Micropublish And Be Damned

How will I know if JonesCat is doing well? ‘Selling lots of books’ is a bit of a vague goal.

So I wrote down some markers which I think would signal progress if I achieved them.

And now I look at the list, I’m feeling even more nervous. I’ve achieved steps 1 and 2, but if I don’t manage number 3 then everything else is stuffed. And the rest seem scarily beyond my control.

Can I really do all these within a year? We’ll have to see….

• Publishing the thing – DONE
• Selling some copies through the website – DONE
• Having people like it
• Selling copies to someone I don’t know through the website
• Getting it into a bookshop
• Getting a review
• Seeing someone I don’t know reading it on public transport
• Making my money back
• Selling out the first print run
• Making enough to do another book
• Making enough to do it full time

Mark, a friend of mine, is a photographer/cartographer. He works for HarperCollins, a tyrannosaur amongst the Megalithic Publishing Corporations. He told me about a new writers’ service called Authonomy. I checked this out.

You upload your whole book and people can read bits of it at a time. They aren’t able to download the whole thing. It’s a virtual bookshelf, like browsing in Waterstone’s without the option of sticking a copy up your jumper and running for the firedoor.

People can then comment on your text, giving it virtual praise and generally buzzing it so that it rises in popularity. And because it’s a publisher running it, there’s a chance that your unpublished or self-published work will get picked up by an MPC.

Sounded good. So I gave it a shot and uploaded ‘The Hills…’

Instantly something felt wrong.

Emails from other authors came at me like bullets. They all said how much they loved the bit of my book that they’d read and how they would buzz up my book if I would just do the same for them.

What the hell is the point in that? I comply and we’re both exactly the same number of clicks up the virtual pecking order.

Yay.

So I started thinking a little deeper about how the site works, and I realise that it’s really just a self-grading slush pile. Authonomy can simply sit back and watch the new writing cream to the top, skimming it off every so often if they fancy.

They also get the email addresses of a bunch of frothing-at-the-mouth wannabes to whom they will no doubt start punting Gordon Ramsay’s latest literary delicacy come Christmas.

Clever Mr. HarperCollins.

But the truth is that I’m not interested in helping to discover other new books. I’m interested in selling copies of mine. And since there are only so many hours in a day and I have many other ideas to put into action, Authonomy is getting shelved.

My pal Mark took this shot. Lovely, isn't it?

Apologies for not posting for a couple of days, but I have contracted a bad case of wine flu. No, that’s not a typing error; the box of Zinfandel I got was cheap and nasty and I drank too much of it.

It’s not contagious though, so don’t worry.

I’ll be back to normal in a day or two, and hopefully the jokes will be better as well.

You’re reading the jacket of a book in Waterstone’s and one of the critic quotes is ‘well written’. DO NOT BUY THAT BOOK.

Saying a book is well written is like saying a pop song is in tune.

Every book should be well written. It’s a piece of professional writing. Should it only be averagely written?

‘Well written’ is what critics say when a story hasn’t moved them. The writer has been tricksy, had a few poetic moments. Shown skill, like a guitarist soloing.

But the critic drifted from the tale. The song wasn’t catchy. Maybe the author had a reputation or the critic just didn’t have the balls to call it as they saw it in their heart. Either way, it’s a pussy shout.

If a novel is really well crafted, you won’t notice the craft.

And if you’re sitting there admiring a song’s musicianship, you aren’t rocking out.

Orright, mah sahn!

It’s been a long time since Dick Happerington trod the flags of old London town, but that’s where I was today, little ginger JonesCat by my side.

Mrs H was heading off to attend her sister’s show at the London College of Fashion and I had to look after H Jnr. We were right in the heart of the metropolis, just behind Oxford Circus in Fitzrovia, an area I knew well from my years in the advertising gulag.

What a perfect opportunity to show my son the sights of our great capital: to lead him down the bright paths of my experience; to tour the haunts of so many heroes of literature; to sup the uniquely potent spirit distilled by teeming millions; and, of course, to do a spot of illegal flyposting.

As we parted from the ladies at our lunchtime berth in the Old Explorer, I knew that this was probably going to be a surreal afternoon: I’d have to deal with Jnr’s pram and bottles and nappies and stuff as well as rolls of posters and the glue. What I couldn’t have suspected was that my day would be so existential as well.

More of that in a minute. First of all, I’d better show you my set up. Jnr was stashed safely in the front of his pram with some biscuits and a giant embroidered ant. Lad seemed happy.

In the rear of this vehicle I stashed several rolls of posters (A3 and A4) and in its undercarriage (a space normally reserved for shopping), I placed a sufficient quantity of adhesive. Most flyposting is done with paste. But that would be too messy, and Jnr would probably start drinking it, so instead I used the cans of aerosol spraymount which I last week liberated from work.

Ours was to be a happy hunting ground. The area is absurdly rich in media companies, ad agencies, fashion houses and trustafarian liggers. Surely a few dozen posters slapped around these environs would generate buzz! reviews! sales!?

As for our tactics, well, there was no point in trying to be surreptitious: it was broad daylight on a Friday afternoon. So I might as well be blatant and trust in the limitless capacity of the English to tolerate eccentricity: ‘I know flyposting is illegal, which is why it is normally done at night, by stealthy fellows. But there’s a chap flyposting in broad daylight while pushing a pram, so I presume there must be a very good reason for it.’

I plastered my posters all over street furniture outside the BBC, around Cavendish Square, the London College of Fashion and a bit of Regent Street. Then I cut back up past the Crown and Sceptre (my ‘regular’ when I worked in Portland Place)

Crown and Sceptre © Fred Flange

and started pasting in Adland. I did the pelican crossing outside Saatchi’s, a junction box by McCann Erickson (who STILL owe me freelance money) and a bang-up patchwork job on the delivery doors of Beattie’s old place, TBWA.

The posters were going up, Jnr was savaging his ant and not many people were staring, so it wasn’t until I was slapping some A3s up outside Dennis Publishing that I noticed the colossal gap in the city in front of me.

And that’s when I had my existential experience.

You know that feeling you get when you pass a gap site – you think you’re pretty observant, you know a town – but you just cannot remember what was there before.

Well, the hole in front of me was the size of a whole city block. Surely I’d remember what was here… and then I did.

This was where they chopped the end of my cock off.

I should explain. You see, when I lived in London I had a spot of bother with the old boy. I won’t distress you with the details, but will summarise and say that the quack decided it would be better for both me and my cock if I let them chop off the end of it. (Not the actual end of it, that would be too radical. Just the foreskin.)

So they booked me into the Middlesex (fitting name) hospital and they bloody did it. Turned out for the best in the end, but before things got better they got very, very much worse. The 13 stitches were a necklace of thorns. My dong went purple and black. Then it swelled up. Thing looked like a fat punk aubergine.

Worst of all though, was the dawn horn. I’d shriek awake from a lovely warm sex dream into a living nightmare of spike-cock agony. And of course, the longer this went on, the worse it got. My nads were backing up and there was NOTHING I could do about it.

My friend Ben was laughing at the way I was waddling along Upper Street one day. I pulled down my tracky bums and showed him the monster right there on the paving slabs of N1. He shrieked and ran off up the Essex Road. Which made me feel a bit better.

Sorry, I digress. The point is that the philosophical impact of seeing that the place where I had been circumcised had itself been excised from existence made me completely lose my flyposting mojo.

Who would notice my little pink posters? Why the hell was I doing this? Wouldn’t the posters just fall off when it rained? Would anyone REALLY buy a book having seen a badly glued-up flyposter? Fine for underground clubs, but doesn’t a book need more… credibility? Did I look as much like a maniac as I felt?

I stashed the spraymount in the pram’s undercarriage and bolted for Warren Street tube.

It was hot down there and I had a lot of kit, but you would not believe the attention H Jnr  got from some Japanese girls just by giggling and waving his arms around.

Maybe I’ll try that tomorrow.

It’s hard to believe, but there’s something else going on besides JonesCat. It’s called The Real World and it will keep getting in the way.

Today Mrs H and Junior and I set off on a road trip to London Town to watch her sister’s fashion degree graduation show. This is great, but ‘The Hills…’ only came out yesterday and I’ve got about a million promotional bits and pieces to be getting on with.

My ingenious solution? Combine the two!

Our journey would take us down the M6, and what with Jnr being a baby and everything, we’ll probably have to stop in lots of service stations. Normally this is very bad, but today for me and JonesCat, this is an opportunity.

You might have noticed that the backs of the doors in the lavatory cubicles often have an advert on them. It’s a good spot – normally people only look at billboards for a quarter of a second, but in the bog you have their attention for 5-45 minutes depending on recent levels of fibre ingestion.

I thought it would be a great idea to put some posters up for my book in there, instead of the usual guff about sat navs. The poster holders are easy to get into: the sides of the frames either snap open, or the whole thing can be swung out with an Allen key.

Before we left Edinburgh I had blown up and cropped the book’s cover shot to A3 and A4, and run off several dozen copies. Jnr kips for the first hour and a half of the journey, so it’s not until Gretna that I get a chance to implement this particular phase of my marketing strategy.

Gretna Services (No Janny in sight) Photo © Elliott Simpson

While Mrs H is breastfeeding Jnr on the grassy bit under the trees, I grab my rolls of posters and my Allen keys, cross the car park and trot into the bogs.

Slo-mo as I step into the tiled cavern of mirror and sink… ten o’clock, an old man is taking off his glasses to wash his face… three o’clock, a small boy struggles to reach the hand drier…  in the corner behind me at five, a Janitor with a mop for hair and a mop in his hands swabs forlornly at a broken tile… but at twelve o’clock, dead ahead, my path to the cubicles is clear… I stride through the gap between the sink islands and step confidently towards my goal.

Trap 1 is free so I duck inside. There’s a heck of a hum, but I have a job to do. I tuck my posters under my arm and set to work on the holder with my Allen key. I spring it no problem and slide an A3 covershot into the guide rails. It has a bit of a recurve from being rolled so tight, but I soon coax it down into place. I swing the cover shut and close the Allen screw.

Standing back to admire my handiwork I can’t stop myself exclaiming, “Awesome!” quite loudly.

Damn. Got a bit carried away there. I listen for a moment to check all is okay, then I open the stall door and step out.

The Janitor has moved closer. He’s standing at the sinks, eyeing me suspiciously from under his lopsided barnet.

“Shit,” I think, and duck into the next cubicle. Then I wonder why I did that – he’s going to think I’m some sort of nutjob. And I could have a perfectly good reason for changing traps, so I shout: “No paper!” over the cubicle walls.

Now why the hell did I do THAT? It just made me seem even madder. All he has to do is check the cubicle I was in to see that there was paper, then he’ll see the poster and… idiot! Still, now I’m in here, I might as well stick another one up.

Quietly as I can, I undo the holder, slot a poster in and fasten the catch. Then I pull some paper out of the dispenser and flush the bog. I start to open the door, thinking I’ll dive across into the stall opposite this time and maybe the janitor will be mopping or something.

But when I open the door he’s standing about three feet away, staring right at me! Damn his mop-bucket eyes!

I jam the door shut. I’m not going to be able to do a third one with that clot outside, which is a pain because I really wanted a photo of one of my guerrilla posters in situ. Might as well snap this one in here and get out.

I delve into my pocket for my phone, but what with the stuff under my arm and Allen key and the tight space and everything I DROP MY ROLL OF POSTERS! I dive to the deck after it, but it’s only gone and rolled into the next stall. I can’t leave and re-enter the next stall, nor can I climb over with all my stuff.

So I lie down and stretch right under. The roll squirms away from my straining fingers. I lie flat on my back and, grunting, push myself as far under as I can.

Which is when a fat baldy dude enters the cubicle. He stares down at me, shiny eyes boggling.

“I’m only taking photos for my book,” I croak, waving my phone around. But the dude doesn’t buy it and he dashes back out in panic.

Next thing the Janitor’s looming in the doorway, lunging in at me with his manky mop. I throw my Allen key at him, haul myself back into my own cubicle and make a break for it.

I’m not exactly Usain Bolt, but the Janitor’s dungarees are flapping far too much to permit an efficient running style, and I lose him round the back of Burger King.

Back at the grassy bit under the trees, Mrs H and Jnr are mucking about with some daisies.

“Time to rock,” I say.

“You’ve never put them all up in that time!” she says.

“Oh yes,” I reply. “Very quick hands, me.”

“I only hope you washed them,” she says, as we head for the car.

It’s a tough choice: to send out a detailed email explaining all about the book and why you should buy it, or just to ping round a link to rouse curiosity and let the website do the heavy lifting.

Now, normally what happens in this situation in advertising is that the client asks you to perform a test, sending both emails to separate groups to find out which one works best.

But I think that’s a particularly nutless way of running your business, so I decided to go for the former tactic.

Why? People send links all the time. Just links. Or links with a line: ‘check this out, it’s cool!!!’, ”awesome!!!!’ or ‘this is hilarious!!!!!!’. (Where the number of exclamation marks is inversely related to the subject’s awesomely cool hilarity.)

Very rarely do I click on them. Twitter seems to be nothing but links, and I couldn’t be less interested. It’s like sitting in the pub with someone who keeps telling you about what a friend of theirs does or thinks. Shut up about him. Tell me what YOU think. What YOU’VE done. You’re the one I’m buying lager for.

On the other hand, with an information-heavy email there’s a risk that I’ll bore people. ‘Here’s an essay about my new project that is completely filling my head and I’m just going to blah on about it because I’m so great and you’re going to have to listen and oh no, don’t click ‘delete’!…’

But since I want to be a professional storyteller, I should be able to hook an audience in an email, to fire their imaginations enough to make them stop working and start clicking through to read more.

That meant giving a teaser to the story. To make this more immediate, I wrote it in the second person. This wasn’t just a gimmick: it ties in with the novel itself, the way Macrae pitches the adventure to Fitch, and it underlines the ‘universality’ of the Swedish girls myth.

Then I decided to make it sexist. The salutation is ‘Lads’, although I sent it out equally to my male and female pals. Addressing the ladies deliberately in the postscript as an afterthought rubs the salt in.

Risky, yes, but also different. I don’t mind if a few people are upset. Any emotion is better than disinterest, even annoyance.

Not that it’s likely to offend much. The guys will respond positively, and as for the girls… well, I can’t be alone in thinking that a good way to make women want something is to tell them they won’t like it.

Here’s what I sent…

(subject line):

The Hills Are Stuffed With Swedish Girls

(body copy):

Lads -

My novel has just been published and I think you might like it:

“…you remember we used to joke how in the next glen we were going to come across some mythically hot European birds, all lost and sweaty and lovely? Well, pack your bags cos I’ve just found out – they really do exist.”

Coming from your best friend, this sounds wonderful. Now that the love of your life has left and you got fired, some boys-in-the-hills action is just what you fancy.

But there are problems.

There’s your upper-class flatmate who gets the shakes if he goes more than half a mile from a delicatessen. And you’ll have to take the cat, but he will insist on murdering things. Then there’s your best friend himself, a vodka-toting maniac whose last great idea was snorting gunpowder…

What’s going to happen when you’re all up a glen in a rainy tent? How much damage is it possible to do on a distillery tour? Will anyone apart from the cat actually get a sh@g?

There’s only one way to find out. Pack your rucksack, lace your boots and escape to a place where the sun is shining, your beers are chilling in the river, the boys are beside you and some Swedish bits in hotpants have only just gone and started pitching their tent RIGHT next to yours…

www.the-hills-are-stuffed-with-swedish-girls.com

And please forward this email on to any other lads you know who like a saucy jaunt in the wilderness.

Right, gotta go. There’s a bird over there who needs a hand with her pigtails.

Cheers!

Richard

PS Ladies – it’s a bit too brutish for you, but if you know any guys who like a good bad time, please forward this email on. Or indeed buy the book for them. *winks*

(email copy ends)

By the end of the day I had sold 10 (3 to girls, 7 to boys) through my website and 6 on Amazon (no customer data). Is that a good response? I don’t know. I have no reference cell to test my data against.

But I do know that it made a little warm shiver run up and down my spine.

JonesCat Publishing Ltd should really be hiring its own office and storage space. But JonesCat Publishing Ltd has just spunked its entire resources on printing 2,000 copies of a book that was definitively rejected by every publisher in Britain, three in Ireland, and eight in the US.

“Hi Pops, it’s me.”

“I know. Your name appears on the screen of my mobile telephone when you call.”

“How you doing?”

“’Richard’ it used to say. But then I changed that to ‘Your Long Lost Son’.”

“Er, right. H-how’s Ma?”

“Seems more appropriate, wouldn’t you say?”

“Y-yes. That is, I suppose. I mean… Listen, are you using my old room at the moment?”

“You want to store your novels in there.”

“How the hell did you know that?”

“Make sure the fellow delivers after noon. I’ll pop open a bottle or two.”

It’s as glorious a July morning as Scotland can muster.

I’m wearing out the carpet by the window of my parents’ sitting room.

My mum asks me if I want tea. My dad offers wine. I decline both.

Fourteen years I’ve been waiting for this moment, to see one of my stories in book form. My parents’ eager smiles tell me they are happy for me. Their worried eyes suggest they thought I would be happy too.

And I am. Yes, honestly. It’s just that there is still so much to do. I haven’t sold any yet and I don’t know if the website will definitely work and how the hell am I going to get a review and the books still haven’t bloody arrived and-

There’s a clank and a rattle and a moan of brakes.

I pop my head up, meerkat-like, at the window. The shabbiest transit van in the world creaks to a shivering standstill outside. With a clatter the driver’s door opens and a man in paint-spattered dungarees steps shakily out. He coughs once, very violently, and a still-lit joint drops from behind his ear and rolls across the hot tarmac.

He drops to his knees and scrabbles monkey-like after it.

I run to the front door.

The boxes of my books are stacked on a lopsided pallet, half filling the crippled van. The driver gets me to sign the wrong bit of paper and apologises for his hydraulic loader not working today. The hydraulic loader is rustier than the Titanic’s rudder.

My father puts his glass of rosé down and we move the boxes four at a time into the house using my mum’s wheelchair.

This wasn’t how I thought it was going to be.

22 books to a box. 91 boxes. Each box is about a foot square. So 2,000 books is the size of two large sofas.

My parents’ house already has more sofas than it needs. The boxes fill the hall and stack randomly on the stairs like a real-life game of Tetris.

I don’t know why, but as we shift them into my old bedroom, I think more about my sofa analogy and construct a huge, crude armchair out of the boxes of my book.

I sit in it.

As soon as I do, I know I’ve made a mistake. The giant chair towers and totters above my head. The absurd conceit of what I’ve done threatens my very skull.

Look how many there are! 91 boxes! 22 copies in a box! I’ve only got a few dozen friends on  Facebook!

What a twat…

“Just put ‘To Mark, best wishes, your long lost son’.”

“Huh?”

I look up.

My father is holding a large glass of rosé. In his other hand he has one of my novels and a pen.

He drains his wine. “I’m very proud of you, son,” he says.

I rise from my book-chair and fling my arms round the drunken old bastard.

I have my first sale.