UK Amazon Kindle Forum discussion

I'm Andrew Lawston, a writer, actor and publishing manager who lives and works in London.

I've been writing since I was about seven years old. Let's be honest, it's a cheap hobby. I'd had bits and pieces of Doctor Who fanfiction published in charity anthologies, and then sold my first short story professionally in 2005.

Something Nice is a collection of ten of my short stories written from 2000 to 2011. Many have been published in small press magazines, a couple have won competitions, but all the rights had reverted to me and I realised that no one other than myself had read all of them. Enter KDP and Smashwords.

Something Nice: 10 Short Stories is available from Amazon and Smashwords in every format I could find.

My stories are sometimes creepy, sometimes scary, sometimes horrible and sometimes funny, but hopefully always entertaining. There's some tongue in cheek SF space opera action in The Hero Function, an unpleasantly Kafkaesque transformation in Gluttony, and a haunted photocopier in Tempaghost. And metafiction gone bonkers in the oldest story in the anthology Write a Short Story.

And the title? Whatever I write, my Mum is very supportive right up until she finds out what it's about. At which point she sighs and says: "Andrew. Why can't you write something nice?"

Well, now I have :)

Have just one-clicked Andrew, sounds like something I would enjoy :-) have a huge TBR pile so not sure when I will get to it but will review when I have :-)

Read the first story Andrew. I hope, no, let's be positive, I expect they will all be as good!

I've just heard that an audio version of one of my stories, recorded in 2008, should be back online in the next few weeks. Really looking forward to sharing that with everyone, it was a brilliant production that enhanced the story no end.

Cool! Make sure you let us know when it is available :-)

Oh Andrew I can think of several groupites offhand who would be very interested in the audio version!

How cool!

Perhaps you'd like to post about it here, when it's available?

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/8...

OK, I'm pretty chuffed right now. Something Nice - 10 Stories is currently at no.10 on the Amazon.fr bestseller chart for English language short fiction. I'm a french speaker (and ex french teacher, tutor and translator) so it's a bit of a lifelong dream to have even a toe in this cultured and discerning market.

Happy author mode :)

Yay! Andrew that is really exciting and the play too. Would love to come see that. Congrats x

I'm well chuffed for you Andrew. Nice to see a good collection of stories doing so well.

Hey - you're just two behind A Goodreads Gallimaufrey - that excellent tome. (tomette, then)

Mad, isn't it?

Something Nice has smashed through the, er, 50 sales mark.

In all seriousness, I thought I'd sell 15 copies tops, so this is encouraging.

Fifty isn't bad you know. Try doing that with a hard back!

I was supposed to spend the weekend writing, and sat down with a notebook, a black gel pen and a pint of four of beer at about 19:30 on Sunday evening. Always the way, right?

Of the list in my previous post, I've scripted the comic strip in longhand, and need to type it up and format it properly. But it's out of my head now. I still have no idea where it goes next.

But after churning out a 1,000 words of prose in the pub last night, I'm reaching the end of new short story which I've given the provisional title of A Boy's Best Friend. It's longer than the 2,000 - 2,500 word stories I've tended to write in the past, but that was always more because I was entering them for magazine competitions with strict word counts. I think A Boy's Best Friend will end up at around 5,000 words. Is that too short to put out as a single £0.77 short story?

I've bought a couple lately that came in at about 5 pages. Now THAT was too short!

I tend to feel a bit miffed if I buy a short story and it's that short. I also get miffed (strewth, I miff easily!) if I buy a short and then it's published in a book of shorts. I either have to buy it twice or I miss the other stories.

Ignite wrote: "I tend to feel a bit miffed if I buy a short story and it's that short. I also get miffed (strewth, I miff easily!) if I buy a short and then it's published in a book of shorts. I either have to ..."

I would rather buy a book of short stories than a single short story for that reason.

I think I agree with both of you. It looks like A Boy's Best Friend will have a longer wait before it meets the great reading public! I'm already getting very excited about my entry in the group anthology though!

I also just noticed a new review on Amazon UK for Something Nice - that takes me to 10 five star reviews!

Well done!
Certainly the last thing you want is miffed purchasers who then won't buy the longer collection because they already have one or two bought singly.

With the number of purchasers I have, I certainly can't afford ANY miffed ones ;)

The exception is that I was hoping to include my group anthology submission in a potential second volume, (it's going to be far enough in the future that the sales will have died down for the group book).

But I'm also hoping that my second book will be at least double the length, and that should mollify readers.

Most of the stories in Something Nice had been published somewhere else previously, but luckily even some of my closest friends hadn't read more than one or two before.

Ah well, the group anthology is unlikly to sell more than a couple of hundred. Just got another tenner for group funds yesterday - only our second lot of profits! Total £30!

So, if you've read Something Nice, and are aware that I do a bit of acting, and you've heard about my MPhil in European Cinema, you're probably wondering why I haven't done one of those new-fangled book trailers that are clogging up the digital tubes these days.

The honest answer is simple. I can't find the charger for my video camera and I've not got a tripod.

But the dishonest answer is that I'd much prefer to let my work speak for itself. To this end, rather than put together an excruciating amateurish plug for my short stories, I'm hereby posting links to excruciating am dram performances.

First off, here's Oberon. I had to grow my hair for four months for this part, and then they put a green wig on me anyway. And a pink shower curtain cloak. It's quite a star-packed cast though. One of the younger fairies is the daughter of the chap who got buried under the patio in Hollyoaks. Elsewhere we had a Father Ted guest actor and veteran singer as one of our Rude Mechanicals. Titania went pro and was recently on at the Young Vic in Wild Swans. And the taller of the two fairies flanking me towards the end has just signed a deal for his debut novel (and they say trad publishing is dead).

Midsummer Night's Dream

Two years after this production, I had to grow my hair again, this time without the aid of a wig, for Someone Who'll Watch Over Me. This 'trailer', much of which is blurred because the lady filming from the audience was a bit of a nit (it's not an arty decision), is sadly the only extant footage of an intense, but often very funny show. In which I played the world's fattest Lebanese hostage. We've just been nominated for three local theatre awards for this and are very proud of it!

Someone Who'll Watch Over Me

But we all have to start somewhere, and by far the funniest clip of my acting available online is a snippet from a 2004 production of The Small Hours by Francis Durbridge. I was barely 25, and for some reason was cast as a 50-something banker who'd retired to open a hotel in Guildford. Joking apart, we only did three nights of this one, so I'm glad there's some pretty solid footage.

The Small Hours

Best of all for that one was the local newspaper review which said "Andrew coped well in the part of Carl Houston and barely faltered in his lines." I don't think there's even been a more 'damning with faint praise' critique of an am dram show!

Have seen the Oberon one before Andrew! These are great! You are very brave! I can sing but would not even contemplate getting up in front of people to do it! :-)

There's a shop in Hull called Oberon (not sure if it's still there) where they sell and repair lawnmowers. I rang once and a deep butch voice said, 'Oberon,' - oh how I had to bite my tongue not to ask him if he was Queen of the Fairies!

Tuesday night's pub writing session showed the dangers of inebriated scribbling. I knew I'd written about 2,000 words over the course of five hours in a beer garden and many pints, and was very pleased with myself.

Then I sat down to type it all up last night. This is always a time when I make some edits and tidy things up a bit - I refer to the process as a 'free draft'. I'm also used to my writing getting a little harder to read towards the end of these pub-based writing sessions. Very occasionally I'll find a phrase like "This beer tastes funny" or "what time did I even get here?".

Sentences including "A wizened little man seemed to be stuffing apricot jam in his ear" caused even me to pause, though. There were repeated references to "Yoda's ill-advised second rap album" scattered through one page.

What's weird is that this utterly paralytic scrawl (which I do not remember writing) is pretty coherent! The spelling and punctuation are fine, I've seen worse examples of my drunken handwriting, and there seems to be some sort of method behind the rambling. It's writing, of a sort, it's just totally bonkers.

Ever thought of publishing it just as it is? Free range writing?

Interesting idea! I suspect that publishing it would confirm every prejudice that's ever been held against self-published authors, and probably invent a few new ones...

Once the story's finished, I suppose I could do some 'deleted scenes' blog posts. Along with a recipe for apricot jam!

That would be good.
I love jam!

Apricots, yummy! Unfortunately, they give me terrible wind...

I've made a lot of chilli jam over the years, but no apricot up to now. I'll look into it! And Gingerlily, stick em in your ear instead - no wind! That's where you've been going wrong all these years...

Andrew wrote: "I've made a lot of chilli jam over the years, but no apricot up to now. I'll look into it! And Gingerlily, stick em in your ear instead - no wind! That's where you've been going wrong all these yea..."

But then I'll be able to hear the wind. And my ear will be all jammed up.

Jammed up but very tasty!

I'll get people trying to lick my ear then?

Well I can't promise anything, but if you hang around with a lot of people who like apricots, well, you never know your luck! ;)

Hmmm, whats the most popular flavour of jam?

Strawberry does tend to get the column inches where jam's concerned, and it's the most common companion to scones and clotted cream. But perhaps people are deterred from ear-licking it by the very fact of its ubiquity?

Perhaps we need to experiment with different jams and different ears?

Ok, I'll take apricot and damson, maybe you could do raspberry and cherry?

I'd prefer blackcurrant rather than cherry. It's darker and people not licking my ear might think I'm a zombie, which would be brilliant.

Damn, now I'm remembering the local supermarket when I lived in Bordeaux, with its wall of jam in every conceiveable flavour! I used to love coconut jam on my toasts for breakfast...

Coconut jam!! I LOVE that idea. And the Wall of Jam!

Funny, I had actually written blackcurrant for your second option, and then deleted it and put cherry instead...

hehehe

googled pictures for 'wall of jam' and got some interesting results...
http://www.google.ie/search?num=10&am...

I loved absolutely everything about living in Bordeaux, but the wall of jam is a special memory!

We'll leave the cherry jam to Ignite, I'm sure she'll want to get involved... and do we involve honey and Nutella? I would certainly consider licking Nutella out of a stranger's ear, I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

i don't like honey so I'll leave that to you, but definitely Nutella!

I do a fair amount of cooking with honey, and have just got a new jar of the clear runny stuff, so ear application would be pretty easy for me!

I'd like to add Roses Lime Marmalade to my list. I loved that as a child.

After all this jam, marmalade, nutella and honey, I hope we get a few takers on the licking front or it's going to be a very wasted effort!

Ok we need to go out and get some volunteer lickers.

There must be some volunteers right here in the forum. Anyone particularly strike you as an ear-licking type?

Its very hard to tell. I mean the place is full of lunatics, but are they the ear-licking type of lunatic...?

Maybe we could put up a notice asking for applicants.

It probably depends on context as well. Some people who would be aghast at the thought of licking a jam-filled ear in most social situations would probably be more open to experimentation in more relaxed surroundings...

Where can we put up a notice without riling the powers that be? :)