Update about missing updates

So.  Yeah.  The WordPress Android app apparently let me down and did not in fact post the last two updates I wrote. Also, I cannot recall what they were actually about.

Helpful.

So, anyway… My next book, The Keepers of the Fire, is complete and is just going through some editing and proofreading.  I have 2 more small inserts to write and 2 chapters to rewrite (as they are, frankly, icky), but with that done, the book will be complete, and it will simply be a matter of giving it a last read through to make sure the worst of the typos are taken care of!

With any luck, Book 2 will be out to buy on Amazon within the next 4 – 6 weeks!  Huzzah!

The Second Edition!

You may have come here from my redirect on Amazon.  If so, welcome.  Pull up a chair, grab a beer and make yourself at home.  Hopefully you have all now received your new, shiny, second edition copies of my book but I bet you have some questions right?  Right.  So then; why the second edition?  This is why:

A new version of an existing book might sound a little controversial, and I suppose it is, but there are a lot of factors at play here and many reasons why I think this new version is needed.  For starters, and most simply, this was my first book and I was, certainly at the beginning, a little out of my depth.  The book was written in two main stages, several years apart, and the work that comprises the first 40% or so of the book is in fact much older than the rest.  As a result, my lack of experience shows through far more starkly there as the earlier chapters meander around and are littered with slow, uninteresting sections that drag down the whole pace of the work.  This alone was enough for a new version, but it might have yielded less changes overall.

What has in fact changed in this new daft is as follows:

The book that Jonathan finds is gone.  The book, as a plot device, was never my first choice.  In my earliest drafts of this story, Tel had found a device, left in this world by Ashna, that led him to the first part of the Sword, thus triggering the story.  For reasons I do not fully remember, I could never get this mechanic to work however, so I abandoned it and came up with the idea of a Templar codebook, thus giving J and Dowd something physical and tangible to interact with and giving them something to do in the early chapters.  Unfortunately, this slowed the book down enormously and led to some very long, tedious chapters were they both waded through the encryption.  Moreover, the encryption was just tosh and would never have worked (and my use of the Mousehole in the picture bugged the hell out of me – mouse holes are a product of Tom and Jerry cartoons from the turn of the last century.  An 11^th century priest would never have heard of such a concept!)

Dowd and J both are developed more as characters.  Dowd is painted in a very, very bad light in the first edition.  He is miserably, reactionary and distant, constantly sniping and barking at everyone and this is not what I intended at all and it certainly is glaringly different to the kindly, gentle professor I paint him as in his flashback.  Dowd and J are now old friends from the start, speeding up all their conversations and giving them both a bit more time to shine.  J has stayed much the same but is just given more chance to show his talents.  As a friend said to me, there is no way someone as rich, handsome, successful and determined as J would spend a lot of time alone in bed!

The final change is regarding Alexander.  At the start of the book, Alexander is preaching to his companions about how they all must stay out of the way, not interfere and not tip the scales but not two minutes later, he is knocking on Dowd’s door and handing out cryptic clues and vague hints. Total nonsense.  With the code book gone, Alexander remains in the shadows, only appearing as our heroes exit Mousehole before whisking them off to Italy to tell them just what the hell is actually going on.

So, big changes but changes for the better.  The new plot device that replaces the book is fun and leads to some good comedy and solid interaction and has also allowed me to add back in some cut work, giving Larry a far bigger moment in the spotlight and letting the comic relationship between him and his flunky, Travis, shine through.  All in all, the book moves faster, is more engaging and, thanks to the device, ties better into what I had already written for the sequel, the Keepers of the Fire, which features Ashna’s work quite heavily.  I hope that those who have read the book will forgive me these changes and embrace the fact that they are genuine improvements that do not dramatically alter the structure or events of the book and that you will enjoy the coming two sequels as much as I am enjoying writing them.

Oh – a quick note for those who have found this blog from Amazon:  There appears to be some confusion regarding the process of getting your book onto the Kindle market.  A few people have pointed out that there a fair number of typos in this book, and rightly so.  Let me assure you that I am a more voracious grammar Nazi that any ten people I know and every single one of those errors a) annoys me more than it annoys you and b) is an actual error, not a confusion on my part.  Amazon offers no help whatsoever in the formatting and editing of your book, it is all down to you.  I am far from being a good typist and so, between fat fingers and an overly enthusiastic spellchecker, there were errors galore in the first, complete draft of this book.  I have done my best to correct them all but, at the end of the day, this book is nearly 200,000 words long and I am not a professional copy editor.  There comes a point where you are simply snow blind to your own work, so I would ask that you cut me and all the other hard working, amateur authors out there some slack.  I own books half the size of mine that have been republished 20+ times that still have errors in them, so that there are so few (comparative to its size) in mine is a miracle.

All that said, I hope you guys enjoy the new version.  With that done, I can get around to writing the second part and hopefully get it published before you all stop caring.  Speak to you all soon!

177,781 – Part 3

A further pause in activity due to a week away followed by a birthday, all woven through with a massive amount of editing and some writing.

The new draft of The Keepers of the Key is about 50% done and I will have it finalised come the end of this week.  It contains no changes to the writing, just a brush and polish of what was already there (commas – why must you torment me so?!).  I’ll get it uploaded to Amazon and to smashwords so if anyone is mid-read, grab the new copy.

With that done, I will be diving back into the task of attracting a  publisher.  New synopsis is written, sample chapters are ready: I just need to draw up a list of prospective agencies and have at it again and nag the living hell our of everyone that bought the book to get a review written for me to add more fuel to my fire.  So few people have actually rated the book or left a review it is slightly worrying.  I am, however, choosing to believe that they simply forget and will leap eagerly to the task once I remind them!  Yes…

ePublishing – Finally.

So your editing is done.  Well largely.  Ok, as much as its going to be.  You are at the stage were the book looks presentable and it takes a discerning eye to spot the errors that are left.  Moreover, if someone says anything about double spaces, semicolons or speech-marks you will attack them with a stuffed badger.

You are as done as you are going to be.

ePublishing then: what’s that all about then, eh?

Well, your experience and mileage will vary depending on how you go about it and with whom you decide to publish.  I began the process with Amazon as they struck me as being the biggest eBook distributor out there and therefore having the largest possible target audience.  While this is technically true, Amazon have turned out to be very insular and largely unhelpful.  If I had the chance to do this over, I would definitely have gone with smashwords.com right from the start.  Don’t get me wrong, Amazon are not doing anything bad, they are just…unhelpful.

Firstly their conversion tool is archaic and unfriendly.  I’m sorry, but even as someone who is way above the curve in the “tech savvy” department, I find the concept of being handed a command-line document converter to be pretty damned ludicrous.  In the end I went with Mobipocket eBook creator (available here).  Its a reasonably friendly piece of software, although it has way more options than you are ever going to need.

Once you have started to toy with the converter things begin to get tricky.  Amazon offer you no information whatsoever as to how you should format your eBook.  They have nothing to say about copyright pages, legal disclaimers or even good formatting practices.  They will, if we are brutally honest, let you upload any old garbage.  And this is the crux of it.  The shear volume of work released on the Kindle store each and every day boggles the mind and the standard of this work is horrifying.  Amazon, it seems, just don’t care and as a result their Kindle store is a flea market whose wares range from the competent and professional to the ravings of blunt crayon wielding madmen.

Smashwords.com are, however, a very different beast all together.  As well as supplying all would-be publishers with a highly informative guide on how they expect eBooks to be published, they also do the conversion for you.  Their conversion software, affectionately known as “meatgrinder”, takes your uploaded work and, in one automated sweep, converts your book to every format known to man while also creating a sample of your book (the length of which is dictated by you) in each format at the same time.  Once done, it then actively gives you feedback on what you may have done wrong!  It is really quite marvellous and I cannot praise it enough.  Even once you have followed all their advice and gotten your book into a far more respectable state, they are not done helping you.  All books that are submitted and pass basic formatting check are then considered by the staff for inclusion into their “premium catalogue” and if they qualify they are then eligible to be promoted into a much wider market.

Beyond the merely technical aspects, smashwords are also far superior in other ways.  When publishing a book you need an ISBN code that uniquely identifies your product in the market.    To publish to Kindle you do not need one as Amazon use their own system but to publish just about anywhere else, an ISBN is most definitely required.  Trouble is, ISBNs are damned expensive.  You have to buy them in lots of ten from the ISBN Agency for around £110 – money that I imagine most budding writers do not have.

Smashwords however publish in formats for a range of devices from the Kindle to the Kobo to the Nook and so an ISBN is required to publish with them.  Thing is, smashwords will simply GIVE you an ISBN for the asking!  How this works I am utterly unclear.  I have scanned through all their documents regarding the subject and I can find nothing suspicious or underhand about their offer.

To add further frustration, Amazon offer two different grades of royalty schemes – 30% and 70%.  Now, if you are smart, you will realise that book one is not there to make you money, but rather to get your name known.  While making your book chargeable to lift it above the vast slew of freebies out there is a sound idea, you realistically want to charge as little as possible for it, thus encouraging the impulse buyers.  The obvious choice then is to go for the 30% royalties then, right?  Wrong.  Unless you accept the 70% scheme, your book is not eligible for Amazon’s sharing scheme that let’s kindle users “loan” books to their friends for short periods.  So you sign up for the 70% scheme.  Thing is, the minimum price you are allowed to sell at then goes up from 99 cents to about $3.  Sure, $3 is not gonna break anyone’s bank but there is a psychology to things that cost less than a buck – people will just shell out that much more easily for them.  By comparison, smashwords have one royalty rate (a little over 60%) and you can set your minimum price to 99cents – another clear win for them.

So, not all ePublishers are created equal.  I’m not knocking Amazon completely – there is still a certain satisfaction to having your book on a site as prestigious as theirs – but they are too much of a Swiss Army knife.  Smashwords offer a far more focussed and coherent service and dealing with them, for me at least, was just a more pleasant experience.