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
