Tips for Writers: Putting a Face to this Blogger

Before we go any further, I suppose it would be a good idea to let you put a face to this blogger, let you know who you’re dealing with, as it were.

This is one of the few photographs I have in which I look even halfway presentable. It was taken last July in Brisbane at the 50th reunion of agricultural scientists who graduated from Queensland University in years in ’58-’62 approximately.

What’s a person with a B.Agr. Sc. doing assessing manuscripts? It’s a l-o-n-g story …

 

Range Wars on the E-book Front

 

A range war is brewing on the e-book front as a result of Amazon’s pre-emptive strike in introducing Amazon KDP Select, a 3-month optional contract operating above and beyond the normal Amazon KDP program available to authors. If an author hits the Select button, for the time their book is enrolled in the Select program, they must agree not to distribute or sell the book ANYWHERE ELSE! This includes their own personal blog or web site. Their title must be 100% exclusive to Amazon.

Before Amazon KDP decided to introduce Select, self-published authors had the opportunity to distribute their books across a large number of platforms — Amazon itself, Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, Smashwords, Books a Million and others. This was good for the writers, good for the e-book publishers and distributors. A nice competitive industry.

 To retaliate against Amazon’s pre-emptive strike, Barnes & Noble, the other distribution giant, has decided to withdraw from its lists all titles published by Amazon. It would seem, at this stage, that even if a book is published on some other platform and merely distributed through Amazon, Barnes & Noble will withdraw it. Books a Million and the Canadian Indigo have followed B & N’s lead.

E-books are the new cash cow of book publishing, and indie e-book sales are rising at a phenomenal rate. In the US, in the last three months of 2010, Amazon’s sales of e-books surpassed that of paperbacks for the first time, and self-published e-books are beginning to appear in bestseller lists. But self-published authors are about to lose their freedom of choice and the wide distribution platforms their books enjoyed in the past. Because B&N and Amazon deliver the greatest volumes of sales, a self-published author or a small press will be forced to choose between these two giants. Going with only one distributor, however large, carries potentially huge risks for the user for the distributor can change the conditions at any time.

Range wars never benefit the peons. In this case, it’s the writers and small publishers who are caught in the crossfire. Is Amazon breaking the law with KDP Select? Should some kind of legal safeguards be put in place to prevent monopolistic practices in the young e-book industry?

 For more details on Amazon KDP Select, see my previous post:  Amazon KDP Select – a poisoned apple?

Amazon KDP Select — a poisoned apple?

When online bookstores began to take off, Amazon quickly established itself as the biggest dealer in the field. Sure there were other bookstores, for example, Fishpond, but they paled beside the giant Amazon. We’re talking hard copy here.

When Amazon saw the trend towards e-books, it hopped right in and again established itself as the biggest retailer. Sure, there were other e-book distributors — Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, Smashwords and others — but Amazon was the biggest. A huge industry sprang up. Writers could self-publish their books and put them on many different distribution platforms.

Looking good. Good for the writers, good for the e-book publishers and distributors. A nice competitive industry.

Then Amazon produced the Amazon Kindle, a series of e-book readers that enable users to shop for, download, browse and read e-books, newspapers, magazines, blogs and other digital media via wireless networking (source: Wikipedia). Amazon has now launched what it calls Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing  or Amazon KDP. With this, a writer can get his book published by Amazon and have it go directly to Kindle, which is grabbing a large share of the applications market with the introduction of its Kindle software for use on various platforms such as Microsoft Windows, iOS, Blackberry, MacOSX (10.5 onward, Intel only), Android, webOS and Windows Phone (source: Wikipedia).  The most recent refinement of all this is Amazon KDP Select.

Amazon KDP Select. This sounds good — until you read the small print in Amazon’s Terms and Conditions: https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=APILE934L348N

To paraphrase this small print: While or the time your book is enrolled in the program, you must agree not to distribute or sell your book ANYWHERE ELSE. This includes your own personal blog or web site. Your title must be 100% exclusive to Amazon.

If you violate this at any point during the 3-month enrolment period, or you remove your book from the program so you can distribute it elsewhere, you risk forfeited earnings, delayed payments, a lien on future earnings – or getting kicked out of the Kindle Direct Publishing program altogether.

After the obligatory 3 months, your enrolment in the KDP Select continues unless you go through the process of opting out. Forget, and you’re up for another 3 months.

This forces the author to remove the book from sale from the Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, Smashwords and others, thereby causing the author to lose out on sales from competing retailers.

By withdrawing a title from any retailer, the author destroys any accrued sales ranking in their lists, making their book less visible and less discoverable should they reactivate distribution to competing retailers.

Do authors want to be totally dependent upon Amazon for sales? New writers are desperate; they will do almost anything to sell their books. And they know that with Amazon KDP, more customers are motivated to go straight to Amazon since Amazon has this exclusive content.

It’s a clever ploy on Amazon’s part. As Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords says, The new Amazon KDP Select program look s like a predatory business practice (ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-competitive_practices). Pretty soon, Amazon can use the opportunity to leverage their dominance as the world’s largest e-book retailer (and world’s largest payer to indie authors) to attain monopolistic advantage by effectively denying its competing retailers (Apple, B&N, Kobo, Sony, etc) access to the books from indie authors.

Indies are the future of book publishing. In the US, in the last three months of 2010, Amazon’s sales of e-books surpassed that of paperbacks for the first time.

Think about this. It might pay indie authors to recognise that their long term interests are best served by having a competitive global ebook retailing ecosystem. Mark Coker recommends an author distribute their book to as many retailers as possible. Many ebook retailers, all working to attract readers to books, will surely serve indie authors better in the long run than a single retailer who can dictate all the terms.

But whoever thinks of the long run? The long run is everyone’s poor relation, doomed to be steamrollered by the bullies of expediency and money.

The contents of this blog are based on a blog by Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords. The original, more comprehensive article can be found at: blog.smashwords.com/2011/12/amazon-shows-predatory-spots-with-kdp.html

Next Week: A review of Australian author Michael Sala’s debut novel The Last Thread published by Affirm Press.

DIY websites by Louise Forster

Writers need to have a website. I don’t have one yet, but I’ll have to take the plunge soon. Just been putting it off. This week, Louise Forster shares her experience of getting up her website. 

 

Building a website takes time, imagination and most importantly an eye for colour and detail.

Our daughter Kylie Burns studied graphic communication and designed my website. The main problem was adapting her Mac designs to my PC. Because she loves designing there were a number of opening pages to choose from. And like a kid in a lolly shop, I loved all of them. Family members would drop by for a peak and put their 2 cents worth in the mix:

Child:    ‘Don’t like the black.’

Teenager:   ‘Love the black.’

Older teenager:   ‘Cool Nan.’

Other daughter:   ‘I don’t do well with people and bits of limbs missing.’

Sister in-law:   ‘Oh gross! Don’t like the cherub man.’

Husband:   ‘There’s nothing wrong with any of it.’

Me:   ‘I love the cherub man. He adds a bit of light-hearted mischief.’

Son-in-law:   ‘Hallmark?’

Me:   ‘Get out, I love it!’

Nevertheless, Hallmark was chucked. I had to look through Shutterstock for a Christmas background I liked, sent it to Kylie, where she made a lovely new design on her lovely new Mac. Of course, if you date your website like I did with Christmas baubles, come New Year it has to be updated. A website should always move forward and keep up to date with your new products – in my case, books.

MY WEBSITE INFORMATION ON COSTS

From what I’ve heard, the basic website built for you by a designer, can set you back around $2.000.

If you do decide to use a designer, make sure you know exactly what you want.

How many pages will you need? Do you want drop downs on your buttons?

How do you want your site to reflect your personality and your product, etc.?

Remember, every time you change something, even if you think, Oh, that’s just a little

thing, the web designer has to delete what’s there and re-build and re-upload to the server. That takes time, and means extra expense.

There are many web building programs to choose from – a lot of people use WordPress. As my daughter is a graphic designer we decided to do it ourselves. We found the easiest ones to deal with were the drag and drop type. Be aware that most, if not all, keep their template copyright, and some have the right to use your product for advertising purposes.

Read the small print.

START UP INFO

You need a domain name, that is, the name of your website. Mine is: www.louiseforster.com

Who you decide to go with will determine what you will pay. This should not be expensive. Run away fast if it is.

My domain name costs:  $11.95 a year. Below is what I paid for all the bits I wanted to build my website.

I chose bluehost as my host provider  – www.bluehost.com

I paid $5.95 a month. However, note this fee has now gone up to $6.95

I paid for 2 years in advance. For $128.75 I have the list below:

Monthly Bandwidth Transfer: 23.57 / ∞ MB

File Count    678

Email Accounts       1 / ∞

FTP Accounts          1 / ∞

Account Expires in 457 days

Hosting package     Platinum Pak

Hostname     box745.bluehost.com

Theme           bluehost

Apache version       2.2.21

PHP version            5.2.17

Architecture x86_64

Operating system    linux

Shared IP Address 66.147.244.245

Path to sendmail

Kernel version         2.6.32-46.1.BHsmp
After all that, I’m going to tell you I’m no expert.

Hope this is helpful.

Louise Forster.

More on websites next week, how to attract readers to your website and, most importantly, how to keep them coming back. 

Self-publishing with Youwriteon

With the rise of digital technology, mainstream publishers became deluged with manuscripts. Today, more and more emerging writers are taking to self-publishing as a way of getting their work out there. Below is one writer’s journey into publishing with the UK Arts Council funded site Youwrite on.  It’s a happy story.

Self-publishing with Youwriteon by guest blogger: Louise Forster

After 11 years I’ve finally cracked it, I’m published. Okay, not in the usual sense with an agent and publisher, but as a self-published writer. I’ll cut to the chase and give you the facts.

I published with YouWriteOn, a UK Arts funded site that anyone can join. Basically it works on a bartering system. You read someone’s work and, at random, someone reads yours. You receive reviews from cold readers who don’t know you. The down side is, sometimes you’ll get a reader who’s not familiar with your genre. Then you need to shrug and say to yourself, what the heck. Of course there are times when a reviewer will say, ‘I wouldn’t normally choose this genre and I almost deleted your piece, but I’m glad I didn’t because I really enjoyed it.’ Check them out at www.youwriteon.com. If the above doesn’t appeal to you, they also offer publishing without peer review at:  www.FeedARead.com

Nearly 2 years ago I paid £58.99 (A$89.77). With this fee I’m published, and printed by Lightning Source, who have Print on Demand (POD) facilities all over the world, including Melbourne (important for me, as I’m in Australia). My book is beautifully presented in paperback, glossy cover, good quality paper and lovely, easy-to-read font. Recently I paid £34.94 for 6 of my books in hard copy; that comes to about A$5.50 per book, and that includes postage!

My book is available on as many online stores you can think of and some you wouldn’t know existed, like www.flipkart.com  in India — I’m waiting for an Indian director to read FINDING VERONICA and love her so much he wants to turn it into a Bollywood movie! (Bring it on.)

INFO BELOW TAKEN FROM THE FeedARead SITE:

• It’s free to set-up your book for sale through FeedARead.com
• You set your own book price and royalty
• Full bookseller distribution service. You can also choose to make your book available via the major online outlets, including Amazon, and for major bookshops to order. The fees for this are as follows:

BOOKSELLER DISTRIBUTION SERVICE
UK Authors: £88
US Authors: $79
Australian Authors: $140
European Authors: E100
All other authors: £88 UK.

FeedARead’s distribution service places your book into the world’s most comprehensive distribution channel. With over 30,000 wholesalers, retailers and booksellers in over 100 countries your book will gain the maximum exposure possible in the market today. This includes your book being available to order through all of the following: Amazon and Barnes & Noble (US); Amazon, WHSmith and Waterstones (UK); Amazon Europe; and TheNile.com (Australia).

My book is also available on Kindle through Amazon. On 18 December I joined Amazon’s new program for Kindle users called Prime. It was a little scary, but looking into it, I discovered that subscribers to Prime pay $78.99 annually. This enables them to borrow 12 books per year from the Prime Kindle list. Why would readers want to go this library route when it actually costs more per book? It saves the reader from making PayPal transactions every time they want a new book. Amazon currently sets aside $500,000/month for distribution to authors. After the 90-day trial period, my book continues with Prime for another 90 days, and so on unless I inform them that I don’t want to continue. Every 90 days, I am given 5 days for promotion, during which your books are available for free, and I can choose the dates — which is most useful if you want to coordinate it with your local book launch and local PR. I had one on the 18^th another on the 21^st of December.  (Normally, the ebook sells for $2.99; I receive 70% of this. )

Your share of the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (KOLL) Fund is calculated based on a share of the total number of qualified borrows of all participating KDP titles. For example, if the monthly fund amount is $500,000 and the total qualified borrows of all participating KDP titles is 100,000 in December and if your book was borrowed 1,500 times, you will earn 1.5% of $500,000 (1,500/100,000 = 1.5%); that is, $7,500 in December.

https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/KDPSelect

The sudden rise in sales happened AFTER I joined the KOLL. I believe that, had I not joined Prime, FINDING VERONICA would have been lost among the millions of books available. However to be fair, I have to say that I also began tweeting a few weeks ago as part of my PR program. Whether the suddden rise in my sales was due to twitter or to joining the KOLL, it’s simply too soon to know.

Whatever it is, it seems to be working!

Readers often like to check out authors before they buy. Next week, Louise will tell us how she set up her website at:  www.louiseforster.com  and what it cost her.

 Stay tuned, folks.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

This
Christmas
I would
like to put
up a tree in my
heart, and instead
of hanging presents,
I would like to put the
names of all my friends.
Close friends and not so close
friends. The old friends, the new
friends. Those that I see every day
and the ones that I rarely see. The ones
that I always remember and the ones that
I sometimes forget. The ones that are always
there and the ones that seldom are. The friends of
difficult times and the ones of happy times. Friends
who, without meaning to, I have hurt, or without meaning
to have hurt me. Those that I know well and those I only know
by name. Those that owe me little and those that I owe so much.
My humble friends and my important friends. The names of all those
that have passed through my life no matter how fleetingly. A tree with
very deep roots and very long
and strong branches so that

their names may never be
plucked from my heart. So

that new names from all
over may join the existing ones. A tree with a very
pleasant shade so that our friendship may take a
moment of rest from the battles of life. May the
happy moments of Christmas brighten every

                             day of the New Year. My sincere wishes.

 

Love,

Danielle

I wish I knew who wrote and set up this Christmas tree. One of my Byron College Creative Writing students from 2001, Pat Kowal, who lives in the US sent it to me. She didn’t know who had written it, just found it somewhere on the net. I’m afraid it lost something along the way: Her version was every colour of the rainbow, and so pretty. But when I transferred it, the colour disappeared, and I have no idea how to fix that.  Even after 4 months at this, I’m still a Luddite!

Anyway, have a lovely Christmas everyone, and a safe and happy New Year. Let’s hope the Mayans were wrong

HAZARD!

Last week I told you about my father, his roses, and the sneaky rosebud clipper. My father’s snipped rosebuds were in the nature of a small hazard. Much larger hazards can swoop on us at any time. They can come in the form of financial reversal —  worse still, the illness or death of a loved one. When they come, cleverness will not deal with them, and beauty will not bale us out. The much vaunted romantic love often packs its bags at the first sign and catches the stagecoach out of town.

What are we left with?

Courage, for one thing. I believe courage is the most important single factor in dealing with adversity. Oddly enough, it’s not developed by leading an easy life. Courage is built in the hard times, not the easy ones. What the Victorians used to call ‘character-building times’, what Tibetan Buddhists these days call ‘the situation as guru’.

What about having a well developed spiritual life? Surely that would be helpful.

How many people do you know who really have a deeply spiritual view of the world? What most have is a religious view, and that’s not the same thing. Religion’s great if you don’t lose it at the critical moment, but I can’t count the number of people I’ve heard wailing when the chips came down, ‘Why has God allowed this to happen to me’?

This kind of ‘spirituality’ will not be around in the hard times.

So we need courage.

We also need endurance, which is courage over the long haul. And, as Thomas Power of Ecademy said, we also need resilience.

The other thing we need in hard times is the support of friends and family. This can often form a net that will help to break our fall, at least to some extent.

No matter what’s happening in your life, no matter how high you’re flying, never lose sight of that bird of prey, hazard. No sparrow, this one.

Is courage the single most important factor in dealing with adversity — or do you think it’s something else?

One week to Christmas. Go safely.

 

My father, his roses and the sneaky rosebud clipper

I’ve been thinking all day of my father, who died fifty years ago. When he wasn’t working on diesel engines, he was a rose afficionado. In his garden, he had dozens of varieties — ‘Peace, Granite, Mrs Harold Alston’ — all dear to his heart. There came a morning when he strode across the lawn to admire the dew on his roses, only to find two or three buds lying on the ground, their stems cleanly severed as if by a knife.

He was enraged. Boys must be doing this, he decided, to torment him. But were there any boys of the right age in our neighbourhood for that kind of mischief? We couldn’t think of any. It was a mystery. The buds appeared on the lawn only after the sun had risen. If my father went out with a torch at three in the morning — and he did — there would be no snipped rosebuds lying on our lawn.

He became obsessed. He would catch the sneaky rosebud clipper if it took him the rest of his life. He arranged a comfortable chair overlooking the rose garden, got up each morning before the dawn and settled down to watch. Of course, he left his lookout sometimes to make a cup of tea or to go to the toilet. Often, to his chagrin, when he returned, there would be a fresh rosebud lying on the ground.

My father sat on. He was determined to catch the culprit and do him some damage. On the third morning, as he was keeping watch, a sparrow came swooping over the rose garden. It came in low and, with a barely discernable change of motion, sliced a ‘Maud Alston’ bud from its bush, dropped it on the lawn. All my father’s theories — and by now, he had many — fell to the ground with the flower.

Sometimes, it’s just hazard.

My father’s snipped rosebuds were in the nature of a small hazard. Much larger hazards than that can swoop on us out of the blue. More on this subject next week, when I’ll invite comments on how to deal with what someone (possibly Shakespeare) called ‘the slings and arrows of outragous fortune’ .

Hope to see you then. In the meantime, go safely in this wild and crazy pre-Christmas time.

Danielle

Story, anyone? An 8-minute read

[This story won the Inaugural Nicholas Shand-Beach Hotel short story competition in 1997, was published in the Byron Shire Echo, 9 September 1997 and recently recorded on BayFM radio 18 November 2011 on Pip Morrissey’s book program.]

 

A Happily Married Man

[908 words]

I was waiting for her when she came out of the Chinese restaurant. I called to her from the shadow of the pile of lumber that stood beside the hardware store in the main side street of the small country town.

“What do you want?” She sounded frightened, as if talking to me was a crime for which someone might punish her — which was not so far from the truth now; I’ve heard the stories about how that he’s treating her.

I just stood there. I heard the XPT whistle at the level crossing that traversed the main street one block to the east of us. The XPT whistled twice; still, I didn’t answer. I wanted to tell her I was going to save her, that I’d had a message, so clear, perfectly pure and beautiful, and that after tonight we’d be together again the way we used to be. But I couldn’t say anything.

Crystal’s eyes followed the line of hills to the west and the little barred clouds. It was high summer and, although it was almost eight, it was still daylight.

“Why don’t you just go away and leave us alone? I don’t owe you anything,” she said.

  The angel’s wings were white.

       The angel’s voice was golden.

       “I have a message from the Lord,” he told me.

       And here I am.

 

The track led downwards to the bottom of the valley where the creek ran through it. As you approached the shack from the last hill all you could see was the roof, and the trees with the vines dangling from them. If the wood stove in the lean-to was lit you’d see  smoke drifting through the clearing.

Some nights I’d wake up beside Crystal in our shack in the valley. The moon would be shining through the branches, the dog would be lying before the dying wood stove with one eye open, and someone would be pounding on iron a long way up the creek. In those still nights I could almost feel the universe breathing. It was a good feeling.

  The angel’s hair was gold.

       The angel’s sword was silver.

       “What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder,” he told me.

       Well, here I am.

 

They say I went crazy when she left me. I never believed them. Sure, I was upset but I wasn’t crazy.

Her last words to me were “You’re nothing. You’re no better than a dog”!

Every night after that, I’d start drinking when the sun went down. Then I’d roam, drunk, around the multiple occupancy we shared with eight other families, howling “NOOO better than a dog”!

        I fell into the creeks, got covered in mud, scrabbling up the creek banks like The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The neighbours locked their doors and windows, which bothered me; I was just grieving. After twelve years she was everything to me.

It wasn’t her fault, the break-up. He misled her. She was vulnerable and he knew it — everyone knew it; her so small and fine, looking fragile in her old St Vinnie’s jeans. I should never have taken the job in Murwillumbah: gone at dawn, working twelve-hour days in the bananas, six days a week. Come Sundays I was no good for anything.

Now I know better. It’ll be different next time.

The way I see it, she was lonely with me away all the time, and he was there. Yeah, he was there. And I say to myself — I said it to myself again this morning when I saw them together in the main street — it’s his being there that’s the problem.

If he wasn’t there things’d be just like they used to be. We’d sit in front of the wood stove in the evenings, with the kero lamps burning, listening to the radio, getting up before dawn. Christ, we had everything we wanted! She knows that too. She just doesn’t know how to get free of him. It’s one of her failings: she’s so gentle. She could never be cruel to anyone.

In the early days when I was desperate, I used to dream of burning him out. But there’s no need for that; I see that now. I’m going round to his place tonight while she’s at Golden Beach with The True Viners. I’m taking an iron bar and a rifle. I want to talk to this bloke, make him understand he’s not important, that he just doesn’t figure in the Great Plan for her and me.

If he agrees to leave I’ll put him on the train to Sydney — no hard feelings. If he doesn’t . . . well, I s’pose I’ll think of something.

But I wanted to see her first to get up courage. Sometimes, I don’t know, I get confused. Sometimes, you know, the vision falters. But I’m okay now; I’ve got it all thought out. Then when she comes back to his place in the morning, I’ll surprise her. Hey baby, the nightmare’s over!

Christ, I love being married. Some people, they can’t take it — all the ins and outs, the ups and downs. But when you love someone the way I love Crystal . . .

She depends on me. I won’t let her down.

       The angel’s robe was silver.

       Was it my heart like lead that called him?

       “‘Free her!’ saith the Lord,” he told me.

       Lord, here I am                                             

END

DANIELLE DE VALERA’s short stories have appeared in such diverse publications as Penthouse, dotlit and the Women’s Weekly, and are currently in 6 anthologies.  In 2011, her full length fiction manuscript A Few Brief Seasons was one of 4 shortlisted for the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival Unpublished Manuscript Award. She has been a manuscript assessor and mentor since 1992, and is listed in the Writers’ Services section of The Australian Writer’s Marketplace. 

So You Want to Give twitter the Bird …

Ah twitter, what a waste of time. It’s got to epitomise the worst of the social media – frivolous, banal, no use to anyone. Certainly not to a struggling writer like yourself.

Think again.

I’ve only been investigating social media for six weeks and twitter for two. What I’ve discovered might amaze you. While it’s true that twitter and Facebook have a lot of rubbish in them, twitter is also doing something else.

It’s broadcasting. In real time — assuming you have a phone that will take the app. I don’t have one at the moment, but after what I’ve seen in the last two weeks, I can see that, as a serious writer, just as I once had to have a computer rather than an electric typewriter, now I’m going to have to buy a phone that will take a twitter application.

For those of you as innocent as I was of twitter and how it works, the basis is this:

On twitter, you choose to Follow certain people. Other people may choose to Follow you. How did these followers find you? They found you on other social media sites. The tweets from the people you are following come up on your screen. Your tweets only appear on the screens of those who are following you.

I currently have 6 followers. Right. So what use could I possibly get out of twitter?

Twitter acts as a broadcaster. A recent survey, whose figures I can’t exactly remember, so puleese don’t quote me, said that 40% of twitter is banality; 30% is self-promotion and the rest is information — which, if you have chosen Who to Follow carefully is information that might be relevant to you. For example, last week, Pier 9, an Australian publishing house in the Murdoch empire, advertised that they were looking for an editor with 2-3 years experience in the trade.

As far as I know, THEY DIDN’T PUT THE AD IN THE NEWSPAPER, THEY PUT IT ON TWITTER.

Agents, publishers, editors are putting stuff out that might be relevant to you. And you can follow them.

Meanwhile, back in the jungle, you can broadcast your own stuff. Wot stuff? Well, recently I had a short story scheduled to be read out on BayFM, the radio station in Byron Bay. It’s not every day I get a story read out on radio, I wanted people to tune in and listen, so I tweeted this to my 6 followers.

You tweeted it to six followers! What possible use could that be to you? I mean to say, 6 people are going to hear about it this way, you’d have been better off texting them. Wrong. Because I was also a member of that powerful social media site Ecademy (the first on the scene in 1998, BTW, compared with Facebook’s 2004) I had been lucky enough to meet Sam Borrett, one of the highflyers there. I became one of his followers, and he graciously become one of mine. When I tweeted to 6 people, he retweeted my message to his followers who number around 5,000. Some of those followers have 20,000 followers.

Are you getting the picture now?

Working on the old six-degrees-of-separation theory, even if you’re not fortunate enough to have a powerful follower at first hand as I had, you can bet your boots that somewhere down the track, one of your followers’ followers has. If you’re thinking of putting out a book in the future, get onto twitter. When your time comes, you’ll have a following, who also have a following, who also have a following, and that’s how something can become viral.

Let’s suppose you don’t use twitter and you have a book coming out. You go for newspapers and a bit of radio if you’re lucky.

How many people do you think will hear about your book?

[More in a fortnight on the social media scene in general, and why, as a writer, you need to be in it.]

Follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com#!/de_valera

Why Am I Here?

This isn’t going to be a blog about the meaning of life, a discourse in which I try to sell you my philosophy, all wrapped up in The Wonder of Me. Rather, it’s an overview of how and why I’m currently upping my profile on the web.

It’s all about book promotion.

As you might (or might not) know, I’ve a little freelance manuscript assessment business, specialising in the novel and the memoir. What I began to notice was that it was becoming so hard to get your first novel published by a large company in Australia that more and more emerging writers were taking to e book self-publishing or going with very small e book publishers who also had Print on Demand (POD) facilities in Australia. Urged on by cries that the internet was the coming thing, what with Kindle, etc. they were excited. Think of the size of the web! they said to me. Millions of people will see my book.

Hmmm, said I to myself. (Perhaps this is the place to admit that I have a streak of cynicism in my makeup. Well hidden, but it’s there.) Back to the point. Most of these writers had little coverage on the net, and the results of their digiPOD publishing ventures were extremely disappointing, to say the least. As the assessor/mentor, the one who had held their hands through all the rewrites, and who had kept in touch with them afterwards to see how this wondrous new digiPOD sally turned out, I was one of the first to hear the cries of disappointment and disillusion.

I felt for them. What to do?

I’m so old I can remember the time in Australia when all you had to do was write out your novel in longhand on a block of foolscap, pay a typist to type it up for you, send it off to a publisher and Bob’s your uncle — you’d be a published author in no time. This doesn’t happen anymore. But the ease and low cost of digiPOD publishing with such sites as the UK Council of the Arts funded Youwrite on, is persuading emerging writers that this is the new, modern book explosion. Just put up your website, and watch the sales roll in.

Ho.

As I was pondering this dilemma, the flyer for Sam Borrett’s social media networking seminar fell into my letterbox. I’m now sallying forth into what feels to me like The Wilderness of Zin. (This phrase, which I’d give my eye teeth to have written, is the name of a paper written by Leonard Woolley and T E Lawrence for the British Museum in 1914 — Lawrence later achieved fame as Lawrence of Arabia, for his part in raising the Arab revolt against the Turks during WWI.) The wails of the disappointed writers have woken me from my happy delusion that all the internet was good for was research and email, and putting up pictures of you with your new hair colour. So here I am, floundering about the wilderness, trying to discover things I can take back home to help those emerging writers.

Will I find anything that can help them? It’s too soon to know. But tell you what: I’m fascinated. There’s definitely something out there.

Wish me luck.

Danielle