Writing

The big red button of doom.

August 22, 2016 by andygraham Leave a Comment

Hitting the big-red ‘publish’ button is hard.

I’m a perfectionist, a planner. I’m not interested in typing up any old tripe and hoping for the best. I don’t want stray, commas, cluttering up my text; repetitive pronouns; superfluous descriptions; or long, winding info-dumps that are being choked to death by adverbs. I want to write good stories that read well, just like the books I enjoy reading.

In other news, experts have concluded that squares have more corners than circles.

This is hardly a revelation, and I know I’m not alone in this mindset. However, this tweaking nature of mine (not twerking, the world’s not ready for that) was once more made apparent this morning. I was re-reading a story I wrote a few months ago. It’s called Switch, a short story from the Lords of Misrule world. The story forms part of a compilation of stories by various authors: Glimpse.

This is the opening of Switch.

A grid of shadows lay across the bed, rigid lines of moonlight that sliced the crumpled sheets into squares. Benn screwed his eyes shut and lay still, listening to his breathing.

Had it worked?

Reaching across with his left hand, he probed at the flesh around his hip. It was tender, but it didn’t hurt.

Maybe it had worked?

He opened his eyes.

Benn twitched the thin sheet to one side and pulled his knee up to his chest. He was gritting his teeth, biting back the pain that was always there. Only today, with his bare legs bathed in the bright moonlight, his hip didn’t hurt. There was a red dot on his hip where they’d injected him with this miracle compound of theirs, but otherwise he was unmarked. He took a deep breath, and, before he could change his mind, pushed himself to his feet. A momentary stumble, and he was standing: cane free, no pain. He stood still, reveling in the feeling. Blah blah woof woof.

Now. . .

There are several things that I’d change. They’re not wrong as such (though my BrE eyes struggle with the spelling of ‘reveling’ that seems to have slipped in there), the story’s just not as I would have written it now.

After that realisation, my thought process ran along these lines:

As an author contributing to a compilation, my asking for changes at such a late stage is not going to go down well.
If I changed it, would I be tempted to go back to it again at a later date and request more changes?
At what point would I be happy?
Do I have time? (Says the man writing a blog and trying to make it pitch-perfect, the hypocrisy of life 😉 )
This story could be important.
Should I just leave Switch as it is and put it down to experience?

Is this normal?

I think yes.

I’m going to say this indecision is normal behaviour and a sign that I’m progressing as a writer. The more I write, and more importantly, the more I read, the better I understand how this process of writing a story works. I still have a long way to go, but the quicksand I’ve been wading through is a little more like a quagmire now, at least in places.

The ‘process of progress’, as with any profession/ job/ sport or skill, primarily depends on two things:

putting the hours in,
putting the product of those hours on the line.

In medicine/ therapy it may mean treating someone instead of just talking about what the studies say (this is a theme that crops up in the Lords of Misrule). In sport it may mean competing. In writing it means publishing. It opens you up to potential criticism, but helps you to hone your skills. Again, this is not exactly groundbreaking news, but for me there was a big difference between writing a book, admitting I’m writing a book, and actually publishing it.

Joanna Penn, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and Neil Gaiman have also written on and around this topic.

But, but, but . . .

You’re only as good as your last gig/ story/ deal/ game, right?

Right.

A poor story, with dodgy editing (and I’ve read a few recently that have made me want to drown my kindle), may put a reader off your work for life. However, the beauty (and curse) of self-publishing means you have many more chances to keep getting that last event ‘right’. There are also a lot of readers on the planet (some still learning to read or yet to be born), and for every ‘hater’ there will be a ‘liker’ somewhere.

Publishing is important for progress.

Courses can help. ‘How to’ manuals and articles are great. Professional editing is invaluable, but reading, writing, and self-reflection on that process is the best way to improve. At least that’s the best way I’ll improve, and part of that process includes me hitting that big-red button.

The decision?

The story remains the same.

Switch stands.

So . . .

Drop me a line and let me know what you would change in the opening paragraphs. I’d be interested to see if we agree. (I promise I don’t bite.)

And on that note a huge thanks to all the authors who have contributed to Glimpse, and especially to those who worked behind the scenes to put it together: Hayley Lawson, Michelle Lowery, Debbie Cassidy, Sarah Dalton, Christine Royce Niles & apologies to anyone I’ve forgotten!

Stripping DRM from my Amazon published ebook

January 2, 2016 by andygraham 1 Comment

This post is about digital rights management (DRM), why I chose to enable it on my Amazon ebook, why I changed my mind, and most importantly, how I removed it. If you are only interested in the last point, click here.

Many of you will already be familiar with DRM. If not, wikipedia’s definition is this:

It’s a contentious issue, some people are pro, some are against. You can read more about how DRM applies to ebooks here and here.

My understanding of DRM is this:

Pro(s):

Your book is safer from piracy

Cons:

It’s harder for people to share your work (unlike print books, which are easily shared).
If a reader moves off kindle to another e-reader, they can’t take a DRM enabled book with them, and would have to buy it again.
If someone really wants to hack your book, it’s an easy thing to do (do an internet search to see what I mean).
Once you have it enabled on your book, you can’t get rid of it.

The rookie

I published my first novel at the beginning of Dec 2015 on KDP select. Amazon gives you an option of enabling DRM or not, and their drop down info box reads like this.

As you can see, Amazon gives you a little information on what DRM is, but not a whole lot as to the ramifications of having it. Maybe it’s not really in their interest to go into more details. But, in this day and age, if you are capable of publishing a book on Amazon, you should be able to do a little research into DRM. Amazon also clearly states that once you publish your book, you cannot change its DRM setting.

As a self-confessed luddite, I was quite pleased that I managed to self-publish, but I didn’t do any research into DRM, and enabled it.

Why?

FRANKLIN is my first book. I worked on it for months, and spent a lot of money on editing (which I don’t regret at all). It is my proverbial precious snowflake, and I was determined to protect it from the millions of virtual pirates salivating over their keyboards, just waiting to hack an unknown author’s work, and distribute it for free (if only . . .)
Coming from a background in music where piracy and streaming has hit a lot of musicians hard, I was all for the idea of protecting my work. (The piracy vs. publicity debate is still very much alive in the music world.)
I had been so focused on the creation of the book, I hadn’t really thought through the publishing process as well as I could have.
I didn’t check into DRM, and to be honest, despite Amazon’s very clear warning that once you enable DRM it’s permanent, it didn’t really register. (This.)

Publicity is oxygen to any business.

I enabled DRM. A few weeks later, I finally got round to reading David Gaughran’s book Let’s Get Digital. In it he has a chapter devoted to this issue. For me that chapter was worth paying the price of the book alone, and I highly recommend the entire book, especially for new authors. He makes a convincing argument against DRM. e.g. examples of how freely available (and non-DRM) work has improved book sales overall. I won’t attempt to rewrite his chapter here.

I also checked out some other sources on the net that I trust, such as Joanna Penn, who doesn’t have it enabled on her work (see here for confirmation and a guest talk on this issue).

Permanent means not temporary

After realising that I may have made a (rookie) mistake on this matter, I looked to remove the DRM from my book. I couldn’t. The box clearly states permanent.

Surely there was a way?

After trawling through several contradictory threads on forums, I went back to the source: Amazon. I sent them a polite email, asking how I could remove DRM without losing my reviews.

Within hours they had replied.

Amazon’s email.

Amazon states that the only way to remove DRM from a book is to unpublish and then republish.
You will lose the sales rank of that book.
Any reviews you have will be transferred, as long as all of the book details match.

(They then wished me a happy new year blessed with joy and contentment.)

Why did I decided to strip it?

My book had been on Amazon for less than a month. After a mild flurry of sales when it was launched, it was languishing in the charts (to put it kindly). At one point, I almost emailed Amazon because I thought my report page was broken. It’s not. I just wasn’t selling. There are various reasons behind this (that’s a future post), and I don’t think for a minute that just by having DRM enabled, I was killing my sales.

The advantage of the low sales ranking was that I wasn’t really bothered about losing it. (This man expresses it much more eloquently). If I could keep my reviews in the process, then I didn’t have much to lose.

Un- and republishing didn’t take long, but I did have a nail biting wait for the reviews to reappear. During this period I emailed Amazon again to confirm that the reviews would reappear. Within hours, once more, I received a reply saying that the editions had been linked and that it would happen, but may take up to 48 hours.

Within an hour of that email, all the reviews were there.

The whole process, from my first query to Amazon to the new, non-DRM version of my book being published with the old reviews, had taken just under 24 hours. I would like to say that Amazon’s customer/ author support has been exemplary through out this process.

Nothing new under the sun.

This is not something I intend to make a habit of, nor something I would recommend for anyone, especially a more established author with a decent sales ranking. There is also no guarantee that this policy will remain. But, for a rook just cutting his teeth, it was a good solution, and a very good lesson.

What frustrates me most is that the information was out there. I bought my copy of Let’s Get Digital months ago, but only got round to reading it recently. If I had stepped back from my drive to publish to do a simple internet search, I wouldn’t have had this problem.

Maybe I’ve made too big a deal out of having DRM enabled, but once I had decided that I wanted to strip it, then it would have irritated me for ever if I hadn’t. (I’m a veteran of the long meander through the rabbit warren of the 3rd conditional: if I hadn’t enabled DRM, then . . .)

There is nothing new under the sun, every mistake has already been made, every excuse already told. But occasionally, just sometimes, permanent can mean temporary.

It’s done.

November 21, 2015 by andygraham 2 Comments

After fourteen months of prep, writing, editing, and a fair amount of hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth, it’s done.

Franklin – a brother in search of himself goes live on an Amazon store near you in early Dec 2015.

What have I learnt in the process?

I enjoyed it. A lot.
I still have things to learn. A lot of them.
Writing a 125K word epic as my first novel was a tad ambitious (see point two)
Those adverbs I was (liberally) peppering my sentences with, (mostly) weren’t needed.
Subtle is good, obtuse is annoying. Those plot twists and sneaky references that are obvious to me, aren’t always clear to the reader. The more I found myself explaining things to my beta readers, the more I realised I had to go back to the drawing board.
I have an annoying habit of picking a word or phrase, and then (liberally) peppering a whole page with it (see point four).
One meaty adjective is worth two vegetarian ones, or a string of vegan ones.
But two paragraphs look better on a page than one. Not as dense.
The search function of scrivener/ word etc is a great tool for editing. I typed in ‘ly’ and played ‘seek and destroy’ with the adverbs (see point four), and subsequently, I had a go at words like ‘then’, ‘started’, ‘turned’ etc.
Dealing with feedback is an art. Some of my beta readers were as subtle as an eye surgeon, others as delicate as an avalanche. All of them were rather good (AmE – ‘totally awesome’/ 1970’s South Wales English – ‘tidy’ or ‘lush’).
I could have changed some of the names to make them easier to say or not quite so ‘smart/ cute’.
My. Punctuation. Sucks. I have a particular problem with commas. I either see an ‘and’ coming a few words away and start haemorrhaging commas across the page, or I spread them across the text the way a farmer sows seeds, and hope that some of them will stick.
The Oxford Comma is a vindictive little sod (see above point), who lies in wait to trip the unwary. And probably mugs little old ladies pushing prams full of orphans.
There’s nothing wrong with ‘clever’ writing, until it gets in the way of the story – the literary equivalent of a beehive haircut in the cinema.
I have a tendency to get up on my electronic soap box and rant (that may come as no surprise to some old friends).
I’m allowed to put more than one sentence into a paragraph.
I should have written the prequel before I wrote Book One – I would have saved myself some timeline headaches, and comments like “did all your female characters have babies while they were in pre-school?”
I couldn’t have done this without the support of a whole host of friends. I wrote the book but there was a team of people around me who gave me the framework to do that. In particular my wife: a one woman ecosystem of encouragement, patience, and love (while she’s asleep).
One swallow doesn’t make a summer, and one book doesn’t make an author. I’m not sure I’ve earned the right to that title. Yet.
I’m a perfectionist and like things to be symmetrical. So, this point is only here to push the list to 21. Part of my rehab.
See point one.

Now where?

Book One is done (barring any horrendous plot holes I may have missed or typos lurking behind the next page). Book Zero (the prequel) is about to be sent to the editor. Book Two is bubbling. Once Ray Franklin and his friends & family are at peace, I’ll stop playing whack-a-mole with the other ideas that keep popping up in my head, and try and coax them out into the light.

Reviews and emails!!!

Until then, on behalf of every (new) author: if you read a book, please leave a review and join their mailing list! The reviews help us get noticed, and the email addresses give us a little bit of professional independence. Don’t worry, most of us hate spam as much as you do.

The WOT Challenge

July 10, 2015 by andygraham Leave a Comment

In June 2014 I decided to undertake The WOT challenge.

In June 2015 I finished The WOT challenge.

Here is my interview about it with . . . err . . . me.

Q. What’s The WOT challenge?

A. Reading all The Wheel Of Time books back to back.

Q. Is that a trilogy?

A. 5 trilogies.

Q. ???????????????

A. Exactly, 15 books (including prologue). It’s a series of high fantasy novels by the late Robert Jordan (pen name of Oliver Rigney Jr.). Completed by Brandon Sanderson after Mr Jordan’s passing, it weighs in at a total of around 4.4 million words.

Q. 12 months reading 1 series of books? Was it worth it?

A. Yes.

Q. Will you do it again?

A. At some point – once I can look at someone with a braid in their hair and not think of the Two Rivers’ Womens’ Circle or see a skirt and not think of ‘smoothing it’ or ‘plucking at it’.

Q. Any regrets?

A. – There was a moment in the middle of the series where I wondered whether I had made the right decision. There were other (non swords & sorcery) books that I wanted to read, I was running out of space on my shelves and there are some passages that drag in places (Valan Luca, I’m looking at you…)

But . . .

Those other books weren’t going to go stale. And for every braid pulling, muttonheaded moment in The WOT there were passages that were gripping. For each dip in the middle of the central books, there was a rise towards the end that carried them over to the next. For every man that would never understand a woman and vice versa (Nynaeve, I’m looking at you…) there were moments of ‘how did he (they) come up with that?’ For every ‘good’ character that we lost, there was an equally satisfying comeuppance for the ‘bad’. And some of the sense of humour (Talmanes, I’m looking at you!) and creativity (e.g. the use of ‘Gateways’ in the Last Battle) towards the end is fantastic.

Q. “It’s all been done before/ it’s a rip off of LOTR/ what’s with the bible references/ it’s a black and white cliche/ just look at sentence X as an example of him being a bad writer…”

A. Blah blah woof woof. Yes. Many of the themes have been done before. Most stories have been ‘done before’, most songs have been sung before. Many stories, regardless of the setting, explore similar themes: loss, alienation, hate, revenge, jealousy and so on. In other words, love – feeling, ‘owning’, the lack of, search for or resentment of love. (And possibly also death and the fear of dying and failure, these fears are arguably very similar). Life and living comes down to one thing – love. All these essential elements of any type of story telling through words, sound or picture are present in The WOT.

And for those of you who are pulling out one sentence as an example of Mr Jordan being a ‘bad author’. Count the number of words in that sentence and then work that out as a percentage of the total number of words in the series.

Q. – Enough teenage cod psychology, back to the challenge! Why did you do it?

A. First reason – I hadn’t found time to read the last book (The Memory of Light) after it was published. When I started reading it I had forgotten some of the details. Logical solution: read everything again.

Second reason – I had given up on fantasy novels, I thought I was too old for them. Then George R.R. Martin became an ‘overnight success’. (1) All of a sudden, fantasy was acceptable again. I gave into peer pressure and read Game of Thrones and really enjoyed it. Yes, GOT is more graphic and realistic than many fantasy novels and has so been deemed by some as more ‘grown up’ (2) and so is ok to read. But for me, it was a logical step to read WOT again. Going back to my formative days as a reader (Druss, Belgarion, Sam Vimes and, yes even you, Frodo Baggins, I may be looking at all of you again at some point).

Third reason – why not? (3)

Fourth reason – a friend of mine had just started the challenge and inspired me to do the same.

Q. As a reader what did you get out of it?

A. A lot of enjoyment.

Q. As a rookie author what did you get out of it?

A. The imagination put into the world building (‘Randland’) and the histories are both inspiring and daunting. As for how the authors managed keep track of the various plots and characters, I have no idea. I have a lot to learn. A lot. Really. Lots…

Q. What was your thought on finishing the series?

A. Is there going to be a sequel?

– X –

1 – I’m being ‘ironical’.

2 – ‘Adult fantasy novels’ sound very different to ‘grown up fantasy novels.’

3 – This post is turning out a little more gushing that I planned. WOT is a fantasy series. It’s not everyone’s thing. I get it.

It’s my house!

July 6, 2015 by andygraham Leave a Comment

A friend of mine recently made a comment about feedback from beta readers and editors:

“It’s your house, you can paint it what colour you want.”

He’s right. You can do whatever you want with your house. You can paint it in an eyecurdling mix of colours. You can fill it with a smorgasbord of cultural goulash. Go obscure, contemporary, cool, sentimental or just ‘you’. Don’t even clean it! It’s your house.

However, if you want someone to rent or buy your house, or even visit from time to time, you may want to tone it down. If you want people to do more than just poke their head round the door, choose a less deafening combination of colours. If you don’t want your visitors to suddenly remember there’s a nicer place a few doors down, batten down your eccentric urges. People complain they get lost in the corridors? Get rid of the sprawling extension.

If your tastes are a little distinct and you want people to look at, eat, listen to or even read what you are creating, remember that not everyone will appreciate your individuality.

That said, standing by your principles and having faith in what you are doing is admirable. I need to do more of it. If more people ‘walked the walk’, the world would be a better place to live in.

A few of the colour schemes clash something awful.

I’ve built my house. I’m now redecorating it. Again. There are a few draughty windows that need fixing and a couple of leaks. Some of the cracks are now showing through the wall paper.

I’ve found a builder to have a look at it and make suggestions. Hopefully, I’ll soon be able to open the doors to the public. Hopefully, that public will want to come back, with their friends.

The great word cull

May 4, 2015 by andygraham 1 Comment

As I mentioned in my last post, the feedback is starting to come in from the ‘beta readers’. It’s been an interesting experience, trying to remain objective (and mature) while my babies are torn to pieces in front of me.

“Why are you capitalising a pronoun after speech marks?” He shouted.

Some of the comments are technical, typos and grammar errors which I missed. Some were careless mistakes. Others were things I wasn’t sure of while I was writing the rough draft and just pushed on in order to get the words down. It’s mildly annoying on a level as I was quietly smug about my grammar not being too bad (another bubble burst). But, it’s all part of the learning curve and avoiding these things in future will save time and make the reading smoother.

You say tomato…

There has been good feedback: “very evocative language”, “I like the plot and characters”; and negative: “too much going on”, “too many people”, “it’s a slow burner but now I’m hooked” (i.e. the beginning is boring). Some opinions have been polar opposites; Dr. Swann has been described as an irrelevance by one reader and one of the most rounded characters by another. Some readers prefer short sentences, others long (though to be fair, a few of my sentences seem to have an allergy to full stops).

Subtle is good. Obtuse isn’t.

I’ve had to explain why X happened or Y said Z. Sometimes the reader had missed something, other times the world which is so clear in my head hasn’t reached the page. But the more explaining I had to do with certain passages, the more I realised I hadn’t achieved what I wanted and needed to rework them.

There have been questions over the motives, reasonings and actions of some characters but all in all the overriding message has been “I enjoyed it.”

I was never expecting the story to come back with no concerns or question marks. Nice though it would have been to have someone say ‘It’s perfect, the best thing I’ve ever read!’, I’d’ve been a little suspicious and it wouldn’t have helped.

I’m immensely grateful to the people who have given me feedback and those that are waiting in the wings. The fairly blunt opinions I’ve had to listen have been both bruising at times and refreshing in an odd way.

Once the last few critiques come in I’ll see where I stand. Then, I’ll have to decide which of my babies (and there are just over 116K of them) I’m going to cut and paste into the great word graveyard in the sky.

Writing

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