Indie Authors: The New Punks

We’ve all heard about the self-publishing revolution in books in the last few years with Amazon Kindle and all the other e-readers and websites. I was watching a BBC documentary called ArtsNight last week and the presenter made an interesting point: punk rock bands were the first indie authors. They learned their three chords, set up their own bands and, in some cases, record labels and self-published their own music. They took control of their own destinies in the same way novelists did recently. Even the punk fanzines were do-it-yourself wonders; stapled together, photocopied and distributed through record stores, mailing lists, by hand and by word-of-mouth in those pre-pre-internet days.

It’s a very cogent analogy. As with the self-published books, some of the DIY punk music that was put out was awful, but some of it has reached classic status in hindsight. Self-publishing until recently was called “vanity publishing,” but writers were no longer prepared to sit on their hands waiting months for a form rejection letter. They too seized their own destinies through the technology that was around them and turned the publishing industry on its head.

Movies are even being made from self-published books for the first time like Ridley Scott’s The Martian starring Matt Damon and a future fantasy film that 20^th Century Fox has purchased the rights to called Fall of Gods (even after that movie deal was signed, the book was taken down from Amazon due to formatting issues, the bane of indie authors everywhere. Luckily, it didn’t impact on the movie deal and Fox could see the merit of what was there despite the flaws.)

Punks and indie authors are strange bedfellows indeed, but both groups were and are pioneers in their fields. While the punk movement didn’t manage to overthrow the mainstream in the same way hippies in the previous generation hadn’t, they democratised their art form and showed others what was possible with self-belief and a little effort. Just as indie authors did. The shockwaves of the indie author revolution are still spreading out from the epicentre and nobody really knows where it will stop or what comes next. The most important thing is that books that would have gathered dust in drawers and on hard drives and memory sticks are now finding a worldwide audience. That can only be a good thing.

© Stewart Stafford, 2016. All rights reserved.

In Pursuit of the Mighty Whoosh: The 21st Century Writer

Being a writer in the 21^st century is like being the driver of a very jerkily-driven vehicle. You’ve dreamt up ideas, written them, shaped them, rewritten and edited them and published them. Then you have to switch hats and sell your work. Now you find yourself measuring your book’s merit and your own self-worth by reviews, ratings, rankings, likes, shares, follows, analytics and sales. If they rise, your confidence rockets with them. If they mysteriously drop, you become frozen with doubt. You can control your writing up to a point. After that, it’s up to readers, reviewers and bloggers to spread the word. You can’t make people buy something they don’t want no matter what social marketing gurus say (who are biased witnesses involved in the hard sell).

It is healthy to get away from that draining stuff for a while. Major writers have people to handle sales of their work. They have agents, managers and the might of publishing houses behind them with their huge advertising budgets and key media contacts. Self-published writers only have themselves and their savings to rely on. That only goes so far unless they have great connections or access to bigger sums of money. If not, they may have to accept defeat on their beloved project when the cash runs out.

Some people say make your own luck but if everyone could do that, we’d all be successful. Life is never that simple or easy. Luck is mostly being in the right place at the right time. The wind catches your sails and whoosh, you’re off. Nobody can plan for that. It just happens. Word of mouth is another way. A neglected work slowly begins to pick up. Sales rise, reviews become more plentiful and positive and you’ve caught the Mighty Whoosh again.

Being an author now is a marathon, not a sprint. The idea that you could hit the send button, publish your book and it would become an instant bestseller really is a fantasy. It will take many months, if not years, to build up a loyal readership and a solid body of work. There is even the possibility of posthumous recognition Van Gogh-style. To become rich and famous when you’re no longer around to enjoy it would be cruel but better late than never. At least your heirs may benefit from your delayed Mighty Whoosh.

© Stewart Stafford, 2015. All rights reserved.

The Vorbing Cometh: October 29th, 2015

Ladies and gentlemen, at long, long last (19 years), my book The Vorbing is finally available for pre-order on Amazon.

US: http://amzn.to/1FL5gzO 

UK: http://amzn.to/1O83olP

Exciting times ahead in the near future. Join me.

One Good Book?

Everyone has one good book in them. So the cliché goes. Well, maybe. We all have ideas passing through our minds; the difference is that writers capture theirs on paper. Some ideas can sustain the epic length of a novel but most do not. Let’s assume that creative lightning has struck; not everyone can express themselves well through language or they may not enjoy the writing process which can be tedious and solitary. Even if they did, have they the drive and/or obsession to take them from a blank page to a finished manuscript? The complete writer is a jigsaw made up of many disparate pieces.

We are all born with certain innate abilities. You either have a good sense of humour or you don’t. You can condition your mind to think certain ways but it is always easiest to go with the natural flow of the skill sets we possess.

There are some groups that refuse to believe that William Shakespeare wrote his phenomenal plays and sonnets. They argue that he did not have a sufficient level of education to come up with his great works. It is an elitist and narrow-minded argument. Education is not creativity. Education is the acquisition and interpretation of the ideas of others. Creativity is the generation of your own concepts, opinions, narratives and characters. Education is the known, creativity is an exploration of the unknown.

Great writers are born not made. We have all met extremely well-educated people who are unable to string a sentence together properly. Their skills may lie in rote learning and having an excellent memory in the exam hall. Someone with a lesser education may have an astonishing natural gift for invention and expression. I believe that is the case with William Shakespeare and that he was the author of his seminal body of work.

Life experience can teach you far more. We learn by doing. There is no exam to measure your life experience level, so it is wrongly discarded as a legitimate source of knowledge.

I meet people with great ideas all the time. When I ask what they are doing about them, their body language immediately changes and the excuses start flowing. “I can’t because of… (x,y,z),” they say. I try to encourage them but, again, they sabotage themselves with their negative inner dialogue. So those ideas in their heads stay there, they never come to fruition as anything tangible or rewarding and that is a great tragedy. The world is a poorer place for it. You can’t live someone else’s life for them. If they refuse to allow themselves permission to go for their dreams, that is their choice. It is hard to believe some people choose failure but human beings are complex creatures with many inherent paradoxes. Not everyone has the confidence to pursue their ambitions to their zenith. Depression and self-esteem issues hinder great swathes of the public daily.

So everyone may have one good book in them but, as you have seen, there are many, many obstacles to getting it out there. Many of those obstacles are the limitations we unnecessarily place on ourselves.

© Stewart Stafford, 2015. All rights reserved.

Indie Piranhas & The Book Promotion of Doom

Indie authors, book marketers and promoters can be a bit like Piranhas sometimes. Once they lock onto you, they start ripping strips off you with their desperate over-enthusiasm, frothing the waters of the information superhighway with your virtual blood. Their bio on Twitter smothers you with grand statements about themselves (“I’m a writer/producer/actor/director/philanthropist/mountaineer/marketer on a personal journey of discovery.” Puh-leese!) and links to all their zillion websites and profiles. Then they send you a direct message bombarding you with more of the same. Their tweets tend to be frenzied, repetitive, spammy Amazon links that clog up your timeline with free giveaways of books you’d never read if you were paid to.

It gets worse because their legions of followers are just like them. Once they see you being bombarded, they join in. Soon you’re inundated and struggling to breathe. Indie Piranhas in action, ladies and gentlemen. Is it any wonder self-publishing has a bad name?

Trying to stand out from all of that is difficult. Nobody knows a first-time indie author yet and the writer themselves doesn’t know who to trust as they’re new to it all. Influencers are important but it could cheapen your brand and hobble you from the start to go with the wrong person or company spamming your book details out everywhere in a scattergun fashion. My old history teacher used to call it “blanket bombing”, i.e. pumping out everything you know on the subject instead of actually figuring out precisely what is needed.

Trial and error is the only real way to learn. You can take advice from people, but you really won’t know until you take the plunge and go for it and see for yourself. It’s the same with relationships, you will meet people that will lie to you, rip you off and break your heart but you have to keep going until you find the right one for you. When you do, everything that was awkward and stressful becomes natural and straightforward. The gears stop grinding and everything flows beautifully.

For all the empty promises on the internet, results will speak for themselves. You will see quickly if it is having any impact on your book sales. The reality is that I only read books that I want to read. I don’t read books that I feel are compulsory or because some stranger tries to pressure me into doing so. That has the opposite effect on me. (Reading is always a joy when I follow my tastes and interests.) It is counter-productive in the long run but they still keep pumping that white noise out to anyone that will listen. Think small, be small. Only the indie authors that can see the bigger picture will be able to haul themselves out of the primordial swamp of the cold-calling hard sell and become fully-fledged writers.

© Stewart Stafford, 2015. All rights reserved.

The Vorbing: The Book Cover

The Vorbing by Stewart Stafford (Coming in early 2015)

The book cover for The Vorbing will be delivered to me on December 15th, 2014. I have just spent the morning answering dozens of the designer’s questions and sending as many photos and other visual aids as I can. Exciting times. It’s another step on the way to my dream and I am slowly but surely getting there with the help of others.

The Vorbing Under Review…

Hey guys

I’ve just put forward my book The Vorbing for review with Kirkus Reviews. It cost $575. Not cheap. They’ll either kick it into the stratosphere or strangle it at birth. If they like it, I get a nice quote for the book cover. If they don’t like it, I can fix it. Win, win. Finances are crucial at this point.

Two donations on my book’s crowdfunding campaign this morning but there’s only 8 days left! If you haven’t contributed yet, don’t miss out, go here; http://bit.ly/1syWT3a 

© 2014, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.

Help A Writer!

Just a reminder, guys, that my crowdfunding campaign for my book The Vorbing ends two weeks today and I really need your help. Here’s the link; https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-vampire-creation-myth-begins

The Inequality of Ideas

I saw a little girl with her father once on a train. She was asking all these serial “why?” questions that young children do and the father was answering them but eventually he grew exasperated and told her to shut up. I was stunned as was the child who immediately stopped asking questions. She had been scolded for seeking knowledge and her mind would close. That was a tragedy that I was witness to.

The key to gaining knowledge is to assume you know nothing, to be very child-like and open-minded and accepting of new ideas and different opinions. There is a dangerous politically correct commandment in play at the moment that I call “Thou Shalt Not Have An Opinion.” It’s where the idea and its originator are attacked in the most public, personal and savage way possible. A retraction and apology is typically demanded by an online lynch mob. If their ultimatum is not complied with, then the originator can face career meltdown and financial ruin. Scary, scary stuff. I love hearing ideas, even if I totally disagree with them or find them offensive. That is freedom of speech. We must have dialogue and debate or we are going to end up in a boring world where no one says anything daring or controversial. It is only when boundaries are pushed and sometimes broken that new art forms and ways of thinking are created.

Writing is not as collaborative a medium as making movies where you’re working with several hundred people. Until you turn the work over to editors or your readers, you are in solitary control of it and expected to have all the solutions. I value my time with other people because I value people but there are others who dismiss the ideas and opinions of others flat out. Their minds are narrowed if not closed off completely (possibly a type that little girl grew up to become.)  We live in a world where control-freakery is seen as being “strong” when actually it’s a weakness. Control freaks can’t allow others to contribute or blossom as it might overshadow them and deep down they are more insecure than anyone so they pounce. Real strength is having the confidence to hear others, even if they have ideas that are superior to yours.

Then there’s the publication of ideas and even here there is inequality and an inability or unwillingness to acknowledge them. Self-published books can be ghettoised. It’s gradually changing but self-published ideas are still prejudged before even being read. Most bookshops where I am still refuse to stock self-published books, bursaries and grants are denied to self-published authors but the taxman will happily hit you up for money upon publication. You’re “legit” when it comes to paying tax and not before it seems. It also appears that some ideas, opinions and writers are more equal than others. What do you think?

© 2014, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.