James Becker's Blog

I may have mentioned my involvement, in quite a small way, with the National Cyber Awards and the annual ceremony and presentation of those awards which this year will take place in London on Monday September 25.

It’s quite a glitzy affair, where the great and the good of the world of cyber protection and security meet and greet and celebrate their successes in the ongoing war against hackers and other assorted nasties with bad attitudes, a desire for other people’s money and access to malignant software. Both the guest list and particularly the finalists reflect the incredibly diverse and varied individuals and companies involved and their often very different fields of expertise and interest.

Present and past sponsors, judges and finalists for these awards include IBM, Amazon, PaloAlto, BAE,  the National Crime Agency, the National Police Chiefs Council, the Financial Conduct Authority, United Nations, schools and universities, BUPA, the NHS, the NSPCC, the National Trust, military units, journalists and current and former ministers and politicians.

The United Kingdom government has always been invested in cyber security as a concept for the simple and very practical reason that a serious and successful cyber attack could cripple major parts of our infrastructure and in some cases perhaps bring the country to a virtual standstill.

And that rather long preamble explains why at 0745 last Thursday (15th June) I was standing outside Number 10 waiting to be let in and wondering why Larry, the Downing Street cat, appeared to have priority. On the other hand, the cat is a resident and I’m not, so that question is actually irrelevant.

To get past the heavily armed policemen who are a permanent fixture at the end of Downing Street, I required a printed invitation, an invitation that matched the list the officer was holding in his hand, and sight of my driving licence to confirm that my ugly mug bore at least a passing resemblance to the photograph printed on it. That was followed by an airport-style search of everything metal I had in my possession, a scan of my bag and finally my passage through the usual kind of portal.

And hence to the famous black door.

I wasn’t there by myself, but with most of the other National Cyber Awards 2023 judges who will be deciding the winners of the competition, which means which people or companies will be given the plaudits and applause of their colleagues, and even their rivals and competitors, as well as receiving a small non-functioning metal robot to mark their victory.

We were all there for the same reason, to attend as a group – the first time we had all ever been in the same room at the same time – to talk about the Awards Ceremony and more pertinently the judging of the event.

It was an interesting, informative and convivial meeting, made all the more so because of the frankly impressive surroundings. Inside Number 10 it’s like a rabbit warren, with doors opening up in all directions, corridors vanishing into the distance, beautiful wood panelled walls, chandeliers, priceless works of art and wonderful furnishings. Because there were so many of us, we needed a biggish room and were accommodated in the state dining room, sitting around a very long oblong table. We even got coffee and a selection of Downing Street pastries, which were actually rather good.

It’s a busy place, and our time there was limited, so a couple of hours later we walked out of the building before going our separate ways. A hardcore of us, which in this context meant those of us who were the least busy and perhaps the least employed or even least employable in my case, walked down Whitehall until we found a convenient café with enough seating space for the, I think, eight of us who were left. More chat and conviviality, and then the numbers slowly thinned as people with appointments began to drift away.

A most interesting day, and one that I personally enjoyed very much. It’s rather good to be able to begin a sentence with: ‘Well, when I was last at Number10,’ and to actually be telling the truth. But even though I don’t move in the kind of circles where such self-aggrandisement is either common or even tolerated, I do have my own personal triumph that I can drop into a lull in the conversation whenever it seems appropriate.

What I can say with perfect truth is that I’m now on first-name terms with an important and well-respected Downing Street resident who works in the Cabinet Office. What I wouldn’t then add is that his name is Larry and his job is Chief Mouser.

Please visit the website: https://thenationalcyberawards.org/

Obviously I’m not the first person to make a statement like the title of this blog post, but I recall an article from a decade ago that emphasised very clearly just how little money most authors of ebooks actually make as a result of all their hard work.

The article referred to a report by Bowker which stated that the average price of commercially published ebooks in the United States fell by about 8% from 2010 to 2011, for fiction from around $5.69 to $5.24, with non-fiction dropping even more dramatically from over $9 per book down to around $6.47, a drop of about 25% in price. It’s worth mentioning that non-fiction ebooks were still costing about 20% more than novels in 2011, but the year before the price difference was 65%, so the gap between the two types of book was narrowing, and it’s also clear that prices across all genres were falling steadily.

And it’s worth emphasising that these prices were for commercially-produced ebooks, not self-published novels, which were typically selling for substantially lower prices, often between 50 pence and £2.99 (then roughly 75 cents to $4.50).

In fact, the blog article pointed out, some ebooks were selling for less than the cost of a monthly magazine, and it was suggested that one reason for the uncertain state of the world of publishing was not a lack of good books and decent writers, but simply the huge reduction in profits because ebooks were then so cheap. And all this at a time when hardback coffee-table books were surging in price, some then costing around £50/$75 each.

Perhaps the most dramatic figure the article came up with was that the ebook price of an average novel of about 100,000 words meant that the author was actually earning about 1 cent for every 200 words written, and that the only recourse for the publishing industry was to immediately and dramatically increase the price charged for every ebook they sold.

Most of which I completely disagreed with then and still disagree with now, because the author had missed several important points. In fact, I think most people in the industry are still missing these same points.

There is a fundamental difference between an electronic book and a physical book which reports of this kind consistently fail to recognise or acknowledge. To physically produce a hardback or paperback novel requires a conspicuous consumption of resources – paper, card, ink and so on – plus warehouse space to store it, and the inevitable transport costs to distribute it, all overlaid by the staff costs at the publishing house and the company used for typesetting and printing. For a typical novel with a first print run of around 25,000 copies, the total cost is likely to be well in excess of £20,000/$30,000. The royalty paid to the author will be around 7% of the selling price – not the cover price – of the book.

But to produce an electronic book, once the manuscript has been prepared, costs almost nothing – certainly well under £500/$750 even if a professional cover is designed – and the finished product can be sold as often and as quickly as the market demands. The author’s royalty will be around 20% of the selling price from a commercial publisher, or 40% or 70% if the book is self-published. Although the contents of the paperback and ebook versions of a novel are identical in terms of the text, in all other respects they are entirely different in every way. Trying to compare one with the other is pointless.

You cannot assess the earnings of any author on the basis of revenue received per number of words written. This only works for short stories and magazine articles where the writer is paid a flat sum for his contribution, irrespective of the subsequent sales of the publication. In fact, there’s a very valid argument that ebooks are still far too expensive – not far too cheap – simply because each sale costs the publisher virtually nothing and the reading public knows that.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I genuinely believe that the market will only really take off when the price of a commercially produced ebook drops to the level at which it becomes a genuine impulse purchase, and I normally assess that as the cost of a cup of coffee – certainly under £3 – and ideally less than that.

There’s an old story concerning the invention of the ballpoint pen, which I believe to be true. An English company began marketing the pen at the highest possible price they thought the market could bear, and about the same time an American company started selling the new pen as cheaply as they possibly could. The English company went bankrupt, and the success of the American firm is reflected in the fact that almost everybody these days calls a ballpoint pen a ‘biro’, in most cases without having the slightest idea where the name came from.

I believe that the most successful publishers of ebooks will be those companies which embrace the ‘pile them high and sell them cheap’ marketing concept which has worked so consistently in the past, and those that go to the wall will be the ones who cling onto old concepts of the value of the written word.

As always, time will tell.

Ten years ago I remember seeing a list of arguably the most unpopular novels of the time, on the basis that they were the titles most commonly abandoned in hotel rooms, the data being compiled by the budget chain Travelodge. The publishing world was somewhat different in 2012 to the present day and I thought it might be instructive to compare the results then to the present day results, or as near to the present day as I could find, and see which current novels have also so displeased their purchasers that they simply discarded them, not even being prepared to carry them out to their cars.

It may not have come as a particular surprise to anyone to learn that the book which came top in 2012, with around 7,000 copies being abandoned, was the erotic bestseller by E L James, Fifty Shades of Grey, which accounted for almost one in every three books that had been dumped, Travelodge stating that in all a total of 21,786 books had been recovered from its 36,500 hotel rooms during 2011. It will probably also not be entirely surprising that the other two books in the trilogy – Fifty Shades Freed and Fifty Shades Darker – also made the ‘Books Left Behind’ worst-seller list at numbers 4 and 7 respectively. I haven’t read any of these three novels, and so I’m not qualified to comment on their literary worth, but I do think it’s significant that most people I’ve spoken to who have read them, or have tried to read them, have dismissed them as boring rubbish.

But I am familiar with the work of the late Steig Larsson, whose three novels also featured prominently in this list, and again their inclusion does not come as any kind of a surprise to me, because I thought the books were really very average indeed. In fact, I couldn’t even be bothered to finish the last one in the series. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins also proved to be unpopular, as did her other two books. But as well as this collection of entirely forgettable novels, there were also some surprises, including The Fry Chronicles by Stephen Fry and John le Carre’s classic Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

The full and unexpurgated list 2012 was as follows:

Fifty Shades of Grey    E.L. JamesThe Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Stieg LarssonThe Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest Stieg LarssonFifty Shades Freed    E.L. JamesThe Hunger Games    Suzanne CollinsThe Girl Who Played With Fire Stieg LarssonFifty Shades Darker    E.L. JamesCatching Fire Suzanne CollinsMockingjay    Suzanne CollinsThe Help    Kathryn StockettOne Day    David NichollsA Tiny Bit Marvellous Dawn FrenchSteve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography Steve JobsDiary Of A Wimpy Kid    Jeff KinneyThe Brightest Star In The Sky Marian KeyesThe Fry Chronicles    Stephen FryRoom    Emma DonoghueStrengthsFinder 2.0 Tom RathThe Confession    John GrishamTinker Tailor Soldier Spy John Le Carre

There are of course a number of conclusions one can draw from this data. It could be argued that the abandoned books are an accurate reflection of the changing reading habits of the British public, and a spokeswoman for Travelodge confirmed that they had noted a change in the types of books found. Previously, the majority of dumped books were either celebrity biographies or chick lit, both of which categories had clearly failed to live up to the low expectations of their purchasers. So, in 2007 the most abandoned book was The Blair Years by Alastair Campbell, which reportedly failed to satisfy on any number of levels, while the following year it was Piers Morgan’s equally unimpressive Don’t You Know Who I Am? In 2009, the book most commonly tossed aside by Travelodge customers was Katie Price’s autobiography Pushed to the Limit, which presumably she paid somebody to write for her, just like all her other books: at least E L James actually wrote what she put her name to.

Perhaps inevitably, ‘unusual’ reading material was discovered at several hotels in the chain, including a bag of Kama Sutra books found in a room previously occupied by an elderly couple in Scarborough, and in Peterborough a company CEO left behind a suitcase filled with comics. And I really don’t quite know what to make of that!

In contrast, here is the most recent list, again from Travelodge, for 2018:

The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret AtwoodThe Couple Next Door Sharri LapenaBad Dad David WalliamsOrigin Dan BrownThe Secret Rhonda BryneThe Girl on the Train Paula HawkinsPaul O’Grady’s Country Life Paul O’GradySharp Objects Gillian FlynnDairy of a Wimpy Kid: The Getaway Jeff KinneyHarry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone J.K. RowlingSecret Garden: An Inky Treasure Hunt and Colouring Book Johanna BasfordIt Stephen KingThe World’s Worst Children David WalliamsFantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them J.K. RowlingBig Little Lies Liana MoriartyAll Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class Tim ShipmanHarry Potter Colouring Book Warner Bros.Thirteen Reasons Why Jay AsherThe Art of the Deal Donald TrumpPrincess Beauty and the Beast Disney

But it wasn’t just books that guests abandoned in Travelodge hotels. Among the more unusual items found discarded during 2019 to 2021 were:

A 3-foot tall inflatable unicornAirline tickets to DubaiTwo first class airline tickets to the MaldivesA suit of armourA child’s Range RoverA miniature model railway setA morning suitA box of Rod Stewart CDsA vintage violinA brand new Rolex watchA Cartier engagement ringA pet poodle called PuddingA wedding bouquetA bonsai treeA keyboardA set of company tax returnsCasino chips valued at £3000A money tree to which £10,000 worth of £50 notes had been attachedA wigwamA handcrafted dolls houseA set of Hermes tarot cardsA stamp collection

and

A 6 foot heart made out of red rosesA R2-D2 robot

both of which would have been difficult to miss when the guests made a final inspection of their room before leaving.

As a nation, America is far more religious than the United Kingdom, and its residents appear to be far more sensitive to what they read, or can or should read, in books. There’s an annual programme called Banned Books Week (bannedbooksweek.org), that is intended to call attention to threats to the First Amendment of the United States’ Constitution, a programme which has been running for over 40 years. Its motto is ‘Books unite us. Censorship divides us.’ Believe it or not, books – a lot of books – still get banned every year in America, and the programme is trying to get Americans to support the idea that all books, regardless of content, should be disseminated. Such banning is what’s sometimes referred to as the ‘Mary Whitehouse Syndrome,’ which can be summarised in the expression ‘I don’t want to read or watch this, and therefore you can’t either.’

This banning is not the work of the government – unlike certain books published in Britain which have incurred official displeasure and been forcibly removed from the shelves, everything from Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Spycatcher – but imposed by libraries and bookstores and, increasingly, by schools. Three of the most surprising, or perhaps predictable, depending on your point of view, classic novels to suffer this fate in America this year were To Kill a Mockingbird, Gone with the Wind and Catcher in the Rye, but in the past a huge number of other volumes have been banned in the States and elsewhere. These range from incomprehensible choices like Black Beauty and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the virtually unreadable Ulysses and almost equally unreadable The Da Vinci Code.

All of which raises the obvious question: how free is free speech? Are there some books which are so bad, for whatever reason, that it is better for the public not to be able to see the text under any circumstances? Perhaps it would be better to look at the matter from the other side, as it were. What kind of damage would be caused to a reader’s psyche or moral outlook if they were exposed to, for example, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone? And, yes, it was banned. Are the readers immediately going to race out and buy magic wands and memorise the words of the various spells that J K Rowling invented? And if they do, does it really matter?

The argument against that book was that it promoted witchcraft. Well, I read it, and it didn’t seem to me that it was doing that: I just thought it was a good story. But even if that was what somebody read into it, was that necessarily a bad thing? It’s perfectly possible to argue that every religion in the world is simply a form of enhanced and codified superstition, because by definition it is impossible to prove a single fact about what is claimed by its adherents to be the truth. In this respect, witchcraft is no less viable a religious concept than Christianity, so why shouldn’t it be promoted?

So should there be limits at all? Should a book which promotes the idea of murdering police officers be banned? Or one that espouses paedophilia, or racial hatred, or serial killing?

The reality, of course, is that today, with the rise of the electronic book and the Internet, it is effectively impossible to ban anything. Anyone, no matter what their agenda, can publish whatever they like. On the Internet, you can read the kind of books that no commercial publisher would ever consider publishing, in even their wildest and most deranged of dreams.

Until fairly recently, I would have happily stood up in any forum and defended the right of any author to write whatever book he or she wanted, no matter what its contents, and no matter who would be offended by it. I genuinely believed that the right to free speech should transcend all other issues, not a point of view shared by many people these days with the advent of the idiotic Woke revolution. And, in fact, I still believe this to be the case with regard to novels. Unfortunately, many publishers don’t.

And then I had the misfortune to read a book by a man named Ken Ham called The Great Dinosaur Mystery Solved, and my views concerning non-fiction books changed almost overnight. This book, without the slightest shadow of doubt, deserves to be banned, simply because some people who read it might actually believe that there is some truth in the collection of rabid nonsense he has produced as a theory. Basically, this man believes that dinosaurs didn’t live over 65 million years ago but a mere 6000 years ago, presumably to agree with Archbishop James Ussher’s utterly ludicrous suggestion in the 17th century that the universe and everything in it was created at about 6pm on the 22nd of October 4004 BCE. This is despite the utterly overwhelming and completely undisputed scientific evidence to the contrary, evidence from almost every scientific discipline from geology and geography to meteorology and anthropology as well as, obviously, palaeontology. In fact, this is only one of a positive flock of similar volumes he has written, all of which, I gather, espouse different shades of the same argument: everything science has proved is a lie and everything in the Bible – one of the most heavily-edited books in existence –  is the absolute truth.

He’s promoting creationism, obviously, which as a theory is significantly less valid than even my own personal favourite ‘Theory that Fairies live at the Bottom of my Garden,’ and makes no sense whatsoever. Everybody, of course, is entitled to their own point of view, but I firmly believe that a book purporting to be non-fiction should at the very least fulfil certain basic criteria, the most obvious of which is that it should be based on fact. That’s what ‘non-fiction’ actually means. If he was writing a novel, it wouldn’t bother me, but this man is advancing this as a serious scientific proposition, and to me that seems very dangerous.

In fact, this isn’t a book that should be banned. This really is a book that should be burnt.

 

As I said in my last blog post, almost exactly ten years ago Simon & Schuster published my thriller The Ripper Secret. Their marketing was quite successful, with the novel being available in all the major supermarket chains and the high street retailers. As well as the usual kinds of promotions, the publishing house also broadcast a podcast I recorded on its website and featured a short article I wrote about Victorian detection methods in the site’s ‘Dark Pages’ section.

It looks as if the timing was quite providential as well, with the second of a two-part BBC documentary being broadcast on the same day as the book’s publication, and with the level of interest in this most notorious of all serial killers still remarkably high. Inputting the search term ‘Jack the Ripper’ into Amazon a decade ago, it came up with just under 3,400 items, an astonishing number of books and films bearing in mind that his unresolved and unsolved killing spree took place almost a century and a half ago. Doing the same thing on Google produced almost ten million hits.

Today, we’ve moved on a bit. Now the Amazon search brings up over 4,000 items and Google produces just under twenty million results, so if anything general interest in this subject has grown.

I remember recording and then watching the BBC documentary. It was interesting, though the conclusions it came to were somewhat predictable and – like a lot of the things the BBC produced then and still produces now – very selective. Their principal suspects were Montague John Druitt and a Polish Jew named Aaron Kosminski, though no believable evidence was advanced to indicate that either man could have been Jack the Ripper. It’s worth pointing out that in all over 200 different suspects have been suggested over the years, and some 30 of these have been seriously considered, ranging from the sublime (Prince Albert Victor with or without the assistance of Queen Victoria’s Physician-In-Ordinary Sir William Gull) to the ridiculous (‘Jill the Ripper’ or the ‘mad midwife’).

The documentary also provided reconstructions of some of the recorded events, and these were not always as accurate as they certainly should have been. For example, when Israel Schwartz witnessed an altercation between a man and a woman who might have been Elizabeth Stride, he also described another man on the opposite side of the street, a man who then began following him. In the BBC’s version, this man didn’t appear at all, and the scene showed Schwartz passing very close by the arguing couple and getting an excellent look at the man involved, which certainly wasn’t the case according to his own sworn testimony.

The programme makers also were highly selective when considering the medical evidence. With one single exception, every doctor who examined any of the victims of the Ripper concluded that the killer had to have had at least some medical and anatomical knowledge. The single exception was Dr Thomas Bond, who stated that he didn’t believe the murderer had any surgical ability, but both he and the BBC conspicuously failed to explain how the Ripper had managed to remove Catherine Eddowes’s left kidney, without damaging any of the surrounding organs, and in complete darkness in Mitre Square in under 15 minutes, a difficult and complex surgical procedure even on a corpse.

With regard to the killing of Annie Chapman, the divisional police surgeon Dr George Bagster Phillips stated that if he had performed the mutilations to her body, even in the well-lit and ordered surroundings of an operating theatre, the procedure would have taken him at least an hour. His views were echoed by the other doctors involved in examining the victims.

Probably unsurprisingly, the BBC very clearly had a couple of villains in mind from the start and ignored all the evidence recorded by every other doctor at the time, and simply took Bond’s statement as gospel, claiming that the killings showed no medical knowledge or ability whatsoever. This was presumably so that they could offer both Druitt and Kosminski – neither of whom had had any medical training – as believable suspects.

Personally, I believe that it is undeniable that Jack the Ripper – whoever he was – had had some medical or surgical training, or at the very least had worked as a butcher or slaughterer, and if that supposition is correct it would of course narrow the field of suspects very considerably. It would also, incidentally, eliminate at a stroke all of the most popular contenders.

The man who was Jack the Ripper in my novel is a far better fit than most of the usual line-up. Records from this period are notoriously patchy and incomplete, but there is evidence to suggest that this man was living in London at the time of the killings, had trained and then worked as a surgeon, and had a history of violence against women, with quite probably at least one murder behind him before he arrived in the city. He is also one of the least known of all the Ripper suspects.

The Ripper Secret was and is a novel, obviously, but the story is tightly woven around the killings which were described as accurately as possible after such a passage of time. I took considerable care to make sure that all the facts were right, and in my opinion the story did and does work as a possible explanation for the murders. In particular, it provided logical answers to six questions which almost no non-fiction writer has ever managed to resolve satisfactorily:

Why did the murders start?Why did the mutilations get progressively more severe?Why were there two murders on one night?Why did the murders stop?Why did Sir Charles Warren resign simultaneously with the final killing?What was the significance of the geographical locations of the murders?

If you read the book, let me know what you think.

This week is something of an anniversary, at least for me. Almost exactly 10 years ago, on 11 October 2012, Simon & Schuster published The Ripper Secret, the second of my two books for that publishing house. So the good news is that in this post I’m not going to be banging on about the parlous state of publishing and the uncertainties for the future of the industry of which I am a very small part. You might be less relieved to learn that I’m going to spend my time telling you about this book.

The Ripper Secret was my second book for Simon & Schuster and was, like my previous novel The Titanic Secret, set around a series of real-world events, in this case the brutal killings perpetrated in the Whitechapel area of London at the end of the nineteenth century by an unknown murderer who acquired the hideously appropriate nickname ‘Jack the Ripper.’

What I’ve always found interesting about this particular serial killer – he almost certainly wasn’t the first man who met this definition by embarking on a killing spree over a period of time, but he’s definitely the most famous – is that even today, almost a century and a half after the events which cast a cloak of terror over the East End of London, his actions still throw a dark shadow over the city.

People still travel to Whitechapel and the surrounding areas, looking for the streets where the Ripper walked in search of his victims, and organized tours of the murder sites – or rather what remain of the geographical locations because development in this part of London has hidden almost all of the sites under new roads and buildings – are still a popular tourist attraction.

And not only that, but almost every year a new non-fiction book is published which ‘positively’ identifies yet another new subject as Jack the Ripper. The one characteristic most of these books seem to share is that the author has a very clear idea of exactly who the Ripper was, and then spends almost the entire book cherry-picking those pieces of evidence which support this contention, ignoring those which flatly contradict it and, in some cases, invent ‘facts’ from dubious sources to reinforce his or her argument. Very few books even attempt to carry out a proper and unbiased investigation of the Ripper killings and then come to a reasonably believable conclusion about the identity of the perpetrator.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, my novel followed neither of these routes, precisely because it was a novel. I did not attempt in that book to provide compelling evidence that my chosen villain was Jack the Ripper, although suggestions have been made in the past that he could have been. Nor was I trying to be selective in choosing which facts would be a part the story. Instead, I tried to weave a believable plot around the Ripper killings, while sticking as rigidly as possible to the historical reality of that dark time in east London.

While I was researching the historical background of this book, a number of questions occurred to me, questions which very few people writing on the subject have ever even tried to answer. Most books have attempted simply to identify the murderer and little else.

In particular, few people ever seemed to have considered the following:

Why did the killings start?Why did the mutilations get progressively more brutal with each succeeding murder?Why did the killings stop?And what possible motive was driving the murderer?

I don’t pretend that my novel actually identified the real Jack the Ripper, but what it did do was provide logical and believable answers to those questions.

As to the actual identity of this most notorious of all serial killers, I’ll leave you to make up your own mind about that.

One of the perhaps unrecognised advantages of the advent of the ebook is the speed of reaction to real-world events that has been made possible by its creation.

You will all recall the sudden and initially inexplicable disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 which vanished on 8 March 2014. To research the few established facts of the incident and come up with a reasonable and believable explanation for what had happened did not take all that long, and several ebooks were written and published in the weeks that followed. I was one of the authors, writing as Peter Lee, and my ebook MH370: By Accident or Design sold well and is still selling. Interestingly, the conclusion I came to way back in 2014 is exactly the same as that suggested on the latest television programmes and research that analysed the disappearance.

To get a conventional book on the subject released by a mainstream publishing house would have been impossible within that timescale, for several reasons. First, initially facts were thin on the ground so a full-length book would inevitably have been padded; second, the publishing process is much slower than most people think and, third, the situation was changing as more information came to light so if I had gone the conventional route I wouldn’t have been able to incorporate the new data as it became available.

The ability to react that quickly is only possible by using electronic publication. The time between the manuscript being completed and the book being available on Amazon can literally be a matter of a day or so. Contrast that with the length of time it would take a conventional publisher to achieve the same thing. Just as an example, my first published novel – Overkill – was a fairly weighty tome at well over 120,000 words. It was delivered as a finished manuscript to Macmillan in May 2003, but the book was only finally released in August 2004, almost a year and a half later.

The ability to react quickly and produce a book at short notice is completely beyond the ability of most publishing houses, and this is in no way their fault. The extended timescale is forced upon them by the various sequential processes that are involved in the printing and publication of any book. The only time publishers do release a book quickly is for works like biographies which are issued a very short time after the death of the subject. And this can only be achieved, of course, because the entire manuscript has already been written by the biographer, and the only things missing are the date and circumstances of the death of that person.

But there are other reasons why even mainstream publishers are embracing electronic technology, and have been for some time. Back in 2012 the bestselling American author Tess Gerritsen released a mini e-book in advance of her new novel, published in August of that year. The ‘teaser’ e-book, for want of a better expression, sold for only $1.99, making it a true impulse purchase, and was clearly intended to both appeal to her large existing readership so that they would have something else to read ahead of the publication of her novel, and also provide a cheap e-book that would allow people who’d never read a Gerritsen book to sample her writing and see if they liked it.

I think this kind of very reactive approach to publishing, of getting additional publications out on the streets very quickly, is something we’re going to see a lot more of in the future, and not just as teasers to bridge the gap between publication dates of a series of novels. For example, if a book proved to be unexpectedly popular, the author could release a short work explaining how he got the idea for the book, the time it took to write it, and other material of that nature. A controversial work could be followed by a kind of expanded author’s note, detailing the sources for the published information and the reason the writer and publisher felt it was important to place the material in the public domain.

In short, I believe this very flexible approach to publication could actually start a whole new trend, and it could only be achieved because of the existence of the Kindle and other electronic readers.

But the corollary of this new development, obviously, will be the widening of the existing gap between readers who like physical books and readers who like to read books on an electronic device. As well as the obvious and well publicised advantages of the Kindle and its electronic kin, this new aspect to publishing might serve to drive more people towards making the jump to an e-reader of some sort, with a consequent knock-on effect in the sales of conventional books. And, of course, that will be another blow that both publishers and bookshops will have to absorb.

And there’s another possibility as well, a possibility that actually takes publishing around in something of a full circle. Perhaps authors could consider releasing their books in serial format, selling them cheaply as electronic downloads in tranches of three or four chapters at a time, which would allow new readers of their books to sample their storytelling ability at almost no cost. And, quite probably, even if the serialised sections were very modestly priced, the cost of the complete work could be far more than most books are selling for today as Kindle downloads.

If this happens, it really would be a return to the good old days, because authors such as Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle released many of their books in this way as a matter of course, publishing their novels in serial form in popular newspapers of the day.

Perhaps in publishing, as in so many other fields, there really is nothing new under the sun …

A decade ago, the world of publishing was very different to what we see today, for several reasons.

Amazon had taken the world by storm, and not just in publishing though that is the most obvious focus. Figures released by Bowker Market Research in 2012 showed that the online retailer was then responsible for the sales of roughly one in every three books sold, in all formats and all types. The previous year – 2011 – its market share had been one in every four books sold.

Not only that, but when all retailers and the market as a whole were assessed, the figures showed that over half of all consumer spending on books had taken place online, and independent bookshops were essentially a dying breed.

The percentage figures for the UK were similar, the only major difference being that in America supermarket book sales were almost insignificant in overall terms, whereas in Britain these paperback sales formed a very important share of the market, with one supermarket in particular dominating. Perhaps surprisingly, that was Asda, and certainly ten years ago the fiction buyer for Asda could quite literally decide whether or not a particular book would make it into the bestseller charts, based solely on his or her decision about whether or not Asda would stock it.

Perhaps surprisingly, the study also showed that sales of ebooks only accounted for about 10% of all book revenue, because of the significant difference in physical and ebook prices, and that women were responsible for 64% of all spending on ebooks. The demographic analysis showed that the highest percentage of ebook purchases came from people in the 18-29 age range (31%), with the 30-44 year old buyers very close behind with 28%. Teenagers only bought about 5% of ebooks.

There was a slightly different poll conducted in a contemporary edition of USA Today, which asked readers how they had obtained their most recent book. Less than half of those who responded (48%) said that they had bought it. Almost a quarter of them (24%) had borrowed it from either a friend or family member, and a further 14% had borrowed it from a library.

A somewhat surprising 13% ticked the ‘other’ box, which could mean that they found it, stole it – though most people wouldn’t consider books to be high value or desirable items in the eyes of most thieves – received it as a gift or obtained it from some kind of communal resource, like the paperback cupboard in a clubhouse. Those people reading electronic versions, of course, could well have downloaded the book for free from Amazon, either because the book was offered as a loss leader to advertise that particular author’s other works, or as a kind of free promotion ahead of the book going on sale at normal price.

But whatever the reason, the one fact that shone out very clearly from that particular survey was that less than half of those readers who answered had actually paid money for their current choice of literature, and that really could not have been good news for anybody involved in publishing, at any level or in any position.

The situation today is also confused, but in a different way, with research suggesting that ebook sales in the UK in 2021 were at their lowest level since 2012. According to Nielsen, sales of ebooks had climbed fairly steadily since that year, reaching a record high of 95 million in 2020, but then fell to 80 million in 2021. However, due to the increased prices of many ebooks, the total spending of a little over £340 million in 2021 was still higher than that seen in some years of the previous decade and represented a market share of 13%. Printed book sales in 2021 were about the same as the previous year, while audiobook sales saw an increase.

A breakdown of the genres showed that erotic fiction was most likely to be purchased as an ebook, with almost two-thirds being bought digitally. Romance was close behind at 59% and war and adventure books at 50%. Not necessarily related, but well over a third of all ebook purchases were made by women aged over 45.

You will certainly have heard of the book Fifty Shades of Grey, a novel that’s been claimed to be both the fastest selling book of all time and also the worst novel of all time. According to people in the publishing industry, one reason for its undoubted success is that purchasers could download the ebook and then read it on a train or in a café or somewhere without any of their companions knowing that they were immersed in a steamy work of fiction. They wouldn’t have the same anonymity if they’d bought the paperback.

Couple that information together with the Nielsen research, and maybe the best option for a new novelist to take is the romance/erotica route …

I know we keep on returning to the same subject, but for that I make no apology. Anybody involved in any way in the world of publishing will be aware that the industry is in a state of flux, with nobody quite knowing what’s going to happen next. By far the most important factor driving that uncertainty is the deepening global recession and more specifically the escalating cost of living, which is clearly having an impact upon every industry in the world and upon what people can afford – or need – to spend their money on.

This of course is the present situation, but to some extent we’ve been here before, albeit ten years ago and without the added complication of a war in Europe. I remember that in the summer 2012 edition of The Author there was an interesting short editorial which described the then-current situation in publishing in quite a concise and effective way.

The author made the point that ebooks were neither a promise for the future, nor a potential new technology: they were already a very substantial part of the publishing spectrum. The figures suggested that sales of ebooks appeared to be levelling off, but absolutely nobody in the publishing business believed that the figures would decline, or that either the ebook or the ebook reader would prove to be a short term fad: the electronic reader as a technology and a device was already here to stay.

The figures also indicated that one of the main appeals of the ebook was to the dedicated fiction buyer, which is perhaps not surprising. I’ve mentioned before that in my opinion the novel is a disposable item, something which is read once and then given away, and for that kind of usage the Kindle and its electronic kin is absolutely ideal. The reader can download the book instantly, almost irrespective of where in the world he or she may be sitting, read it and then remove it from the device, secure in the knowledge that the ebook is securely stored in Amazon’s archive and can be retrieved at any time, and at no further cost.

Following on from this, even ten years ago it was also becoming clear that ebook sales were supplanting rather than supplementing the sales of printed books, and most especially the sales of paperbacks, which given the foregoing was entirely predictable. What was perhaps rather unexpected was that sales of hardback books appeared to be largely unaffected.

Other factors in the equation included piracy, which was and is likely to remain a problem. In one survey over one third of the ebook users questioned admitted that they had illegally downloaded copyrighted material at some point. There are two ways of addressing this problem: complicated and simple.

The complicated way is to employ some form of Digital Rights Management (DRM) to try to ensure that only the person who has paid for the book is able to download it onto his or her device, and that it cannot subsequently be copied to another device or uploaded onto the web to be downloaded from there. The problem with this is that hackers regard such measures as a challenge, and are quite happy to spend hours, days or even weeks working out a way to disable the DRM or bypass it. It becomes a kind of contest which neither side is ever going to win.

The simple way is, really, really simple. When the price of an ebook, or anything else for that matter, is reduced to the point where for most people it is insignificant, which normally means about the price of a cup of coffee, there is almost no incentive for anyone to download a pirated version when for just a pound or two they can legitimately purchase the real thing. The problem at the moment is that commercial publishers seem completely unable to grasp this fact, and almost without exception almost all of them are still pricing their ebooks at a similar – and in some cases even at a higher – price than the paperback version.

I’m aware of all the arguments surrounding this subject, arguments which undeniably have merit, at least to people in the publishing industry. But what they fail to grasp is that they’re not selling ebooks to people in the publishing industry: they’re selling them to members of the general public. And most book buyers are very well aware that preparing an ebook and offering it for sale through Amazon is something that only ever has to be done once. Every subsequent sale of the ebook costs the publisher precisely nothing, whereas every paperback has to be printed, bound, stored, transported and finally displayed in a bookshop window or sent through the post, expenses which clearly have to be paid by somebody.

The inevitable result of this pricing policy is that most readers believe that full priced ebooks are at best unreasonably expensive, and at worst a rip-off, which makes the idea of downloading a pirate version infinitely more attractive.

I’m not really in the prediction business, otherwise I would simply win the lottery and retire to the Caribbean, but I’m prepared to wager money that within a couple of years, five years at the most, the essential truth of this argument will finally be realized, and publishers will begin selling mainstream ebooks at about the same price point as self-published authors are doing at the moment. In other words, for less than about £3.

And I’ll make a further prediction: if they do this, ebook piracy will be enormously reduced, and the publishers will be selling far more copies than they do at the moment, and will be making significantly larger profits.

 

 

As you might reasonably expect, on the occasions when I meet a fellow author we almost inevitably end up talking about writing. That shouldn’t come as very much of a surprise because authors, like people involved in any trade, usually take a keen interest in how other people approach their work. One author I met some time ago worked in an entirely different way to the method that I use. He had the patience and the ability to work out an enormously detailed synopsis for each book, a synopsis that might approach one third of the length of the finished manuscript, and then he basically wrote the book exactly following that synopsis.

One of the things I like least about writing is doing a synopsis, even a one-page effort, and I simply wouldn’t have the patience to work the way he did. I tend to start with an idea and a blank page in Word. I think of a decent opening sentence – or I try to – and then go on from there. I always know more or less how the book is going to end, but I very rarely have any idea of the twists and turns which the plot will take during the writing, and for me this system works. Neither of us was right or wrong. Like all authors we work the way that seems to suit us best.

But occasionally I have stopped and wondered if some form of specialist software might help me to organize my thoughts rather better than simply trying to keep the entire plot and all the characters tucked away in various compartments of my unreliable brain. So some time ago I decided to try a program called Storybook Pro. I played around with the free version for a while and then decided to buy the ‘Pro’ version and see how that worked.

On the face of it, that should have been a remarkably useful program for any writer because it offered the ability to create major and minor characters, describe locations and all the rest of it, inspect the timeline and use various charts and other tools. In reality, and in use, it was precisely the opposite. The program was non-intuitive in many respects, and the parameters were so rigid that it actually acted as a dampener on creativity. I doubt if any working author had had any input into the design of the program at any stage.

For example, in most of my books I begin with a prologue, normally set many years, sometimes many centuries, before the action which takes place in the present day. Storybook Pro simply wouldn’t let me do that, because it insisted on a precise date for each section, and it also wouldn’t allow me to call the first chapter ‘Prologue’. In fact, I did eventually find a way around this, but it took me the better part of half an hour to do so. The dating system was particularly rigid. You either had to insert a specific date or use what it called ‘relative dating’, where a particular section occurred a number of days after the previous one. It was so much easier in Word to just type the date I wanted – rather than the date the program wanted – at the head of the chapter.

As well as chapters, there were also ‘strands’ and ‘parts’, neither of which seem to be particularly useful for any purpose I could discern. The program was also irritating in that various icons on the screen didn’t do anything – for example, at the beginning of each chapter was either the word ‘draft’ or ‘outline’, each followed by a different icon which logically you would expect to allow you to switch views. They didn’t. Neither the name nor the icon did anything at all, which rather made me wonder why they were there in the first place.

Other niggles with it were that it was incredibly slow to load, so slow, in fact, that usually I ended up clicking the icon again, when it would generate an error message telling me that the file was already in use. Word is a big program, but it loaded in less than half the time that Storybook Pro took to appear. It was even clumsy when you left it. Clicking the close button didn’t close the program but generated a dialogue box which asked if you wanted to close the program. Oddly enough, that was why I had clicked the close button, but the program – or more accurately the programmer – appeared to be too stupid to realize this.

But perhaps my biggest concern with this program was that shortly after I had purchased version 3.2, the company sent me an e-mail that explained how much better version 4.0 was, and how much less rigid the parameters were, and offered me a substantial discount off the purchase price of the new program. The idea was that existing users could input a code during the purchase process, and the price would then be adjusted accordingly. So I tried this. In fact, I tried it about a dozen times, and it simply didn’t work. I e-mailed the company. I actually e-mailed them six times pointing this out and asking if they could fix it. I never had a response to any of my messages.

The most sensible choice of action seemed to me to give up, so that’s what I did. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Storybook Pro is no longer available to purchase unless you can find an old copy on one of the auction sites. And if you do, that’s where I’d leave it.

I’ve tried other specialist software since then, and the only one I’ve ever found of even the slightest use is a cheap and cheerful program called Write Your Own Novel, but even that doesn’t work as well for me as Word, so I’ll just stick with what I know.