Kindle, Twitter and Authors good and bad

Since the birth of Kindle and self-publishing, the world of the writer has been revolutionised.  I'm lucky I was present at the very beginning because most of the things I'd written and sent to agents and publishers were being sent back with a 'not sure there's a market for this' and 'we're over capacity and cannot take on any more writers'.  Both encouraging sentences which when decoded mean, 'you're not worth spending money on, we can't take risks'.  They could also have been saying 'you're a bit crap, come back when you learn how to write'.  But, being there at the beginning, I managed to get these manuscripts out and live on Amazon before most people cottoned on and flooded the market place.

Instead of spending lots of money on A4 envelopes, printer ink and stamps - Kindle/Amazon opened a door to self-publishing (a previously expensive route which was called 'vanity publishing' whereby you had to try and shift physical copies of your book somehow) by offering your downloadable book to kindle users.  It's possible to offer it free of charge too!  You upload your work, give it a snazzy front cover and a blurb and sit back, wait for the money to roll in and then buy a yacht in the Azores. 

Only, it doesn't work like that - you still have to 'hawk' your book about a bit and how do you do that without annoying people?  Well, along came the Kindle promotion tool - you make your e-book available for free any five days in 90 and people download it because, well - it's free, and then either leave it for a while and then delete it or they read it.  If it's good they'll tell a friend, if it's great, they'll leave a review - if it's terrible, they'll leave a review too.  This 'peer' method of getting your books out there and 'recommended' is superb. 

A true writer just wants their work read.  They just want someone to tell them they were entertained and that you did a good job.  It makes your next project worth while.  You don't feel that you're wasting your time - imagine if JK Rowling hadn't found a publisher for her first Harry Potter book - do you think she would have reached book 3 or 4 before giving up?  If they're just manuscripts on a shelf that have been read by 3 members of her family and one of her friends - what's the point in putting body and soul into book 4?

When you 'know' there's an audience, paying or non-paying, you try harder.  you read your work back when editing as if you're someone else reading it - which is harder than you think.  You see things you wouldn't normally see if 90% of you thinks 'this will never get published'.  Publishing yourself through Amazon means your book is available to a market - on the bookshelf all day, every day.  The more people download your book, the more it appears in the list of 'you might also like...' below other books in the same genre. 

It's made me a better writer even if I'm no nearer to getting a 'real' publishing deal.  I've gone from my first novel in 2003 (a really awfully written mess of ideas) to a couple of books which have five star reviews, lots of them in fact, which keeps me picking up the pen/keyboard and writing more.  I've even been asked for signed physical copies of my books.  I'm a playwright first and foremost and the fact I didn't even pick up a literary pen in anger until about ten years ago, these things astonish me still to this day.

Then there's twitter - the point of this peice really - it's used for loads of different reasons.  I use it to follow people I'm a fan of and hear their thoughts on stuff, hear that Curt Smith's new album is out now and he's back recording with Tears for Fears (yay!) and read the odd hilarious tweet by 'the sixth form poet' (worth a follow) .  However, I don't have many followers.  It almost seems pointless to tweet something funny I just thought of because I never get a retweet, I never get a mention in fact or a reply. 

I decided to set up an account for a character in one of my books to experiment, tweeting things I thought would be funny if he said them - I had 1 follower after about fifty tweets with loads of trending hashtags so I tried a different tack.  I followed 200 random people (ones who popped up on the 'follow' list at the side) and within 24 hours I had over fifty followers.  However, the character's twitter feed is now bombarded with more tweets than I could ever read and most of them telling me to download their latest book with hashtags #book #author #kindle.  It's quite annoying really.  I very rarely put links to anything I've written on twitter and seeing this twitter feed just reinforced my reasons.  Some tweeps were tweeting about their book once every ten minutes - the same tweet!
 
I love my 15 followers because they're not following me because I'm following them (well, maybe my all time hero Vince Clarke is but that's not the point).  They're following for their own reasons and they're loyal and I haven't annoyed them into unfollowing me yet with anything controversial or boring or too many tweets in a row.
 
Kindle is now becoming saturated with self-published authors, some excellent, some absolutely terrible (of course, it's all very subjective); authors who relentlessly tweet that they've got a book out and you should read it.  Authors who love to write, who think they may be rich one day because of it, ones who do it for the love regardless, ones who write because they know something they want other people to know. 

No longer do we have to rely on agents and publishers to sift through the wheat/chaff because yes, most of what they reject is awful, but at least now there are books there that may not otherwise have seen the light of day and all it takes is one person to advocate it, spread the word and the cream will, as always, rise to the top.

After all that - Chapter 1 of the book I'm blogging here is up on Wattpad if you fancy a read. For Free!

http://www.wattpad.com/story/6996489-chance-chapter-1-preview

In the beginning, there was monopoly

Chapter 1 then. 

I hate flashbacks - especially in those TV shows where they've gone into the fifth season and they're struggling to keep it fresh.  They'll show someone covered in flour head to foot with a meat cleaver in one hand and a tube of superglue in the other - then they cut the scene with a banner saying 'yesterday morning' and proceed to tell you how the character ended up in that situation.
If you're going to do a flashback - make it linear, that's what I say.  So, instead of having all the characters facing mild peril and then flashing back to 1985 to find out how they got there - I'm starting with 1985 whilst leaving a key fact out.  Not that you'd notice until it's revealed later. 

Six characters - six monopoly peices, but what's interesting about that?  Not a lot - until Troy brings Simon (a new lad) to the game.  Nobody really takes to the new lad, which makes Troy even more protective of him.  They get the monopoly board out and Troy allows Simon to be the hat - in stomps Gavin, late yet full of fun - which changes when he finds he is not allowed to have the peice he always has at these monopoly nights. And so begins his journey from jolly fat kid with no self awareness and a penchant for bizarre behavour to bitter morbidly obese megalomaniac misanthrope.  Hilarity ensues or something does. 

Once the game is over, Nina finds a Ouija board in the games cupboard but no planchette to use with it.  'Why not use the monopoly peices?'  And so, the demons of silver sands are invited into the closed circuit of the holiday park, bringing with them an array of strange phenomena.  Being summoned by small pewter board game counters only adds to the oddity and in turn, each who used a counter in summoning the dead shall forever be tied to its destiny.

As you can tell, the plot is still being developed.  All or none of the above will appear in the final book. Or will it...

How Bizarre!

I wanted a character name to be juxtaposition, something bold and almost biblical to represent someone with such a mundane life.  Troy! That's an impressive solid reassuring name.  Now imagine if Troy was unemployed.  Or he worked in a shoe shop.  Not that there's anything wrong with either of those things but being called 'Troy' you'd expect him to be an astronaut or have a degree in body building.  In the end, I decided that his monopoly peice of choice would be the car.  One of the devices in the book is that each of the kids who played monopoly together back in the 80's has had their lives mapped out by the peice they chose.  Troy, being the car went on to drive formula 1, and then, because he missed the high speeds and danger, became a taxi driver.  So - Troy, the taxi driver.  Perfect... however, once this entire backstory had fallen into place I was wandering around Sunderland (come on, we've all done it) and a yellow taxi drives past... and on the top... 'Troy's taxis'. 

What are the chances? Nobody is called Troy these days.  Nobody I tells ya.

Bizarre.

BLURB

Like all good novels (and a lot of terrible ones) there must be a blurb to get the reader excited.  Here's one I knocked up in about 2 minutes and it'll change drastically as the book develops no doubt :

Have you ever wondered whether your life has already been mapped out and the big decisions have already been made for you?  Have you ever felt that who and where you are right now is a direct result of one small choice you made when you were young? Could your destiny be influenced by a choice as small as what counter you chose in a game of Monopoly when you were fifteen years old? That certainly seems to be the case for six teenagers who met whilst on holiday at the Silver Sands caravan park in the mid-eighties.   

It is twenty five years later and Troy (the car) drives taxis, Billy (the boat) is an entertainer on a cruise liner, Louise (the dog) runs a dog hotel, Douglas (the boot) has been fired from every job he's ever had, Nina (the iron) works for the local press as a journalist, and Gavin (the top hat) is a local businessman and councillor who, by refusing to renew Silver Sands' entertainments licence, hopes to close the park in order to buy the land for development.   

Something at the creepy old caravan park is stirring however, and it's not just the restaraunt manager making today's soup.  With rumours that Silver Sands was built on an old Viking burial ground it seems that a strange ethereal force more powerful than fate is bringing the six friends together once more, but why?  Will they save the park from closure? Will they just have one more holiday then move on and get over it or have they been brought together for one last game of monopoly with terrifying consequences?

Characters

It all starts with a character - sometimes an ordinary character who finds themselves in extraordinary circumstances, sometimes an extraodinary character in mundane circumstances.  This time is was two characters - Troy Thompson and Simon Johnson.  While the idea for the novel was brewing, they had an obsession for board games - one which led them to charity shops to buy ones they'd never heard of - then they had an obsession for the dobbers in the games (it's the only word I know for dobber, the counter you move around that tells everyone else that it's you - not them).  Then I thought they could have their dobber collection stolen and act as two PI's tracking down the dobbers as they're left in mysterious places, a treasure hunt with a hidden message...

Then I went and had a hot cup of Mocha (or is that just 'a hot mocha?' not sure) and all that stopped being interesting apart from the two guys obsessed with board games.  Their past, their present and their future.  Past - holidaying together at some sad old caravan park just up the road.  Present - rooming together in their late twenties.  It all still sounded very unspectacular until I focussed on that caravan park bit. 

When you were at school, did you ever stand in the cloakroom alone?  Remember the silence, the smell, the odd feeling of being surrounded by parkas?  Then looking out of the window into an empty playground - hearing a sort of ethereal childrens' shouting and laughter in your head?  The caravan park felt like that - a place that had seen so much happiness, laughter, good times, memories, ghosts, still winds, an empty present, shadows, things that were, broken glass, boarded up windows... the seeds were there!

Simon never left when he holidayed there as a teenager - but why?  How does he know Troy? Why has the park turned from a laughter filled holiday hot spot into a ghost-town-like rusted tin village?  Is it haunted? Why is it haunted?

I think I know!  Must get scribbling.