1. Invisible books
2. Slow Boilers
3. Slow Builders
4. Breakouts

These terms are fairly self descriptive, so it’s not hard to see that authors ideally want their books to fall into the fourth category, but categories 3 and at a pinch 2 will do. The only category you really want to avoid finding your books in is number 1, and yet that is probably where a lot of books will end up.

As the author of books that are for the most part invisible (I’ve sold a few copies and received some good reviews, all of which I am very grateful for) I’m interested in what makes one book invisible and another a slow boiler, slow builder, or breakout. Is it just the content between the opening and closing pages|pixels of the book? Or is it something else?

I’m mostly invisible as an author. I tell myself I’m busy building the back catalog, that is essential to epublishing success, and that as soon as I have a handful of titles published I’ll spend some serious time on the marketing question (It helps that John Lock’s book on self publishing also suggests this approach). I have only recently started to think about things like Twitter, a Facebook author page, and blogging more often, so expecting my books to be anything other than invisible is unrealistic at best.

Now that I am starting to think about making my books, and by extension myself, more visible, the question is how to go about it? I have some fairly definite ideas about things I don’t want to do (and most of them involve broadcasting Buy my Book! Read my Book! Check out my Book! or variations on that theme) but does that doom me to invisibility or simply mean I have to be as creative with my marketing efforts as I am with my plots and characters?

I think the very best thing I can do – and this brings me full circle – is continue to write the best books I can, making each one better than the one before it, knowing that over time they will accumulate, gathering a review here, a mention on social media there, and hopefully converting readers into fans. I have more to say on this point but will save it for another post and get back to the question at hand, why are some books invisible?

Are they just bad books? Or is it that people don’t know they exist?

To answer this question, I am going to start actively looking for invisible books. Books in the same genres as mine, that have sales ranks in the upper stratosphere and review counts at the opposite end of that depressing scale. I am hopeful that I will find some great books, and when I do I’ll leave reviews and mention them to people who might care, and maybe that will make those books a bit more visible.

Never judge a book by its cover

Everybody in the publishing industry seems to agree that readers do judge books by their covers. I’ve heard some writers state that a great cover is just as important as great content, and I know of one writer who hit the number one spot in his category (and retained it) who claims it was all down to the cover art.

As a writer, I like think it should come down to a clever or interesting title and a good product description, but I can’t deny the importance of covers, even if I’d like to.

I’m very happy with the cover for d.evolution. I was lucky enough to find a great image that was exactly what I wanted, and it was available under a creative commons license.

I’m hopeful that the image is recognizable and interesting enough, that people will see it and decide to read the product description, and hopefully that will lead them to buying the book.

For my first book, A God-Blasted Land, I’m still tinkering with the cover. It’s now in its third iteration and last night I finished working on a fourth cover that I plan to use when I released an updated version of the book.

I liked all the previous covers when I finished them, but as time passes (and possibly as my skill with image editing programs increases) I look at them and think, well, they could be better, and one of the advantages of self publishing (though this could just as easily be described as a disadvantage) is the ability to update the work.

I’ve wanted to experiment with a text-only cover for a while. A God-Blasted Land is the first book in a series and I was always going to struggle to create a theme for the covers of the series if I stuck to using images, but a distinctive text cover, well that’s a different matter.

As an indie author I love getting my hands dirty and learning new skills, but at the same time, I try to be realistic about what is within my ability, and unfortunately, as much as I’d love to learn the skills of a 3D digital artist (one day) I appreciate that it would be necessary to dedicate as much time to it, as I do to writing.

So, what do you think? Do people really base buying decisions on covers? Are covers an essential introduction to the book? Does a good cover necessarily need to include images? And lastly, how did I do with the text only cover (the red one above)?

Some of these things can be done by almost anybody. Formatting the ebook files is the obvious one (if you can find your way around Microsoft’s office software, you can manage this too) yet there are services out there charging as much as $200 to produce the finished ebook files. And as a self publisher that’s a couple of hundred dollars that could be pumped into marketing, or you know, the mortgage.

I see a couple of problems with paying for a service like this. The foremost being what happens if you want to change something post production: try a new cover, update the text, or fix a typo?

With my first book, A God-Blasted Land, I spent many hours formatting the HTML and generating the finished ebook file for kindle, and later tinkering with the .doc file for Smashwords. If I hadn’t already been familiar with HTML and coding I would have wasted many more hours figuring it out, or even turned to an ebook formatting service.

Luckily for me (and you) I discovered Scrivener shortly after publishing A God-Blasted Land (actually, I’d been hearing Mac owning writers sing Scrivener’s praises for years, but didn’t own a mac until recently, and now they have released a windows version too). Scrivener makes formatting ebooks as simple as clicking a couple of buttons, tinkering with some options and hitting ‘compile’. It will compile both mobi and epub formats, and will even let you export your work to a .doc file (important if you plan to publish with Smashwords though you will still need to follow the Smashwords style guide to get the .doc file just right) or plain old PDF, RTF, or HTML.

Scrivener isn’t free software, but as a writer I think it is probably the most useful piece of software I own, and the time it saves me formatting ebooks alone, makes the price of the software a worthwhile investment. Plus, you’ll only have to buy the software once, whereas you’d need to pay a formatter for every book you want formatting.

The following video (from the Scrivener team via YouTube) provides a walk through of compiling ebook files. If you’d like to see samples of the finished files, you can check out samples of my books from amazon.com, A God-Blasted Land or d.evolution.

Buy Scrivener 2 for Mac OS X or Windows.

My new novel, d.evolution, engages with some of the ideas George Orwell first put forward in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and updates the technology that Big Brother uses to control the people. In d.evolution, Big Brother isn’t just watching you, Big Brother is inside your head.

But how could this happen?

Is it reasonable to suggest Big Brother is even possible? Don’t we know better now?

Modern technology makes it theoretically possible. Most internet users don’t consider what is happening in the background when they log on. How the free online services we use scrutinize our usage patterns and online behavior to help them turn a profit. Or how our obsession with social media would make it quite easy for Big Brother to keep an eye on us.

In d.evolution, the integration between man and machine via neural implants plugged directly into the user’s brain, gives New World Technology (the Mac Daddy of Internet companies in d.evolution) the ability to locate anybody, anywhere, at any time.

I’m a technology optimist (it doesn’t concern me that the online services I use are tracking my behavior because I see it as the tradeoff for getting access to some really cool services) but even I think it is sometimes worth asking the question:

How could this all go wrong?

d.evolution is my answer to that question.

d.evolution is available from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.

Eight years on and my new device is a little bigger, but infinitely more useful and has a charge that will last for weeks. I can even proofread and annotate my own work on it.

There is however one thing that I miss about paper books, and that is giving and receiving them as gifts. I gave most of my paper books away to libraries (we move too often to keep lugging them around) and the only books I kept were the those that were given to me as presents and had a message in the front cover, or were signed by the author.

I released my new novel, d.evolution, as an ebook earlier this week, and I don’t think that just because it is an ebook people shouldn’t be able to give copies to their friends or families with a message added to the inside cover (assuming they want to), or that people who like signed copies should have their collecting habits curtailed just because we are moving away from analog goods to digital, so as a bit of an experiment I’m offering personalized copies of d.evolution.

Visit the personalized ebooks page for more details if you’re interested or leave a comment and share your thoughts on the idea.

d.evolution is a dystopian, time travel story that features sentient code, killer robots, and mankind’s struggle to break free from his own creations.

Read the blurb, first chapter, or head over to amazon and grab a copy.

To celebrate the new book, I’ve made A God-Blasted Land available for free for the next three days (13th to 15th of April).

In the grand tradition of second books in epic fantasy trilogies, The Bastard Cadre and The Enchanted Forest takes our fearless hero on an unexpected side trip to an enchanted forest that introduces illogical plot points, creatures that have no reason to exist, and a society where STDs have no power, setting the author free to indulge in wish-fulfillment. The Bastard Cadre and The Enchanted Forest features Elvish-like creatures (who are nothing like other Elves and sparkle with originality) and a romance so awkward and clichéd it would make Robert Jordan blush. The story raises more questions than it answers while advancing the plot in no discernible way.

The Bastard Cadre and The Enchanted Forest is available absolutely nowhere except in the author’s nightmares.

Happy April Fools.

I don’t know how much the length of books influences whether or not readers take them up, but I suspect it plays a part, though most readers probably aren’t attempting to lift their social status by reading thick books the way eleven year old me did. I’ve read in several places that publishers believe people who read certain genres (fantasy for one) buy books based on weight (among other things) and that’s the reason we have so many epic door stopper fantasies (or is that epic fantasy door stoppers?).

Before I switched to audiobooks and ebooks (some time in 2004) I perceived thicker books as being better value for money, after the switch I slowly changed my mind. If an audiobook is listed as 40 hours long, I’ll thick twice about whether or not I really want to spend that much time with it, but I won’t give a second thought to buying a book that sounds mildly interesting and comes in at a reasonable 10 hours even though both books cost exactly the same.

If you’ve ever challenged yourself to read a book a week for an entire year (I managed to do it in 2009 and 2010) you come to appreciate shorter books when you drop behind your target. As more people move to ebooks (and we see less paper books) and they share their reading habits on Goodreads, Library Thing, and Shelfari, it’s not going to be the length of the books that impresses people, but the number of books they churn through. There is still something to be said for being widely read, and as ebooks remove the restrictions the production process places on book length there is no reason for authors to avoid shorter work.

When you stop to compare your memory of the shorter books you’ve read with the longer books you’ve read, I’ll be surprised if the shorter books don’t take up as much memory (or almost as much) as the longer books. It’s the ideas the books present that stay with me, not the word count, and books twice as long don’t always present twice as many ideas.

Reading shorter books exposes readers to more ideas, and writing shorter books allows writers to play with more ideas and try new things.

Charlie Stross has a post that talks about why books are the length they are, and in it he states that he and his publishers can make (probably) twice as much from two 300 page books as they can from one 700 page book. From an economic position, that suggests writers could make more from four 150 page books than they could from two 350 page books. As ebooks inevitably bring down the price of books, and people start accepting shorter books as normal and realize they fit better into their busy schedules, many writers will start thinking about novella length books.

As a science fiction writer, and even as a technical writer, I like gadgets. In my day job I get paid to describe how things (software) works, but in my fiction writing I often have to fight the urge to do the same. In A God-Blasted Land the main character can jam electrical currents, rendering electrical devices useless, at one point he needs to stop somebody from identifying his companion with a bio-scanner. In the early drafts of the story I went into great detail about this device, describing among other things, how it was powered, collected samples, connected with a satellite to query a remote database, and so on, all so that the reader would understand exactly how Avril (our reckless hero) was able to disrupt the device.

Luckily, one of my earlier readers read this thoughtfully crafted technological description and asked:

Do I need to know any of this?

And followed it up with:

Couldn’t you just say he jammed it?

And you know what? I realized I could and that most readers would probably be thankful I did.

Another reason to avoid involved technological descriptions, or even specific instances of technology – aside from putting non-techies to sleep – is to prevent the text from quickly going out of date.

If I write a novel today, set in 2020 that refers to characters using their iPhones, who is to say iPhones will even be around in 2020? All signs indicate they probably will be, but who knows for sure? Apple could go bust, or we could all be using d.evolution style implants for our communication and computing needs.

The generic term phone poses much less risk, and it seems unlikely (in most cases) that the brand of the phone will be critical to the story. The word phone already means something radically different to what it meant eight years ago, and its meaning will likely change again in the next eight years, but for anybody reading your fiction in eight years time an out of date reference to a once common instance of phone technology will probably only distract them from the story, whereas the generic phone won’t.

Over the course of the day the book was downloaded 280 times, I didn’t do any marketing other than to mention the download on twitter, so to say there is a market for free ebooks is an understatement. It looks like free might be a great way to distribute ebooks, but I’m left asking myself:

How can writers be compensated for writing books if they give them away for free?

Anybody who ventures online is familiar with free services that are supported by advertisers, or freemium services where a lite version of a service is provided (to the majority of users) for free and the extended feature service is provided for a fee to those who want to pay for it.

Could books go that way?

Will ad supported books become common place? Would readers tolerate advertising in books? What about freemium books with one time editions created with the main character’s name changed to the name of a fee paying reader? Will writers adopt loss leader tactics and release free books to draw readers to their other paid books? Or will they make director’s cut style editions with alternate endings, commentary, and deleted scenes available to their true fans for a fee instead of charging for the book?

I don’t know exactly what the future of publishing will look like, but I think its worth thinking about these things now.