling, there’s little point making a fuss about it. But neither do I wish to spend time promoting a platform where it’s hard for a reader to tell the difference if they’re paying money to a genuine author or a dubious doppelgänger. They seem to operate a strictly hands off policy at Amazon, so anyone can publish anything and get away with it, thus e-book piracy thrives. Use Amazon if you like, but I don’t and never will. If you find a book on there that looks like mine, it’s pirated. I also find it near impossible to get stuff like this taken down.

Smashwords on the other hand perform some basic checks on your uploaded work. Their formatting requirements can seem fussy at first but are not unreasonable, and the fact the author has to put some effort in does tend to discourage the pirates who’d rather not do any work beyond cut and paste. Unlike Amazon the Smashwords team also do random searches on snippets of text from your uploaded manuscripts to check you’re not merely ripping off someone else’s work. This level of diligence enables them to court distribution arrangements with other “premium” e-book sites like Apple’s iStore, Barnes and Noble and WH Smith. That said, although those big names do carry my books, I’ve never had a download from any of them, so they’re not worth bragging about.

Smashwords also allows a writer the flexibility to set their work as free, or to experiment with a range of price-points. If you make your books free, you can expect on average three or four downloads per day – more when a work is new. If you set a price, you won’t download as many. “The Inn at the Edge of Light” went up in December 2019, priced $0.99, and as of now has been downloaded four times, which is hardly a living, so don’t kid yourself, but all in all I do recommend Smashwords for its integrity and its service to self-publishing.

If you’re happy to give your books away, Free Ebooks have a much higher download rate, but sadly I note those titles I put up on Free Ebooks started appearing on Amazon in pirate versions. Ethelyn Purvines pirate version of my Sea View Café was lifted directly from Free Ebooks. I’ve now closed my account with them and had them pull all my books from their circulation lists. If you’re sensitive about the possibility of your work being stolen, I really can’t recommend them.

There is another distribution network called Wattpad but that’s a bit of a wilderness and I can’t recommend that either, not if you’re ambitious to find readers. I do post on there when drafting a new work, but for reasons that are more to do with setting the pace of writing a story, than for self-publishing it. For example, my current work in progress “Winter on the Hill” I’m posting on Wattpad at a rate of roughly one chapter per week. I find this deadline, though imaginary, adds a little energy to things. When the story’s complete, it’ll disappear and go to Smashwords.

Writers write for many reasons. For some it’s vanity, but they tend to last only so long as it takes for reality to kick in. Others write for their friends, others for themselves, others because it’s in their blood, and they have no choice. For critical acclaim and money you still need to find your way into conventional publishing with its distribution and marketing machinery. Without that, if the Booker prize is still your aim, you’re dead in the water.

Until someone comes up with a coveted prize for self-published e-book fiction, the literary talent willing to sit on a judging panel for free, and a sponsor willing to stump up some serious prize money, self-publishing’s always going to be for the outsiders who can’t get a look in any other way, and that means writing mostly for nothing.

Is writing for nothing worth it? Well, “Saving Grace” went up on Smashwords for free about a year ago and to date it’s been downloaded 2166 times, so plenty of people have read it and some have written back to tell me they enjoyed it. Am I pleased by that, even though it’s not made me a dime? Yes I am. By contrast just four people have downloaded “The Inn at the Edge of Light” for which I’m charging $0.99. Am I as pleased by that? Well, grateful as I am to those readers who took a punt, the money gained from self-publishing is clearly never going be sufficient incentive to write your next book is it?

But then writers write. If it doesn’t suit you, or it makes you unhappy, then don’t.

Be well.

Graeme out.

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Selling online? Set yourself free.

Amazon and Smashwords allow the independent author to easily self-publish online for money. You upload your file, your cover artwork, set a price and that’s it. I’ve self-published on Smashwords for years but have kept my books free. Downloads are in the region of 1000 per year, initially, tailing off gradually to a few hundred, all of which I’m more than happy with. As for Amazon though I refuse to deal with them as they regularly feature pirated copies of my books and have made the process for getting them taken down so opaque I no longer bother. It’s just easier to tell everyone I don’t publish on Amazon, that any book appearing on there under my name is in breach of copyright. If you’re a pirate on the other hand I highly recommend the platform as it’s more than likely you’ll get away with it. But that’s another story.

The lesson thus far then, in so far as my own experience goes, is that if you want to self-publish, and you’re happy to make your book free, you are guaranteed to find readers, and plenty of them, and that’s a truly liberating experience, both for you and for your story. However, the same is not true if you set a price.

According to Smashwords’ own analysis, some authors do sell very well indeed, while others don’t sell at all. What they don’t say however, is what proportion of writers don’t sell, but I suspect it’s most of them. By far the most popular price point is free but some books, especially those priced modestly at $0.99 or $2.99 do sell, sometimes, but that doesn’t automatically mean yours will. As with conventional publishing the reasons why one book sells and another doesn’t aren’t clear. Good marketing helps of course, but there’s only so much an independent author can do to get their name and “brand” out there without breaking the bank, and my philosophy has always been that since it’s unlikely you’re going to make much money anyway, you’re better giving your books away and going for a readership. Better for a writer to be read and make nothing at it, than to aim for gold and not be read at all.

I’ve got eleven novels on Smashwords now, coming up on twelve, all free. But what would happen if I set a price for them – say $2.99? Surely I’d sell at least a few copies? Well, as an experiment, I tried it with “Between the Tides” and it killed my readership entirely. Not a single download. So I lowered the price to $0.99. Same thing. Not a single sale.

The lesson then does indeed seem to be “keep it free”, but in the end it’s up to you and there’s no harm in trying. Someone always wins the lottery. Nothing ventured, nothing gained and all that, so go for it and see what happens.

Which brings me to the shameless self-publicity bit about my latest novel which, as of this evening, is now complete. As is my habit I’ve been serialising it for free on Wattpad first, even though Wattpad is a simply dreadful platform for downloads, but I still find it useful as part of the drafting process, even if that only means getting the chapter numbers right. But how’s this: once it’s done, I’m going to pull it from Wattpad, then publish the final draft exclusively on Smashwords for $0.99. I’ve even filled in a US tax form and everything in anticipation of making a killing. After all, this book’s been a year in the writing and I’ve burned some serious midnight oil on it. Why should I give it away?

Well, for one thing, I’ve already had my money’s worth from it. It may be fresh to the reader but I’ve lived and breathed it for a long time and, even though no one else may be able to decipher what it is I’m trying to say in it, I do, and I’ve already moved on, psychologically, to thinking about the next project.

Still,… it’s tempting. So perhaps you should catch up with it on Wattpad, just in case I change my mind. Go on, I’ll give you until midnight December 31’st. Then, come January 2020, I’m turning over a new leaf, becoming a paid author no one will ever read again. And then like all New Year resolutions, once I’ve sobered up, normal service will probably be resumed, and the Inn at the Edge of Light will finally,… be set free.

Possibly.

Or not.

As the case may be.

 

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The Sea View Cafe pirated again!

Okay look, you’re a persistent little bastard, also a lazy, talentless sleaze with a very small penis who’ll never make a bean, and you’re going to die alone and friendless, never having known a moment of true love. This is what I predict for you my friend because the path you’re on can have no happy endings, and it makes me sad.

I’d urge you to change your ways, but you’re already lost. You steal ice cream from small children. You steam the stamps from envelopes, and re-use them. You steal sachets of sugar from cafes, toss litter in the street, steal coins from the homeless, dump shopping trolleys in the canal, and you think you’re such a badass.

If you have a dog, you kick it, and when you take it for a dump, you put the poo in plastic bags and hang it from a tree. You are not a nice person, Mr Pirate, and nice people do not like you. No one will ever like you. You only know people like yourself and while they may pretend to like you, and laugh at your jokes, first chance they get they’ll steal from you, and have sex with your girlfriend behind your back, because she doesn’t really like you either.

You’re tying to profit from me, and fair enough, I put myself out there, and expect this sort of thing, and I do, honestly. I expect it, like riding a motorcycle on a balmy summer’s eve, you expect to get the occasional fly in your eye. But it’s only fair if I profit from you as well, at least to the tune of a title for this evening’s blog, and a bit of tongue in cheek exercise for my fingers which have been somewhat lazy this week. Also to ponder the existential question: why,… are there people like you?

The cover you made here isn’t bad at all, not exactly to my taste but I might be half admiring of it, except you probably stole that too because that’s the sort of person you are. It also speaks more to the chick-lit genre which if you’d bothered to read more than the title and the first line of the blurb, which you also stole, you’d know this doesn’t sum the book up at all.

It would bother me more if I thought you were ripping a lot of people off in my name here, but most likely you’re not, so the joke’s on you. You won’t get rich off me. Get a proper job. Work hard, and be nice to others. You never know when you’ll need their help. Do to others as you would have them do to you, not whatever you think you can get away with.

I can’t wait for volume two!

Reader beware: Michael Graeme does not publish for love nor money on Amazon.

 

 

 

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Pretending the world is still a beautiful place

So,.. out walking with my phone in my back pocket. Not a good idea, cracked the screen and killed it. On the upside it’s a Chinese ‘Droid, so it didn’t cost much, and all the important stuff was saved to the removable memory anyway. All told then, nothing lost and in true consumerist tradition I threw it away and ordered a new one from Amazon. This was Sunday, just before midnight when I placed the order, standard postage, nothing special. I was thinking it would do me good to be without the phone for a bit – teach me to be more careful. However,…

Next day, Monday, a bank holiday and there’s a white van outside come mid-afternoon: ‘Sign here mate’. Package delivered, and I’m holding my new phone in a state of bemused awe. Okay, this doesn’t happen with everything you buy off Amazon – and you usually have to pay a premium for next day delivery, so I’d clearly hit upon a set of fortuitous circumstances here, but it illustrates how the machinery is gearing up to provide us with an instant gratification. But is this what we really want? Given the direction things are moving in it seems to be what we want, and it’s impressive, but do we really need it? And rather than being served, are we not merely being used, abused and generally hoodwinked into expectations that are ultimately self destructive?

While I was sitting in my garden, sunning myself all Monday, the guy in the white van had been up since dawn, sorting his deliveries out, then sweating on one of the hottest days of the year while fighting his way through bank holiday traffic along with so many other diesel belching white vans, each making their own manic deliveries, and all so we could get our stuff faster than we really needed it. But before doing his bit, it was another guy pushing a trolley in a warehouse to get my thing, his feet and knees killing him, the machine counting him down to a telling off for going too slow, that he’d better hurry up, keep pace, deliver more stuff to replace all the other stuff he found last week that’s already been thrown away.

But don’t worry about the human exploitation angle. In the near future, our stuff will be picked and packed and bagged entirely by machine and given to a drone for delivery. No humans involved. We’ll all be living within an hour’s flying time of a fulfilment centre by then, and the thing will be dropped off to a landing zone in our back yard, or maybe we’ll be fitting delivery chutes to our roofs and they’ll be as ubiquitous as chimney pots. Then we’ll be grinding our teeth if the drop’s five minutes late, berating the quality of a drone that struggles to make time against a howling gale. Total time to fulfilment? a couple of hours, and we’ll be looking to cut that in half. The infrastructure will facilitate it, and we’ll get used to it, and expect it, whether we really need it to be that way or not.

So, safe now in possession of my new phone, having been without one for all of fifteen hours – and ten of those asleep – I drove out to the coast, secure in the knowledge it was tracking my every move and could guide me back home if need be. But the coast, on the evening of a Bank Holiday Monday was like the aftermath of a rock festival – litter strewn as far as the eye could see. The promenades were thick with it, the beaches too. You could even see outlines in it where the cars had been parked and all this discarded stuff had just spewed from the open windows. Fast food cartons, plastic bags, blobs of ice-cream,…

Feral seagulls feasted on all the food waste, and what they missed the rats would get come fall of night. The tide was coming in; scent of the sea, scent of disposable barbecues and recreational weed. In a few hours the beaches would give up their filth, and the sea would gulp it down, vomiting it back up wherever the ocean currents took it.

While the machine pioneers pioneer ever faster ways of telling us what we want, then getting it to us ahead of when we want it, whether we really want it, or need it, or not, the aftermath of a bank holiday Monday provides no better illustration of the price we pay for a society hooked on consumption and instant gratification. And the price we pay is this: we are drowning in our own effluent. And it’s too late to do anything about it because our heads are so far inside this box now we’re losing sight of the light of day.

We all had our phones out, taking pictures of the sunset and cooing over it while stepping around the trash. I took a picture of a waste bin, dwarfed by mountains of rubbish piled beside it. I was thinking to post it here, but it turned my stomach, so I deleted it, kept the sunset, posted that to Instagram, self censored like everyone else, so I can go on pretending the world is still a beautiful place.

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The writing life – the secret of getting that novel published!

Publishing a novel? Well, it’s easy. Anyone can publish a novel these days. You write it, then you put it on the Internet. You do it yourself through a blog, serving it out of a Dropbox account, or use the likes of Smashwords, Wattpad, FreeEbooks, Amazon, and sundry others I’ve yet to make the acquaintance of, who serve it out for you. Your work gets published for free and people will read it. Guaranteed. Simple. Amazon and Smashwords even let you set a fee, so you can actually make money at it. The downside? Unless you go viral, don’t expect to make more than pocket-money, and your chances of going viral are about the same as coming up on the lottery. People come up on the lottery all the time, but the chances are it won’t be you, so don’t bank on it. Most likely you’ll make nothing at all.

I can feel your disappointment right there, because money’s the thing, isn’t it? What you really want to know is how to make serious money at it, or maybe even just enough to quit the day job and write full time. So, let’s go there. You write your novel and, if you don’t fancy online self-publishing, or it just doesn’t seem real to you, then send it to a traditional publisher or a literary agent. But this route is even more like a lottery. Someone always wins, but the chances are you won’t. In fact, the odds are so stacked against you doing it this way, it makes more sense not to bother, and only a fool would waste years filling out their ticket anyway.

There are exceptions, not to be cynical, but you need an edge. Your name needs to be widely known for some other reason, either by fair means or foul, because publishing’s about selling and names sell. Or you need an influential contact in the industry, someone who can sing your praises to a commissioning editor. Or you can enter your novel for a prestigious literary prize, but that’s an even bigger lottery. Either way, without your invite to the party, you’re not getting in, and that’s just the way it is. Always has been.

Persistence pays? Yes, I’ve heard that too, mostly from published literary types selling tips to writers who can’t get published, and maybe it’s true, worth a dabble perhaps, but don’t waste your life trying . Don’t spend decades hawking that novel, constantly raking back over old ground with rewrites, moving commas this way and that and coming up with yet one more killer submission, then beating yourself up when it’s rejected. Again. Don’t lie awake at night grinding your teeth, wondering what’s wrong with you, wondering why no one wants to publish your story. Chances are you’ll never know. So let it go, it’s done. Now write another.

What is a writer for? Do they create purely in order to give pleasure to others? Or do they do it for the money? Do they crave critical acclaim? Or is it more simply to satisfy a need in themselves? Why does anyone create anything that serves no practical purpose? I mean, come on, it’s just a story after all.

In my own writing I explore things, ideas that interest me. I enjoy painting and drawing too, but it’s the writing that gets me down to the nitty gritty, writing that is the true melting pot of thought, the alchemists alembic through which I attempt a kind of self-sublimation, a transformation from older, less skilful ways of thinking, and through which I try to make sense of a largely unintelligible world. The finished product, the novel, the story, the poem or whatever, is almost incidental, but until it’s finished the conundrum, the puzzle I’ve set myself isn’t complete. Completion is the last piece of the jigsaw, the moment of “Aha!” – or more often a wordless understanding that signifies a shift in consciousness, hopefully one in the right direction.

I know this isn’t what writing’s about for others. But most likely those others are a good deal younger than I am, and not as well acquainted with the realities of hawking the written word in exchange for a living. I’ve been writing for fifty years, never made a bean, haven’t even tried since ’98.  This is just the way it’s evolved for me, but don’t let that put you off. You do what you want. You may get lucky, or die trying.

How to get a novel published? Other than giving it away online, who knows? It’s always been a mystery to me, but in one sense persistence does indeed pay, in that it eventually yields a little known secret about getting yourself published, and I’ll share it with you now: when it comes to the art of writing, getting yourself published isn’t really the most important thing.

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The Kindle Swindle

I write novels and give them away as free books. Every now and then I notice my books popping up for sale on Amazon. The curious thing is I don’t publish on Amazon. Weird isn’t it? My books are put on there by some miscreant calling themselves Michael Graeme who has first downloaded them from elsewhere and then had the brass neck to charge money for them. Its a bit,… ughhh,… creepy.

Because I give my books away it’s not a big problem for me, leaves me nowadays only somewhat bemused, though it’s troubling to think of my name being involved in a scam of some sort, and I can only advise readers that any work by Michael Graeme appearing on Amazon is not authorised and you should not pay money for it. All my work is freely available and will be until the day I get a call from one of the big six. Then I’ll finally be quitting the day-job, buying myself a Harris Tweed Jacket with elbow patches, and moving to Hampstead.

For authors who do try to make a living by selling their ebooks, the Kindle swindle is more serious, potentially diverting money away from their own pockets and into the pockets of crooks. It’s not clear how the problem can be solved and for now it’s down to individual authors to be vigilant and call it out when they see it.

This sort of thing is always disappointing but sadly part of human nature. The first time it happened to me I was deeply upset by it, but those of us self publishing online, whether successfully or not, must, I’m afraid, come to accept it as part of the scenery. If it’s happened to you, don’t take it personally. If you complain to Amazon they will eventually respond and take the titles down, but it’s a drag to be honest, so nowadays I just leave a comment on the offending titles to warn potential buyers off.

The latest crop of thievery from my ebookshelves has in common the fact that all my books were recently uploaded to Free Ebooks for distribution. It’s a site I have otherwise been impressed with given their download rates, but have now grown wary of it. If any other authors have had a similar experience I’d be interested to hear from them.

So, to wrap up, please don’t pay money for my books. It’s eccentric, I know, but go to Smashwords, or Wattpad, or Free Ebooks where you can get them for nothing. I am the genuine, the one and only Michael Graeme, and I do not publish on Amazon.

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Is Amazon good for aspiring writers?

Rows keep breaking out between Amazon and the world of corporate publishing. It goes like this: Amazon squeezes the publisher’s profit margin by insisting on lower prices, the publisher bends as much as they can, keen for access to Amazon’s awesome distributive power, while trying to maintain a decent cut for themselves. And if Amazon’s not happy with the deal they switch off the “buy” button. If the reader wants that publisher’s titles, they have to get them from somewhere else, they’ll be harder to find, and more expensive. None of this is personal; it’s just business.

From my perspective the struggles going on in contemporary publishing are merely symptoms of a near extinct business model, and its inevitable demise at the hands of a scary new predator. Amazon has sharp teeth and is using them to reshape the way we buy books – or indeed anything else for that matter. The big publishing houses may yet find their balance and survive in some new shape or form, I don’t know, and I find it hard to care. What interests me more is what all this means for the aspiring writer.

Traditionally, a writer plugged away in obscurity for years in order to finish “the novel”, then they spent even more years debasing themselves in search of the beneficence of the notoriously mercurial literary agent. The agent then fixed it so a publisher would read their work. If the publisher liked it, then began the writer’s slow rise from obscurity to mid-list mediocrity – except in rare cases, where a chosen few were invited to the top table of celebrity authorship. Here, in exchange for getting their teeth fixed, they might at last sup from the publisher’s golden chalice.

For the aspiring writer, at the bottom of the money chain, this system left much to be desired. To be a writer, and happy, you had to be either pathologically deluded or well connected. For the publishers and the agents though, it worked very well, enabling them to exploit a limitless ocean of creativity on which they floated their luxury liners. When they were low on talent to stoke the boilers, they just reached down and pulled another one on board. It was obvious anyone who came along and threatened this centuries old system was going to be viewed in a dim light. But unless you’ve been living on another planet this past ten years, it’s impossible to miss the fact that something is changing. Many of the smaller luxury liners have now been torpedoed. The ones that remain have become overloaded with hangers on and are sailing pretty low in the water.

There’s no shortage of writers to stoke the boilers of course, but to stretch the nautical metaphor to destruction, there’s now a problem in the engine room, and it’s this: the route from writer to reader is no longer controlled by the gatekeeper of traditional publishing. That you’re even reading this is proof that anyone can publish anything now, for nothing and find an audience. Surf over to Amazon or Smashwords and you’ll find novels by unknown writers for free, or for a couple of quid. Most of them look and sound crap, as most blogs are also meaningless crap, but this new age does shed rather a clinical light on the traditionally published stuff, a light that strips these expensively marketed and slickly edited works of their mystique, and you know what? A lot of them are crap too.

So, anyone can publish anything? Isn’t that great? Well, on the one hand, yes, but on the other,whether anyone notices you or not is a matter of luck, unless you’re prepared commit some heinous act on the basis there’s no such thing as bad publicity. But by the same token, there’s been many a traditionally published book pulped long before the public has had time to wake up to it. As any aspiring writer with more than ten years experience will tell you, traditional publishing is no guarantee of making any money at all, let alone fame and fortune – neither is the fact of getting that novel miraculously published. So you’re published, so what? We’re still turning up obscure Victorian authors and lauding them as undiscovered geniuses, but who died penniless, believing themselves failures in their own time.

So, the question is this: does the “Amazon” way of doing things, torpedoing those fuddy duddy publishers and bursting the market wide open, make it any easier for your average unknown person to take up the pen and make a decent living at it? The answer of course is a resounding no – indeed, you still have to be slightly mad even to try it. Really, don’t do it. Get yourself a proper job and, write in your spare time.

I can shift a few hundred of my titles on Feedbooks and Smashwords each week, by giving them away, and that’s fine, I seem to be happy with that, but if I were to charge so much as pennies for them, that hit-rate would dwindle to a trickle that was hardly worth logging in to check. True, some authors have done well, financially, by self-publishing, and good luck to them, but then some authors always do make it big – it just doesn’t happen very often and the likes of Amazon won’t change that.

Publishing will always be about celebrity and the shifting of large numbers of catchy titles, crap or otherwise, at a tenner each. As profit margins are squeezed, those writers in the “paid but mediocre” bracket will find themselves squeezed out too as a bigger slice of the marketing cake is reserved for those authors with the perfect teeth. More and more writers will be joining the scruffy ranks of the indy scene, self-publishing for peanuts, while scratching a living doing minimum wage type jobs. It’s not a rosy picture, but then it never was. Creative individuals will always be at the mercy of patronage, wherever it comes from. Yes, things are changing drastically at the money end of the book business, but for your average aspiring writer, it looks pretty much like business as usual to me.

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Convincing liars

I could tell I’d arrived early at the office this morning by the fact that there were very few cars on the carpark. Normally I arrive much later and struggle to find a space. I couldn’t remember why I’d decided to get in so early, but it’s as well I did because I discovered they’d been moving the desks around over the weekend, and it was going to take me a while to get settled in again. The desks were new – a lot smaller than we were used to – a bit like those old school desks. I presumed it was so they could fit more desks into the limited space. But the reorganisation had gone much further, eliminating such a thing as personal desks altogether and had embraced instead a full blown policy of hot-desking.

Everything’s on the machine these days anyway – no bits of paper to speak of, and anything that’s left lying around on desks is mostly junk and can be binned. It was a bit odd at first, settling down on a particular desk, doing a little work, then nipping to the gents and coming back to find someone else sitting there. People didn’t like it and there was a lot of grumbling. It was unsettling for sure; a queer, impersonal way of working to never be permitted your own sense of familiar personal space, but I decided I could weather it for the few years remaining to my retirement.

I remember it was about mid morning and I was chatting to a colleague about the shake-up, when I glanced at my watch and felt a moment of serious disorientation. I didn’t recognise the watch at all. Sure, I’d been looking at a watch like that one on Amazon the night before, but I’d not bought it yet. Had I?

No! It was not my watch.

It was a classic trigger, a jolt of inconsistency that made me realise the whole day, so far, had been a dream.

Dreams, it seems, are convincing liars.

On the upside, this was one of those rare occasions when I found myself becoming conscious that I was dreaming – entering the so called lucid dream state. On the downside, I was disappointed in myself because I realised I’d been taken in by distinctly third rate scenery and a very poor plot-line; this was not my office at all, nor were these my colleagues, and only in my dreams am I anywhere near retirement.

I’ve made a study of  the lucid dream-state, am fascinated by it, and use it more often than I should as a plot device, but here I was experiencing a rare awakening inside one of my own dreams, and feeling distinctly underwhelmed by it.

After the initial realisation, I fancied the dream was fading, so I focused on my hands, and on that unfamiliar wristwatch. The observation served to steady things and I was able to hang on for a while longer. Then I did what I said I’d never do if I found myself inside a waking dream: I imagined myself becoming lighter than air, and floating upwards. Sure enough, up I went. Then the dream popped, and I was wide awake at 5:00 am, thinking to myself: now that was interesting!

I drove to work (again) feeling rather groggy this time. The carpark was reassuringly full and my desk was in its familiar place. I was just settling in with coffee when a colleague came up to me and said he’d been thinking of buying a new watch from Amazon and someone had told him I’d bought a nice little automatic from there recently. He wondered if he could take a look at it. I looked down at my wrist,…

And hesitated.

Now that was even more interesting!

Sweet dreams

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How to become an independent author

So, you have this thing you’re interested in and you want to write about it, or you like to write stories, or poetry. Maybe you’ve even tried to find an agent who’ll hopefully find you a publisher, but it’s all gone wrong. Years have passed, and your dreams of sharing your ideas, your enthusiasms are in tatters. What now? Well, it’s simple, and since you’re reading this, the answer is staring you in the face: self publishing online. Become an independent author, and cut out those elusive middle men.

You still have this thing you’re interested in and hopefully the experience of trying to get a publisher hasn’t stifled your enthusiasm for it, nor scarred you too deeply in other ways. So, do your thing, write your book, then look up DIY self publishing outlets like Feedbooks, Smashwords, Wattpad, or Amazon’s Kindle Marketplace, and get yourself a blog too, like this one. It costs nothing.

These are all basically websites that allow you to upload your writing. They then host it for free, for ever. Too good to be true? I mean, what’s in it for them? There has to be something, right? Well, yes; they sell advertising. Or if you’re using a website that allows you to charge for your work, they’ll cream off a percentage. In the case of Feedbooks and Smashwords, your free books also lure readers in where they might linger long enough to explore the paid content.

Writing for free, Feedbooks, Smashwords and Wattpad are all good options. Blogging is also free of course, unless you opt for premium packages. Blogging adds exposure for you and your work, and gets your name into that all important Google box, though it can take years for a blog to gain traction. Mine’s gone gradually from nothing to about a hundred views per day in three years, so you need to be patient. But good blogging’s a skill, one every writer should be familiar with nowadays, and it’s interesting learning the ropes as you go along.

If you want to charge your readers to download your books, Amazon or Smashwords are the ones to go for. But remember, if you charge for your work, you won’t get as many downloads, and probably not enough to make a living at it anyway. I’m not saying you can’t make a living self-publishing, but you’ll need to spend a lot of time promoting your work – or you may be lucky and go viral. These are all ebooks of course. Paper’s still an option, through the likes of Lulu.com, but I think our attachments to paper are nostalgic and, as fond of paper books as I am myself, I no longer see it as a progressive medium, I write exclusively for portable devices now. That’s where most of the readers are. How so? Well, I found you didn’t I?

But self publishing isn’t proper publishing, is it, and especially not giving away free ebooks? Well, it’s a matter of opinion. In the olden days, if a writer was frustrated in his attempts to publish conventionally, he might have been tempted down the route of vanity publishing. This means he basically pays a printer to print his books and then he tries to sell them himself, or give them to friends and family. The test of success though is in how many of those books he sells to strangers. It sounds dodgy, and it is, but a surprising number of writers in previous centuries started out that way and became famous – though too often only after they had died in poverty, believing themselves to be failures. There are some parallels between vanity publishing and self-publishing in that one’s success is measured by the number sales, or if selling is not your aim, then in the number readers who download your book.

Writing is easy, conventional publishing is not. Conventional publishing is almost, but not quite, impossible and It renders you vulnerable in a world that can seem at times a very cruel and lonely place. Think of self publishing as a safer option – but only if you keep your hands in your pockets. You may not get rich, indeed, writing as an independent author you may make nothing at all, but you won’t get shafted either.

And readers will find you.

That’s the how of it, and I hope you can see it’s quite simple really. The why of it is more complex, and important, and follows next time.

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Will the real Michael Graeme please stand up?

And speaking of plagiarism,…

It seems I’m still publishing on the Amazon Kindle Marketplace! An early non-fiction work titled: “The Hexagrams of the Book of Changes” keeps popping up on there. The miscreant is doggedly persistent. However, it’s not exactly a best seller  and the subject matter is esoteric to say the least, so it’s unlikely many have been duped into downloading it for money. Just on the off chance, if you were in the market for such a thing, do beware – the Michael Graeme who pops up on there from time to time selling my books, is not the genuine Michael Graeme.

This is not to be confused with Michael Graham of course, the American talk show host who is a genuine author of several books on Amazon, and the other Michael Graham, genuine author of the novel “The Future Visible”, also available on the Kindle Marketplace.

I am, however, so far as I’m aware, the only genuine Michael Graeme and, unless my various alternate realities have got their wires crossed here, I do not publish on the Amazon Kindle Marketplace.

Well, that’s cleared that one up.

So, will the real Michael Graeme please stand up?

No.

It’s a lovely hot day today – too nice to be inside, blogging. He’s off for a walk.

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