Clive’s Comments (group member since Feb 13, 2008)

Clive’s comments from the Blurb group.

I checked "Last American Roar" and it's poetry. Trying to market poetry is about as easy as a fly swimming through a barrel of treacle.

An excellent review! Well done, I'm happy for you.

It appears that Amazon has leant hard on Authorhouse/iUniverse who have decided to go with Booksurge. The smaller presses mainly seem to be untouched so far.

There has been some confusion about missing "Buy Buttons" on Amazon UK and other non-US Amazon sites. There are a lot of reports that Lightning Source's computer feeds are in a mess and that has resulted in missing "Buttons" on Amazon UK, for instance. My own recent release, Rebody, (SF) is available on Amazon US for instance, but not available on Amazon UK except via the market traders.

The big issue with Booksurge of course, as Cayr pointed out, is that it doesn't have Ingrams as distribution ... personally I am sticking with Lightning Source, at least I know how to successfully produce a book with them, I am not about to go through another whole process with Booksurge.

I've just started a POD fulfilment house to complement my small press.
Citiria Books is not a publisher - rather, it is a fulfilment house. It provides all the services required for an author to self-publish their work - including low cost printing and distribution.

I've just started a POD fulfilment house to complement my small press.
Citiria Books is not a publisher - rather, it is a fulfilment house. It provides all the services required for an author to self-publish their work - including low cost printing and distribution.

If you'd like to find out more, the Web site is at:
www.citiria.com/citiriabooks

Now that I have sufficient experience producing books I have decided to start a self-publishing company. I'll compete with Lulu albeit on a tiny basis at first.
I should be able to offer *much* better deals than Lulu.

For instance, their "Professional Book Cover Design Service" costs $1,000 and the author has to provide their own artwork! That surprised me. For $1,000 I would source the artwork too, or maybe I'll just reduce the price to $500 if the author provides the art. And by "art" I mean proper well known illustrators.

More news soon on this.

I'm leaving Sayulita (boo hoo) today. Have had a great time. Got some work done on my next novel, KUFFAR (a thriller or action adventure, not sure really)

Had a great final dinner last night at El Tigre: Red Snapper fried in butter... bit expensive since I was last here, but you can still find bargains... yesterday's lunch at "El Crucero" (The Crossroad) restaurant (motto: "Comida Economica") produced chicken and cheese burritos with salad and a whopping big fresh lemon drink, for $35 (pesos) about USD 3.10 - absolutely delicious. Pure Mexico; there was a huge jukebox playing "banda" music.
One of these days I will organise a writer's workshop in Sayulita if I can get enough interest. It really is a wonderful place to be.

Great - let me know, please!

Well, it really is difficult.
However you do have one big advantage, you're a woman. Something like 55% or more of books are bought by women, and the Romance genre - which nowadays includes all sorts of sub-genres - is the best selling of all literature.
In fact, chick-lit is also way ahead of other lit in terms of selling e-books.
If you really want to make a career of it, try writing a romance, is my recommendation. After you get published - it usually takes two or three novels - you mightt branch out.
Don't make the mistake of trying to sell your first novel, put it away somewhere and write another and try with that one.
Oh, and join a good critique group. I heartily recommend the Novels-L group sponsored by the http://www.internetwritingworkshop.org
International Writers Workshop. Free and excellent - many of its members have succeeded in being published. Including me...

- Clive

From The Guardian (UK) Feb. 8, 2008, in response to a request for a way to have an exciting trip on the US West Coast:
http://www.ivebeenthere.co.uk/article...

I recommend starting in San Francisco. Check out the Italian restaurants in North Beach; with luck there may still be one or two of the old fashioned diners, where you sit down at a long table with other customers and choose from a limited menu of good old-fashioned Italian "dishes of the day".
Take route 1 across the Golden Gate Bridge into quaint Sausalito (I wonder if the hippy houseboats are still there) then follow it all the way up the coast. Jenner Russian Gulch Park is worth a stop. I found a B&B around there called the "Victorian Guest House" that was furnished like my grandparent's was. As you follow the coastal highway you'll find the views are simply breathtaking; be certain to have a video and a good stills camera with you.
Past Rockport you'll have to leave Route 1 and take 208 over to 101, this (208) is a twisty road through magnificent forest with tumbling streams. As you continue you'll find yourself amongst the giant sequoias (redwoods), another magnificent site.
Garberville is an interesting spot. Half the town is redneck loggers and the other half are rich hippies with marijuana plantations hidden in the nearby hills. The main street is the divider between the two groups.
Further along, Eureka, when I was there, was described to me by a resident as a town where rich divorcees retired to.
Somewhere north of Reedsport there is a logger's restaurant that makes a fascinating detour, but unless one of the locals can tell you where it is, don't try to find it!
I can't take you any further north because my own intent was to visit Crater Lake, the scene for "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". I took 199 from Crescent City, following gorgeous scenery along the Smith River. All along the Redwood Highway through Selma, Grants Pass, Gold Hill, then 234 to the amusing town of Shady Cove. I asked a local about the name and he said it was probably the shady deals done there, laughing.
At this point I found that my non-4WD vehicle couldn't negotiate the mountain roads covered in snow and ice (it was December, after all) and turned back, heading for Nevada, and crossed the mountains, ending up at Reno, worth a visit and a nicer town than Las Vegas.
All in all this is a fabulous journey and one that you will fondly remember for the rest of your days.

Have you ever gone looking for mushrooms?
It's like, (an hour or so goes by) - where are all the mushrooms?
Then you spot one. And another. And suddenly you see mushrooms all around you.
I think the brain filters the mushrooms out until it finally spots one and then goes "oh so that's what's wanted" and suddenly you know they were there all along.
Seems a bit like that with reviewers. Trawling the blogs I discovered lists of links to other blogs so I started using copy/paste to Word, then did a sort, eliminated the duplicates, and managed to send about 8 review copies out in the last week.
Not that this isn't hard work.
Actually I did the finding, my part time donkey, ermm, marketing guy, did the donkey, ermm, marketing work.

I'm a bit annoyed with them at the moment. They had this competition running that I was interested in entering. The fee was $75. They had set up a Paypal payment form - but it didn't work.
I asked them to let me have an email address so I could pay using Paypal - pretty straightforward you'd think - and they couldn't be bothered.

Which book fairs did you send books to? I'm interested in this too. I am considering using them to exhibit at Frankfurt. Do you think the library shows are any use?

Things seem to be moving along now, I was going to say I just managed to get a reviewer interested in the US, but then I realised the reviewer is in Canada! Bahaha. But I am still learning ... I think I am getting the hang of it.

Lightning Source makes a lot of sense. Citiria prints with them too; how else could we publish in the UK? It would be impossible. You have in-house book design? We have a part time graphics person and a part time marketing guy, I do the cover layouts and internals with Indesign. Pretty hard work running a small press, isnt it?!
Citiria is looking for new MSS in SF, modern fantasy, and war memoir/fiction.

Great to hear from you, Belle!
I think you've hit the nail on the head, there. Oh dear, please forgive the cliche ...
You've been submitting to the bloggers I hope?
I'm not sure what your budget is. You might like to consider these:
1. Trade shows: If you join the IPA (Independent Publishers Association) you can put your books into trade shows like the library shows and even the LBF or Frankfurt, for relatively low cost (less than $100) - I will be going this route myself.
2. Try your local libraries to see if you can persuade the librarian to stock it.

It really is tough out there though. Who did you use to get your books published?

Best wishes
Clive

I'm delighted to say that Graeme's Fantasy Book Review has just published a new review of my recent SF satire, Rebody.

There was a piece on Kassia's blog "Booksquare" today that really, really made me sit up and go "WHA??T!"

The big problem about being an author is to get anyone to read your book, let alone buy it. Don't think your friends will! They will think "Oh it's that ole mate of mine I knew him since wayyyy ... back, haha now he's written a book, I'll wait until it's in the NYT best seller list then I'll see if it really is any good."

Now, there is this Web 2 thing going on, and apparently some female author has been writing a novel day by day on Facebook, disguised as a blog. It's really a novel but it comes across as the outrageous romantic adventures of a real woman. Get the idea? Me, I think it is popular because of the very idea that it's a real person and not a serialised novel. Hmm.

You can't publish a novel as a true memoir and get away with it, at least not for very long as has been proved recently by several high-profile cases in which the author has been vilified for indulging in false pretences. On Web 2 though ... who's to prove it's really fiction?

So it occurs to me to create a false identity on one of these Web 2 sites and use it to serially publish an outrageous novel. Really really outrageous. My protagonist might crap on religion. He might kill people. He might - well, you get the picture, but I think there would be certain boundaries that he wouldn't cross, like the really bad pervie ones for example.

I do see one murky big problemo, though. Have to watch out for copyright grabbing. And this, so far as I can see, rules out Facebook straight away since those eejits appear to grab all rights to everything that appears on their site! (Did you realise this?)

Comments welcome.

Strangely, I find my SF-satire on American life doing well in the UK, but the USA is like a black hole. No reviews!

I wonder why. Are Americans so hypersensitive that they can't tolerate a little satire?

I sent it to Dave 'n Busters - actually I had to because I didn't want to risk being sued by them, since two of the scenes take place in that location. They liked it.

So, I am at a complete loss.
Or is it simply that hardly anyone in the US reads SF? I must say that I have the impression that the UK is a much more "SF" market than the 'states.
Oh well.

Prospect Magazine has a wonderful piece on the current state of book reviewing and how it is changing.
While reading the piece I found myself wanting to shout YES! Bring it ON!

For those of us who aren't signed by Random House, getting book reviews by the print media is practically impossible. They are such insufferable snobs! It's very much as if literature is judged by those "types" by the size of the publisher's marketing budget.

Prospect notes:
John Sutherland (himself a prodigious newspaper reviewer) suggested that literary blogs and online reviews—particularly those on Amazon—were leading to a "degradation of literary taste." "How dare one of these 'literary mandarins' feel they are above us and by implication, above book buyers and readers?" the novelist Susan Hill fumed on her blog. This, in turn, prompted a newspaper literary editor to email Hill informing her that "no book either published or written by you will in future be reviewed on our literary pages."

- and my message to Sutherland, is "get stuffed you stupid git."

My message to you, if you're an up and coming author published by a small press, is not to bother with the old farts in print media, but to approach the bloggers and the specialist media.
E.G., If you're a fantasy author, approach the fantasy mags and zines for a review. And if you're a reader, take print media with a (very, very large) pinch of salt. They are beholden to the big publishers with deep pockets.