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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Ahead of the times

Now and then you’ll come across one of my novels popping up on Amazon, even though I don’t publish on Amazon and prefer to give them away. Instead, someone calling themselves Michael Graeme, will steal one of my titles, stick it on there and charge money for it. I know,… I’ve talked about this before, but anyway,…

It’s a common issue faced by all creatives working in the digital sphere. Why? because our “product” is easy to replicate and distribute. You just cut and paste. And it’s not just text of course: music, photographs, videos, computer-apps, games, databases, information,… you name it, it’s all vulnerable to filching. But does it matter? Should we not be viewing this ease of reproduction more as an indicator of a strange but bright new future?

Those wealthy enough can protect themselves to a degree, or at least they can for now. Indeed there’s a whole industry built up around digital rights management to prevent file copying, but the ways of defeating it are morphing faster than the defences can adapt – that’s just the nature of digital technology. So, do we accept piracy as a hazard against which there is no realistic defence long term? And more,… is this an indicator of the changing nature of society, of what we understand as industry, work and value?

It’s hard to imagine a cultural shift when you’re still living in the last vestiges of the old one. Science fiction writers and futurologists can have a stab at it. The most I’ll venture with any certainty is that in fifty years our current era will seem like the stone age, socially, technologically and economically.

The shift began with the ability to “cut and paste”. It renders anything you create, digitally, worthless, at least in traditional money terms, even if you’ve spent years working on it. How come? Well, you only need to apply the basic rule of economics which states the price of anything is proportional to its scarcity, and anything so easily reproducible as a computer file isn’t exactly scarce is it? unless rendered artificially so by technological countermeasures, and they will always have the tide of anarchy against them.

So the future is looking like a place where our traditionally paid labours are worth nothing, and all information based “products” produced by those labours won’t be worth anything either, at least by contemporary economic rules. For a time I’m sure there’ll be an elite of celebrity artists who continue to be paid handsomely via the old model, their works protected by a stout, metaphorical ring-fence of barbed wire, but by then they’ll be servicing exclusively a societal elite holed up in their security patrolled mansions – these being the crooks and the psychopaths still looking for ways to game the old system for maximum profit at the expense of the rest of us. All this even as that old system atrophies around them. And in part, they’ll do this by hoarding and guarding what bits of tangible capital remain and renting it out to the rest of us.

Already we have a generation who own nothing. They rent their homes, their cars, their phones. There’s even talk of retail models whereby we rent the very clothes we’re wearing. Stop paying, pause for breath on that tread-mill of the damned, and you’ll literally be left naked and broke as the day you were born. But I’m sure that’ll just be a temporary end-phase, that it’ll last no more than a generation, a necessary period of reflection for impressing upon us the need to think differently about the notion of value, of what we value and how we value it. And then, all writers, like everyone else, will be producing stuff for free, simply because they want to. And whatever we need, even the clothes on our backs, others will produce for free as well.

The alternative, at least for the ninety nine percent of us who own nothing, is a form of unwaged slavery, but I don’t think that’s going to happen because when a man has nothing left to lose, he’s impossible to control. And the greedy freaks, the one percent who go on hoarding wealth will be reviled and shamed and shunned to the remotest desert isles with all the money in the world to play with, money that’s worth nothing any more. And then the very notion of piracy will have become a quaint old fashioned term, one we must look up in the OED, then shake our heads in wonder such a strange phenomenon ever existed in the first place. An egalitarian utopia? Unlikely, I know, but the opposite doesn’t bear thinking about either, though I admit for now it seems the more likely outcome.

I remain optimistic though, and if I’m right, the future isn’t what it used to be. But at least I know why I give my stories away – I mean apart from it being easier and less self destructive: I suppose I’ve simply always been ahead of my time.

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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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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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The machine that ate my brain

I’ve just noticed my novel “Between The Tides” popping up for sale on various strange websites, adult sites, the sites you hesitate to click on, so I refrained from further investigation. It used to happen a lot with Amazon too, my stuff getting stolen and sold by pirates. The first couple of times this misappropriation and misrepresentation bothered me deeply. It used to feel like a violation.

It’s my business if I decide to give away a novel I’ve spent years writing, quite another if some n’er-do-well cuts and pastes it and charges $5 for the download, but for all of that it concerns me less nowadays, and there’s nothing I can do about it anyway. I hasten to add “Between the Tides” is not an “Adult” novel. It’s a contemporary literary romance, so anyone paying their $5 and expecting pornographic rumpy pumpy are going to be disappointed.

Technology opens up all manner of possibilities, not all of them for the better. The Internet enables many, like me, a means of self expression, changing the definition of what publishing actually is, and I count this on the plus side. But on the other there’s a million new ways of exploiting the innocent, of scamming them, hurting them, even enabling new forms of global warfare with whole nations trying to shut down each other’s essential infrastructures, like electricity or air-traffic control. And its effect on global politics is only just becoming apparent, sophisticated algorithms undermining the democratic process and swaying election results in favour of the plutocratic moneyed minority.

I’ve always been a progressive when it comes to technology, but some of the visionaries driving it now are clearly nuts, also unfortunately incredibly rich and powerful. Technology changes lives, brings about revolutions in the way we live and work. These revolutions used to take centuries to come about, then it was decades, now it’s down to a few years. The pace of change is accelerating, and some visionaries, real live CEOs of Silicon Valley companies, extrapolate a future where the time for change is compressed to zero. They call it the Singularity, and it’s at this point everything happens at once.

Really, forget religion, the techno-visionaries are quite evangelical about it. The Singularity is analogous to the Second Coming, or the End Times, or the Rapture. It’s at this point, they tell us, machines will become conscious beings in their own right, and we will have achieved immortality by virtue of the ability to “upload” our minds into vast computational matrixes, like in some hyper-realistic massive multi-player online role playing game.

But given the darker side of technology, is this something we really want? I’ve only to watch my kids playing GTA to know it’s the last place I’d want to be trapped for eternity. Or perhaps, given the inevitable commercialisation of the meta-verse, our immortality could only be guaranteed provided we obtained and maintained sufficient in-game credit, and when we ran out, we could be deleted. Thought you’d be safe from market forces when you died? No way, the visionaries are working on ways of it chasing you into the afterlife.

Certainly our machines are changing how we live at an ever accelerating pace. Meanwhile we remain essentially the same beings that walked the planet two thousand years ago. Whether or not you believe it’s possible to preserve your essential thinking being by uploading it to a computer depends on how you imagine consciousness coming about in the first place. There’s the mechanistic view, that the brain is a computer made of meat, so as soon as we can make a computer as complex as that, Bob’s your uncle. But I’ve never been of that view, so I’m able to rest a little easier that my afterlife will not be spent avoiding evil bastards in a GTA heaven or keeping up the payments on my immortality.

In the matrix, there’s nothing I can do to stop the bad guy from stealing the book I’ve written, but he cannot steal the one I’m writing nor, more crucially, my reasons for writing it. Such a thing transcends the mechanistic world view, a world view that’s a century out of date, yet still cleaved to by the technocracy with all the zealotry of an Evangelical Preacher. The technocracy long ago deconstructed heaven and transcended God with their own omnipotence, but what they’re offering in its place now makes less sense for being all the more transparently absurd, and for the simple fact that machines do not come for free, that those who own them are paid by those who do not. Bear this in mind and our relationship with machines will remain balanced, and correct. Forget it, and the machine will eat your brain long before you get the chance to upload it.

 

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Push Hands, and the Pirates of the Amazon

As I’ve written before, one of the hazards for Indy authors who self publish is piracy. You write a story, put it up for free online, and then it mysteriously appears for sale on the Kindle Marketplace. This has happened several times with my novels – and it’s just happened again. My story “Push Hands” is currently available on Amazon for the princely sum of $3.25, and I’ve no idea how it got there. I cried foul on the comments section, which is how I got the last lot of pirated material taken down, but Amazon doesn’t always approve of such unconstructive criticism, and I may have to approach their legal department directly. Again.

There’s not much we can can do about online piracy, other than remain vigilant and challenge it on sight.  If you’re an Indy, the first time this happens you’ll find it upsetting, even a little creepy that someone out there is impersonating you, but I think we have to accept it more as an occupational hazard and not get too hung up about it. The main concern here is for our readership, and to make sure no one ends up paying for work they think is coming from us, when it isn’t. So if you find your work for sale on the Kindle Marketplace, and you didn’t put it there, keep your head, spare your expletives and speak to Amazon. There is a process, and it works. Amazon will take it down.

If you’re a reader and you’ve paid money on the Kindle Marketplace for anything I’ve written, then I’m sorry but it’s been pirated and I urge you contact Amazon, who should refund you. All my work is available for free on Feedbooks. I do not self-publish on the Kindle Marketplace.

If you are the pirate, I’ve nothing really constructive to say to you, other than you’re courting some seriously heavy Karma, my friend, and you really need to mend your ways before it catches up with you.

I am the real Michael Graeme and you’ll find the real, unadulterated, unpirated, totally original, and absolutely free version of my story “Push Hands” here:

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Plagiarised again!

This is becoming something of a habit.  I’ve just found my interpretation of the Hexagrams of the Book of Changes for sale as a Kindle Edition on Amazon for £6.57. Needless to say, it wasn’t me who put it there. Please don’t  buy this book. It’s available for free, from my Website here. I’ll be making sure Amazon take it down as soon as possible. If you have already bought it, please don’t worry. It will eventually disappear from your Kindle of its own accord and your account will be refunded by Amazon.

As with all Kindle titles from unknown authors do please check the preview content before paying. You can usually tell if it’s pirated by the standard of the formatting. Pirates take no interest in formatting. They simply cut and paste from the source text and the result is always sloppy. A bona fide author  will always take more care with presentation.

I do not publish my work on the Kindle Marketplace. If you find it there, it’s been cut and paste pirated and the alarm bells are most likely already ringing because I do keep an eye on things, having fallen foul of those pesky Kindle-pirates before.

If you are the pirate – desist. You’re self-evidently and very seriously out of Tao, and anyone who knows their Book of Changes will tell you that’s not a thing to be taken lightly – they’re also likely to give you a wide berth in order to avoid the risk of getting caught up in collateral damage. So, don’t be a clown, take it down.

For those of you who don’t know me, all my work is free and (mostly) available from Feedbooks.

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Kindle Chaos

The murky underbelly of on-line publishing?

They say where there’s muck there’s brass, but equally the opposite is true: where there’s the sudden glitter of freshly minted brass, the muck’s never going to be far behind in chasing it. It seems reports of the financial successes of certain authors using the Amazon Kindle marketplace as a publishing platform have resulted in murky characters muscling in and trying to sell ebooks on Amazon.com that don’t actually belong to them. They call it content farming. I call it plagiarism, or stealing.

Can’t write? Not a problem. There’s plenty of creative content out there you can simply cut and paste and sell under your own name. Just delete the author’s name and replace it with a false one of your own. But wait, isn’t that illegal? Sure it is. It’s also dishonourable, deceitful and downright dirty, but we writers are stupid enough to put our work up where anyone can copy it aren’t we? So it’s our own fault, right? I mean some writers even give it away – so what’s the problem? Worried about getting caught? Don’t be daft. Who can afford to get a lawyer involved to sort it all out? Sure, if the original author spots it and complains to Amazon, they’ll pull the plug on you, but by then you’ll have made a few bucks for very little effort and disappeared back into the woodwork like the n’er-do-well worm that you are.

It happens, apparently. It happens a lot, and it’s getting worse.

I wasn’t aware of this until a couple of my own books appeared over the weekend as retitled Kindle editions. The seller, who I’d never heard of, was claiming authorship and demanding the princely sum of $6.70 per download. My thanks once again to Lori and Emma for pointing this out to me, and for covering my back. I couldn’t believe the barefaced cheek, but then I’ve always been blissfuly naive in the ways of the world. I was initially quite cross, but I’m more philosophical about it now.

I’ve been agonising over Kindle publishing myself, but eventually rejected it as being too complicated – the financial and, taxation side of it – and then someone else comes along steals my stuff and puts it on the Kindle Marketplace themselves. There’s the plot of a good story in there, and a complex moral as well that I could spend a long time exploring . But seriously, it seems there’s little an online author can do about this, other than keep their eyes peeled by frequently googling their own stuff and making sure there’s nothing suspicious about what comes back at them.

Amazon were quick to act in this instance, taking the links down, but now I’m wondering if any copies were sold, and if that money can ever be repaid to the customers who downloaded those books in good faith – because they received a second rate product to say the least.

While the books were still up on Amazon I used the “look inside feature” and noticed the formatting of the text was mangled, the chapters not always complete, showing all the signs of having been clumsily combed off the internet, patched together and offered up for sale like a badly pirated video that turns out to be all noise. The difference is, however, with a badly pirated video, you know it’s pirated before you pay for it, because the guy selling it has a dodgy look about him and operates in the shadows of your local boozer. If you pay for it, you only get what you deserve, but with the Kindle, you’re assuming Amazon’s content is legitimate, and you’ll be justifiably cross to find yourself paying for disjointed content. It also tarnishes the reputation of the Kindle, and Amazon, and undermines consumer confidence in the whole e-book market.

I think this is actually quite a blow for the online independent publishing sphere. While on the one hand it’s encouraging to know there’s enough money around in independent publishing these days for the criminal underworld to take an interest in it, the last thing we want is paid content from independent authors turning into a minefield for the consumer. That way we all lose. I’m happy to be keeping my work on the free side of the internet for now. It makes it no safer, but there’s less confusion. If you’ve ever paid to read an ebook with my words in it, it was stolen.

So, if you recently downloaded those disjointed, second rate cyber-knockoff copies of “Love lost and found again” by “Kevin Peters” or “Fearful of the consequences” by “Jennifer Watson”, do please contact Amazon and insist on a refund. And if you’re not already weary of the whole business, please go over to my Feedbooks stream and download the proper e-books for free. “Love lost and found again” is a plagiarised version of “The Road from Langholm Avenue”. Fearful of the consequences is culled from my novel “Push Hands”.

Regards

Michael

**Update Feb 14th**

It seems I’ve taken the plunge at last and started selling my work on Amazon.com, with three Kindle titles listed – The Road From Langholm Avenue, Push Hands and The Lavender and the Rose. Yes, these books are under my own name and their original titles, but I’ve no idea how they got there, nor where the revenue is going.

I’m trying to have these taken down but in this case Amazon is putting the onus on me to prove I own the copyright, so they want address, phone number, inside leg measurement, plus a declaration signed in blood, on pain of death or life imprisonment, that I’m telling the truth.

Interesting! Okay – just sent that off to their legal department. We’ll see how it goes.

15/2/12 – Amazon reply to confirm receipt of my query and express regret that they are unable to respond as quickly as they would like at this time. Offending books still there.

17/2/12 Offending books still there.

21/2/12 Message from Amazon confirming imminent shooting down of offending books. Books gone.

Matter closed.

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Pirates – the nineteenth century solution?

As pirate attacks continue to wreak havoc on one of the world’s major shipping routes, my researches into completely unrelated matters have turned up this fascinating nineteenth century account of piracy off the western coast of Africa, and how it was efficiently dealt with.

On the morning of the 14th of September 1828, a 500 ton copper clad East Indiaman, armed with six carriage guns, slipped out of Portsmouth harbour, bound for Bombay. The vessel, the Sesostris, was a regular trader between Britain, Cape Town and the East Indies, carrying freight and passengers.

Two of the passengers were a young couple by the name of John and Margaret Wilson.  John a newly ordained Church of Scotland Minister,  was bound for what would become a lifetime of work in India as a respected missionary. His wife, Margaret, was to become a devoted teacher,  establishing among others “the Bombay school for destitute girls”. As the Sesostris neared the equatorial region, Margaret, in typically understated fashion wrote in her diary:

We were once or twice alarmed by the appearance of piratical vessels. The captain ordered the large guns to be loaded, while muskets, swords, and pistols, were all in readiness for an attack. I do not doubt that one of these vessels was what we took her for; but we looked so formidable, that she kept at a distance.*

To disgracefully mangle an Ambrose Bierce quotation: “There is nothing new under the sun, but a lot of old things we have apparently forgotten!”

*From “A Memoir of Margaret Wilson” by John Wilson (1844)

Margaret died of fever in Bombay , in 1834.

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